Art & Perception

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Rex

Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night

It’s not much of an observation to say that a lot of artists are crazy, but it’s interesting to observe that few successful ones are.

That is contrary to commonly held myths about artists. That’s what makes it interesting.

It was my recent experience on Whidbey Island that prompts me to say this. I met a lot of successful artists there. They were successful on every count. They were doing exactly the art they wanted, and they were making decent money.

By “decent money” I mean over fifty thousand a year. Of course, that’s not a lot of money in terms of what it takes to own a home and raise a family in many parts of the US, but if you’re able to live where the real estate is not too expensive and you’re reasonably thrifty on top of that, it can be done. Many people manage on less. Most of the pro artists I met on Whidbey were doing much better than that.

But what struck me about that Washington group is something I’ve noticed again and again in other places with other publicly successful artists. They were not just calm and friendly people, they were genuine social adepts. These people were all highly tuned to their audiences; indeed, what was singularly remarkable was not their ferocious independence but their sense of community with the human race.

I don’t know if we can thank Freud for the notion that neurosis is helpful to an artist, but that notion does not accord with my own experiences with artists.

I look at the crazy ones with their messes and incomplete projects compared to the order of the power studios; I look at the nervous smiles of poor sellers compared completely natural engagement of the big sellers, and I know.

I’m on to something.

So to complete the list of why artists don’t make it we have:

1. The art is technically inferior.

2. The message is either boring or disagreeable.

3. The artist does not even try to sell.

4. The artist does not produce enough.

5. The artist wants too much money.

6. The artist is crazy.

The last undercuts them all.

Freud was wrong. Success in the arts is directly proportional to sanity.

The best and most successful artists are some of the sanest people you will ever meet.

Of course, one might ask, how is it, exactly, that craziness reduces one’s chance for success?

I can think of a recent example from my own life in which I tried to help an excellent artist but was rebuffed by insane suspicions about my intentions and unprovoked attacks on my character.

A guy can only take so much.

But that’s something crazy people do. They live life like it’s a script for suicide, and so they always make wrong choices at critical junctures — like ruining friendships by failing to understand social boundaries.

How does one handle such people? I genuinely want to learn because it’s obvious to me that a lot of artists are troubled beings, and if they could just get it together socially, they’d have so many more chances to win.

In my last post, I gave a definition for art as the “quality of communication.” That was the shortest conceivable statement.

The long version of the definition, without using the words “communication” or “quality” would be,”That which is imparted or transmitted by any means and is perceived to have a supreme or very great degree of excellence.”

By classing art within the broader confines of communication we have tools we can use to make the study of art quite a bit less arbitrary and a quite a bit more useful to explain, predict, and enhance. So that is a useful definition.

I’ve included here one of the inimitable Michelo Angelo’s most famous pieces. It is an interesting mix of idealism and realism. The contrast between the religious and erotic imperatives informed much of the great man’s work. The overly large head and hands of this David have always intrigued me. It was as though dear Michelo was saying, “The secret of David is his mind and his craft, not his beauty, for beauty fades, but these endure.”

There is really no faulting the technique here. At this level, any nitpicking sounds like the Fox in the old fable who when he could get the grapes he wanted, complained they “sour.”

This piece exemplifies the perfect marriage of technique and message.

But this union is not always obvious.

Someone could say, “Well God made the universe, so when I look at the sky, I am looking at His art.”

Certainly, the sky can be aesthetic. That’s why using the word “aesthetic” in a definition of art is so problematic. The definitions are circular.

Maybe God did make the universe. If so, the above statement could be true. If God did not make the universe, then we might have a hard time considering the sky art since it violates the notion of a conscious creation and hence our sense that communication requires an originator and at least some vague intention. But if we are to define art in a way that encompasses every view of the universe, then we cannot rightfully exclude such beliefs simply because we do not happen to believe there was a conscious cause and therefore not a true communication.

We can narrow our definition of communication to exclude such things; we can broaden it to include the will of God or gods; we can narrow it to exclude non conscious transmissions, or we can broaden it to include non conscious transmissions; regardless, we have a means of understanding why one person will experience something as art and another will not.

Intention need not be a complexly pre-conceived “message.”

