about the artist
As with autobiographies, artist’s statements provide author and artificer a fair opportunity to exaggerate accomplishments as-yet-unknown, inflate statistics that probably need that, and overvalue awards and distinctions that were surprising when they came and have become, over time, trophies that are taken for granted.
I’m going to skip all that and tell you why I still enjoy, after a career that’s been so wildly erratic that I’d have to show you a picture of a train-wreck to capture its many ups, downs, and crashes, painting pictures:
Though never relaxing, it’s always fun.
Even a lousy painter feels a sense of history’s hotly obliterating shadow and feels strangely comfortable there.
Along with the lies one might tell with it, one may also be secretly honest.
Even if it must end, no completion is ever possible.
If you don’t learn something with every experience, you’re not paying attention.
You can’t learn (or fail) too much.
You can keep becoming something that is understood to be you.
Let’s also get honors and accomplishment out of the way. If one’s career cannot be, at least partially discerned in the work itself, somebody’s left the house without his or her keys.
During my busiest year, I mounted exhibitions at the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia, the Greenville County Museum of Art, and Virginia Commonwealth University. I was hardly idle, however, during all the others. I’ve written articles for American Artist, American Arts Quarterly, The Artist’s Magazine, Memphis Magazine, The Commercial Appeal, and slew of other “little” and/or literary magazines. For a five-year period, I read my reviews of Washington, DC-area exhibits on the radio. I was also Art Correspondent for Open Letters Monthly. Until I insisted on being paid.
I’ve also felt the notion that Memphis’s character - which is hardly a homogeneous one - is worth capturing on canvas, paper, panel, guitar strings, prose and poetry, and the spoken word. That connection has lasted for decades and is likely to last and persist right along with me.
