WHY I DO IT
Joan AllemonI try to imagine a world without Art; without pictures, stories, songs, dance, theater, architecture. I cannot.
But this raises the question about my own reasons, needs, impulses to make pictures. The desire to make something that has never before existed. What propels me toward that end? What moves anyone to create something new? It's not as though having done it the need is satisfied. There is always something more to be said or a new to say it. It is an endless game. A game of struggle, self doubt, destruction, reconstruction and ineptitude. The yawning chasm between what I want and what I get. There are a few rewards like the occasional virtuosity, the satisfaction, sometimes, of saying what I want to say clearly, spontaneously and in just the right way. I know when I see it but I can't will it. When it's right and I know and I feel it in my gut something other than my conscious mind has produced it or at least the parts that soar.
This is the real reason why I do it. During the process of making a picture, after my brain has told my hand how to move, what color to choose, what I want the picture to reveal something happens to my state of being. I only know it after it's happened. It's as though I wake up from a trance and realize I have been to a place where there is no time, no mind, no body, no specific place, no self consciousness, no ego, no will.
It is a glorious place to go to. It's my space travel, my religious experience, my spirit trip, and probably the primary force behind why I make pictures or at least why I keep returning to my empty canvases.
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"Coming Out"
I am in the process of making a large picture. In the center of the vertical canvas is a standing woman, head down arms outstretched, hands resting on a tall column to her right and left. In the background is a Roman courtyard, columnar buildings around a formal garden space. The woman is a classic nude in a rigid classical setting. But just what is she up to? Is she holding up the columns to keep the building from crumbling? Or is she simply resting? Or is she pushing the columns apart so that the buildings and convention will crumble and perhaps change her life?
Maybe she is doing ALL of the above. Maybe, like me and countless women everywhere, she is holding up the structure to keep things in order, to keep things from falling down around her head, to protect her loved ones from chaos. But if she's pushing the columns apart is it because she sometimes feels the need for more room, less confining spaces. Or maybe for something significant that will change the status quo. Some kind of action that will precipitate a change in the old order of things. One moment of monumental change in her
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