Someone once told me, “Out of all the people in the world, 25% of them can understand Art and 25% of those can make Art.”
Sometimes people tell you things that are outlandish and at the same time genius. Some of the best scientific theories started as sparkles of intuition. Back doors that gave small yet powerful glimpses at truths that were unknown. Truths that would never have been inspected otherwise. I laughed when someone told me, “Out of all the people in the world, 25% of them can understand Art and 25% of those can make Art.” Humor is the best inspiration. My mathematical mind conferred with my visual mind and turned that sentence into an image.
A grid of sorts.
I was working at an Art supply store in West Los Angeles. All of the employees were Artists. Everyone had good ideas. A sixty year old painter with a PhD in French Cinema often lamented that, “People these days, don’t want to do the work.” He saw a laziness that was permeating all of society including everything “Art”. I let those ideas echo inside my mind. I knew he was right but I wanted to agree with him through a back door.
I wanted it to be funny.
The collector in me was already keeping the small pieces of paper that customers used to test pens and pencils and markers and pastels. There were a couple dozen pads throughout the store. We were supposed to throw away the top sheets every day but I found many of them too beautiful. The various test swatches became a color-code to complete the grid image. While materializing the “25% of 25%” theory I removed the drawing process from my painting process, therefore backing up my colleague’s thoughts about “the work”.
I was being “lazy”, doing less “work” (while making Artwork from ideas that I got “AT work”.)