Artist’s Statement

I sat down to write this statement and I came back, rather distractedly, to three artists who have been helping me through some trying times – the incredible tension and anxiety and workload laid on the political-scientist-half-of-me by the recent plague.

First, I have been thinking a lot about Philip Guston recently – about how his work is symbolist, surrealist, neo-expressionist, and pop all at once, how he made work that was both profoundly political and profoundly aloof, above, and superior to the kind of politics I read, speak, and write about as a political scientist. I think about how his work makes me uncomfortable, about how it makes other people uncomfortable too. I find a kind of quiet inspiration in that, the challenge of Guston. I’m not sure Guston is my favorite artist, but I think he is the artist I most want to be like – which is surprising, now that I write it out.

Philip Guston once wrote, “I paint what I want to see.”

Hot damn, that is good.

II.

Second, I have been thinking about George Herriman, the brilliant comic artist who for decades produced what was arguably the most perfect and beautiful of all comic art, Krazy Kat. Herriman’s work, again, manages the symbolist, surrealist, expressionist, pop tension with aplomb and in a way that defies simple understanding or categorization – it is a comic about a cat in love with a mouse whose great passion is throwing bricks at the cat, at its very root, but damned if it isn’t somehow so much more – like Zen koan or the maddening discourses of Zhuangzi or the beautiful cackles of Diogenes, but American, so damned beautifully American, the colors, the landscapes, the feeling of jazz fused with ink and color.

III.

Finally, I think on Keith Haring, the man who perfected the line. That alone would be enough, but it isn’t all, is it? Haring the graffiti artist, Haring who died too young of another epidemic, Haring whose popular work adorned a million t-shirts but whose most powerful work is stunningly avant-garde and filled with passions hardly imagined by most of his admirers, Haring the man who made art that screamed at our ugly damn world there is hope, but we must stand for human rights and against those things that dehumanize us, especially the weakest of us. Profoundly political and utterly unstained by politics themselves.

IV.

These aren’t the only artists I think on and over, seek inspiration from, but they’re the ones I’ve been thinking of lately as I finish a semester and try to again reassert the artist half of me over the political scientist half.

So, I try to do it. I close my eyes, listen to music, breath deeply, maybe sip some cold water, some hot tea, or a dark beer, and then pick up a thing (brush/pen/pastel) and make a mark, trying to scratch out the thing that is there, somewhere in the mess of my head. The whole thing is rather like improvisational jazz. I’m playing with bits and pieces, scraps and snips, some my own, some from cave walls and museums, graffiti and old newspaper strips. I’m rearranging them, adapting them, looking for themes, looking for joyful dissonances and unexpected melodies. I forget about the world, a little. I talk to myself, and the paint, mumbling and cussing and singing off-tune. I stain my hands and clothes in ink and paint, glorious battle-scars. I only notice later, in the mirror, chuckling.