Great: The Greatest Abstraction So Far
Perhaps I’m better at speaking for creativity than art. Or maybe my art is more about the creative process than I once believed.
A while back, a man asked me if I thought I was a great painter. I liked him and wanted to answer honestly, but I was confused by the question. When I think of painting—the experience of painting—my mind is a flurry of images and sensations: swooshes of motion, glimpses of pain—chanting, red skies turning blue, old dreams. How shoulders become necks. Geometries and broken bones. Lovers.
A great painter? What is a great painter?
“Like when you’re painting,” he said, “Do you think of yourself as a great painter? Do you tell yourself you’re great?”
“Uh, no,” I said.
The man told me he’d put himself in a mindset of “greatness” while pursuing a particular job. It made some sense. I wanted to paint him, abstract him, go beyond his idea of greatness—because what is it?
Greatness as a painter? Or artist? It makes no sense to me. Okay, yeah, I get it. We define certain artists and people as great. It happens. Opinions accumulate. Things are noted. Other things are never seen. Which one is great?
The more I thought about it, the more “greatness” felt like an odd thing to measure—it has no shape and is slippery. What does “great” even mean? When I think of the artists I’ve known, the ones others might call great—highly successful in their work, some of them famous for it—I’ve seen some great performances and shows and witnessed a fluffed-up ego or two. But I’ve never heard one artist say that they think they’re great—
Okay, I’m willing to imagine there might be a few who have some pre-game mental thing they do—maybe there’s one who pounds his chest with his fists and screams something about his manhood before grabbing his paintbrush—wait. He’s not an artist. I’m getting confused again. But I’d be surprised if I’ve ever met an artist with a Post-it on their mirrors that says, “I am a great artist.”
Sidenote: If you have that Post-it on your mirror, please tell me more about it. Does it work? Are you great? Do you not think greatness is an abstraction of an abstraction? At what point do you take the post-it off the mirror? Who will inherit it?
Most artists, I think—or maybe I want to believe—are too busy thinking about what they’re doing to define themselves in one blunt word: Great.
Great. I remembered to purchase carbon black at the store. Great. The guitars didn’t break when tossed on the baggage claim conveyor. Great. The collector who looked at my work ten times without purchasing anything brought the museum director to my studio.
That’s great.
Something about this feels about right. Grr—what a good feeling. I might be headed in the right direction. Maybe. Maybe not. There’s something to this. I’ll keep working on it. After I make an omelet.
Shit. Someone ate all the eggs.
Great.