"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing," Mr. Salinger told the Times in 1974. "Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy......I love to write just for myself and my own pleasure."
I think it's a safe assumption to say that this same attitude is the kind that painters are prone to as well. Yet is it truly a realistic notion? Is it possible to be successful with our self indulgent habits, and how do you measure when you have crossed the lines into self indulgence? The writer who mentioned this particular quote, Jennifer Finnley Boylan, bluntly made her opinion known: No. All writers or artists at some point must have some kind of audience in their head, at least to some degree. Otherwise what would be the point of writing if you know that no one can connect to your work. Perhaps some painters paint with themselves in mind and just perhaps, PERHAPS! There is someone out there who can understand them.

"Nothing pleases Apollo better than the slaughter of a frivolous, irresponsible reviewer on his altar."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
This is so fun and completely true. Maybe I was apollo in another life. Humorous and kind of a sexy idea but somehow doubtful.

"There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in it's life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then singing among the savage branches, it rises above it's own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in the heaven smiles. For the best is only brought at the cost of great pain.....or so says the legend."

Taken from The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
In an eerie way there was just something about this poem that really resonated with me. Yes clearly its tragic but I can just hear this birds peircing song whenever I read the poem. I think that this relates to my situation with self at this moment. I feel like I am on a mission to sing my one song where everyone shuts up and listens. Whatever medium that may be. It very well could be in painting but there is the likelihood that it could be in something else, I am extremely drawn to music but frightened at the same time by its intensity. I relate to the thorn bird poem because I have always felt that there was an inner voice inside that was being stifled. I long for that one release even if it may be just that one time. That one endless moment that lives on forever in the nostalgia.
Its also a situation of love. Love is such a strange emotion for me. Difficult, yet wonderful. Unforgettable yet daunting. I want it so very badly. I don't think that I have ever really felt love between another individual. I feel like I have so much to give. In a sense I feel like that fragile bird longing to sing its haunting song to the one that will come to it at last.

"The world of construction seems to be the most tangible, and therefore final. This made me nervous. I started to wonder if it were really so. Isn't a construction a beginning of a thing like a seed? Isn't it a segment of a larger totality, like an elephant's tail? Isn't something just about to emerge not quite structured-never quite structured....like an unfinished church with a sky ceiling?" YOKO ONO, around 1966.
This really got me thinking. Tangible is final if you think about it. Done. Finished. No more. I can totally understand how an artist would like to play around with this concept in their work. Making work that requires the viewer to use their own visual library to construct an image from a fragment that they may or may not recognize. Here are some examples that Yoko Ono uses

Smoke Painting
Light canvas or any finished painting
With a cigarette at any time for any
Length of time
See the smoke movement
The painting ends when the whole
Canvas or painting is gone.

Painting for the wind
Cut a hole in a bag filled with seeds
Of any kind and place the bag where
there is wind
As you can see these frank ideas are very intellectual and require a certain amount of positive energy from their viewers. But what I love about this kind of work is that it is my believe that it accomplishes exactly what it was created for: What is our concept of art as artists, and how can we manuever it into a new and original way? Shock, controversy, I think that truly original work will require these elements.

I've recently became entranced with an artist, who I think is especially gifted with expression, his name is Jean-Michel Basquiat. He is somewhat of a legend in the art world and in the book I'm reading there is a beautiful quote that talks about his career:
"It has been written of Basquiat that he "embodied the myth of a modern Icarus who rose too quickly and burnt himself in the heat of the sun." Such a beautiful and tragic description of an artist. The book lists some of Basquiat's earlier infuences which I find amusing.
Excerpt from "Jean-Michel Basquiat-a Biography":
"Early themes were:
1) The seaview from voyage to the bottom of the sea
2) Alfred E. Neuman
3) Alfred Hitchcock (his face over+over)
4) Nixon
5) cars (mostly dragsters)
6) wars
7) Weapons
8) Made drawings of oopick+Fritz+wair+Yaboo with Marc Prozzo