Inspiration

I bought my first piece of signed art today. My fam was walking around Downtown Naples and happened upon the annual art fair. Most of the art was bad but the artists weren't talentless; they just made boring, insipid art. I guess one has to consider the audience - a bunch of wealthy old people probably don't want anything revolutionary hanging on their wall. Anyway, seeing all that stuff reminded me how much I like to make art and how I could make better art than a lot of that; art that people still might want to own.

This all tied in with this week's conversations between my brother and me. Rick's pretty knowledgeable on economics and unabashedly libertarian. He says the economic situation will force people to stop consuming and start conserving. Instead of throwing away a torn shirt you'll take it to a seamstress for example. He also thinks people will become entrepreneurs again. They'll lose their jobs and be forced to create products or services that fill a need. I've had some good ideas that I thought would make money before. But those ideas have never come to fruition because the risk required to realize them was too great. I wonder if getting pushed out of comfortable jobs will force people to wager what they wouldn't before. Perhaps the results will be innovative and fantastic.

Which brings me back to art. It's something I couldn't risk before and the pressure of it made me hate doing it. Now that I'm away from it, I realize I might have some talent, and I might have some good ideas. I bought that picture because it was the first one of the artist's that caught my eye. Michael Bryant is his name. He does the double exposures all in camera, so he's got no idea how they'll come out until he develops the film. I guess it just reminds me that life operates in strange cycles. Sometimes you think you're just going around the same circle all the time and nothing's going anywhere. Then all of a sudden you're someone new, and you're in some new place, and your whole life is different. But at the same time, whatever it is that makes you you is unchanged and you can't escape from it. Nor would you want to.

"plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose"