something_transcendent_02

The working title for this color palette has always been "metaphor." I think if you were to ask "what is this art a metaphor for" the obvious answer is "hell if I know." Expressionism in the sense of art that expresses an aesthetic idea rather than referencing some real world thing or even a concrete idea that you could otherwise put to words has always been interesting to me. It means that the art - if it has any deliberateness to it - is trying to express something that can't be transmuted into any other medium and still mean what it's meant to mean. The pixellated rifts in the rectangle aren't meant to represent a mountain. The soft blue in the circle isn't a sky. The orange and lavender washing into indigo and black inside the triangle isn't a volcano or something, it's a movement of pink to orange to purple to express the feeling of moving through those colors while balanced against three other lines and circles and patterns moving in different directions at the same time. I know it's unfair to be annoyed when people look at something expressionistic and say "I see a camel here" or "looks like a bush just there" - but it's an exercise in missing the point when you do that. Similarly, people who make "abstract" art and by that they just mean sort of abstract-ish representations of other things, it's a different genre.

The last need, that transcendent thing - why? I can give one other reason why this is a need. It has no end. Every need that can be simply satisfied ends up meaning that you play a shell game for the rest of your life rearranging and shuffling the food or shelter or money you need and never ever lifting the shell to find anything beneath it. A need that has no tangible object, but that is something more like what Artistotle called a "final cause" is what I want. That kind of cause has been abused a lot historically, and it's made fun of a lot in popular smart-people circles now. They believe there is no final cause that draws the world forth towards beauty or purpose or order - final causes are a superstition that mankind came up with before we understood the first causes, the things that move and build and grow or fall apart on their own to no other purpose and can be reduced back to their essential elements. Maybe I really am just a sum of those other simpler chemical causes, but the state I find myself in - when I'm free and exist in a place and have a moment to myself - I need some final cause, some luminous idea, some gratifying purpose or movement, I need some other thing - something transcendent.

Maybe I just need, in fact, to take myself less seriously. Maybe I need to come up with a silly name to make artwork under so that all these other needs seem less pretentious and less self-obsessed and puts me in a less exposed place in the world. Maybe I need a name like sgt_slaughtermelon, and I can lump my other needs under that first one.