“I will now make a picture of a cat,” or “Hmmm… I like the shape of that water line. I think I shall take a picture of that,” is intention enough, it seems, to satisfy the requirement of a creative impulse from a creator for communication to occur. Because communication can be complex does not mean that it must be complex. Often the very best art is based on simplicities so profound they cannot be easily be expressed in words and indeed were not conceived that way by the artist.

If art, while having its own ideals, is classed within the broader category of communication, it follows that art will obey the rules of communication. The success or failure of any work of art can be understood the same way communications succeed or fail.

That summarizes the key points of my previous post. Purposely, I ignored the vast subject of craft or skill to keep the scope sufficiently narrow, but I did say, that understanding that art was a subset of communication can be used to explode the relationship between art and technique.

Here, I make good on that promise.

Our entry point into that explosion is found in the word “quality.”

But I must do a little backtracking and undercutting. Forgive me if the following paragraph is too pedantic, but I cannot assume everyone knows this.

How supreme the “supreme” in quality is, is naturally a matter of opinion, but when we crack the dictionary and look up the word “art,” we see the root meanings in all the Western tongues go back to “craft” or “skill.” In Greek, we have the root, techne, from which we get “technical” and “technique.” Techne and the Latin ars were regarded by ancient peoples to be so nearly synonymous that they were considered merely different sounds for the same thing. In Sanskrit, an Indo-European language also, the word ars is even more fundamental — to make, to fashion, to form. That may be the most ancient surviving meaning. Linguists differ on this. It is possible the Sanskrit word evolved while the Latin remained true to the original Indo-European sense, but common to all the original meanings is an implicit expectation that craft, in order to be considered worthy, must be excellent in implementation.

In the arts you will find people who disagree with this. It might be two tenths of a percent; it might be as high as five percent, but most of the human race will expect that anything which is to be regarded as excellent art must have excellence of execution.

It was that pesky 0.2 to 5.0 percent that defied explanation.

I have dreaded bringing Picasso up.

In about something less than one in twenty households in the US that actually hang art on their walls, you are likely to find a Picasso print or two. He and his consequences need to be explained. In other forums, whenever anyone points out that Picasso was really not very skilled, there seem to be several minions of the mediocre who have to rush in and carefully “explain” how that is not so.

The industrious champions of skillessness will provide links to the same old crappy work Picasso did when he was a young teenager. These are supposed to show just how talented he really was, but in fact only show that when he was fourteen he could paint like the average sixteen year old art student of the era.

We will see the same old beginner errors. We’ll see that same, ugly heavy handedness he never overcame his entire life. Picasso never did learn how light will diffract on the edges of objects and so he always tended to juxtapose his lightest lights and darkest darks in a naíve effort to separate objects from the background to the foreground. He never did overcome his inability to draw conic sections. He never really got perspective. Always his paint is over blended or under-blended.

It’s all so obvious to anyone who really can draw and paint. So obvious, that to us, protestations to the contrary are used as shibboleths.

[Short definition: A shibboleth is code used to test whether someone is really a part of a group or not. For example, anyone who says, “You know, time is the fourth dimension,” reveals that he or she is not a scientist and indeed, really does not know much about math.]

So “Picasso was an extremely skillful painter” is a shibboleth that indicates the person does not really know how to draw or paint.

But still, regarding Picasso, there will be those same old versions of quotes from writers who did not know how to paint or draw like Gore Vidal, Henry Miller, and Gertrude Stein about what a gre e e eat draftsman he was.

All that misses the whole point.

It’s not that Picasso wasn’t a great artist. He was.

He was a great artist because he could achieve powerful communications. He was not a great artist because of his technique. He was a great artist despite his crude, even disgusting, lack of skill.

Picasso accumulated a fan club of hyperbole wielding people who, like him, wanted “not to create art, but destroy it.”

Art in Picasso’s era was in need of some destroying. It had become too rule bound and pretentious. Only the very wealthiest people could afford it. (Picasso himself found his prices ironic and tried to do cheaply priced things, but collectors drove those prices up too.) The catastrophes of life and betrayals of ideals in Europe during WWI and it’s conclusion, WWII, were not addressed by the earlier aristocratic traditions. People lost their faith in the old guard, for the old guard had brought them ruin. Indeed, the birth of of popular atheism in America tracks right back to this era. Picasso correctly addressed the rage and despair felt by many. His crude technique was appropriate to his message. His was a righteous anti-pretty, anti-beauty crusade. Reality was too horrifying to be faced directly, but the horror, meanwhile, had become internalized. Picasso told the truth. It was ugly.

