While I'm sure this is a profound avenue of academic exploration for someone - what got me thinking was the juxtaposition of language and limitations... more to the point, art as language - and as such, a limitation. After all, it's easy to argue the case for visual art as a tool of communication: consider pictograms. What I want to know is whether they were art or language first? What made one pictogram more appropriate than another to represent an object, much less a concept?

But I digress.

Along the creative path, most visual artists spend some time working with representational art. We generally begin our life as artists by developing the skill to create a visual image everyone will recognize as a cat, a person, or the neighbor's apples (before we ate them). We struggle with our own muse as it leads us toward or away from the desire to create something clean, poetic... recognizable. We argue with other artists, well-meaning friends, art collectors and the stranger on the street - taking some version of the pro or con position. Is representational art really the only art? Or is it simply mimicking nature and therefore a compromise with our innermost creative impulse?

Lest I be accused of actually having a position on that subject, I want to make one thing clear: I believe all visual art is representational. The problem is that what a color or shape, or combination thereof represents to me, may have nothing at all to do with what it represents to you. It's all very Shakespearean, "That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet." Just because it doesn't look like a rose to me, doesn't mean it's not a faithful replica of a rose as perceived in the moist interior of someone else's skull. In other words, the visual arts are the ultimate Tower of Babel.

Every painter speaks his or her own unique language.

The challenge artists face is two-fold; to learn how to speak our own language with precision and integrity, and to shape it in such a way that others can see it as a distinct language with its own internal logic, beauty and power. If we are fortunate the images we create, like great music or theatre or movement... will prove so compelling that the world around us will resonate to our unique voice - even when the concepts, the syntax, the presentation - are unpronounceable.

For a painter, the truth is that the only language we can speak with any authenticity, is the one unique to who we are in the moment. While painting for an audience is a time-honored way to pay the electric bill, it's not - in my mind - what painting is all about.

In fact, teaching someone to paint in a particular style is an absurd form of cultural imperialism: it's a way of saying, "your language is inadequate - use someone else's" - or more accurately, "the way your personal creative practice reflects your inner universe is wrong". When someone tells me, "I used to paint, but I wasn't any good," I just blink.

What do you say to that? Who defines good when you are speaking a unique language?

Perhaps the spoken language is a straitjacket, nudging us in invisible and subtle ways to the beliefs we cherish and the way we process the world visually, and logically. I'm convinced that the reverse is true of art-making. As long as your work is true to your inner world, you are truly free. It is only when you stop making art for yourself that the straitjacket arrives.

-Lindley-