Bob E. Grant: Painter
The artist’s view
Like most people, I was born or so they tell me, I don’t remember. They tell me it was a maximum security military base; maybe I came from another planet, or was the result of some weird experiment. Who knows? Anyway, my lifelong passion for drawing, painting, and art in general started when I was a child and has lasted to the present day. As an adolescent, I could see that society was based on hypocrisy and superficial values, where the chief interest was to find security to become somebody important or to have a good time with as little thought as possible. All the nationalism, racism, and religious dogmatism made it look like a world of ignorant idiots. The only possibility of not getting ground up in the gears of the big ugly machine was to pursue the life of an artist. They lived by their own rules and values. There was freedom to learn about life and understand oneself. My natural talents and inclinations made it seem not a choice, but inevitability that I would be an artist. On hearing my choice of career, many people told me the life of an artist leads to poverty, depression, and insanity.
Now I have lived that life, and the cynics were right. I have suffered from poverty at times, I have been depressed at times and yes, I have behaved insanely at times. But today I love life and still see beauty in the world. I have the inner certitude that it’s worth walking on the razor’s edge. I wonder how the cynics whose decision was to conform and imitate feel about their situations today. I make visual compositions because that’s what I love to do, and among many other things it is self liberation and a manifestation in concrete form of thoughts and feelings which could not be expressed any other way. It is a possible connection with another person beyond the superficial. People are suffering on a daily basis, suffering from living the lie that they can live without art and therefore the artist. But without creativity there will be total destruction. The crisis is now, and in order for creativity to flower, we need the seeds. All of us and in particular the artist (I mean the real artist not the fakes of which there are plenty), we the creative ones are the seeds.
I’m ending my artist’s view with a description of today’s society comparing it to a visual image that is much too familiar to all of us: “The building is crumbling, the walls are giving way, and fire is destroying it. We must leave the building and start on new ground with different values” (J. Krishnamurti). Love is what really matters.
Sincerely,
Robert E. Grant
Links: e-mail me
Like most people, I was born or so they tell me, I don’t remember. They tell me it was a maximum security military base; maybe I came from another planet, or was the result of some weird experiment. Who knows? Anyway, my lifelong passion for drawing, painting, and art in general started when I was a child and has lasted to the present day. As an adolescent, I could see that society was based on hypocrisy and superficial values, where the chief interest was to find security to become somebody important or to have a good time with as little thought as possible. All the nationalism, racism, and religious dogmatism made it look like a world of ignorant idiots. The only possibility of not getting ground up in the gears of the big ugly machine was to pursue the life of an artist. They lived by their own rules and values. There was freedom to learn about life and understand oneself. My natural talents and inclinations made it seem not a choice, but inevitability that I would be an artist. On hearing my choice of career, many people told me the life of an artist leads to poverty, depression, and insanity.
Now I have lived that life, and the cynics were right. I have suffered from poverty at times, I have been depressed at times and yes, I have behaved insanely at times. But today I love life and still see beauty in the world. I have the inner certitude that it’s worth walking on the razor’s edge. I wonder how the cynics whose decision was to conform and imitate feel about their situations today. I make visual compositions because that’s what I love to do, and among many other things it is self liberation and a manifestation in concrete form of thoughts and feelings which could not be expressed any other way. It is a possible connection with another person beyond the superficial. People are suffering on a daily basis, suffering from living the lie that they can live without art and therefore the artist. But without creativity there will be total destruction. The crisis is now, and in order for creativity to flower, we need the seeds. All of us and in particular the artist (I mean the real artist not the fakes of which there are plenty), we the creative ones are the seeds.
I’m ending my artist’s view with a description of today’s society comparing it to a visual image that is much too familiar to all of us: “The building is crumbling, the walls are giving way, and fire is destroying it. We must leave the building and start on new ground with different values” (J. Krishnamurti). Love is what really matters.
Sincerely,
Robert E. Grant
Links: e-mail me
