Jamey Series

Well, this guy in my studio building Jamey has quit art.

Maybe that's not eggs-actly right because he did say he was going to be doing digital art and working full time.

Painting Racket

But he's quitting the painting racket for good he says.

He said he had grown tired of the whole art scene and how he thought he had started painting for others or painting what he thought other people would like and had stopped painting for himself.

That was that. He quit and he gave away all his stuff, which included a few canvases that I took off his hands.

I really tried to give some of the canvases to other people too and other people did get some so I don't feel guilty (I feel a little guilty).

Push Comes to Shove

I can understand where Jamey is coming from, sometimes the world around you seems so hard to deal with, and people seem so unwilling to live their lives following artistic guidelines that I've thought about quitting too. I've thought about what it all means and I've thought that when push comes to shove, art isn't a top priority.

I mean, after 9-11 when things were ker-azy, it was hard to come into the studio and paint my little paintings of a horsey or something. There seemed to be much bigger things at work.

But I also think that if you're being an artist correctly, and by that I mean if you're a conduit between the world around you and the people of the world of which you are a part, you take the bad times with the good. Your only duty is to interpret the world you live in so that people can understand it better.

BIG Problems

You don't have to necessarily paint something like the Goya painting the Third of May either. http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/goya/may_3rd.jpg.html. I think during difficult times, if you just work at being that conduit and nothing else, things take care of themselves. It's when you think about things too much, where your mind gets involved and tries to reason and rationalize that you really run into BIG problems.

To me, there is nothing at all wrong with painting for people. I think that's what you SHOULD do, paint for people. That's the whole idea. The most avant garde artists in the whole freakin' world connnected with their audience, they had to.

So when Jamey says he wasn't painting for himself, he was painting for other people, I think what he was saying was he was thinking too much about his paintings, he wasn't just letting them flow.

Irony (as I understand it)

The irony of the situation (if I understand irony which I've been told I don't) is that if he WERE able to paint for himself and go with the flow, he would connect with people around him MUCH MORE than he would in a situation where he tries to reason and figure out what people like and then do more of that.

In other words, when Jamey says he's not painting for himself what I think he really is saying is that he isn't painting for others. When he says he's painting for others, I think he really is saying that he's painting for himself.

I don't presume to know all that's going through Jamey's head and I'm sure I'm getting this all wrong or making it seem more simple than it really is. It's confusing, that's for sure. I don't blame Jamey for quitting, but I hope he reconsiders at some point because he's pretty good.

So I got about 4 canvases from Jamey, all of which I've started painting on. I call them the Jamey Series.

A couple of them already had paintings on them that I painted over. I felt kind of bad about that but what else are you going to do?