Images and Thoughts

March 27^th

There is a kind of peace every artist must fight to obtain in being a warm radiating effect, producing ripples and not immortal art. In coming to this peace, one realizes that intention and presence matter more than medium. More than any technical detail—the medium is just as frail as the work of art itself. But the information sent out in the ripples does not just disappear—it is translated and moves across countless mediums to descend through the world like anything else. A warping meme life on the one hand, a physical influence, a pattern unraveling or being reconstructed, or… culture. Or… nature. There are endless interpretations of this radiating effect. But the effect is there, and the creative spirit is nourished by the involvement with the process of this effect’s initiation and not the particular extended interpretations of it. The self is nourished in a different way by discussion and interpretation, a wonderful intellectual spiritual cultural individual way, but the contentment with the pursuit of creation must underlie all creative endeavors if the way is to become full, if the artist is to dive through specificity into a perfect acceptance of anachronistic reality, and of his own state and direction in the world.

Right now the questions of medium and culture are large in my thoughts. Do I attempt film, or video game design to attempt to unify disparate creative impulses? Would game design really give me the interaction with culture I desire so strongly from it? This is my current struggle. Aim myself with honesty... towards what I can both dream and talk about—to a place where I am a part of not only something larger and outside, but something larger that is human as well. Not just if I am to be happy, but if what I create is to have an intimate proximity to the culture which has shaped me and engage in a dialogue with that part of the world as much of my art engages in visual discussion with physical reality as I experience it.

What is the culture that has shaped me? Coming instantly to mind are the stories I read as a child, the books my parents read me, the friezes and arcading and columns of architecture soaring and solidly anchored to their monumental foundations in Germany, Italy, in history. I think of the red roofs and spiral staircases and marble facades and alleyways and canals of Venice.

And of Japanese architecture, of the roofs made to make the demons slide off, of the wood carpentry and paper sliding doors, tatami and zafus and square tables, all the animated narrative coursing out from this context into my childhood from movies and shows and books and the internet, Gundam on 56k and Miyazaki on the old wood paneled television in my mom’s upper living room.

I think of the city of Seattle, the bank of America building and the web way of backstreets and the gum wall and pike place market and most of all—the endless extending sprawl of this epicenter, the roads rolling up and down through greenwood and shoreline and stretching flat like aurora and descending suddenly into Shoreview Park, and curving up to end like a cat’s folded tail at Richmond beach. Edmonds and Lynwood and Pacific Park Apartments to the north, the empty foggy roads and casinos and cheap stores and the graveyard I walked and biked to with my camera, at the beginning of my life beyond the firmly clamped hand of high-school.

Days of waking up and wandering, exploring, yet with purpose—following a parent’s lead but always moving so freely with my eyes in road trips, vacations, adventures—learning to follow my eyes with my feet on my own and learning to love the world both alone and surrounded by family and out in the public spaces and an unconsidered wanderer in the more private between places, between the city and no-where, between the city and agriculture, the freeway, pedestrian hell, unremarkable roads, and the wilderness.

Across that gulf in the back-country the threads of my visual focus have been much closer at hand, but in this transitional time all threads that dangle are ready to be picked up again.

I can accept the way these threads intrigue me and find both meaning and more in them, I am an artist! I need not keep shrugging them off as nostalgia. Time is made to be punctured, broken.