I finished, well- almost finished - an art project today.
I've been a potter, a ceramic artist, for thirty years. Clay is my art medium. I've done very little with brushes and paints and am in no way a painter. But I have been out of my pottery studio for almost a year now and have had a niggling need to do something besides bake and decorate cakes. So one day I bought myself some paints and started playing around with them. Around that time I read the newsletter from the gallery where I have been showing and selling my pottery for the last fifteen years. I saw that the February show is an open show with a theme (of square art) and I decided to use it as an excuse to experiment a bit. This is what I came up with in my spare time.
Samuel came into my studio tonight and I asked him for a comment on it. All he said was "I don't know what it means."
???
How does he think that art should "mean" something? Mr. Dirtywrench looked at it, cocked his head and gave me that look that I knew meant I don't know what it means...
Okay. Listen. It doesn't mean anything. I am not going to scrape together some pretensions and come up with a high-fallutin' meaning for it. It is first of all a painting exercise and secondly a project that I did just for fun. It's a project that doesn't need me to labor in a cold studio with hazardous chemicals. I don't have to submit it to flames of intense heat and lose sleep over whether the results of my hard labor will be good or terrible. I get instant gratification with this project.
There is nothing original about the idea at all. This kind of thing has been done in fabric, in tile, and other media. I simply spent some time painting 12 x 9" canvas papers, I cut them into two inch squares and spent several days arranging them. The gallery might very well tell me to get that thing outta here.
If they do let it stay in the gallery it needs some kind of a title. I need some help here. Does anyone have a good idea? I have one day to come up with something.