When I started out this series of posts, I was thinking about the different parts of an artist's statement. What, I asked myself, needs to come together in order to give the reader and viewer an insight into the work that I've constructed?
After I wrote the last two posts, I got to thinking. One of the things I've learned over the years is that for my art work to find it's way to a conclusion, I have to abandon a cognitive understanding of what I'm doing, the subject matter I'm working with and any story lines I might want to tell. I have to continually surrender to the presence and the process of the artwork, because otherwise the art has a way of becoming didactic, of becoming a one-to-one correspondence between my idea and the finished piece where there is no mystery and no middle ground where new ideas have present themselves.
That mode of working has it's downside. I realized that after many years of working this way, I don't stop to figure out what the story is that I've told. "Oh my goodness," I thought to myself, "there lies undiscovered riches." I mentioned compost in the last entry. I think that unless I stop to reflect on the finished piece of art work, I'm missing the valuable "compost" for the next.