I wanted to write this essay because I was compelled to express the extreme emotions and the extreme events that surround making art.
And I know that in the minds of many people artists are very simple - they do some doodles, sell them to someone and then it's a complete circle.
Well what happens when you dream of projects that nobody wants?
Sometimes projects emerge as very simple thoughts and these thoughts gradually grow into visual things, now these visual things may sometimes need thousands of dollars to happen.
I'm not saying this just to throw thousands of dollars around, I'm just saying that to construct a project there's got to be someone to back it up.
That somebody could be the artist, that somebody could be a collector, or a Medici of the art, or it could be a commercial backer.
I don't do commercial art so for me that's kind of out of the question. I do not want to make art that's influenced by Instagram kind of liking, where an algorithm intelligence drives approval for relatable, replicable and easily understood projects. Especially ones that haven't happened yet.
I want to express my profound gratitude to Anita Durst, the creative director of Chashama who supported my project, gave it a platform and even jumped in and created a performance literally on the fly.
All of a sudden I made this silly white room art installation and hundreds of people all of a sudden thirsted to paint. And people had an incredible time painting, people had a ball. But they did not know it beforehand.
(For White Room Art Installation) I put the canvas up and set up the entire configuration which was pretty elaborate although you can't really figure it out at first glance. I had an elaborate setup with clothes protection and gloves and shoe covers and entering the room was basically an experience, everything from the brush cleaning cups to the painting plates everything was thought out beforehand and nothing was left to chance.
Including the fact that I had directions painted All over the room.
White Room. Paint Anything.
All the little details that I created for this project (White Room) were small knowledge that I learned on previous projects, I used to yell at people to invite them to paint but I figured out it's very unproductive and in one of my most recent street art installation I figured that I could simply print the directions and people will read them and figure out what to do. This is what happened so I implemented that small knowledge unilaterally.
Besides taking care of the making of things the mental aspect of making art is literally mind-blowing as in sometimes you want to blow your brains out. There's this anguish which I've read even Van Gogh's letters, there's always this pressure of the art bulging from below.
In my darkest moments I have to report to you that I had a friend, a single friend who simply said on the phone to me "you have so much to offer". I'm really grateful to my friend Ian who never gave up on me.
Art making is really difficult so I'm always looking for inspiration from all walks of life. I've often been a major freak about space and science fiction and so a big follower of NASA and spaceX, and its a founder.
Elon Musk recently said that he's neither optimistic nor pessimistic about his stuff, he simply feels they need to be done.
I decided to adopt that philosophy for all my future projects, paintings and ideas. These are the kind of projects, paintings and ideas that will never see the light of day if it weren't for me to champion it.
Also, I've been thinking whenever things get very difficult and I'm like, you know, I'm just going to give it up, no more installations, no more painting. I'm just going to fix my life. But then I'm thinking to myself, so just imagine if Elon Musk had given up after all the rockets exploded? I remember the time he was not a darling of any media and I remember occasionally going on Twitter to follow on some of the rocket stuff. It was really all grunt work for Elon and his spaceX all along. Grunt work where you put your nose to the floor to the ground to the plow and you just keep pushing.
Nobody owes me a thing, there's no art fairy, I absolutely don't want to make art that makes likes or clicks or anything of that kind, I want to create deep work that touches people.
Even if it touches five people, I want people to be touched and to really be glad they take part in art.
I'm not sure if I'm going to continue with my installations in Central Park - I applied for a grant with Sony and have a couple of other projects I wanted to present to them. I want to grow the work and not settle into a routine or a "thing" because I am not a shop.
I really have plans for drawings and paintings which basically I have a 50,000 years worth of plans for. I really miss working in oils, and there are a lot of things that I have in my head visually.
I really want some time to think about the installations I would like to do robotically on Mars, this is so far-fetched, kind of seems silly just to say it but I want this to have deep meaning and to think about it seriously, with the mind of an engineer, and the rigorousness of a curator.
I've always imagined robots on Mars making marks on the surface of Mars, like cave paintings plotted robotically. Or Nasca drawings plotted robotically. The robot rovers we currently have on Mars can realistically scrape the surface and drill holes, but they could also leave tracks and take pictures.
So I'm thinking about using the cold weather to be just cozied up at home, with the weather being really cold outside and with some of the covid shut downs, I really don't want to go anywhere on any sort of resort and be away from my art. I really am bored out of my mind when I am supposed to do some daily activities with no intellectual or visual challenges like vacations.
Currently there are all these free courses on one of my favorite websites edx.org, you can learn anything in human knowledge at college level. These courses are from Harvard, MIT and really the best places in the world. Love learning about stuff that's none of my business.
I mentioned earlier that art making is very difficult, and it's not because making anything that looks like art is difficult I mean any drunk person with a brush at the bar or any monkey or elephant could paint with their tusk 🦣.
Making art that is rigorous and that has never been done before or seen before, making art that really touches people and confronts them with experiences they have never had before, on the sidewalk or in the studio. I really want to go back to my roots of drawing and work on my painting. So all of this requires major sacrifice and for myself I've decided that my sacrifice would be things from the material world, like clothes, gadgets and vacations, entertainment, furniture and so forth. I've decided for myself that because I feel I have to do the things that I need to do and I haven't figured out a way with unlimited resources, actually that would be impossible with the laws of thermodynamics, so I've decided that I will live a very minimalist lifestyle with very minimal consumption in every sense, and every effort that I make monetarily will go towards art. I have absolutely no qualms about it, and I never miss things.