Salt Water Taffy

“Stop looking for snowmen in the desert.”

Art doesn’t happen on the canvas, or on the pedestal, or on a sheet of drawing paper. Art happens in the viewer’s mind. This concept is kind of tricky to communicate, but since most people don’t really care anyway, I’ll just muddle through the explanation and be happy with it.

Picasso is credited with saying “Art is a lie that reveals the truth”. While many interpret this as artists trying to create the illusion of three dimensional space in two dimensions, or sculptors trying to convince us that a marble figure is the actual person of David from the bible, I don’t believe this goes far enough in explaining the art as a lie statement. I’ll elaborate, but first some backstory.

I had the incredible, amazing, (insert any superlative of your choosing here) opportunity to study closely with a scholar named Ioan Petru Culiano at the University of Chicago from 1989-1991. I had enrolled in a unique and special program, Tutorial Studies in the New Collegiate Division, that allowed a student in good standing to create their own curriculum as long as the student could find a sponsoring professor who would be willing to enroll in the program along with him. My long and arduous spiritual journey in short, I wanted to get my degree in Magic. There was no shortage of professors at the University of Chicago that also found this area of research extremely interesting. Culiano was one of these, and was willing to sponsor me.

Perhaps the book I was reading and had along with me in my initial conversation with him helped my case. I was reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, who also wrote The Name of the Rose (which became a movie starring Sean Connery) when Culiano said, “Oh, I’m good friends with him!” Wow.

Culiano’s pedigree was nothing short of astounding. He was the golden boy of Mircea Eliade, a god of History of Religion, Shamanism, etc. At the time, Culiano held the Chair of History of Christianity. In a later conversation he shared with me his disgruntlement that he wasn’t chair of History of Religion which was held by Wendy Doniger (who was also a student of Eliade) and I remember laughing and thinking to myself “I guess scholars can be just as petty as the rest of us”. But back to that initial conversation, when I happened to mention I was also of Romanian descent and a practicing fine artist, that was that. He must have liked Romanian artists who read Eco.

The point of this backstory is that after hundreds of hours of lectures, many intense conversations with the man, and even an in depth study of his book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, I came to realize, and to believe, that the world was not only seriously ‘magical’, but that nothing in my world, or any world, exists outside of myself. The entire realm of what’s real occurs within my brain while I look at it, touch it, smell it, taste it, and listen to it. Even that last word, “it”, is deceptive as it hints at something other than myself, something that can somehow exist without my brain thinking it into existence. That is not the cup of coffee that I am holding. That is my brain recreating a scene of lifelike and intense illusion, complete with sensory impulses telling me the coffee is hot, and brown, and the cup is smooth, and the smell is delicious, and it’s at arm’s length away. This realization was reinforced some ten years later while watching the movie “The Matrix” (possibly my favorite movie of all time, which after reading my backstory, you might imagine)

“Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth…there is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” ―Spoon Boy to Neo

So if everything exists only in my own head, Art must also exist only in my own head. And in yours. In other words, “Salt Water Taffy” was painted by you as soon as you looked at it.

I hope you think you did a good job.