Found art

I learned to draw by copying details from works by Rubens and van Gogh. What marks they used to make an eye, build the contour of a face. The same way you learn to dance by copying what your ballet teacher does, over and over until it sits in your body and you develop your own technique.

While I loved Rubens--Daniel pleading to God from the lions' den (or pleading with the lions)--I gravitated more to van Gogh and the other Impressionists. I liked that they found the subjects for their art in the world around them. Rather than Jesus coming down from the cross, or Samson falling victim to Delilah, the Impressionists studied the landscapes around them, the bar or theatre scenes, the real content or context of their lives.

I still like to look at Rubens, or read a wholly fabricated story, but the kind of art I like to make is from the things I find in my own life. The way I picked up objects that caught my eye when I was a kid--a stone or bottle cap, a pen knife in a souvenir shop, anything that was a new shape or color, or hinted at some new experience. Now it's not objects, but surviving a series of choices, making new ones that might bend the future in my favor. Trying to cultivate a creative life out of the little bit of time I own every week, in a place where parents want schools to stop wasting money on the arts and start spending more on science. Improvising my way through raising a child, or trying to understand the evolution of a marriage.

Art rendered from my own experience of the world, a portrait of my ignorance, an opportunity to understand, a chance to make the idiosyncratic universal.