ArteSumapaz is an art and culture center founded in 2019 on a former coffee plantation in Cundinamarca, Colombia. Our strategy for the center is based on an ecosystem of communities; with the belief that no one community type by itself is sufficiently robust to create enduring meaningful change in the system. The center’s initial central function is that of an artist residency, in which artists come from all over the world and stay anywhere from one to six months. The residency is artist-funded, meaning we don’t rely on government funding. Because of the difference of economies between Colombia and the US and Europe, it means modest fees from a handful of artists ensures a financial break-even for the foundation’s operating costs.
The creation of an intentional community in which interested individuals make a more substantial donation to the foundation forms the basis for purchasing the property over a five-year agreement with the owners. Meanwhile, we have already demonstrated that with artists and passive reforestation, we are able to generate more revenue than the local traditional model of cow ranching, which has allowed the land to regenerate with local species. The three main communities that have thus far worked together include the local agricultural community, international artists, musicians, writers and other makers, as well as the longer-term participants in the intentional community. Each community provides either a historical perspective or a source of fresh new ideas.
The idea that nature is at the center of creative endeavors can be heard in the advice of artists going back to the Renaissance, and even more recently, in the pedagogy of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College in the United States.
Saying that nature conservation is at the heart of art making comes easily, as does a focus on social justice issues such as colonialism, racism, misogyny, and discrimination against trans persons. We’ve come to believe that these are not separate issues, but in themselves are all a part of creating innovative solutions to help heal both the traumas of people, but those traumas inflicted against our very environment.
We ask creatives to ponder these issues; but also how do we then share them across with local communities in a non-colonialist spirit. This, ultimately, requires a mutual sharing of ideas; it cannot be unidirectional. We have to work within the realm of not only creative solutions, but in the systems of communication in which those ideas can be received and help to create change.
In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake wrote, “…all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you “ of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you “ of today.”
This brings to mind one of my favorite psychologists, Robert Kegan, who’s theory about adult development suggests that there is an ultimate stage of development in which we understand that we are not fixed; that we play roles with other people in the context of their own roles.
Kegan wrote another book, which would really be more at home amongst other business books like the classic Good to Great, or Blue Ocean Strategy. In “Immunity to Change” Kagan takes this notion of adult development and writes about the things that impede us from changing despite our resolutions. Some flukes in our identity keep us from having to face other bits, and thus in some form or another, keep us from even greater demons.
In those cases, we’re less of Sheldrake’s processes, and more of a fixed notion, at least until the final D catches up with us and we become one again with the dust of ages. Perhaps then, we might spend some of our time being an object, and other parts of our time being a process. Perhaps, it’s a choice we each face every day – to embrace being an unfixed thing – or to assume all the elements of our identity, fixed in place.
In drawing, particularly with charcoal or pastels, we use a horrific blend of chemicals in a spray can called fixative. The idea is that the stuff keeps the particles of the drawing from being changed, or with certain Ultraviolet filters, from fading. Of course, all matter is forever unfixed – and whether your paintings and drawings crumble by next spring, or in 2,000 years doesn’t really concern the sedimentary rocks established over 300,000 years ago. All of these things of ours will become part of the earth again. Even dinosaur fossils are for the most part not the bones themselves, but bones that have been replaced with minerals, only holding the original form of the prototype.
How can we cultivate being more in process and less of a thing? I would say by “allowing” it. In allowing, we don’t attempt to impede the rich messages of the world around us by our own fixed ideas of what things are saying. When asked how he made his characters have such voices, the playwright August Wilson protested that he did not make them have voices, he allowed them to have voices. Michelangelo had a similar idea about uncovering the figures that were already existent in the stone, while his contemporary da Vinci exhorted artists to find the images in the water stains on the wall.
There are many tools available to us, like Word of the Day, the Tarot, the iChing, and more. The hallmark of these tools is they present us with a structured set of archetypal information or even seemingly random notions – and our brains magically stitch these things into relevant patterns. It’s as though someone living across the hall came over and knocked on the door, and gave us the treasure map for the box of gems hidden in your own backyard.
