It took far longer than I expected to crate up Reflections and Clouds as per instructions, but I feel confident that it is as snug as it can be in its packaging, and that it will arrive in Oklahoma on time next week. I'm going to miss it, but I wish it well in the big city, as one of the shining stars in the show. It should be the centerpiece, as far as I am concerned.
I feel another rant coming along, and I'm going to try to grab it by the shoulders and spin it around into a positive. I've given a lot of column space to the subject of art in this blog, and I could easily revisit the topic once a week until the end of the internet, never tiring of my job as cheerleader. I die a little inside, when I hear about art budgets being slashed, in schools, cities, or states. It felt like a knife in the heart when I heard the governor of Oklahoma was cutting funding for the arts, mere weeks ahead of my stepfather's turn as a featured artist in the state-sponsored series at the capitol. It's a favorite target for some politicians, to paint the arts as a luxury item, the first thing to cut when budgets get tight. To me, that is the biggest outrage. Painting, sculpture, drama, music, literature... These things are not frivolous. They are not optional line items. They are the very expression of our lives, of our culture and humanity. When you look back to the earliest mark humans left on this earth, what survives is not their economy. We don't continue to marvel at their conformity. What we have to show the very moment when humans learned to represent their souls, and to become immortal, is art. From the second the first homo sapien smeared charcoal and ochre on a cave wall, and others understood the abstract message conveyed there, art had meaning. Without art, none of our struggles and wars, work and diligence means anything. Without our culture--and with this I include our language and philosophy--how can we prove we are more complex than army ants? I will never stop supporting the arts, voting for the arts, participating in the arts.
My stepfather posts a few of his paintings every day, to expand his audience and share his amazing body of work with his friends and acquaintances. Sometimes I get to see old friends in the art that shows up, paintings that I remember from my childhood, that were sold or stored long ago. This morning, he brought out a work he did a few years before he and my mother married, a dark, jarring painting of Icarus, as his wax wings melted from the heat of the sun, and he fell screaming to earth. When I was an adolescent, this painting scared and intrigued me just a little, and it inspired me to study and learn. I remember reading the myth of Icarus, and feeling like I had an inside knowledge of the story because I'd already been familiar with that painting before it ever came up in school. I discovered that I liked a lot of the darker, spookier art, like Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son or Fuseli's The Nightmare. I think having access to so much art as a child helped expand my horizons, made me more curious to learn and less afraid of having my opinions challenged. I can't imagine how cold and sad would be my world, had I grown up with blank, white walls. My mind would be sterile, and my heart would be empty.
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