The Fear Of Experimentation Among Artists

Critics, galleries, museums and the art community, as a whole, do not encourage and support experimentation among artists.

 How many times do you go to an art show or gallery and think when is that artist going to change, they are doing the same thing over and over, year after year? It can be monetarily safe for artist on outdoor circuits to do so, or so they think.  It is truly an illusion because people like change and growth. 

 The Medici's during the Renaissance  understood artist need a supportive atmosphere, so they provided the financial support and let the artists create.  Many a master artist has stood in fear of what the critics would say if they changed their style or medium, but it is an natural evolution.  So they supported artists like Michelangelo and others.  As a result we have a period of time in which great art was made and valued.

Artists are human beings, they experience and change their opinions and feelings like the rest of us.  And as they do it reflects in how they perceive the world. They also need time to process those changes and how they will express them to others.  It takes a process of failure and success.

Raku 

Raku kiln being loaded, experimentation with form and glaze

But as a society we do not encourage that process, we decide an artist is washed up or done when they move from one style to another and initially it does not appear as successful as the original style.

Experimentation is key to art.  An artist must be not only allowed, but encourage to experiment.

So I have been experimenting in glass and clay for quite a while this last year, feeling my way through two new mediums for me.  I have tried to approach them without paying attention to what others have done before me for the large part, and just see what I could create without thinking of what should be done.

Of course I have failure or something I did not happen I wanted or thought would happen! But you know and I know it is not failure, it is as Edison said when asked about all his failures in the attempt to invent a light bulb, that it was just 3,000 attempts that led him to the light bulbs invention.  It is all how you look at it.  But, for me, it is a learning process of what the medium will allow and what journey evolves from me.

I am working on a sculptural form that is additive and reductive.

The Raku kiln firing up, love that inner glow.

The Raku process depends on intense heat, and then shocking the clay by taking the pot out when it is red hot.

It involves a more playful mind, not taking each step so seriously, nor seeking perfection of others ideas of what a good pot or clay sculpture should look like...or what form glass fusion can take, watching the glass seek its own form and adhere or not according to its properties.

Pot hot out of kiln, first peak at glazing

Looking at the coppers and greens that are emerging

The glaze is the same all over, but the fire and oxygen cause some parts to be greener or copper

Art has always depended on experimentation from the invention of the crayon, to paint in tubes, to the invention of the camera, to the development of acrylic medium, to now the new digital and technology that have opened up an new world of possibilities.

To be an artist it takes courage, for there will always be critics, either professional or others.   That is how impressionism was born, pop art, conceptual art, abstract art....it is artists trying new concepts and ideas and processes.

I say experiment!  I take a risk, don't just create to sell to who bought last year.  I say evolve as an artist, not exist.