Preceding the passage quoted in the beginning, Sheldrake wrote, “You can think of your life like this. The growing tip is the present moment — your lived experience of now — which gnaws into the future as it advances. The history of your life is the rest of the hypha, the blue lines that you’ve left in a tangled trail behind you. A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history…”
The last four people sharing lock-down with us here at ArteSumapaz have left, and I now have both an exhibition space (elGranero) and the massive studio. Several years ago, I packed up all of my work that had been in the upstate New York studio, and shipped them to Bogota. I realized recently that I really needed to unpack these paintings that had been wrapped in plastic and cardboard – some of the earlier works were suffering from the direct contact with the cardboard – so I decided to use this opportunity of space and tranquility to unpack, and to mount a personal retrospective of my work.
The belief here: lives are ruled by energies, that an empty seat can retain an essence of its occupants malevolent, benevolent. A found knife casually taken; even a stray cat may tiptoe between gods and the transient; messages. In the wind, words that bring life or finality, bring love or heartbreak.
In march 2019, I spent the month at Studio Kura in Itoshima, Japan, in an artists residency. During that month, I made two large pieces using ink on hemp paper, collaging the drawing together as I worked. During the exhibition, I was asked to make some comments, which are below.
So in the history of art, there’s two major approaches to the figure. And the first of which is what you see in both a lot of Western art and Eastern art in which the figure is this hero; the Buddha; the Christ; frequently, where you have this central figure from which all the world is emanating. The figure might be ascending, or descending, or just holding space. For many years I’ve played with that idea, but over time, I’ve become interested in other approaches to the figure. And the ways that figures interact with each other.
How many different ways can two or more figures interact? The Virgin Mary holds the baby; two lovers; a fight; many , many more. And these pieces i like to imagine figures interacting in various ways. In one moment, they might be doing one thing, but at any given moment, i might change my mind! Maybe the figure that were fighting, are now kissing, or hugging! This is what goes on inside the painting, where the painting is talking about itself. And then there’s me, and our relationship to the painting and what its doing, and that can be a very different story.
I think when I’m sitting in my studio all alone, quietly thinking about what matters to me, I think the thing that is most important to me is the idea of an embrace. A hug: whether it’s a mother, a lover, or even ourself, giving ourselves that. I think what I’d like most from the work that I do is that it embraces you, the viewer, so that hopefully when you leave this space, you feel you’ve been given love.
If there has been any one famous person I would have liked to have had over for dinner, it would have been the art critic John Berger. Throughout his books you get the sense that his love of art was that of a practitioner, and it flowed over into his love of life and friends. In one of his essays, I recently found a few paragraphs that express perfectly my own feelings or aspirations about my own art.
Writing of Rembrandt, Berger wrote, “On canvas after canvas he gave to a part of a body or to parts of bodies a special power of narration. The painting then speaks with several voices – like a story being told by different people from different points of view. Yet these ‘points of view’ can only exist in a corporeal space which is incompatible with territorial or architectural space. Corporeal space is continually changing its measures and focal centers, according to circumstances. It measures by waves, not metres. Hence its necessary dislocations of ‘real’ space.”
(…) “If they reveal an ‘inner-ness’ it is that of the body, what lovers try to reach by caressing and by intercourse. In this context the last word takes on both a more literal and more poetic meaning. Coursing between.”
(…)”For Rembrandt, the embrace was perhaps synonymous with the act of painting, and both were just this side of prayer.”
The other day, there was an announcement in the news that the oldest figurative paintings, cave paintings in Borneo, have been identified as being over 40,000 years old. We´ve been mixing color with some sort of medium and applying it to surfaces for a long time.
Someone once said something like this:
“Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist. Titian was a great painter.
Ingres was a great artist. Delacroix was a great painter.”
And the list continued right up through Rauschenberg and Johns.
What does that mean? What is the difference between a great artist and a great painter? It was a wonderful proposition, and no doubt was intended to be polemical. Maybe there isn´t really a correct answer, but somehow in debating we come to see painting and its position in art differently.
Paul Delaroche, a French painter has often been quoted as saying ‘from today, painting is dead‘. He said that after he saw one of the new daguerreotype photographs. And certainly, photography stripped painting of its mimetic purpose. Other people have occasionally repeated some version of that phrase; and then, whether it’s simply zeitgeist or a conspiracy, there seem to be a whole new spate of shows in Chelsea galleries featuring really strong painting. We’ve been at this for a long time.
Correggio, that wonderful Italian renaissance painter who was so gifted, there can be no other conclusion but that he was brought to our planet by aliens, has often been quoted, probably apocryphally, as saying, “Anch’io sono pittore” (I too am a painter!) upon seeing some works by Raphael. Even if he didn’t actually say it, the fact that someone would fabricate the sentiment is telling; for one great painter to recognize the familial connection with another within their shared media.
