Who said I love to do it Dianavan? I'm not very good at it, and I'm trying to quit.

I like to sew too. I'm a seamster. I think someone could concieve an alternative to the sewing patterns on the market, which add steps and complications to the process, and which probably put people off sewing who might like it. It's not as complicated as instructions make it look.

In art classes some teachers would hang back, not wanting to "influence" you to be like them. I didn't like that much, I liked it when people just came out with what their deal was, and let you think they were idiots, if you did. With this lesson in mind I'm going to just keep posting my own notions on this thread until they seem to add up to my deal. I may get around to putting a few of my things up on my photos page, but reproductions are painful. They're either wrong, or you think Why didn't I use That shade of that color instead of what I really did?

    I might put up a figurative thing I was happy with, before I started doing commissioned portraits, then try to explain why although it's not as straight and naturalistic as the portraits, I think there's more to it in other ways. I think I can explain it. I think I can, chugga chugga.

I'm not a big expert on what people call Outsider Art, art by untrained artists, I feel there's something sort of condescending in it, sometimes. And I'm more interested in trying to still paint when you're corrupted by it. But there's a guy here in louisville who has no education in art or anything else and does the most entertaining and sometimes really tasteful drawings and paintings. Maps of the city, fanciful maps with made-up street-names, businesses, commercial signs and logos. He writes friends' names and things into them. They're a hoot to begin with (in one a Romance Novel Company is named after me) and simply by doing it so much he's got a feel for it. That's education isn't it? He doesn't have any impressive technique, but the child-like effects suit his style by being hilariously deadpan and earnest.

   I've seen other local artists whose work I really hated emerge like butterflies from the cocoon of keeping at it, year after year. I had thought they were just inherently awful, couldn't be liked. Now they're fantastic.

   It may be hard for many people to like De Kooning, but it may also have been hard for De Kooning to like himself. He almost abandoned his most famous work as pointless, but one prankish eleventh-hour element changed his mind. He stuck a model's smile from a magazine on a painting. Abstract expressionism had humour, after his stuff, it was illegal to be funny in American high art before that. He once said he thought anyone could do wonders with whatever they had, if they could accept it. That's one of those cases where I think an artist was good at putting things in a real-life perspective.

   Another was when the critic Greenberg said that it was impossible for a serious artist today to paint a portrait, and De Kooning said Maybe but it's also impossible not to.

I'm thinking I'm just going to rattle on like this, and if anyone doesn't like it, I'm going to make it even worse. Don't make me start on my Hamlet/Invasion of the Bodysnatchers/Frosty the Snowman/formalist aesthetics bit. You've been warned.