The Naked Grid
I have chosen to include this piece online, to "publish" it, as the blog app so ingenuously describes it, as self therapy, to expose the failure of my artistic endeavors to the world, and position myself to embrace my reality in a healthy way, without the drugs this time.
I am naked in this picture. Spiritually naked of course, I would never inflict a physically naked picture of myself on the world, unless I decided to blackmail my family.
This picture actually exposes self delusion on many levels. First, the viewer finds their eyes drawn to the sloppy grid lines on the book, as the human is drawn to complexity and darkness. But at that point, when they attempt to evaluate the grid lines, they experience a visual revulsion, as their vision recoils from the unpleasantly unaesthetic messiness of the grid lines on the book. Why? They cry out, brows furrowed, body tensed. Why did he do that? And then they take in the pen-holding hand, which at first glance, to the unpracticed viewer seems to look somewhat handlike. They see the level of detail, all the wrinkles in the knuckles, the arrangement of the knuckles, and they realize that this is the only part of the picture actually drawn from life, and that it probably took the "artist" more time to draw this hand than it took him to draw the rest of the picture - even the terrible grid lines on the book. And they look closer and start to see some strange things about this hand. The thumb appears to be completely flat, as if the "woman" in the picture has a paper prosthetic. And the pinky appears to be missing some definition, and the hand might be holding a small baseball where the artist may have intended to depict a palm or something. And then the real problems begin, as the viewer tries to figure out which arm the hand is attached to. The orientation of the hand seems to indicate a very short arm coming from begin the book, but the rudimentary elbow on the other side, attached to a line that might be a shoulder and humerus, suggests a separate route, an arm with a second elbow? The viewer looks carefully and finally, unwillingly, at the unfinished book, and sees lines that are without a doubt attached to the hand. Is this the missing second arm? Could it be that the artist has placed a book here to cover this arm? The arm certainly looks to need something, either cover or maybe with a little more effort, repair. Perhaps the artist should use erase able pencils to begin their future pieces, just for the hard stuff, like arms. But maybe the artist tells himself that pens are more honest and immediate, that he's creating something beyond just a perfect mundane illustration, something evocative and meta...ha ha, the viewer laughs and laughs. Honest! Meta! Really? What else does he tell himself?
