Over the past year or so I have been reading more writings by artists. This includes correspondences, journals, and art reviews of other artists/artworks.

For example: Philip Guston, Adrian Piper, Van Gogh, Carroll Dunham. Why have I been doing this? Sometimes I read journals, and this is the pleasure of biography. This is the sense of understanding the trials and tribulations of an artists life and how an artists deals with personal struggling. However, more than that, I am interested in how artists are reflecting on their personal art practice and other art works (what inspires them). I have a voracious appetite for this, Why?

I have no idea.

That is why I am writing this blog post.

I made a number of false starts in my analysis. I started writing about the changing nature of art, the artist, the interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary nature of art today, art and commerce, art and propaganda (advertisement), aesthetics, craft…. naw.

Then I started thinking about creation in general:

Why create anything? What do people find interesting in other people’s creations? What motivates people to create in the first place?

But I am not interested in all creative function. A business person can be creative, and this is different than the creative activity of a painter. I am more interested these days in the creative activity of the painter. How to keep working in a medium that seems almost exhausted? What is the impulse? Because there is something that draws me to this kind of work as well, but I do not know what it is.

To create means to create something new. This is not some sort of capitalist fetsh. How to create something when it seems that everything has already been created?  How to create something with the burden of history and information?

To that end, if anyone has any good recommendations on artists writing about their work and art that they like… please let me know.