Stefanie Schairer, Berlin, Germany
Art touches people, art reaches people, art can be all and nothing, I am doing art, because I want to play and touch people.
R. L. Croft, WA D.C., USA
As a boy, I kept a list of all the professions that intersted me. In no particular order, that list included riding shotgun on the back of a garbage truck, train engineer, spy, explorer of faraway lands, soldier, dentist (like my father), and painter. With the wisdom of maturity, each of these achieved its final evaluation. Garbage smelled too bad to justify the ride. Driving trains seemed monotonous. Spies are by definition duplicitous. Land explorers are an extinct species. Growing up with Vietnam raging for ten years of childhood cured me of wanting to be shot at for the ultimate benefit of the military/industrial complex. Dentists stick their hands in filthy mouths, inhale other people’s bad breath, listen to Muzak, and end up with back problems. So far, there’s been no regret in being an artist, and it’s been influenced to varying degrees by all the others.
Along the way, I discovered the difficulty of making paintings that do not derive heavily from all the great pictures throughout history. This led to a 12-year period of false starts, and a reevaluation of how to approach any concept of drawing, resulting in a slow transition to sculpture. Another hindrance was the late realization of how much the art world establishment resembles big business in its “ladder of success,” that is, adherence to climbing to the top by way of expected production, self-promotion, networking and education goals. I’ve always tried to work against these criteria. Duchamp summed up the ultimate approach when he said, “I have forced myself to contradict myself, in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” In that spirit, I continue to be an industrious shunpiker.
As an addendum to my ”why make art” submission, this year’s example of impromptu drawing as an introspective pursuit:
The latest trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina generated a second vessel drawing made there. These images document “Shipwreck ‘09″, a 2-day project (4/30-5/2/09) at the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge just south of the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge near Nags Head. My collaborator Michael Anthony and I hauled driftwood lumber along a half-mile stretch of beach to a work area using a flat metal sled and rope harness. Nosed into the base of the same dune site as last year, we drew a 13 ft. wide, 70 ft. long, 5 ft. high shipwreck, which was nearly twice the size of “Shipwreck ‘08″ (the area is known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic”). All of the wood was stacked, with only a few dozen pulled nails reused to stabilize certain areas. Nothing new was added to the beach.
Joe Statuto, PA, USA
At this point, making art is what seems to be my essence. It is the one thing that motivates, maybe it’s the challenge. Maybe it is about expressing certain emotions in a world we create, a form of autonomy. It is an egocentric pursuit; to think anyone would want to see what I have done, but I want to share it with others.
Susan Scutti, NY, USA
To feel hope… To feel the fear of exposure… To challenge myself… To figure out what I really think and feel… To assert my individuality… To entertain myself.
Zak Zavada, PA, USA
I make art to help me better understand my own motivations in life. It is only with hindsight, when all of the dust of an experience has settled that I can make sense of my own feelings about what I saw. I need to take photographs to have evidence of my own existence.
