Commonalities

So many contemporary art movements want to accentuate the artistic freedom to work without boundaries or formats. While I appreciate and often even feel lured towards this creative perspective… I have to stop and wonder what qualifies the members of an “anything goes” art movement as a group?

At what point does the philosophy of an art group’s manifesto have to give way for actual cohesion of style or subject, so that an actual art movement can form? My own work runs the gamut of (1) travel-inspired works, (2) abstracted landscapes that propel movement as a binding force and (3) introspective anthropological narratives – at what point do I take one or all of these directions and build some sort of unified front to stamp a permanent spot upon the present or future art world. Within my lifetime will that even be possible for a painter stuck in the current conceptual art time warp? After all these years, try as I might, I can’t help but feel more passion for painting over all other mediums. – While I still don’t believe they hold the answer for the direction I see my work taking, I think I just had a small epiphany with regards to what motivates the Stuckists’ art movement.

Could the most ridiculous of all the twentieth century questions (Is painting dead?), be the button that sets me off? My personal motivator to prove that painting is or should be the high art of choice? Surely the contemporary art world has not branched so far out that something as simple as stating “I am a painter” is a call to arms or binding factor for an art movement... I am a painter. - DN