I’ve been gallery hopping here in Bogotá for over three years now, and I rarely see a lot of painting. (Jaime Franco and Luis Roldan have been wonderful exceptions.) There tends to be a lot more what you might call conceptual art here in Colombia. Colombia is a very different place than the US; and you might say that the differences are fundamental, going right down into the soul of the place. If a street vendor gets on the bus and says “good morning,” everyone on the bus replies, “good morning.” It’s the polite thing to do. You wouldn’t do that in New York City. The biggest difference I’ve felt in the galleries and open studios is that people have narratives about their art that they like to share. The idea of the art speaking for itself doesn’t appear to be that popular. You’ll see little narratives typed up in US galleries, too, but here it’s at another level.
Sometimes it’s great to hear the story behind a show – and I admit, I’ve gained from it. At other times, it seems gratuitous. But still, there is more often than not a strong feeling that the concept behind the art is critical. And there’s a great deal of what you’d call “conceptual art” here. And so it often comes up in conversation; what is it about the difference between painting and conceptual art?
It reminds me of the whole disegno/colore paragon that was popular during Correggio and Raphael’s time. Maybe, just maybe, the dialectic is off kilter. Perhaps there is a pattern between both of those oppositions; disegno/colore and conceptual/painting. For one, it’s obvious that a painting can often be quite conceptual, just as a work emphasizing great drawing can be glowing with color. Perhaps, the difference in both oppositions is the sense of planning versus process.
It was said that Ingres would paint his works in grisaille, and then overlay color. Obviously, that’s a pretty well-planned approach to making a painting. As opposed to Delacroix’s laying down brushstrokes, and “discovering” his image. It makes me think of architecture, in which someone wouldn’t think of constructing a house without very specific plans.
Coming from the tradition of the New York school of painting, I’ve always been submersed in the approach of working through the medium – the voice of the medium, as opposed to imposing ideas onto the medium. I like the idea of discovering the image; being surprised by it. In this, there is a connection to surrealism – the cadavre exquis. Chris Martin wrote , “We are trying to paint what we have never seen before.”
I have a feeling that “painters” have a lot to learn from the world of conceptual art – and some painters have shown that they’ve taken the lessons to heart. And that the obverse is true, too. The controversy really is only as valuable as it adds to our collective thinking.
My father was fond of telling a particular shaggy dog joke on the theme of how to cook a carp. A carp, as you might know, is a bottom-feeding, oily, freshwater fish. Not exactly considered something you’d normally eat. So, the story goes something to the effect that you place the carp on a freshly cut piece of cherry wood, and commence to pound a series of oils and spices, and garlic, and wine, etc into the fish. Since it’s a shaggy dog joke, you continue on and on with all sorts of wonderful things. Then, you throw away the fish, and eat the board.
That, for me, exemplifies business and marketing plans. It isn’t about the fish (or the meat of the plan), but the process that matters. And in going through that process, you think through things that you might not have thought about.
I recently received a review copy of Allan Dib’s new book, The 1-Page Marketing Plan (and I think the journey the book took from Sweden to Colombia, and took almost two months! It’s a bit of a miracle it arrived at all!) First off, I’ll tell you, I like the book. Dib’s writing goes down smooth, and is not stuffed with too much extra verbiage. He covers a lot of topics important to the nascent entrepreneur: customer “phases;” lead capturing and nurturing; and messaging. Ultimately, his template for the eponymous one-page-plan is elegant and simple.
Dib also covers the messaging itself. He counsel’s his readers to get into the mind of the customer. Yes, yes, yes! He introduces 80/20, and lifetime value. These are important concepts that are not often introduced soon enough to entrepreneurs. Indeed, I’d recommend this book to the newcomer to marketing plans.
For me, the largest gap is in the absence of addressing goals and objectives. But that’s my personal bias; I was introduced to strategic planning from that vantage point. For me, there is a natural logic in thinking about where you are, and where you want to be. From there, it’s a matter of figuring out how to make it happen. But perhaps, there really are other ways of attaining success. After all, it’s not about the carp.
(For updates, please visit us at www.arteSumapaz.org)
We couldn’t drive up the road – it was blocked by a portone, one of the massive gates that Colombians often have at the entrance of their properties. But I skirted around a pillar and made my way up the driveway, past groves of bamboo or guadua, and massive stones completely surfaced in lichen. At the top of the road rested a clay-tile roofed, one-story casa with a porch wrapping all the way around the side and front. There on the walls were a half-dozen posters of art: Matisse, Renoir, Dali, Picasso, Miro, and other classic modernists. The ink of the reproductions had all faded in the sunlight, leaving only the blue and black inks. Why were there art posters on a farmhouse tucked away in the Andes?
