A story of about how I began to say Im an artist: By 1999 I had spent about 6 years singing in a band my friend and I started during high school. We had gone through a roster of musicians, 2 to 3 shows or more every week, maybe 7 albums and hundreds of recorded improvs sessions, countless girlfriends, bottles of malt liquor, acid, blunts, mini vans, and southern towns. By age 21 I needed a break. My circles of friends were in art school. I didnt totally understand what they were talking about late at night, but I could relate to something they were getting into called Dada and this guy named Foucault who seemed to write philosophy you could get into. They would talk about how ideas and art such as those irritated the shit out of their professors who were proponents of a kind of weird tasteful modernist painting they indoctrinated their students with through strict teaching methods. I followed the struggle my friends had to be more relevant, to make relevant art. They would take trips to New York for escape. I thought all of this was a lot more interesting than the indie scene which had grown old for me.. and the constant struggle between people to make something had also grown old. I wanted to make things for myself. I had always told people I was an artist. I thought of it more like a personality disorder I had inherited from dad. Oh yeah, I make paintings in my bedroom, to put something on my wall. But I pursuing music. Art was my disorder. A few years passed. I began to make paintings more seriously after hanging out with my friends around age 21. Paintings, weird objects. It came out quite differently than the learned homogenized strict style taught at the local university in Chattanooga. I spent most of my time at the senior art studios on their campus. My girlfriend, older than me, was a painter, had a studio. I mostly sat their and worked on a novel by cutting up lines from free books Id find. This kind of fascinated to painters I think. I was fascinated by their brushmarks and very disciplined ways of painting (though I thought it was all to conservative somehow). I began to point my video camera at slow motion fragments from films at home. It made a strange effect. I roughly edited them together to make 2 hour abstracted films Id play at the local artists living rooms. These were a big hit and I began I consciously realize I was an artist and it was more than just a disorder.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 22:56:41 +0000
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