A Personal Viewpoint About Art A naive human plays at shaping some passing expression, ponders, and soon joins a vital struggle with the Muses. Energies focus. The creative process yields music, paintings, poetry, inventions - whatever. This is the artist's destiny. *  *  * Yet, such personal, introspective art-making is a very privileged activity. It is a luxury in a world where energies obviously can be directed to more immediate, beneficial ends for human good; and furthermore where others - propagandists, advertisers, the mass media and artists in the "business of art" - find pragmatic, sometimes craven, uses for art that adequately fulfill their crass purposes.    Nevertheless, I know art-creation in communion with life as an engrossing way to explore my own mind and sensibilities - whether or not my utterances carry content and power enough to engage or sway.  If, through the artist's private processes, I have revealed maybe only to myself some hints of an emerging, evolving "wisdom", I know that my work has become seed: Perhaps it will generate significant tone, color, flavor or idea within the ongoing development of human culture. So, Why Artists and Art? I believe that dedicated artists serve a vital, human need:  They expand and enhance awareness both individually and collectively .  As they explore their own hidden, personal psyches, each confronts an inner life's vision and also reacts to a unique, surrounding, outer life.  Through their works, other humans then peer afresh into new-old universes, witnessing vivid, candid views of life. Human consciousness thus is enriched as the artists give renewed expression to universal human concerns and awareness.  Sensibilities are sharpened; and finally a grand mix of metaphorical energies is set in motion, resulting in new inventiveness, insight, true wisdom. Since this compounding of mentality happens at all extremes, from tribe to the furthest reaches of emotion and intellectual thought, art accrues as a very important force:  It becomes present tonality, and ultimately, grand cultural inspiration. - jack bice Here are more thoughts from a letter to a student: Claire - I am happy to reply, although I'm not sure what assistance I can be. My work represented on the Internet is of course not the same as real life, real time seeing and hearing, but only a cursory view. One might think that a large body of works produced over a lifetime could somehow summarize an artist's life; but it cannot, because any life is more complex than ever can be recounted or archived. Outside the creative act, life evolves in myriad other dimensions. Making art is just a part of life, with each bit of exotic, expressive formulation, as it come into being, existing in time, idea, feeling and action - vaporous and vanishing. Each fleeting faction might be recorded in the art product, but finally it is all witnessed superficially, indirectly, incompletely by others. So, art making is private, the art a curiosity. And the art is not the artist's life. With all of this convoluted philosophy, perhaps you will understand something of my habits: I become intrigued with an idea or perhaps an action, tool or material. I intuitively and spontaneously, without planned purpose, move things into relationships. This might be doodling with pencil on a scrap of paper, turning over a few notes or chords on a keyboard, pointing a video camera on its own monitor or attacking a large canvas with a full palette; but the results always become developed as expressive statements - aesthetic/expressive order from chaos - and usually surprising and gratifying. I think of this private act as a strange exploration of life from within myself which is inscrutable and otherwise inaccessible. I hope this helps your project. Let me know what develops. Sincerely, Jack Bice