THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM THE SL COUNTY’S JULY “ART TOO! ART NOT!” A MONTHLY PANEL DISCUSSION.
DISCUSSING THE “IMPORTANCE OF PAINTING IN SOCIETY” WERE KAREN HORNE, JOHN ERICKSON AND LAYNE MEACHAM.
LM: Do we need art? Well, we don’t have any choice. Artists are going to paint whether society wants it or not.
JE: I like keeping the censors there so there is some kind of an edge that you can push against; because, for example, in Salt Lake I can start to feel somewhat like an edgier person but if I go to New York I’m a conservative.
JE: Art is an engagement with that delectable thing that is unprecedentally you.
KH: A painting is something that reveals itself over time and you almost have to educate yourself to see it.
KH: The act of painting is a kind of meditation; it’s a kind of refocusing . . that you confront a scene and you try to make sense of it; you try to refine perceptions so that you can actually see wihtout preconceptions.
LM: What’s the artist’s role responsibility to society? Nothing really. But then hypocrisy slips in because we all like money. The only artist that would really say there is no obligation [to society] totally is the outsider artist; the one who has never sold a painting, is barefoot in London, wandering around like a derelict and doing art and nobody knows about him.
JE: Or someone who’s got a teaching job.
JE: I like to be influenced, in the broad sense of being educated . . . it’s that need to know, maybe to become an outsider through over education. . .It’s a great energizer, the thickness of culture.
UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Categories: Visual Arts
