“Artspeak” is a word I made up for all the stuffy pretentious insider terms used by professional artists. Some of the words are useful, because every profession has its own vocabulary. But for some reason, the way some artists talk just gets up my nose.

One of an artist’s more dreaded tasks is writing an Artist’s Statement. If it was allowed, mine would say “I saw it, liked it, photographed it, and painted it BECAUSE I THOUGHT IT MIGHT SELL!”. Instead, an artist is expected to be articulate, and even fluent in answering questions such as:

What informs the color in your work?

Is the subversion of closure an important element in your work?

What are the paradoxes in your work?

What are the paradoxes in the practice of painting?

How do your cultural roots inform your practice?

I think artists are expected to say things like this:

I’m constructing a framework which functions as a kind of syntactical grid of shifting equivalences.

Imagine the possibility that painting might take root and find a place to press forward into fertile new terrain

Instead, this is more my style of questions and answers:

1. What do you want people to see in your work? reality and the beauty of Tulare County

2. What is a distinguishing characteristic of your art? it looks real

3. Based on your conversations, what do people find delightful or surprising about your art? the level of reality.

That’s me, keeping things real, just an ordinary realist from a real rural place of realistic folks.