View of Hacienda Australia in the clouds
That was only one of many aspects of this magical place that have become a part of my humongous audacious dream; to establish an alternative school of art, residencies, and perhaps even a sustainable community in a former coffee plantation about a 100km drive from Bogotá.
When I was 17, I was studying German in my local high school. One day, I visited the library at the Goethe Institute in Atlanta, and came upon a two-volume edition of Paul Klee´s Pedagogical Notebook. My German was still pretty rudimentary, but I could make out was that Klee was primarily saying, “hey, look at nature; not just at the surface, but deep down into the system and structure – whether it is a flower, a human body, or even an entire eco-system.” The systems-based approach to understanding the world, and by extension, art, really resonated with me – it struck a nerve or a chord, so to speak, and was even a core element of the book that I went on to write about social media marketing.
Klee had developed his notebooks as a record of his pedagogy at the Bauhaus, which had set up shop as an alternative art school in Germany in 1919. When the Nazis rose to power, the Bauhaus was forced to close with many of the teachers migrating to other countries. One professor, Josef Albers, along with his wife Annie were invited to lead the art program at a new experimental college, Black Mountain College, in the mountains of North Carolina. While the teaching methodologies that Josef Albers espoused have often been criticized for their pedagogical rigidity, Albers played a key role in an institution that, which while it only lasted 25 years was one of the most influential in the way art is taught in the US to this day.
View from above the house looking towards Chinauta
Black Mountain College was established in 1933 by three professors who had lost their own jobs for refusing to take loyalty oaths. One of the key influences in the founder’s philosophy was that of American philosopher John Dewey. Dewey was also tapped by Albert Barnes in the formation of his school, the Barnes Foundation, in Merion Pennsylvania. My own mentor and professor of painting at SUNY Purchase, Nicholas Marsicano, had himself been a Barnes Foundation student. Barnes was notoriously opposed to the snobbishness of the Philadelphia elite, which included the Pennsylvania Academy of Art; thus, when Marsicano and fellow student Ralston Crawford wanted to be accepted into the Barnes academy, they had to meticulously avoid any mention of their experience in Philadelphia and claim to be the sons of poor coal miners.
Marsicano was a truly great influence in my artistic life; in his teaching, Marsicano believed that a teacher should leave their own artistic prejudices at the door, and help the student solve their problems through their way of thinking. In one conversation, while looking at a painting, he asked, “do you know the difference between a monster and a demon? Because what you have here is a monster!” I think that for many of us students, that sort of talk lit a fire under our minds, and got us to think more deeply about painting.
I was so fortunate to have a found a great teacher; we are all lucky if we find one such person in our formative years. But I was doubly lucky, because before I worked with Marsicano, I had the good fortune to encounter the sculptor and teacher, Jim McDermid. McDermid, incidentally, was a graduate of Cranbrook Academy, which has been called “America’s Bauhaus.” I recall one day working away on a sculpture, carefully carving out shapes out of rolled-out clay, while tossing the scraps in a heap. I heard McDermid exclaim, “wow, that’s beautiful!” But when I looked up, it was the scrap heap he was admiring! And admiring was just the right word – McDermid taught me to look at the world in admiration; perhaps let the things that aren’t so wonderful pass. He exemplified for me the words of Van Gogh, “Admire, admire, admire!”
Exploring the finca on horseback
Really, I came of age, artistically, in an environment which was awash in the thinking of the New York School. The current New York art scene was moving in another direction – that of more conceptually rooted art – but my influences were those which came more out of a process-based art. The great playwright August Wilson was once asked how he made his characters have a voice, and his response was something to the effect of “allowing them to have a voice.” This is the very type of thing that was implicit the New York School way of thinking.
At SUNY Purchase, the flagship school of the arts in the New York public university system, I also met musicians, dancers, photographers, and writers. It was amongst the actors that I came across a whole other approach to art, that was based in the teachings of Stanislavski, Stella Adler, and others. For example, while working on a play, the director might yell out, “inside,” meaning the actor should work from a place inside their body; and then “outside” for the actor to feel that they were indeed outside of their skin. To me, this was revelatory, and antithetical to the seemingly drier way of thinking back in the visual arts building. Later, when I was teaching drawing at the Woodstock School of Art, I used some of those theatre techniques in my own teaching.
