Epiphany

 For many years I would always get a sinking feeling when I allowed myself to think about all of art history in comparison to my own art. I always felt like an insignificant (relatively speaking) grain of sand on a whole beach, and I had to compete for attention with all of the other grains of sand. I always felt that There must be trillions of other peoples paintings in the world. It’s true that I always knew that it’s important to follow my own vision and none of those other artists should matter, but It was never about “how good I Am” so to speak, it was always about the sheer size of the beach, the number of grains of sand on the beach. 

Competing for attention is a drag. But I guess you have to do that if you want to have an audience. Like The old “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” thing. 

Epiphany: focus on the audience right in front of me, which I already have, and forget about the size of the beach of other artists. There can be as many kinds, types, sizes, of audiences as there are kinds of other artists, or other paintings besides my own.

Here’s the best part: it doesn’t have to be about the size of the audience either. Audience being the viewer of the art. It only takes one or two people. 

Having something that I’ve made, to show to begin with, right of the bat, is far better than watching TV all day.

I will always think of the above recent painting, which is of one of my old sculptures appearing at the bottom of the basement steps, as my “epiphany painting” because round about after I finished it, the above described epiphany came to my mind, probably not for the first time, but I remember thinking along those lines then.