I made my first clumsy oil paintings at ages ten and eleven respectively, with more disciplined early attempts coming a few years later at fifteen. That was fifty years ago, and I’ve never stopped painting since, so there have been plenty of opportunities along the way to think about what art is, and what it means to make it. I have lots of opinions on the topic, as well as my own personal taste, which I wouldn’t impose on anybody else even if I could. The diversity of artistic ideas, approaches and experiences is what gives the stuff vitality and keeps it fresh. But I do like to write and talk to other people about what I see in art and what I get out of it, not only as a maker, but also as a devoted appreciator and lover of all sorts of artistic things.

Generally, despite all its stylistic and philosophical diversity, there are two main kinds of art which I look at and think about. One is the art of the museum, meaning all that work which preceded us and which our forebears presumably put there because they thought it worthy of preservation and display. The other is the art of “The Now” — of what is being thought about and made in this moment through which we are living; which is a little bit ironic because so much contemporary art seems to be both made and critiqued from the perch of some imagined future art historical perspective, whereas the works in the museum, having been completed and assessed so long ago, are things we are more apt to see through our own eyes, in the moment, as they are.

Much is said nowadays about the context within which both these past and present kinds of art were made. This has apparently become a crucial qualifying condition of any artistic experience we might wish to have. But I love museums precisely because they make a kind of non-contextualized looking possible. As a reasonably educated person, coming from a multi-generational artistic family background, and with my own substantial practical experience as a craftsman and also as a maker of artistic objects (both for myself and for others who hire me to print and reproduce their pictures) I have always been able, without recourse to any other authoritative guide, to walk through a museum’s galleries and draw my own conclusions about what I see there. For me, this seeing typically involves making distinctions between those works which appear fixed to the ideas, tastes, and conventions of their time, and those which expand beyond those cultural containers to meet me where I live today. I tend therefore to be less concerned about what a given work has to say about its people, place, or time of origin (which are of course also interesting subjects, but all of which are now dead and gone) than with what it is says about all time, all places and all people; in other words, with what it has to say about The Now. Another yardstick against which I measure any work of art that I encounter is that of its material quality, meaning how well, or masterfully, its maker did whatever they set out to do. To me, these two things are the locus of any work’s actual artistry.

These evaluations I describe have everything to do with how a work was made, not only in its physical method, but also in the nature and quality of the maker’s relationship to the process itself. We seem, however, both here in the US but now also globally, to experience art today mainly in terms of what it is about and how it looks; aspects that are often then evaluated against previous iterations of content and style along an always advancing and presumably hierarchical line which is also strongly tied to commerce.

Living as we do in such a pervasively monetized, market-oriented culture, we are trained from birth to feel perennially dissatisfied with what we have and to hunger always for some presumably more fulfilling upgrade yet to come; a craving fostered and reinforced by products designed not only to rapidly age and fail, but which are intentionally made to project a superficially exciting impression of novelty. The problem though with anything made to look so determinedly new is that it will inevitably look equally and inversely old within a relatively short cycle.

This planned obsolescence, and the conjoined longing for ever shinier new things which it is designed to manipulate in our hearts, are a particularly American phenomenon. But the grafting of that mindset onto the objects and ideas of art is also a legacy of an Avant-Garde ethos that grew out of the European Modernism of the late nineteenth century, and which has been carried on in the same unbroken spirit of triumphal and manifestly-destined advance across myriad stylistic and ideological revolutions ever since.

To use a hackneyed catchphrase of our day, “it is what it is”, and it has given us what it has given us, including, by the way, some quite powerful and wonderful works. But what if the best, most meaningful things that all and any of that art has to offer are actually located somewhere else: in some sphere of thought, action and experience that exists quite apart from these temporal, fashionable, ideological (and also frankly commercial) externalities, however much it may also engage them along the way?

Rather than attempt to draw an instructive blueprint or map, or even a description of what or where that place might be, perhaps it would be better to simply end here with that question.

Perhaps the point is to persuade you to ask it for yourself.