Category: thoughts

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

Charles Bukowski

If critics say your work stinks it’s because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered “dangerous” but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

Jack Kerouac

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible.

William S. Burroughs

I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I’m not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.

Jim Jarmusch

I hate labels. They can be restrictive and confining. Pigeonholes. But they can be useful as stepping stones to new ways of working. Then they can be pitched.

I’ve never been a big fan of surrealism. Though the word simply comes from the French meaning ‘beyond realism’, to my mind most of the work done under this tag is just bizarre. I think the concept of ‘beyond realism’ is worth exploring though.

There’s a powerful underlying spirit and hard-edged reality to this desert. A separate reality (to steal from Castaneda). It’s not visible, and as powerful as straight, strictly realistic photos can be, they seldom capture it. At least mine don’t. I’m experimenting with double exposure and refraction to try to hint at it.

As reluctant as I am to use the term surrealism, I’m flirting with it. I’m trying to push through the limits of conventional reality and delve in to what’s beyond reality, at least beyond what’s accepted as reality, yet keeping it real without sliding over the edge into absurdity and ridiculousness. It can be like walking a tightrope. We’ll see if I’m up to it.

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

Joyce Carol Oates