Meaning

I just added a page to my new web site titled, Meaning.  I went against Matisse, and his advice that artists should cut out their tongues.

http://www.jimhathawayink.com

from a letter to an old friend on the other side of the world, 4 am today

Sunday I got thru alone, trying to put life in order, a little cleaning, a preparing of lessons for the coming season, and attempting some product branding that my sister had so strongly suggested. She is a machine, a new and complex creation every few months, a web site, linked with printerest or some such internet thing, there are so many new internet things. She is blogging, tweeting, fade booking, poking her publishers for links and connections.

So I changed my domain name. Instead of brushink.com, the domain name I have used for the past ten years I registered jimhathawayink.com. She lobbied for putting my name out front for purposes of branding, Jim's cola, that sort of thing. So i did.

It is possible to go too far with this. I have also opened a twitter account @jimhathawayink but I can't seem to tweet. It seems too abstract and more like clutter than anything of importance. I did get my first follower, a kind soul I have never met. My sister showed me ways to get more by following other tweeters and hash tagging and other magic. But again, it seems like clutter, and perhaps not reaching people who might enjoy my paintings.

My paintings are silent. Paintings don't move. It is their nature. It defines them. Paintings just sit there and wait, sometimes for hundreds of years to be seen or appreciated. Paintings have time.  More and more it makes painting seem a nostalgic activity. A thing of the past.

Paintings are not Andy Warhol. They aren't pop. They aren't fashion. They aren't hype.

But of course they are. Always have been.

Artists are wiggling, struggling, hungry souls, desperate for recognition, a piece of the pie. A person wouldn't put marks on a wall for others to see if they didn't have a pretty big ego. And we are of our time. Though as you point out, you yourself are also of a different time. Part of your soul reaches back into times past.

You and I were born at the dawn of the computer age, into a time of punch cards and spinning reels of tape attached to a whirring beeping buzzing machine that fills a room, alone in its room, unconnected, before the net, before the web.

Now here we are.

Boy, Can I run on. Who put a nickel in me? Perhaps I ought to tweet after all, or at the very least blog - Put this very missive on line, publish it for the world to see, or not see - our brave new world of disconnected people stumbling down streets, little screens so close to their faces, and in a desperate attempt to seize it, miss the world completely.