Kagan, this is great painting. There's plenty of painting history here, but the blur of today is uniquely contemporary....! Bravo.......!

You're obviously a person of great intelligence and taste and I bid you welcome to the Art Process site. Seriously though, I do appreciate your kind comments.

I try not to look for myself in other painters. This allows me to appreciate the widest possible range of creative endeavors, and to continue growing as a spirit. I'm always delighted when I encounter good work and this site offers the opportunity to make constructivecomments. There's plenty of foolish jealously, envy, and shortsightedness out there.........

I think you're right to take the attitude you do and you put it well. If we only look to ourselves in the work of others we would never learn anything new. Obviously we all attach ourselves to different strands of art history and make our personal choices based on the quirkiness of our individual natures and tempements but like you I believe we should always keep ourselves open to new p ossibiities. I've looked at your porfolio on this site and visited your website and can say that your work is extremely expressive and well executed and although you come at it from a different spot than myself it doesn't prevent me from respecting and enjoying what you do but more on that later when I visit and comment on your work on site.
As to your comments about envy, etc. At my age I've pretty much seen it all and I generally ignore it or steer clear of certain people. However the reasons are obvious enough, a billion artists and a very small art market pie to carve up being the main. That's why this site is so refreshing (all respect to John-Paul for his concept and blood and sweat he's put into realizing it) it has nothing to with the market, just communication between artists and hopefully fraternity.

Hi Kagan, I hope you don’t mind me addressing you by using Kagan. I just like the sound of the name. Fraternity, strands, spot, these are fantastic words, and you’ve used them in an artful coherent way. “Fraternity”, well hopefully humanity is on the road to some kind of understanding of itself. We’ll either wake up from our slumbering stupidity, and put the pieces together or we won’t, but the “we” implies a pluralistic approach to our continuity, and intellectual concepts like fraternity certainly provide a more interesting framework with which to advance than some of the benchmark fundamentalist notions that wield the sword of fear . Great minds and spirits, have passed our way and left the essence of their light behind, so there really aren’t many valid excuses for remaining spellbound in the shadows. Reason, what an awesome, marvellous and uniquely human evolutionary development………”Strands”, but of course all the way back to DNA, or Henri Bergson’s creative evolution and initial “élan” or impulse. In art, as in life this fiber-strand aspect is not always immediately decipherable, but it undeniably exists.…… Pollock was to Gorky, as Gorky was to Miro, as Miro was to Picasso as Picasso was to Kandinsky etc. and yet Pollock studied with Thomas Hart Benton, and for me this is where the notion of strands starts to become really interesting and begins to confuse linear thinking people who see strands as being straight, taught and apparent rather than the bending, stretching, sinuous, folding synaptic correspondence that probably is the material result of a tremendous explosion some 14 billion years ago. For me the “spot” is like a perch. You’ve got to have it to rest, and create something intelligent. It gives you perspective, and a place to start from. If you’re in flight all of the time it’s pretty hard to transcribe the voyage. Ours is a grand tree with many branches………….and the roads to liberation are infinite.
I wasn’t specifically referring to envy etc. in the “art world”, but more in the general sense. The important thing for me is doing the work, and challenging myself. This is why I’m not still living in New York City on the Lower Eastside where I was in the 1970’s right before the big graffiti explosion, but that’s another story. I’ve never been apart of the art world pie slicing party, and it’s highly unlikely that I ever will be in the “Cruella” sense. I’m just not going to paint like this person or that person, or perform numerical cartwheels in order to please some insipid gallery director. In the 1970’s I cleaned out two foot block long piles of pigeon dung between buildings in New York, and in the late 1980’s I was the chief negotiator for a multi –million dollar contract between two French, and American High Tech companies, so as Joni Michel would say I’ve looked at both sides. Its not easy staying centered, but if my art leads to nothing more I can thank it for getting me there. I’ll look forward to reading your comments, and seeing more of your work.