Unfortunately, some people people learn the wrong lesson. They think that because Picasso could be so successful with his crap technique, so too can they. But lacking his energy, originality, passion, self promotional skills, and stable of pet writers, they flop.

In music, it just drives classically trained musicians batty that bands like AC/DC could rock the house and sell so many tickets while the technically brilliant symphony groups or jazz ensembles so often have trouble making ends meet. But Picasso and bands like AC/DC spoke a message that addressed the needs of certain audiences. It was not about being “pretty” or “beautiful.” It was a primal scream of naked, unadorned emotion.

The mistake is to overly intellectualize this. The lesson is simple. Technique need only be good enough to get the job done.

What technique you use depends on the job you are trying to accomplish.

Technique is subordinate to the message.

To continue a musical analogy, I once came across a little book in the bargain bin of a music store. It was called Harmony. What caught my attention was the author’s name: Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky. I bought the book. At the time, I was teaching myself the keyboard. Tchaikovsky, interestingly enough, did not even play music until he was over forty. So he knew what it was to be an adult learner. His explanations of music theory were purely aesthetic. He concentrated on the types of feelings that various chords produced. Here’s a quote, “If we accept the notion that in music, as in all art, we are to express all the emotions of the human soul, then we must master dissonance, for our feelings are understood and made known not in isolation, but in contrast.”

I would say that an artist who can only deal in beauty, is not much of an artist. Life is full of ugliness. You may not want to hang it on your wall, but that does not mean it isn’t art. The purpose of technique to is carry the signal. What signal that is, is the choice of the artist.

Some artists get by on technique alone. They really have no message. They can do this because their technique is good enough to itself cause an impact. Their carrier wave is so strong, that there really need be no more signal than that. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I wonder what they could accomplish if they did have a passionate message however, those highly skilled artists.

I wonder what they would do, those passionate but naíve artists, if they actually knew how to draw and paint.

I can’t help but think that both would make better art.

This post also appears on rexotica.

It was a comment in one of Paul Butzi’s elegant posts The Four Seductions that I said “Art is about communication.”

That phrasing was a writer’s device. Paul, quoting or perhaps paraphrasing Stephen Dietz said “Art is about craft.” I held up a contrary mirror to that statement and used the word “about” again. That was an artistic phrasing of a larger idea.

Art is a certain kind of specialized communication. Communication is not necessarily art. Art does not equal communication, but all art is communication. In mathematical terms, art is a member of the set of communication. What makes art different and special is that a communication that has value.

People consider a communication art when it has merit, worth or excellence. Perhaps a better word than value would be quality.

This is how people, ordinary everyday people use the word art. Nothing has been invented here. So this is not really a “theory.” It’s an observation of observed phenomena. The word “art” is used to describe any communication that can be valued as to excellence.

That’s really a definition for art. The quality of communication.

What is interesting about this way of understanding and analyzing art is the magnitude of predictions and explanations that result. By considering art as an instance in the class of communication, we have an organizing principle that can be used to predict, measure, enhance or create art. We have a way of helping our own art, and we have a way of helping other artists.

For example, if art is communication, it follows the rules of communication. If it’s too original, it is difficult for people to understand. If it is too unoriginal, it is a bore. Too loud and it is irritating. Too quiet and it has no impact. If the subject bears no relationship with the experiences of the perceiver, it is not likely to be grasped. If it deals with a subject in a way that is not stimulating, it is not likely to be valued.

Second, we see that we can dismiss binary or two valued logic as applied to art. It is never therefore “art or not art;” rather, it is degree of art. Someone might attempt to make the case, “If that’s true, well then everything is art. And that can’t be true.”

(That’s so easy to refute I won’t even bother; rather, I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. Assuming of course that you actually read this.)

However, considering that art is communication and that the term is used to describe a the quality of communication, we do open the field to many expressions that have not always been considered art but craft. Craft becomes art when it breaks away from mechanical functionality and begins to “emanate.” One’s personal appearance becomes art when it transcends the purely functional. One’s life itself becomes an art form when it becomes something more than mere survival. So it is true that art as the quality of communication expands the definition.

Therefore this is not a trivial idea.

