Stability

Laundry → Art

“I have never been able to understand the artist whose image never changes.” Lee Krasner

My thinking is not quite so cynical. I have my own way of understanding the origins of her thinking. Since WW2, North America has been craving stability. After the defeat of the Nazi horror, the victors were deserving of more than a little chest-thumping. It was time to relish our ability to step into the modern world; a car in every driveway, subdivisions with houses all a mirror image of themselves, the washing machine, soaps that will clean and give your life a fresh scent. Life itself lived in the world of repetition = stability; of singular identity.

Art reflected that need for stability. Pop art reflected that repetition in spades. The 1950s and forward had its share of daring and experimentation, but even then the art world became a reflection of the North American lust for stability. It evolved into having a body of work. How dare you want to hang work without a common string.

Don’t get me wrong, I get the consistency expressed by artists who choose that route, whether consciously or not. However, there is a growing need for the Lee Krasners of the world.

From my early days of picking up the brush with intent, I battled with the reason I didn’t have that common string, as did galleries. For one, I’ve never tried to. I don’t think I could. Eventually, the reasoning dawned on me that I couldn’t bring myself to hold one end of the string and the other end at the same time. My mantra became: Style is a trap of limitations. The trap was firmly set in my consciousness. The only answer was to cut the string and develop my consciousness as I am, and damn the torpedoes.

Place 2 Garden Inabstracto 5