How do we as painters define ourselves and our roles? Over the course of art history we find a dichotomy of objectives for the visual artist, theApollonian and Dionysian dynamic. Apollonian periods cover the intellectually interesting man of stoic nature an overly serious man in the image of man, firm, rigid, an unemotional man of future, or almost to be. As the goals and reasons for the Apollonian decline we find rising the exuberant and intoxicating Dionysian spirit of dream, instinctive wisdom and ecstatic play. A fluid, lusty, extra-natural man, the beautifully interesting man expressing the emotional man of now, a man of being. These emotionally evocative and sublime waves of dream play were happening during Akhenaten's rule in Egypt, the Middle Ages, Mannerism, and Modernism.
Painting was released from the cave of Apollonian representation by the Cyclops of Photography. Finding itself freed by the hot poker of Impressionism, painting has not been corralled back into the tomb of the Apollonian cave, and it is not my fight to force that to happen. In fact we fight for our continued release and lives still! Now that painters are not the sheep of governments, or institutions we should strive on in our Dionysian dream states using any and all tools for our own means. Let the dreamers dream! Should not the viewer be the interpreter of our dreams instead of a reader of our own definitions? Why must we be completely intelligible?
We are separated from our elder-selves, the keepers of the Apollonian and their esotericism. No longer slave, feral and unkempt, we often fall victim to the wolves of the wild world. We must recreate ourselves beyond being only clever sheep to become something above both man and beast. Can we find our ultimate vernal pan-like play before someone forcibly pens, binds, or otherwise corrals us into an all too confining august?
While deconstructing, pushing and expanding upon my current use of materials I will find, through play, further answers to the problems of self, and how man relates to mysticism, myth and allegory in both ancient and contemporary man and myth. With no more outsides to find, like the Americas for Mannerism, or Africa for Cubism, and with even outsider art, and the art of the insane within us, can we find new myths, or must we create them? Is such a birth possible, or were we unknowingly sterilized from having mystic ecstasies before being released from the womb of our institutional cave?
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