Inaccessible Art

People often ask me why I strap art supplies onto my back — canvas and paper, a travel easel, the variety of paints and charcoals, brushes and turpenoids and mediums — in a 20 pound kit of avante-garde materiel to be hauled to remote locations, just to make art? I could say that I feel that, when I’m on the mountain top, that I’m full of potential. That I’m inspired by the Hudson River School. Maybe I’ve read John French Sloan’s The Gist of Art one too many times? And I’m attempting to make another painting. Another landscape titled: I was in Montauk Point in June; and nature was pretty; the sun threw purple shadows north-northwest.

But to be completely honest: I’m not sure why I do it myself. The act has lost all meaning.

I’ve come to accept the deeper parts of myself that I don’t understand. I throw my hands up and listen to and live with the parts that just are. We occassionally give each other a knowing glance, and tear off into the woods to make some thing. Performing a clumsy attempt at finding the boundaries of my umwelt. To give me something to write about where I can emphasize the end of every line.

In a sense, I think, it’s an callback to primitive life, nested within other more archaic callbacks. Let’s consider humanity’s early nature creating art, inexplicably, in the remotest of locations; The palimpsest of animal fats and stone pigments on the walls in the deepest bellies of caves; The congeries of lines uncovered in the landscape of the desert; The figurines cultivated by exposing the chalk on far off hills. Maybe it’s just human instinct to go some where unreachable and put your hands on it. Now, any thoughts of attempting parietal art gives me the feeling that I’d be commiting an act of vandalism. So, the art is made in inaccessible places — intentionally, in the passive voice, in the way that every artist knows how art is made — and it comes back with me.