Message or Gimmick

It’s always something.

On Sunday I described the experience of seeing a need for change within my current Sacred Planet series. Although I love the work as it stands, I was embracing a desire to perform a defiant act - desecrating the surface of a piece by flinging paint over the existing imagery in order to underline its symbolic content.

I screwed up my courage. I felt it was right. Today you see the results. Perhaps not everyone will agree that this was a good thing to do, but I can live with that. Because the longer I make – the more I embrace the reality of making. The process is what counts. If something worth showing the public comes out of the making, it’s gravy.

But on to the next realization. There are seventeen other pieces in the series. You can see some of them in my gallery at complexcloth.com. If flinging paint defiantly worked on one, does that mean I should continue flinging?

Just between you and me, I did. And it worked on two more pieces. But then it began to get hard! It occurred to me that a defiant act is defiant partly because it spills out. It spews from an uncontrolled moment. That’s where the energy comes from.

So can defiance be thoughtful? Anyone who has studied American History 101 knows the American Revolution happened through a combination of detailed planning and reckless daring – possibly the yin and yang of defiance. See the need, plan the actions; dive into daringly executing them.

So I backed away from adding more paint, in order to think about the ramifications of my choices. The color absolutely must be part of the message. The placement? Probably counts. Is the paint flung or bombed onto the piece from the top of an eight-foot ladder? Am I moving away from defiance and toward an idea that could become a gimmick? Yikes.

There’s a paradox here. The end game visual message can spring from a moment of raw artistic courage, or it can carry power invested in the piece through careful planning. Both ways of working are valid. One thing I know for sure: continuing to fling without planning has the potential to ruin what was, up to that point, a perfectly good effort.

Now I want to find a graffiti artist and ask these questions. Is it easier to tag in the beginning when it’s a defiant act? Does it get harder to do once it isn’t as random any more – like, say, when someone gives you permission to do a really big spray paint image on the side of their building?

I suspect a tagger would agree with me. Defiance and planning both have their satisfactions. Maybe all we can hope is to know when to choose one over the other.