One day at college, while in a fit of desperation, I was in the library thumbing through books, I came across a little book about Zen Buddhism that retold some of the teachings of Rinzai. They were fundamentally about notions that the listener should stop the thinking process, be – experience reality with all of their being. This resonated with me in a way that the Klee notebooks had earlier; I felt that painting could be about something that was outside the bounds of thinking and words. That lead to one of my painting teachers, the very kind Bob Berlind, to write in my evaluation, “Ric fails to engage in critical discourse.”
Coincidentally, when my then girlfriend, Jen Williams Dragon (now with her own audacious dream, Cross Contemporary in Saugerties, NY) and I later moved up to the Catskills, there was a newly-established Zen monastery being developed in Mt Tremper. Abott Daido Loori had found the property, a former Lutheran summer camp, and established the monastery. Over the years I studied there a bit, and even more often, encountered Loori at the local diner. While I was admittedly a poor student of Zen, I felt it had a tremendous impact on my thinking – and I continue to be a poor student of Zen even now.
View of the front porch of the farmhouse
One of the big things I got out of eastern ways of thinking was an approach to looking that isn’t often talked about in European-based art; that of becoming something. We tend to look at things more as objects sitting across the room, or as a landscape. But in working to really feel something with your whole body – a landscape, another person, or even a painting – we can have experiences of the thing that could be a totally different way of looking.
The Zen monastery in the Catskills wasn´t the only such place that figured in my life. During my adolescence, and oddly enough in Conyers, Georgia, there had been a Cistercian (Benedictine order) monastery founded in the 1940s. For a short while, I had had a job in the bonsai greenhouse. At the Holy Spirit, I met brother Aelred, who secretly shared woodcut printing, and secretly, transcendental meditation.
Both of those monasteries come to mind as I think about my own project; they were both established in a grass-roots manner – by individuals who got the “bee in their bonnet” and made it happen. Perhaps it’s the allure of creating community of like-minded people, and creating sacred spaces where people can do things that they hadn´t imagined. After all, in thinking about Black Mountain College, I’m not convinced it was the pedagogy – but more the creating of community, and moving thinking outside and beyond the way we think about things every day.
I’ve met an enormous community of young artists and musicians here in Colombia; they’ve had a different education and seem to be interested in some of these other approaches to artistic thinking. The idea of sharing this, and in the process discovering what they, and other artists have to bring to the table, is exhilarating. And in Great Britain, Mexico, the US, and other places, other new forms of alternative arts education are emerging. My main objective is to create that; an alternative arts school.
When I, and others, start envisioning what this could be, other things surface: community; sustainability; working with indigenous peoples; and more. But all of this is way beyond the capabilities of any individual. Thus, the beautiful challenge is to bring together others who want to participate in the creation of an arts-based community project here in Colombia.
There are many, many challenges facing this project. The first is acquiring the property. The next, if not at the same time, is creating the coalition of people who want to participate and lead in the various aspects of the project.
Identify four to five individuals who can bring the financial resources to help acquire the property (goal: to acquire the property by the end of 2019).
Share this with anyone you think might be interested
Feel free to have a conversation – let me know and we can start a call
Here in Bogotá, we are planning a series of presentations over the next year in the homes of friends. If you’re interested in hosting such an event, please reach out.
Transcript of a talk given by Nicholas Marsicano to his painting seminar at SUNY Purchase, circa 1984.
The Dada act appears to be by, upon a situation. The man who put the moustache on the Mona Lisa did not put it upon Leonard da Vinci; he put it upon a lousy painting that they made so much of, romanticized; all false values in terms of what art really is. Leonardo da Vinci has a little painting about this big sitting up like that over the Mona Lisa on the side; one of his masterpieces of painting; his masterpieces – the Annunciation – everybody comes gawking at the Mona Lisa because all of this fiddling that takes place around it. These are some of the things you come to understand.
In terms of service: the nature the art serves society or makes the world better to look at or something like that; this business of Utopia, or humanism, it’s going to do something to make a better human being – or is going to propagandize for some situation. I’m afraid, yes, it can do that. On the other hand, it can be the worst enemy to any of these dogmas. The church or dogmas, the government or dogmas, society, or social injustices.
