In the Summer of 2001, I began a new artistic project I called The History-Project. It would be one of my most lasting artistic visions, though perhaps not the most lasting of all, hoping as I do that there is always much, much more to come.
Basically, what I have realized over the years is that I am not an abstract painter or painter of abstractions, abstract paintings. All I have ever done is paint what I saw in my surroundings. It was a historical footnote, or accident, that I happened to have been born with one foot in the 20th century and the other to be sprawled, sliding across the 21st.
I only ever choose to write these things with the hope in my heart that it a) be useful to someone and b) useful, but never obscene or ugly or in any way distasteful to anyone ever. This was difficult because it is the story of my life, and as people love telling me, life isn't easy, or life isn't always rosy, etc. At the same time, I've only ever wanted to give a faithful record of what I saw, thought, and did, and maybe a little of what I have felt. It was important to me that my fidelity to the handicraft could never be denied or even questioned.
The problem is that people often read things into my work and my explanations too. It is for that purpose that it seems as though I am making such elaborate, sophisticated short-cuts and wrap-arounds and all sorts of stuff that ends up looking quite ugly on the surface. But I believed in the power of great discipline and so sought to be so rigorous in my methods, meticulous and systematic in my daily practise, that I imagined to myself a few years ago, a story where they would say of the Painter once he has passed on, that, "He Alone Brought On An Age of Discipline".
Heed These Words: As I was saying before, there's no magic trick to being an Artist. I find it rather unfortunate that people keep wanting to be an artist as soon as they encounter one, or that someone might say something as absurd as, "We All Have a Little Artist In Us." We really don't. "Artist" is not a job title or job description.
Here is what is to be the salient point in all of this. Painting is one of the only things I ever wanted to do, more or less since I was born here. But the massive proliferation of individuals wanting to be "Artists" has made it nearly impossible for me to practise my craft.
At first, it was more or less easy to maintain. I just lived in complete isolation where no one could have found me if they tried, even people who knew where I was, they couldn't have done me any harm, and here is why.
History grows out of itself. History grows out of itself and "eats its tales" if you will. The problem is, one cannot just wake up one morning and decide: "I Shall Now Paint a Portrait of History". That wouldn't make any sense, except that that's what History looked like to me, not a portrait, but what I saw everywhere around me looked like human History to me. And so I painted it, and any semblance of a normal life for me disappeared that very same day.
What happened is that everything in the universe seemed to start working against me. I thought that this was a strange thing for me to be thinking, and I did what the painter in me does in such a context, I added a brush-stroke or two, and called it "The Persecution Sets In." (These are not literal examples, it was just to point out that a sophisticated and masterful Documentation process has always gone on concurrently. Painters in today's secular societies are like anyone else, they get interrupted every now and then. The difference is that when I got interrupted and couldn't paint, when I took off again, this too would be projected onto the canvas and maybe received a name like, "Constant Interruptions are So Beautiful It Hurts My Senses.")
In any case, and in conclusion, DO NOT TRY ANY OF THIS AT HOME. Unless you are a distinguished professional painter with at least 5 years of practise, you shouldn't put any more faith in what was said here than you would in the comics of Sundays paper. I mean that, and 5 years is not enough. I would say 15 years of continuous practise AFTER you had already spent another 15 or so honing down the skills and learning the art.
So that's that. Imagine how painful it is to dedicate your life to something and then be forced into a position where you can never do it. To add insult to injury, everyone suddenly wants to become An Artist Like You, making it impossible to even breath properly now, since it is so exquisitely asphyxiating.
Asphyxiatingly yours,
A.G.
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