just_left_alone_02

Is the square in this piece needed? It seems overly formal, and yet - as a part of the whole series it needed to be something other than another composition that ultimately rested on a triangle. Squares represent human places and things and tools, and so the need was to fill and escape this square, or maybe just to fill it with something meaningful. What I needed was a reason to contrast certain colors with others, and to have some kind of focal point to dissolve into - and ASDF provided that. This is one of the more textured pieces from the series too - and I think that the plainness of the framing square is offset by the complexity of the circle. Again, what it came down to was thinking "what do I need" while making the art, and thinking.

I have always loved May Sarton's "Journal of a Solitude" - and loneliness and being alone is the running theme. She says, "when it comes to the important things one is always alone ... the way in which one handles this absolute aloneness is the way in which one grows up, is the great psychic journey of everyman." This thought by itself has shaped my thought in a lot of ways. So much of what we talk about today is in terms of community and our communal values - and I think it's very much almost a given that these should be foremost in our practical life - but we are not a community when we are by ourselves. We do not simply take the community consensus when we think about why we are here, or why we do any particular thing. Sometimes we do things for the sake of community, but to totally abstract myself into being a member of a community and nothing more will make all the experiences that happen to me and the choices that I have to make and the suffering or joy that I go through seem unreal, and if anything I want my life to feel more real than real rather than less. Sometimes I think I need to experience things alone. I need to do that in order to grow up.