Well, well, well...

Ummmmmmmm? This is a difficult question, Eb... And fir folks who may not have the artist's soul what I amj going to say will make little or no sense and some might actually attack me for what I'm about to write but...

I am an artist an' other artists here in Mudville will knew what I mean when I say that being as artist is both a blessing and a curse...

Artists have a different way of processing information... Artists know instinctually what Carlos Castanada was talking about when Don Juan tells Carlos about "seeing by not seeing"... What he means is that most folks go thru life and they see what most folks see... Artists see that stuff too but artists also are always searching for stuff that the other fokls miss...

What other folks miss becomes the window for artists... Sometimes these windows are convoluted (Dali's "Clock" painting), melemcholy (Wyeth's "Girl in the Field" painting"), down right tortured (Munch's "Scream" or Picasso's "Guernica"), confuzing (anything bu Escher)...

Music, is very much the same... It's the same process... Don't do what other folks do... Don't walk where they walked... I think of Jimi Hendrix "National Anthem" as the the best example of "seein and not seeing"... He fou a way of not seeing the way the song had traditionally been played...

But there's more... Artists are kinda compuulsive because in their struggles to find order in their own lives they have to "create" order from disorder... Back to Castanada here... Artists are not all that intersted in what ordinary folks regard as the body of information... Because it is ordinary... No, they/I will mess with it because ordinary ain't what artists are... There's no order in the ordinery world for them (us)... So they/we go about tidying up the stuff that ordinary folks don't have a clue about...

I'm sure this only makes sense to those of you who are artists... Artists isn't about product... It's all about the way we look at stuff...

Duchamp probably said it best when he said that "art is shit" in desrobing the dadaist movement in that the product is just the "shit" part of the process... Like I said, this ain't about product...

Jimi Hendrix didn't do the "Star Spangled Banner" becuase he had thought it out and thought it would be a nice product... He did it becuase he had ***had*** to do it...

I think I was born an artist... In spite of startin' to paint and draw very early and then write poetry and then songs and then, and then, it really didn't sink in until I was well into my 30's but since it did, I think I have some grasp on it...

These are my thought and I reserve the right to alter them... But that's what artists do... Add... And subtract from the the obvious...

Bobert