How to commemorate the Great Giveaway of nearly all of a lifetime of art? Especially as the huge physical push on the parts of myself and others that it entailed coincided with the Great Earthquake and Tsunami of Japan? That soon after beginning to realize what was happening there, one of the Great Nuclear Disasters in human history was taking place for the people of Japan? For the world?
I felt guilty continuing to process all that I had been put through, all I was putting myself, friends, acquaintances through. For me this past eviction from my art studio and all I did to save my work from the dump will always be somehow preempted in my mind by tragedy on a scale of which my relatively small drama pales in comparison. It is just as when Pedro's and my exhibition at Deeproots, the reception of which was in the very week I realized that the studio I had occupied for the past twenty years would have to be vacated by Pedro and me despite more than five years fighting my landlord there, coincided with the breaching of the seawall that was Hurricane Katrina. How to properly address one's own personal tragedy in the face of catastrophic disaster affecting entire regions, an entire country, the world?
I don't know, I suppose it's something to do with the famous selfishness by necessity of the artist.
I blog, I have begun to work on a documentary film about this eviction, and the imperative of the art I had to give away, the imperative of the giving away of the art.
Painting, The Beating Heart of the Butterfly, owned by Lana Jean Rose