As artists, we have heard many debates in our lives about whether this is art or that is art. Is a sunset art? Is graffiti art? Can animals make art?

But the answers to these questions can be found by applying the above criterion. Are you experiencing it as a communication — conveyed information? Do you value it?

Then yes. It is art. For you.

Sure, we have heard “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

But why?

This is not something new. Artists have “always known” this. They have an intuitive grasp of this even when they deny they are trying to communicate, and it shows in their work.

As an an organizing principle, art as a communication of quality predicts that art is not a universal. Sure. We know that. But why? What will be art for one will not necessarily be art for another. Why? Because art, as a subset of communication. It succeeds or fails the same ways that communications succeed or fail.

The “artiness” is a matter of opinion because value is a matter of opinion. How much would you pay? Why does a painting appear more valuable in one environment than another? Why does promotion work? (Clue: there is a relationship between degree of attention and degree of communication) Elitism itself in art is explained by this principle. Because one group can see it is art (or pretends to) they are therefore more capable of perception than the crowd, and therefore superior. What are they doing? They saying “This new practice/thing is valuable communication.”

That’s all.

Because I have narrowed the scope of this essay, I do not here treat the relationship between art and technique. But the understanding here can be used to explode that topic.

It could be said, that communication must have intention in order to regarded as “true” communication, but there are several ways to refute that. One, in law, intention is an ineffable quality that is difficult or impossible to prove or disprove. Second, intention can be the intention to not have an intention. Third, nowhere in any usual dictionary definition is intention required for the word communication to apply. Fourth, the requirement that only sentient beings can communicate is a peculiarly Northern European tradition. It is not shared by most of the world, as in Africa or Asia where it is very strongly believed that “inanimate” objects can give and receive communication. It is nothing unusual for a Latin to talk to his sword or his pistol. In Japan, there is a tradition of “seeing stones.” They are “emanative” rocks. When discovered, usually in rivers, they are highly prized and will receive special places in gardens. Visitors will be taken near them without being told about them as a test of the visitor’s sensitivity.

It could also be said that if art is actually defined, then what are we going to talk about?

Art.

To show the possibilities for discourse, I have selected one of my favorite paintings. It was named “The Tempest,” but that came later. No one knows what Giorgione called it. He never explained it.

Let’s look at it. People have debated this painting for centuries. Whole books have been written about it. It’s “meaning” has always been a huge mystery.

Who is that guy with the walling stick? Is it a walking stick? Maybe it’s a spear shaft. A phallic object the goes with his exaggerated codpiece as was the style then. Is he the painter? Giorgione resembled this man. He is not looking at the woman. He’s looking off… somewhere, and he seems to be thinking. Perhaps he is looking back in time. Is he a wanderer? A soldier? There’s a bangage on his leg. Is that significant? And the woman with the child. She looks so vulnerable in her nudity, and yet the way she looks out at the viewer is anything but vulnerable. It’s like she’s saying, “You see? This is life.” Or is she? Her look can be construed as accusative. Then there is that divide, that watery gulch between the two figures, and the two figures are so differently painted. There is considerable texture to the man, but the woman is more smoothly painted. Is that significant? Did he paint these in two different periods? It’s like Giorgione put them together in the picture, but they are really in separate countries. Is that symbolic?

Was this autobiographical? Did Giorgione get a girl pregnant then leave her to her fate? That seems to be going on here, but maybe the guy died, and this allegorical. Maybe the woman is a friend of the painter and he felt compassion for her difficulty.

Then there is the storm in the background. We know this is Torino, but it’s a fantasy, Romantic Torino. There is a sense of something imminent. Doom? Danger? Change? And notice that tippy building behind the man. A world gone askew.

We will never know. Giorgione’s intentions, if he even had any, are not clear. We can only speculate.

What do you think? (There are no wrong answers.)

This painting demonstrates several things. It shows that the artists intentions need not be known for a communication to occur; therefore, artist’s statements of intentions are not significant. Indeed, it suggests that an artist would do well to dispense with any vanity on the subject. It suggests that the art that will be considered truly great will be the kind of art that is actually completed by the viewer. This is the singularly remarkable characteristic of art that comes down through history as truly great. Ambiguity of communication in art is a highly valued characteristic, evidently.

I have completely ignored technique here. That was intentional, but the opportunity for viewer participation (two way communication), when combined with dazzling virtuoso skill is a one two knock-out punch combination.

