Alright then…. There’s an infinite variety of ways to approach things in the fine art world, more ways than there are actual artists doing it. Finding your own way in this morass of various and sundry ways of doing things can seem a real challenge, unless you’ve identified what it is your mark making wants to do.

I’m at the point where the marks that come off my brush are free enough so that even “mistakes” born of spontaneity are exactly as they are supposed to be.

In my short essay called Anatomical Deviations (click through to read it on my website), I address these such freedoms, freedoms that arise when one realizes that a nose doesn’t have to look like a nose to be a nose, and in fact, if its a peculiar nose, or even a downright obtuse nose, it can still serve exactly as it needs to. The only consideration might be how this nose (or any other body part, or even any THING) is accepted by the viewer of said nose. We all have preconceptions, ideas of what is acceptable or not, and if your nose is unacceptable to viewers, you’re bound to alienate some people just by the discomfort you have them experience by seeing your nose.

(PAUSE)

Well, this is something, a pressure even, that you either surrender to, or not – you can paint your nose how others need you to paint your nose, or you can surrender to the needs of what it is you’re painting, whether its your nose, or not. What is more important to you, sacrificing your values, your vision, to be accepted, or standing by what you do as if there is no any other way, and there could be no other way, and any other consideration is far from significant or relevant to the painting’s raison d’être?

I guess my choice is obvious….

The above image is a detail from a painting, as yet unposted elsewhere except years ago on that madness called facebook. I call it “Six Cubed – Where the Fool becomes Magus.” This is a painting done with contemporary subject matter vaguely overlaid on a work of the Flemish Baroque era artist named Franz Fracken the Younger. His is a work called the “Allegory of Occasion,” though the title is more correctly translated as the “Allegory of Opportunity,” which I’ve had the pleasure of seeing with my own buggy eyes at the Musée d’Art et d’Archéologie du Périgord, in Périgueux, France. They have a real treasure with this one.

”Six Cubed” is my update of this allegory, and my cover retains that allegory. Its executed with acrylic paints and inks on canvas, nearly a meter squared in size, and it containins approximately three dozen figures, countless eyeballs, a ball of dung, a few snakes, an eagle, an insect, a devil, and a bunch of “other” stuff. The figure (with its nose) as detailed above is just one amongst the rest, but is the one that best serves my “a nose is a nose” axiom.

Fine Art is only what you make of it.