Grass is always Greener when I paint it.

This is my first blog, well at least my first non myspace or social network rant. I followed my oldest and dearest friend here and have put off doing this for too long, but I start Grad school this spring and want to be one of the cool kids so I will blog too.

Speaking of the Oldest and Dearest she sent me this article today and it prompted this blog:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/452786.html

  Neitzsche was moved or stagnated by what he saw and it affected how he wrote and felt about the world depending on locale. He and I have had a love hate relationship through the years. He makes me think about faith in ways I find unsettling, it usually leads to religious crisis followed by zealotry that only a lapsed catholic can manifest. When I crawl out of my Canonical Law cave where I hid from the truth he was laying down, Neitzsche changes me. His humanity, and explanation of it in others is rarely wrong even when I am determined it should be. So when I read about where he was when, and what he saw and felt as his writing happened I can see how the visual landscape shaped his work. Is it no wonder that all my papers are beginning to sound the same, and my glass looks like the same collection no matter what shape and color it is? I mean when the world is only a tank of gas big how much can really change? I would like to think I am am smarter than that, that the rut I am in is a state of mind not a state being, but I know I am full of beans. All my attempts to "Live Art" in my local museums and in my internet wanderings are just that attempts to live. Only but putting my feet on the ground and seeing beyond the gallery, into what was in my favorite authors, painters, sculptors, and friends field of vision can I really experience where their heads were when they created.

  I have tried so hard to put myself beyond my comfort zone, trying some radical new challenges of mind, body, and faith this past year. I usually blame it on budget, my lack of artistic travel is directly related to my finances this is true, but I am beginning to think that the travel physically will suffer the same fate of underwhelming me with how much the modern world has taken away from what is beautiful, or overwhelming me with the amazingness of the world leaving me a drooling caveman incapable of taking what I see and feel and putting it into intelligent words and art.

   Change is began in the physical not the mental, how very practical. I have been trying to change my world from the deepest recesses of my mind and artist yearnings, maybe the best way to affect change and to effect what I see is to change where I see it from. Pray for me blog world that when I save the cash to get to Venice it hasn't sank and I can write a sentient blog from some beautiful old world building not from my table at their local McDonald's. Let there be enough of the world of beauty left to see under what we have done to it as a modern society, by the time I can afford to get there. Tell me that these places are not like men, great on paper but lackluster in practice. Let the green of my favorite paintings be a cheap fallacy compared to the green of the inspiration landscape.