This year for the holidays I decided to take an extra step in making sure my presents look the very best. I designed custom gift wrap with my face all over them, because when you are in the mood for giving, you have to be selfless. Lol.
Without any preconceived idea, I began working. If you simply start something, inspiration typically steps in. I hung a large roll of paper on my studio wall. I then tore a piece off the top and pinned it above. I did this over and over as the image began to come into my mind… I was thinking about time and life and matter, and how everything has an end, an inevitable destruction. Fate. This is the “Destroyer” – inspired by a line from the Bahagavad Gita (also echoed by Oppenheimer, speaking about the first atomic bomb): “I am become death the destroyer of worlds”.
It feels a bit disconcerting when you realize your utility sink is better at art than you are. Well done, sink, well done… I always took interest in this very subject: Art that is made without intent. Clearly this sink was just used to clean cups of paint and brushes without any aesthetic purpose, but this side effect of the process is (I would say) more beautiful and complex than anything I have ever painted. Does that make it less of an art? Perhaps something is not art until an artist takes notice and decides it is so. This is, one could argue, what every photographer does. They find something that speaks to them or that they feel others should experience, and simply record it. A photograph of this sink is one thing, however photographs feel less real, and so actually cutting the bottom of the sink out of it’s whole and hanging it on the wall – That might be more interesting.