I can’t quite say the man who was most religious painted the most religious painting. In this case it was just the opposite. The non-believer who believed rather than the artist for the dogma. It’s true at times. Art has been subject to the church. Art has been subject to the government. Art has been subject to society and each and every one of us in some ways are affected by this opinion and by the circumstances. And some ways, sometimes we appear to make a concession to what the world wants of you, and yet, you are committed to the truth – the inner truth of one’s self. Even though the external truths is demanded of you, is something else, and you can do it – perform it. But in the end, you know you are being untrue to yourself. When it comes to painting, I think that’s the one thing you have to know is to be true to yourself. In that sense, it is an individual singular art. There’s only one man who paints or one person who paints, I should say. There’s not many, many people.
And it is possible art flourishes best when we come into contact with each other. In other words, when we have acquired respect for other painters like yourself. And you can look at their paintings and their art and it may be different from – appear to be different from what you’re doing – and to be able to say, “Jesus, that’s nice, I like that!” In other words, the generosity of appreciation and understanding is all we want. To hope that you’re going to get it from anything other than a painter and even then, it’s questionable, is impossible. They will say things; how wonderful you are and all that sort of business. But in the end, I think the respect painters have for each other, when that is possible, is the most important thing to any painter. Is there one person who understands me? Poor Van Gogh! If he would have gotten that, he wouldn’t have needed to have blown his brains out. They can say all they want about the guy being nuts, but that’s the thing that kicked-off the final tragedy of his life.
And he wanted it – and wanted it so badly and he needed it. It is an art of aloneness. But the one thing is, you cannot be alone. You’re only alone in the process and the act of painting and doing your own painting. After that, you want at least one person to say, “Jesus, that’s good, nice!” and to tap you on your shoulder. This also, you must be able to give. I find amongst students, the only reason why most of you are not doing the best work and justice to yourself is your inability to give it to somebody else. Because when you give it, it is you who are giving it. It’s almost like saying it’s your dream – and you are created. Perhaps and understanding for that painting that that other person who did the paintings, might know in a different way, perhaps, that the way you know. And that reassurance is all that is necessary and so therefore, in this class, I do hope and expect to establish some exchange. Any person’s accomplishments or student’s accomplishments should and must be your accomplishment. If they can do it, you should never feel you can’t do it, too. And the fact that they have done it you take your hat off and “thank you” – as if to say, “well, I don’t have to do it; It’s been done for me and I’ve done it.” Then you can go and do what you want to do. OK?
But that lack of generosity is what perhaps is one of the greatest limitations you impose upon yourself. It’s alright to say, well, I’ll only go look at Rembrandt. Yes, it’s safe, but even then there are bad Rembrandts. Even then, there’s no saying what you see, whether you see the right thing or not is the right thing. That learning to see is what it’s all about.
I don’t necessarily encourage the habit [referring to a student with a studio off-campus] or the idea of that kind of situation at a certain point – and if you’re good, then it’s even more important why you should be here that others should be able to see what you’re doing. It’s part of your responsibility to give as well as to take.
I think the poet or writer is more capable of that kind of isolation because he can go down to the mailbox and the world comes to him. But when it comes to painting, you got to be able to see and see the real thing. I know you can tell me you got all the books and all the reproductions and all that sort of business, and I know that Malraux spoke about the “Voice of Silence” or something like that. That business of an art that comes from a reproduction. It’s not the same thing as seeing a painting – as seeing the scale of it confronting it. All right – that’s my answer to that. My only hope is you don’t encourage it any more than necessary in terms of isolating yourself. Look, they’re nice people, and nobody’s going to bite you. And if they do, you’ve got to learn to bite back. Otherwise, you’ve not going to learn how to survive. I mean, if you’re so precious you’ve got to be protected, that individuality, it’s hopeless. You might as well give up the ghost and go buy yourself a new one at the five and ten cent store if necessary.
What I mean by that is you can’t be so protective of your art and yourself. Because the world is hostile. They don’t like the fact that you paint. And they’re going to pick away at you in every shape and form that they can. When you told your mother or your father that you wanted to be an artist – that’s the last thing in the world they wanted to hear. And God knows they should be the most sympathetic. You’re not desirable citizens. You are the devil, that’s all there is to it. And you’re the snake in the grass in the garden of Eden. Well, face it, that’s the artist.
And especially today I think it’s more hostile that it has been for a long time, this whole situation. There have been periods certainly when the artists perhaps were in command of the world of art, but today I think you’re at the mercy of gallery dealers, critics, museum directors, and everything else.
