We stand here, or stand wherever we're at, and we witness the world around us and what's going on. And that is the underlying fodder for our poetry, for our paintings, for however we express ourselves artistically. So in my paintings, I often, even though they're abstract, there is motion, there's color, everything has meaning.
Every line, every layer has meaning. And with my poetry, definitely it has meaning. And it speaks, my poetry almost always speaks to some aspect of the reality that we live in.
At least I try for it to. Because if we don't do this, then the people in charge of advertising, the little closed cliche of marketing and TV people, you know, there's a very closed loop. They're not really trying to push the parameters.
They're trying to remind you of things, to buy things. And if we allow that to be the artistic direction, then, you know, good luck. And, you know, when you think about art, as opposed to just recorded history, aside from art, art is really truly, you know, when you can't question what it's about most of the time, and you look back, it is a true temperature of the time.
So as in like Goya's paintings, the war paintings, you know what was happening when you look at that painting. No one can dispute that, as opposed to an accounting of history that may be questioned. So when the artist depicts what's going on, it is really the truth.
It is a true accounting of history, whether it's an abstract painting or poetry or prose, whatever it may be. You know there is something real there, true. And it's really interesting because not only do we have the concrete illustrations of through art of the political wars, things that are physically going on, but we also have the psychology being reflected throughout art as to how people are depicted, how they sit, their posture, their movement, their colors, whether they're abstract or whether they're photo realism.