Sometimes you just realize you are never going to have an experience that you desire. An idea will remain in fantasy alone, trapped, lacking the proper actors to play the role. And while we use experiences to fix our ideas, some ideas are indelible, unchangeable, and solid.

This is okay. The human process is made with an infinite number of ideas and experiences to have. And while we may sometimes repeat the same ones over and over, improving upon it each time we go, occasionally a new idea and experience comes to the surface for us to share. There is permanence in death, there is permanence in loss, there is a permanence to a moment lost in the past.

Ideas remain well on after the expiry of their birthright… to both our benefit and to our own demise.

Robert Rauschenberg was an artist who I had just come to begin to understand in the past year. Yesterday, Rauschenberg died at the age of 82.

His works can be quite difficult to approach. They are full of paint, encaustic, collage, found objects, taxidermy, newspaper, fabric… an endless supply of ideas and images and concepts smattered onto large, overwhelming canvases that blur the lines between all previously defined media. His paintings can be sculpture, his photographs can be paintings, I once read about him being described as a “maverick” and I think the honor is fitting.

The first hundred times I had seen his work in person I detested it. I simply could not understand what was going on, everything looked ugly, and it appeared as if it was just trash glued together (in fact, it usually was.) But as I grew as a person and an artist, I began to see the beauty and intellect that was woven in to his pieces. Reckless abandon and chance, no different from the work of artists who had constructed massive color grids in the same format, equated to beauty and clarity. Deep narratives arose and symbolism became important.

Today, I am sad that my explorations with him will now only be in retrospect. The production has ceased, the final page has been typed, and the last illustration has been added. The loss of a major influence, even one not yet fully realized, makes for a sad day for us all. There is one less artist trying to reveal the beauty in what gets thrown away, to make stories out of tragedy so we can begin to cope with losses, one less effort to weave together the fabric of human experience that we are all wrapped in.

The quote from John Baldessari that I posted last week, “Solving Each Problem As It Arises” is incredibly inspiring to me. I wasn’t yet twenty when I saw it for the first time, and for all I can remember, it was my first major contact with a Conceptual Art piece. On first view and reading, the premise is simple: Baldessari discusses his feelings on how artists process through ideas and lead themselves through work and to an exhibition. A fairly simple quote, and a fairly simple idea of painting a quote (or an idea) on a canvas.

As one learns more about Baldessari and his work, and the more one examines this work in particular, one can begin to appreciate the finer nuances that really makes this simple idea a grand work of art.

The real presentation of the idea, though, falls on these two facts:

1) Many of his paintings were not painted by him, but by others who were commissioned to perform the work needed to realize his ideas;

2) If you look carefully at the painting, you will see that the immediate problem presented was squeezing all the letters of the words onto the canvas. You will notice the varying sizes of the letter O, some wide and fat and others, most prominently on the right side of the canvas, skinnier.

With great simplicity Baldessari demonstrates in his design that sometimes the way an artist solves a problem is by shoving things in, reducing things down, hyphenating, kerning, shrinking, and otherwise making like-things different from themselves to get the idea across. The process is now the idea. In our daily lives, as artists-all-in-our-own-right, we perform these actions everyday, whether it is an extended hug with our loved ones, or coffee on-the-go as we run to catch public transit. The idea might be “do this now” while the reality is “limited space/time.”

Idea, problem, and resolution in one moment.

Ideas are often blown in with the wind. It almost feels as if it is dry-monsoon season in San Francisco because for the past six weeks or so, it has been coming just as strong as when the wind first started. In a town full of blowers, we’re all being blown.

And when these ideas are blown in, landing like falling leaves from a tree, a collage of nature, one sifts through and finds the leaf with the map written on it. Or, the leaf with the arrow pointing to the treehouse with all the real ideas waiting inside. And then, later in the evening, your father stands out on the back porch and yells to you off into the distance to come home, take those ideas, and use them after a long day of play.

I have kept my focus on creating a discipline recently. In a short time I feel a small but significant improvement in my daily life and in my ability to create. I feel more human, too, for better or worse. But, suddenly, creating a discipline became a project of it’s own. Getting stuck in repetition, working past any mundane associations with the process, and beginning to find the places in life where one could focus and concentrate.

The discovery-and-creation-of-art as meditation-in-action.

Some discoveries:

Mental thread gets really tangled quickly once the first snag gains tension. The spool unfurls, and like a feline pawing maniacally, everything becomes knotted and lace-like. Every so often when this occurs the only remedy is scissors, or something sharper, like the mighty pen.

Parents are more important than I ever figured. From the discovery of things that would become creative influence, to the first indelible memories of life, and the crutches and crosses one carries with them into adulthood. And, most of them are rotten. Which is very saddening yet highly reflective of the state of humanity.

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were (or are) the real Gilbert and George.

Why translates into how. Process transforms into product. Children become grown-ups.

Parenthesis are incredibly sexy.