Notebook Entry: 2011 Key West
It all started with Prometheus.
He stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humankind to further their growth as a society. Zeus becomes furious, punishes Prometheus. He ties him to Mount Caucasus where a vulture will come each morning to eat away his liver. Overnight, his liver will grow back again. A symbol of the creative process.
This is my final note for 2011. A year of hiatus and redefining. A year of introspection and search. A year of cerebral mountains and pitfalls and also of growing back my liver. The art world is a complicated mesh of possibilities and probabilities and it is essential for an artist to once in awhile step off the speeding train and revisit his road map and ask himself tough questions. I gnawed and digested like an omnivorous beast through books and knocked on the door of every image and artist that I ever cared for.
Then came the dream…I am a small house.
The little house that was me was built inside a bigger house; this house was artist Enrique Martinez Celaya. His house was built inside yet another house. This house was painter Leon Golub. Golub’s house was standing inside a house which was the Greek sculptors. And so a house exists within a house, and so it continues.
The following night I had the same dream. This time I was standing in front of a big building with a single door. This building had a nameplate that said “Donatello“. Upon entering through the door a second building stood inside with the nameplate “Michelangelo“. Through the door of the second building stood a third building with the nameplate “Auguste Rodin“. Like a Russian doll it opened up to the smallest of building in its nucleus, which is me.
The composer Schumann believed that his musical compositions were dictated by Beethoven, and Auguste Rodin said that his work was quotations of Michelangelo’s.
After these dreams I spent a lot of time locked away, my only company that of the giants before me. I studied their choices, their decisions and their problem solving. My road map was transforming…
And for the upcoming new year I can only repeat the words of James Joyce:
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