But the reason I picked this painting in particular is that it has historically demonstrates an amazing capacity to stimulate dialog. It shows that what makes art the most valuable in the eyes of people throughout the ages is something that generates communication far beyond it’s own time. That is one thing you can say for sure about any really famous piece of art.

If ever there was a proof positive that art is about communication, there it is.

Twenty thousand years of art history scream it from the mountain tops. It is writ in letters of fire across the sky.

But I’m afraid I won’t be able to participate in any dialog resulting from this post. I’m taking a long train trip tomorrow, starting before dawn, and as soon as I post this, I shall have to pack. Please do not think me rude if I do not respond. I will have a look at again Monday, but until then, I shall be offline.

This is an excerpt from something that looks like it will grow into a book, but right here, right now, I thought I would go directly to the heart of the subject.

I do not expect to win any popularity contests with this post. Truthfully, I am so far south of caring about that, I think new words would have to invented to describe my insouciance. As “posts” go, it is long, but I barely scratch the surface of the topic.

I can think of a great number of reasonable objections to what I say here. I doubt I’ve heard them all.

But let me say this. I know that for many people, doing art is not about money. Money is no true measure of success. Success is a multi-faceted jewel. Pride. Self fullfillment. Joy of creation. These are worthy. I honor anyone’s right to pursue their craft on their own terms. There are certain forms that are simply not economically viable. Artists who work in those form know that. They continue out of love, and truthfully, I love them for it.

But this post is about making money at art. It’s about making enough money at art to do only art.

Surviving as full time artist is a worthy ambition. I make no defense of that goal. It needs no justification. No explanation is required. None will be offered. It has always been my ambition to live through my art since the first synapses of my mind ever fired. I am by nature a type who must be self employed. Factually, by actual experience, I would rather die than fill out another job application.

I’ve made tons of money in other ways than art, however. I’ve made it doing things that made me sick to my soul, like pretending people needed college in order to be educated, only to see them betrayed by a market which had no place for their skills; rather, their lack therof. I am not a person who is impressed by degrees, rank, position, reputation, or money. I like money. I like the things money can buy. I like fast cars and motorcycles. I like vacations to the islands and long trips in yachts. I like to race horses on mountain paths. I like dining with crystal and dancing till dawn wearing seven thousand dollars worth of clothes, but money is not the measure of a man or a woman. I’d just as soon wear a t-shirt and blue jeans and dig in the dirt as sit in another gods forsaken boardroom and watch another boring brain fart of a Powerpoint presentation.

In this post, though I could not resist “insouciance” above, I have purposely kept the language simple. In fact, as I wrote, I kept in mind the vocabulary and attitude of a bright and rebellious teenager. This is stuff I wish I studied when I was sixteen instead of all the artsy fartsy theory I was discovering then.

How to Make a Living as an Artist

It’s not enough to be good. There are plenty of good artists. more… »

In a comment elsewhere, I said, “I am not much interested in technique any more. … Many other artists will always have better technique than me, but when people are walking by, which works make them stop, look, and say, ‘Wow?'”

Does technique really matter?

I often remember something a pianist friend of mine confessed. He said that for most of his career, the way he kept track of how well he was doing was by keeping a log of the number of hours practiced.

That, he said, was a catastrophic error. He should have been keeping count of only one thing: the number of concerts given.

As a painter, I could translate that to: Number of works sold for how much each.

The whole last century of art could be described as an anti technique reaction. When I look at those perfectly executed paintings of the nineteenth century with all those naked boys and girls thinly disguised as gods and goddesses preaching some insipid moral lesson, I am glad we don’t paint that way any more. Why does it matter at all how well you paint it if no one is interested in what you have to say?

What difference does it make how well you can play the piano if no is there to hear?

In another recent post, things got really nitty gritty technical. Regarding that technical stuff, Lisa Call commented, “For me this type of thinking is very left brain and analytical ‘I need to place this color next to that one and then X will happen if I also do Y and Z.’ But I find that my best work is made if I can shut off that part of my brain and just go with what feels right and not stress each small step.”

I thought that comment was revealing. I hope you don’t mind, Lisa, for bringing it up here again. It’s a succinct restatement of the paradox. Technical stuff means being all concerned about technique, but is that what makes art, art?

