Having Been in a Garden of Sorts all This Time

                 I find myself cast out.  I think that after this eviction and the giving away of the artwork of my entire life as an artist, not only will I survive, but I will Feel a great liberation.
        

                I wonder how Adam and Eve felt to leave The Garden of Eden and to discover a whole world beyond the only world they had believed they would ever inhabit.

Adam and Eve and the Short Distance of Time Surrounding an Object

As relative time passes and relative distance grows it becomes clearer what is important to me. This is relatively important as I am the creative person that I am, and I am not you, or any other. There are times to be swept up in the minutiae of daily and bureaucratic life because there are times and places when we really seem not to have a choice in such matters. Such a time it has been for several months, and my life has been the place around which the objects of law, the requirements of material, and the obstacles to freedom have seamlessly flown into my path.

And so has finally arrived the moment of some creativity, when I allow myself to briefly comment on this seventeenth Adam and Eve I painted or sculpted out of twenty-nine that I created seemingly, but not quite, out of thin air. This for example is oil paint on canvas.

More important to me than material concerns (although as one glorious Art Professor at UCSC, Donald Weigant pointed out--- "art is SUCH a materialist pursuit"---and he did of course refer to visual art as that is what he taught) are not the spiritual either, as Kandinsky would have it, but the personal/psychological in art, in Adam and Eve, in life.

This began to emerge from my work in a much more literal than ever before way in this Adam and Eve series, some of which appear further down this blog, some of which I shall post above, with as little explanation as possible. Suffice it for now to say that for me they are an original male fantasy of bearing no burden of guilt, of finding yet another use for the female of the species, that of Carrier of Collective Guilt. The more interesting question is how it happened that the guilt itself through the culture of at least one of the three religions influenced by the story was interpreted. Through the ages (time and space again) sex and the perception and resultant feelings surrounding all of these became the fulcrum of debate, shall we euphemistically call it. Actually, as many understand the myth, the tasting of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, resulted in the sin of knowing what only God heretofore had known. Tragically, it was a story told by men, notorious deniers, hiders from many truths, that set the world up for destruction by thousands and thousands of tiny cuts, as the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny continues to cut it's swath through the diminishing jungle that should have been this world. Or should it have been the Garden of Eden? It's all relative.

Adam and Eve in The Dutchboy Art Studios of the Artist's Imagination

The studio was real, this painting of it is according to anarchistic lack of law that is artistic license. It was the imperfect but grandly large and very utilitarian studio I was sadly forced to leave behind. For an artist, ultimate utilitarianism is The Garden of Eden.

Here I was able to work on the art you see at this blog, and so much more. I was able to show and sell the work, I was able to invite galleries, museums, collectors and friends to view the paintings, sculptures, artist's books, masks, prints, and drawings in person over a period that lasted twenty years. I held classes here, with the core group of students in attendance for over ten years. My best student was Pedro Moreno, who became my best friend. He took one on one classes here, once a week, for three years.