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Evolution Through Art
A new book offers a platform for the figurative art movement to knock down the door of the art world.
I was 18 when I made a sincere effort to fall in love with art.
The suburban life of American culture is almost devoid of appreciation for the vast history of art and its meaning. I grew up in an art culture of the postmodern, in which art was confusing at best, and families would walk out of an art museum underwhelmed and snickering contemptuously at the soulless shit entombed there.
The good art, now a hundred years old at least, felt like it came from an ancient era. I felt detached from it and wondered at its meaning. In canonizing the greatness of the ancients, lifting their work on pedestals, while presenting postmodern art as what exists now, art culture undermined the validity of the living figurative art of our time. Not that there was much left to show. Postmodernism and historical obsession allowed figurative art to become almost extinct.
In college I focused on science, but I soon discovered that I needed breaks in my work and used the pause to look at art. To just sit, and look at it, and feel it. After an expenditure of effort on a problem, when I turned my attention to a piece of art, I was better able to feel the energy shimmering from it.
