public

david hockney isn't one of those people i think about every day. maybe once a month. i'm a fan, but he's not on my mind in the same way that dekoonig or rothko are.

some years ago, there was a [grand] [massive] [killer] [stellar] [awesome] [enlightening] [inspiring] retrospective of his work in tokyo (probably travelled from somewhere else, don't remember). this is in the late nineties. anyway, i picked up his autobiography, and opened it to some random page, and a sentence jumped out at me. (please do not let me know this was on the back cover, let's keep my memory pure and unpolluted even if it's wrong.) he said something about having completed (or undertaken) his education in public. and this got me very excited - it wasn't about what i knew or didn't know or could or couldn't do, it was about going ahead and trying to expand the things that i can in fact do. john ronsheim taught me that you sing to learn, not to show off. this was a pointed reminder that engaging in artmaking need not be confused with virtuosity, skill, craft, talent, but is a pursuit. you can only chase and search and hunt.

so that thought, educating myself in public, became sort of an inner mantra. it's ok that my pieces aren't as skillfully executed as they might be. are they getting better? is the work getting stronger? as long as i'm comfortable that progress is being made, then i want to keep pushing on.

ray says that one trend we can start to accept is that ever-increasing amounts of time in our professional activities will be spent learning.

privacy is over. we're all getting increasingly public educations.