“Aun aprendo,” I am still learning . . .

Every time I write on this blog, I feel like I am being a bit rebellious.  It appears that in order to be the “Best Artist in the World,” one of the rules to follow is to “Say very little.”  At least according to Laura Owens.

‘In a journal that Owens kept in her early twenties, she wrote a fourteen-point list entitled “How to Be the Best Artist in the World.” Among the dictates: “Think big,” “Contradict yourself constantly,” “No Guilt,” “Do not be afraid of anything,” “Say very little,” and “Know that if you didn’t choose to be an artist— You would have certainly entertained world domination or mass murder or sainthood.”’

Peter Schjeldahl in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-radical-paintings-of-laura-owens

Of course, if you think hard enough, you will find serious exceptions to any of these rules.  Like “Think Big,” for Morandi, or Klee, “Contradict yourself constantly,” for Van Gogh, “No Guilt,” Max Beckmann, “Do not be afraid of anything,” for Bonnard, Matisse, Vuillard.  Suffice it to say that the rules for Ms Owens apply only to her, and only if you think she is the very best artist in the world, which really is perhaps not necessarily a completely consensual opinion:

https://hyperallergic.com/417482/laura-owens-whitney-museum-of-american-art-2017/

And as for the rule to ‘say very little,” well, could i just make a list of artists who have anthologies of both written and recorded words in books that I own:

• Leonardo da Vinci
• Picasso
• Matisse
• Van Gogh
• Cézanne
• Gerard Richter
• Philip Guston
• Per Kirkeby
• Mark Rothko
• Etc. Etc. Etc.

Why am I writing about this now, over one year later, and the relevance of something 13 months old is truthfully, irrelevant?  Well, because I am going to once again “say a lot” about something.

Roy Forget, “22 ans ou la vie en rose (1992-2014),” 

Oil on two linen canvases, 116 x 178 cm, 2014-2018.

At the closing of my solo show at the Duplex Bar a couple of nights ago, someone asked me if the old man on the right was not a Druid.  The whole idea of this Father Time humanoid being associated with an ancient pre-historic European barbarian intrigued me.  If symbolism is still a possibility, this old man would be the old European patriarch who says “Aun Aprendo” (just like Goya did in the original lithograph), “I am still learning.”

Détail of Goya’s lithograph entitled « Aun aprendo ».

His city is not that of a pristine homogenous race.  People of color are there, from Africa, from Asia.  And even though old European myths die slowly, they are being transformed.  Singing troubadours and exotic erotic visions of veiled snake-charming nubile princesses, like Salammbô, have given way to harsher realities of homelessness, social strife, and pollution.  But the old Druid still says, “aun aprendo.”  

Or at least I am hoping he does.