Objects in the Mirror #12: My Art

by Clark Flood October 2, 2006

My art is about the joy of arranging colors and patterns in a way that pleases me, and maybe pleases others as well. My art is about finding beauty in everyday objects. I paint the things I see around my house or at my studio. I liked the blue in this paper coffee cup.


My art is about color and delight, and sometimes reflects my love of mystery and ancient times. Mostly my art is about energy. My art is about me. You see, I have these deep emotional feelings, and although I don’t make my art with my hands, the ideas and emotions are mine. I am a third-generation fine artist, and my art is about color and light, history and heritage. My art is about repetition and pattern, and one reflects the other.

My art is about downloading data from the Internet and remixing it to make something I can call my own.

My art is about what I think and feel and it’s brutally honest. It’s honest because I want you to know who I really am.

My art is about the human body. My art is about the spirit of the victims, about children who wrote poetry instead of cursing man or God. It’s also about selecting images that people take for granted and showing them in a whole new way, one that may not have been thought of before, and doing it in such a way that the audience can see something new in each viewing. Doing this keeps the piece interesting, and worth seeing over and over again.

My art is about humanity and humanity’s earthbound ties. It is about the land and our responsibility towards it; about primitive symbols that relate to my heritage and the natural world. My art is about the magic of making art. The how, the why, the what, and even the where have unending fascination for me. My art is about road trips that you can take without going anywhere.

My art is about all people who are neglected, and all people who are in struggle. My art is about these disenfranchised people, or franchised people, whomever we’re dealing with. My art is about violence, because I was subjected to so much of it as a kid.

My art is about playing with fragments to create something whole. My art is about freedom, of mind and spirit, personal freedom to choose and follow your own dreams. I am in the process of creating a website.

My art is about creating order out of chaos. My art is about being in a particular place or situation. When my paintings work well, it seems as if you can walk right in.

My art is about my personal interests. My art is about my life, and that includes my dreams. My art is about knowing that I can always turn to my bits of paper and find myself fascinated by the images that come to life out of this so-called pile of trash. My art is about bringing forth my inner landscape and sharing it with the outside world.

My art is about people. I see them as being just as beautiful as everything in nature. The character of human beings interests me greatly. Perhaps we, as a sub-species, have reached the point of extinction.

My art is about keeping a mathematical balance, and rebelling against myself. I try to create a very harmonic color scheme, and feelings, without depicting things.

Basically my art is about the prevention of drug abuse and gang violence in our society. In the Clubhouse, I have learned how to express my feelings and my culture. My art is about healing. My art is about so much more than wine.

My past is in Hong Kong; my present is here in America, and my art is about what this transition means to me. My art is about more than just entertaining, it is about consciousness-raising, teaching, enlightening, about the deep spiritual and emotional levels. My art is about love, and the heartache and loneliness of life. My art is about telling all, and keeping quiet. Some things are said aloud, but other things can only be shared in allusions, on the fringes, peripherally.

My art is about being female, feminine and womanly. You only see it as pornography. That is not me, that’s you. My art is blatant and honest. My art is about people and the way they experience their lives. I intend for my artwork to reflect emotions and thoughts. My art is about my feelings. At this point in time, I am feeling monsters but not scary, scary monsters, not eat-baby-animals monsters. My art is about self-expression, and it is not commercial.

I was constantly told to tone down my act — which I did — but that’s not what my art is about. You could say I don’t work best when threatened by management.

“My art is about the importance of the Holocaust on our generation,” explains Teicholz, a 40-year-old mother of two. “Whether it’s walking or using mud on my feet or hands, my art is about physical capacity, even though it is not figurative.”

That’s what my art is about. It’s actually simple. My art is just sharing the beauty I see while I frolic through my life. I hope it makes you happy because my art is about feeling, not just seeing. I consider them as one and the same, and a lot of my art is about that, about taking scientific data and turning it into art. More than that, my art is about celebrating life. It’s informed by what I see, what I hear, what I. touch, what I feel, and lots of reading.

My art is about seeing the effect that light (or lack of it) has on color. Light is what allows us to see the beauty that surrounds us everyday.

My art is about being a part of this world. I want my art to convey the transience of time and the importance of the moment.

I don’t like telling people what my art is about; what’s more important is what it means to them and whether or not they make that connection. My art is about me. It is about who I am and what I feel like on any given day. It’s about my thoughts, my feelings, my interactions, my experiences, and my inspiration.

My art is about being a selfish, self-centered artist. My art is about being one bean in a 10,000 pound truckload of art-making beans. My art is about everybody else’s art. My art is about looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s a pretty little needle, and when you jab it in your eyeball, you see retinal patterns.

Clark Flood is a freelance writer living in Houston.

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