#art, Thinking About Art and Life…

I don’t usually wake up thinking about art, but on a foggy July morning, watching the sun rise amidst the absurdity of the meteorological conditions, my thoughts went immediately into creating a record of such a daybreak. So, all morning I have been thinking about art, and especially about the new painting I am working on. I still have not put a single drop of paint on the canvas, but I have been «painting» it for about a week. Of course it is all in my head, as well as some ideas in a sketchbook. But yesterday I finally decided upon the composition. Funny thing, I decided to ignore all the previous sketches and create a brand new one of a thought that suddenly came to my head. So, now I know what the new painting is going to be.

For me that is the «process» of art. It involves trial and error, improvisation, allowing the subject to take centre stage and do it’s solo, and of course I must take into good consideration the rhythm of the entire work. That is the process of «JaZzArT» to create a surreal-expressionist work out of a bunch of ideas. Now I am thinking about the colours it will have. Colours are very important for my surreal-expressionist art as there is a lot of abstract within these figurative compositions. Colour creates the mood, the intention, the message and also attracts attention, and that is very important.

For me the process of art does not include inspiration, or muses, or intuition or the thought that I «am» or «have» talent. My talent is developed with every painting I create as I work, diligently and hard to make it «work». Talent is not a possession, nor is it something you are born with. Talent is developed through hard work, repetition, trial and error and with the desire to create. If people were born talented, they would have a genetic condition, and then be pre-disposed to create but what they create would not be art. Art has to be the result of effort, of enthusiasm and of discipline, and of course, the unquenchable thirst of the artist that guides him to the waters of creativity, which is art.

I am an academic artist. I graduated from Fine Arts at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, Florida. Since those days I have grown as an artist because I always considered that art was the search. So I searched and am still searching. I am also finding, I am also learning. I have sought out knowledge from any source, be it a book, a video, another artist, but always from somewhere or someone. There is no such thing as a «self-taught» artist (or anything). No one can teach themselves what they do not know. The knowledge comes from somewhere.

And at this point in my life and career, and after what I am seeing that goes on in art schools at unis almost everywhere, I no longer advocate a Fine Arts degree in Art. I would instead suggest an art academy where you can register and define your course of studies. If you are interested in abstract art you need not waste your time learning figurative (although you should have a good introduction to it), just like if you wish to pursue sculpting, why waste time doing watercolour landscapes.

But the worst thing that I see in the Faculties of Fine Arts is the way the professors want to guide their students to the art forms they like. The worst one is conceptual art and performance art. It seems like there is an overabundance of performance artists as well as conceptual artists. Fine, for whoever likes that, I’ve no beef with them nor with their style. But I think that if you are training to be an artist, an artist that draws, paints, models and sculpts, then you should not be influenced to veer your course of studies towards conceptual or performance art. And that is not the job of the professor. I never wanted a professor to guide my head or thoughts, all I wanted was for them to teach me the basics of art and of the art world (business), which they rarely touch upon.

CHEERS