How much of what we do as artists is “reaching”?
I happen to think that the answer is quite a bit. Or rather…way too much?
One might think that the real question should be: What are we “reaching” for?
As artists we tend to be introspective or perhaps retrospective. I suppose it just means we are, in one shape or another, looking at some sort of perspective. Whether it’s our own perspective or it’s an attempt at twisting the viewer’s perspective seems irrelevant to me right now.
In fact, the question at hand, “What are we reaching for?” is irrelevant to me right now.
I personally don’t care what you’re reaching for. Nor, do I think, should you care what I’m reaching for, insofar as some convoluted or self prescribed perspective is concerned.
Truthfully, if you’re reaching for some predetermined outcome, or outcry, from me, when I see your art, you’re going to be sadly disappointed. The same is going to be true for me. If I, somehow, after battling my own low self worth as an artist, delusion myself into thinking that you’ll perceive what I want you to perceive when you look at my art…I’m going to be sadly disappointed. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.
The question that I’m most concerned with right now is WHY…why are we “reaching”?
I mean…is it drive? Is there some “thing” that drives artists to create?
Why?
So that one day…after one of my photographs or paintings is sitting in some collector’s home that a critic or collector or curator or whomever will prove that I, a brilliant and poignant photographer, had a good eye for irony and hypocrisy, or composition, or juxtaposition, or whatever…
Crap. It’s all crap.
Yet tomorrow…just like today…something will compel me (perhaps even drive me) to “reach” for some way to connect with my viewers/future collectors…whatever.
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Linda
