Sowing Stars, and a Little Bit of Space Dust

Hello everyone. I've been a little absent from Substack for the past couple of weeks. I've been in the studio painting, shoring up my emotions for back to back funerals, and I've also been doing some intense brainstorming. I want to share a passage a little of what I have been thinking about.

My entire body of major works has, unintentionally, been expressing Aristotle’s theme of Eudaemonia since my earliest figurative paintings in 1977. It’s a moment of joy, a moment of feeling the most alive. Out of the millions of feelings that we humans have, that I have, I wanted to pick the one most worthwhile to paint. Art, I believe, is the ideal medium to show Aristotle’s concept of happiness as an end in itself.

Newberry, Jette, 1977, oil on linen, 52x42".

In my minor works, like my pastels, drawings, and sketches, I am super focused on visual perception. Sometimes I’ll draw a vase or an interior, not with any grand message, but because something powerful about the light or color attracted me. I try to capture that moment, and many of those drawings could take anywhere from five minutes to an hour.

Newberry, Pillow, 2019, pastel, 19x19”.

It's a sliding scale of time. If I'm going to work on a major painting, which could take a year or more, I think deeply about the messaging and content. That entire year is spent on a moment that I think is the most important to celebrate. I don't focus on unresolved issues because those issues are not ends in themselves. It seems counter to the idea of "art as an end in itself" to show something that needs to be solved. For instance, if you paint a pathetic person in a sewer, what you really want to do is pick them up, dust them off, and give them some human dignity. An ideal situation would be to unleash their potential, which would mirror Aristotle's concept of a life well-lived.

While painting can capture this, if the subject is negative or problem-ridden, it calls for resolution. It becomes a means to an end, just as Aristotle says money is not an end in itself but a means toward something else. From my perspective, a problem projected in a painting is the same thing, a call to be fixed.

One of the saddest things about life is that our greatest moments are fleeting; we don’t get to hold them forever. But through the magic of art, we can.

A sneak peak of what I have been working on this month, revisiting an older work.

Cheers,

Michael