Small Town Stuckism

Superficial Relationships in Empire 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20"

I’m workin’ it. Painting in the morning, proofreading my book in the afternoon. A busy summer. I will pop and fertilize the vegetation. Here is another sneak peak from Making Friends With Wild Dogs:

“Only the tiniest fraction of mankind want freedom. All the rest want someone to tell them they are free.”
— Irving Layton

Tonight is the Member’s Show at the Art Association. I didn’t submit any work because I live in artist hell and I’ve become wary of showing up to events that drain. I’ve been sharing my neurosis for too long to the same people, who, after all these years, will not accept that I am a local treasure, unless they are being gregariously fed sweet cakes and warm quiches. Unfortunately, I became an artist, a thinking one, in a paint-by-number town. I expect over half of the paintings showing tonight to be in the genre of “Saturday Senior Classes”, a step up from the “sip and paint” landscapes finished after the second glass of cheap wine. Watercolors of darling pets, acrylic flowers, oil clouds, and uncanny valley-rendered grandchildren. However, nothing from the gut—no dire warning, love gushing, admonition, or revolution, and about as sensitive as a still life of a dull brick sitting on an old chair. Here is an unwritten rule on the member show prospectus:

Entries will be immediately ignored if shown to represent anger, confusion, exasperation, desperation, meloncholy, lust, rage, tenderness, despair, yearning, envy, grief, regret, disappointment, sorrow, anxiety, resentment, longing, frustration, vulnerability, connection or surrender.

The world is shutting out artists because it has closed its mind to feeling. Art is getting marginalized to mean nothing about what the artist is made of, which is a travesty to the human condition, and an insult to Stuckism. The same is true of any thought-provoking “profession”. Think of philosophers. Nearly 200 years ago Thoreau wrote:

“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?”

I am a philosopher-artist expressing my thoughts with primeval paint (made of plastic goo in hot factories). To call myself a “philosopher” in 21st century America is a joke to those who can no longer feel. I have not been witness to a single local outrage over the U.S. sponsored genocide of Palestinians, nor is there mention of the thousands of lives lost in Ukraine so western oligarchs can plunder resources while playing nuclear chicken with Russia. I have to log onto the Internet and circumnavigate the globe to find kindred spirits who feel enough to think out doomsday scenarios. My own friends and family are propagandized into blind obedience and cannot form an opinion (nor action) of right living that isn’t an obvious regurgitation of cable/network news and the bottom line of its advertisers. Imagine Thoreau and his Concord friends (Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott, Whitman) not having discussions about slavery, ever. Imagine them believing everything they read and viewed in the Charleston Mercury, and being hush-hush because they were afraid of what they knew not what. Fearing to think out loud was unimaginable to educated people of the 19th century. Today it is the norm.
A deep, sustained droning of anxiousness, (sometimes terror), exists throughout society. People have taken the artist out of their lives, and relegated philosophy to a college survey course, just another elective in a career package bought and paid for. Don’t upset the boat. Block feelings. The abandonment of expression and hardening the senses has caused so much unnecessary suffering. Over time, emotions steadily diminish and leave a void for a gong of cognitive dissonance to resound 24/7. We lose our sleep and precious sanity. It is safer to abide by direction from in-groups within the class bubble, which lessens life, making ourselves and relationships stale. Art is relegated to pretty pictures, and philosophy, just another feng shui makeover in Good Housekeeping.

That is the town I live in today, as a Stuckist artist. It’s your town too, Mr. an Ms. painter of ideas, whether you live in big city London or low down Oswego. The benefit to a philosopher-artist in a big city is the much-improved chance that she finds a kindred spirit “in the flesh”. It’s nice to share a cup of coffee with another sensitive creature able to call a spade a spade, and a genocide the mass murder of innocents by power systems that have sucked the feeling out of those whom you love. More than provacative concepts and genius composition, give me physical connection to other humans being artists. It is futile to sit in a cafe alone considering the human condition as society drifts further away from being humane. Communion must have a reawakening else art becomes a dead duck and quack practice for the very few, and very lonely. For the time being there is an Internet to exhibit my painting with ideas while I grow years younger in my old age, fixed in a small town of strangers getting stranger.

I won’t attend tonight’s Member Show at the Art Association because there aren’t any artists in Oswego exhibiting their ideas. Another lovely boquet of flowers or big-eyed puppy dog won’t address our mutual need for our feelings to be born again.