Some #art thoughts I've been struggling with:
1. I'm learning to do oil painting. I have a lot of cultural baggage about painting, from outside. Oils as high culture, mastery of art, pure fancy creation.
2. I'm deep in a math art place, variations on Menger sponges and related ideas. Stark geometric objects, fine hard lines and proportions.
The two fit together weird; I feel like my subject is fighting my medium, and yet feel like using tools (stencils etc) to mitigate that is "cheating".
And that "cheating" sense is something I'm trying to power on past, to say, fuck it, there's a whole history of modern art unmoored from fusty Old Masters mystique. My hand is unsteady? I need a sharp straight line? Do whatever makes it happen!
But it's still there in the back of my head, in the wrestling match between different things I could do when I sit down to paint. Better to use a tool, force a straight line? Better to freehand and train my unsteady arm? Better to find a compromise? Etc.
@joshmillard I think art itself is the practice of providing answers to questions that don't have answers.
You're taking some polarities (emergent math, art and manual representation), and used against/with each other they sort of circumscribe something. I also wonder what the nucleus is.
@vai Yeah. Part of this is I'm continuing to work through what was almost a running joke to start with before turning into a deliberate-ish fixation and is now a whole ongoing aesthetic project/obsession/whatever that snuck up on me and turned out to be more engaging and important to me than I'd have guessed six months ago. I don't know where it's going, so trying to steer it is sorta complicated and quixotic.