Sunday, December 19, 2010

As an Artist, What is my Job Description?

In my mind, and the minds of many artists before me, to Goya and back further, we artists have pointed out things in our world that are not right, things that are not just.
As an artist, I believe that it is my duty to point out the wrongs that I see around me. It is part of my ability to celebrate the good, but it is important that I note, record and expose to the world, the things that bad people would not have exposed to the light.
If we artists were to forget this, to just paint pretty art, are we really artists? Or are we decorative painters? Isn't art about the human condition, and the expression of that condition? It is to me; to me, there is no more sacred a duty than that rooting out of hidden evils.
Some of us do that with a video camera, some of us with a still camera. Some of us write about it, in books, blogs, and articles. And there are those of us who express these things with art, using paint, pen, sculpture, wax or a myriad of media to get the point across.

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