This post also appears on rexotica.

Posted by Rex Crockett

Karl kindly invited me to post on his blog, and within moments of receiving his invitation, I had an idea, and here I am with it. Except after writing what’s below, I went, “Well, this is more of an article than a post. I’m not really asking questions; I’m making statements. I don’t see how this really invites a return response.”

But after writing it, I couldn’t see how to turn it into something more interactive and less assertive without turning it into something it wasn’t and thus losing the whole flavor, and I don’t really want to mess with this post because it’s from the heart.

Karl had a comment regarding one of mine on The Fall of the Art World. He said, “But I do hope some more critical comments come in. We don’t want to get into some silly artist group-think here, do we?”

I agree with that; moreover, it got me thinking about that whole group-think thing.

I was reminded of a comment of Claude Monet’s regarding his development as an artist. He said that at a certain point his career, rather early actually, he found it counter productive to hang about in cafés talking endlessly over absinthe or coffee under clouds of pipe smoke with the various artists and hangers on in the Parisian art scene. He decided he needed to spend more time painting, and painting in his way at that — outside, in the fresh air, with nature as his teacher.

I’m neither an anthropologist nor a psychologist, but I do enjoy people and am endlessly fascinated by their social dynamics. As a perpetual student of said, it is fairly obvious that there is a certain liability to only talking about things, whatever the subject, with only a certain group. Groups evolve their own agreements, but those agreements may not accord with widely held perceptions. At times such cohesions may be inspired and elevating, at other times merely serve to make for inclusions and exclusions of memberships, and at other times can serve to render the group completely out of touch with reality.

You see that kind of thing in all the arts. In jazz, if you use any chords that have less than four notes, you’re “not doing jazz,” so you hear (in bad jazz) only a lot of weird chords. Musicians will make jokes about the “jazz police.” In certain art circles if you do any recognizable representations of anything, you’re being “literal.” “Kitsch” takes on a special meaning. Among certain groups of computer programmers, the hostility to ordinary computer users is palpable; e.g., non programers are called “lusers” — a variation on “nuser” for “new user.”

On and on. Group think. The deadliness of this is that it can knock you out of touch with your audience. The jazz policing ends up costing you any audience but some real creepy cats. Fear of literality and kitsch makes for paintings that are indecipherable without a book that explains them — an irony lucidly and humorously put in Tom Wolfe’s _The Painted Word_. Contempt for ordinary users makes for programs that no one can figure out how to use and documentation that is so technically nomenclatured as to be useless, and so, no work.

Now here is another irony. It so happens that I did that Monet thing. I actually traveled around the mountains of California for several years, living on the road, doing these brush and ink paintings specifically calculated to be do-able from a backpack. It was a rejuvenating and enlightening experience. It was very good for my work. I would not trade that time for anything I’ve ever done in life. It was not a lonely time. I still sold my work in lot of ways, on the street, craft fairs, various personal contacts, and so on. I met all kinds of interesting people. There is a whole nomadic culture in the Western US. The lifestyle worked. I made money. Not a lot, but I didn’t need much. Yet at a certain point, only about eight months ago, I started to yearn for the kind of patter I’d grown accustomed to at other times of my life when I had other artists
to talk with.

So on the one hand, while I see Monet’s take on things as a very wise move on the part of an intrepid explorer, I think I’ve gotten to some stage in my life where I feel a certain responsibility to other artists as well as students. I could not fulfill my social responsibility with the nomadic life. I know Monet had a hard time of it too, and he eventually settled down. To see the guest lists for his mature era parties is to see the who’s who of French culture and politics of the time. So he evidently reached the same conclusion. Certainly he managed to find a way to “keep his vision pure,” as he liked to say, and still be a social person.

With other artists, it’s possible to explore really new ideas before you take action on them. Other artists are likely to be more willing to experience edgy work. They can see through the rough edges to the inner jewel. A little (or a lot) of wackiness is tolerated or amusing. The strong passions that artists feel are well understood by others with such feelings. When I’m doing a show or speaking to an audience of collectors, buyers, or customers, I’m definitely putting on a show. I’m acting, and I’m acting more conservatively than I really am, but around other artists? Well, I remember this one group show I was in. I was looking at the other exhibitors all laughing and yucking it up, and I thought, “These are my kind of birds. They’re all crazy, and I love them.”