The Artist's Mind/ the Public Eye

Last night I went out to reading held by the local Six Gallery Press, as I haven't been getting out of the house much lately and needed that creative inspiration. There I ran into my friend, the gentle giant Jessica Fenlon, who as always was gushing with her creative process. We stood on the corner talking about that moment when one is writing or making art, and everything starts to come together, not just in the work, but literally as if the contents of the art suddenly spilled over into reality with a great a-ha (such epiphanic moments being for me one of the strongest reasons to and for which to create, somewhat like the faulty pattern recognition of apophenia, except as artists, who else decides what patterns are real?)



What was actually more inspiring than the reading was afterward finding Jessica's website, drawclose, which, besides having some of her rather fantastic and surreal videos, made me realize that I have far too many creative outlets that a). I've been terribly neglecting of late, and b). aren't as represented on the interwebs as they could be. At least not in one cohesive place. I realize I should probably bite it and get a domain name at some point, but for now I've taken the trouble to make the links to my various writings more visible in the sidebar here, as well as update a ton of artwork from the past 8 years to my flickr account, in particular making new sets for Collages, Inklings, and photographs of Modern Ruins. The next step will be figuring out the best way to host music so that I can put up recordings somewhere.

On the other hand, I am also reaching a point of frustration with the easy and public mediation of the Internet, which happens every couple of years, when I get too caught up in the public representations and analyzes and begin neglecting the creative process all together. It seems to me that we live in an age where everyone is creating (or at least "producing content") all the time, and is equally making that content available, all the time, except what is lost is the ability to step back, to edit, to build larger projects. Or, is lost the necessary silence, the magical space created when no one knows where or who you are or what you are doing, when out of the public eye the artist's mind is the total sphere of attention, and anything becomes possible. It is only when you disappear into the work that the epiphany truly starts to happen. And it won't if you're too busy telling people about it to let the threads weave and build up to something more than the just this.