1. Pragmatism versus ideology
I’m
foremost a thinker and a painter And I want to make clear from the get
go that painting does not happen in a void. You certainly withdraw to a
certain extent from the societal noise. But the societal noise is never
far away and it somehow always finds a way to creep back into your mind.
So the mind is never really totally detached from what is going on in
human affairs. And so, whatever the views of the artist about what art
is all about, the fact of the matter is that the act of painting itself
can’t avoid to be tainted by what is going on around the image maker. In
other words art is not a think on itself. Art is an integral part of
societal life. And once this idea is firmly ingrained in the mind “art
for art’s sake” appears for what it truly is: an aberration.