Day 0061

Despite having plenty of time this morning to gather my reflections on Paris, I did not. Here they are at the end of a busy day in an attenuated form, diluted by time and tiredness.

• No place left for the artist, the creator of the new, the seeker of perfection
• The best you can hope to do is equal the skill of an earlier artist
• The question becomes "what has not been done before?". What variable can I tweak to stand out? Do I make it more abstract, change the materials, combine styles, or what? What is left that can be new?
• Even if you attained excellence at representational art, you would not be breaking new ground
• The same with less representational art. The whole spectrum of artistic endeavour seems to have been mapped. What new discoveries can be made?
• There are only a finite number of artists that we can keep in our minds at any one time. Only a finite number we can devote our attention to, and call 'great artists'. Every decade longer that humanity survives is another decade of art to fill up museums and gallery space. In a thousand years, what works will be left? Will we have space for the second-rate, the merely very-good? Only those pieces that are milestones in the development of art, or are precious by their antiquity or rareness will command any attention. Everything else will be lost to oblivion.
• The same for literature
• So then we are left with the process of creating art as the valuable thing, not the artefact that is produced but the process itself. The pursuit of a goal, the channelling of thought, the honing of a skill. These are good in and of themselves, not for the product they create. The real product is you; a happy, fulfilled, striving, seeking, trying, thinking, active, creating you.

Another pen and ink drawing because I am being lazy and they are quick. One of Leonardo's grotesques, with all of the penmanship and anatomy lost in my version.