The art world today has problems. Its dedication to half-century-stale shock value is a rotten foundation. Long ago when it was new, the way avant-garde transgressed against the public’s safe and secure sense of good taste was supposed to invigorate their unrecognized desire and usher in a new age of creative freedom. Instead, that shock value narrowed, targeting ever-more-specifically only those already experts in the field of art. Now Cubism wasn’t shocking enough, no. What was shocking was that Cubist in fact painted using an evenly spaced grid that they eventually painted over, leaving major compositional elements like a vase or a hand in eye-catching positions with respect to the dimensions of the canvas. The charlatans! Those chauvinists dazzle your eyes and seduce you into liking their work by technical means, thereby limiting your individual freedom to create your own experience of art! It’s your reality, not their aesthetic playground!

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What was needed, it seemed, was art that went further. Deeper into the crevice of suppressed desires, devoid of niceties that pander to the populace! Ripped cardboard and various detritus as art! Artists that smear ketchup and mayonnaise on their bodies! And extremely intelligent, difficult theoretical texts to support such endeavor. This is not a pipe, it’s a devastating critique of this or that norm of polite society! How can you tell? Well if you had read Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida on the subject like I did, you would know that what society in fact does is discipline your body to react the way you do to specific stimuli, much like Pavlov’s dog. I know the media is practically encoding social cues directly into my mind. You know, if the man says jump, then you ask how high. But to really get it, you would first need to understand the principles of semiotics laid out by Fernand De Saussure. So just hold off for now, you might be embarrassingly wrong, and I wouldn’t want you to feel uneducated.

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Slowly, the galleries of high art ended up filled with diagrams for the theoretical texts current among top critics. An artist was left with a choice between presenting work that looked like an illustration in a philosophical treatise absent the text, as if that made it easier to understand, or entering the game of one-upmanship that continued to thumb its nose at traditional taste that hadn’t been relevant for decades. Today, however, a stack of papers in a museum described as “Post-Conceptual” is white noise no more or less than a Thomas Kinkade outlet store is in a mall, and a video of an artist doing this or that outlandish thing alone in their studios falls flat to media as commonplace as Tik Tok and its legion of dancers. In fact, the Painter of Light™’s encapsulations of saccharinity incarnate may well be more likely to get a rise out of a viewer than something as bland as a sheet of typewritten text. Who really sounds more like an outraged bourgeoisie asking "Who would buy that?" in response to his Disney Dreams series?

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Ultimately, either you know Marxist-Feminist-Postmodern-Semiotics and fancy words like bourgeoisie, or you don’t. If you do, you smile and nod at the continued relevance of what you learned in grad school. And if you don’t, you’re left out in the cold grasping for straws the artist might offer as in-jokes for those in the cheap seats. Critiquing those that critiqued the critics that supported an artistic tradition not seen in a century leaves little room to maneuver. Art ends up oddly formatted editorials preaching to the choir about the importance of marginalized minority perspectives by literally presenting inaccessible bookshelves. Those that buck that trend exhibit self-apologetically directionless aesthetics slathered with art historical reference points like spoonfuls of sugar. My style isn’t not about having a style! I double-negate your refusal to paint a pretty picture. And in the vacuum, critics do little more than pepper their prose with an artist’s biographical details and soundbites as if it’s gospel truth.

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What power does any of that actually offer an artist, art viewer, or art writer over the sociopolitical sphere? If, as their theoretical canons would have it, they’re attempting to effect societal change, where can that betterment be located? Whose job is it to keep them honest? How many of the artists that claim to “want to start a conversation” in fact do? How many art professionals start their critique on the homefront, with their own institutions and the role they play as aesthetic power brokers? The only forums that exist are in unanimity as to what constitutes a proper bibliography and in denial that their iconoclasm is anything but a settled dead letter. True freedom of mind demands art be available as a neutral registration of the times, a glassful of pure potential value. No art scene can exist without a network of viewers willing to open their hearts to learning to love a wider variety of life’s possibilities. I will be the primary source of future historians if I garner interest. The question is do I deserve it?

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Each of my tapestries are made using a grid four units by four units aligned on a six by nine rectangle, the same aspect ratio of a single pony bead. Between each corner of the grid run diagonals, producing an intricate web of many intersection points. From there, I align ellipses from one intersection to another, until I’m left with a tangle of curved lines that becomes my starting point. Deleting portions of each ellipse one by one, I produce the compositions you see in a finished tapestry. This working method allows for an endless variety related styles. Where one looks like a patchwork of excited rectilinears, another can look like a gravitational center radiating orbital swooshes, and yet more can appear like a dense spiderweb. The grid and ellipse mode ensures that the contours will lead your eye from one shape to the next in intriguing ways while the pony bead pixelation makes walking towards and away a rich optical play of continuous curvature becoming blocky staircases to and fro.

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I make no apologies for working on a grid as a home-brewed cottage-industrial Bauhaus-of-one. Working in this manner is not a cheap parlor trick that deludes the eye. It’s a fundamental principle of art, an element of experience, and the framework of a language. Art deserves a lexicon. Developing a lexicon is difficult. Why haven’t high art’s shocking affronts to good taste startled us from our supposed slumber in the comfortable confines of accepted values? Because viewership and appreciation are demanding skills. Try holding one of my planes in mind while you determine which others underlap and overlap it. Feel the way it effects your sense of space implied by the tapestry. Then blur your eyes until you’re seeing nothing but color and the way deep colors recede and bright colors call out. Do the two feelings of space agree with one another? Do they contradict? Do you like what you’re experiencing? Feel your way through each response. Try to name them. Coin terms. Relate to the work.

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Art hits a dead end without a fluent viewers and ambitious makers. Not one thing in this world doesn’t have some quality or another. No matter our differences, that we do perceive is common to all. Any response may or may not be aesthetic, artful or pleasurable. It’s up to the conversations we have with one another to make something of them and make good on the opportunity to better and more genuinely understand our neighbors that art provides. Demonizing aesthetic experience as an institutionalized myth or celebrating it as an absolute good are both wrong-headed and oppressively biased in this regard. I hate the art world for losing faith that life can be made more worth living in place of forcing its imperfections on a supposedly insensitive public. The pressure to renounce beauty as possible in today’s world is either an historical fluke or art’s death. No avant-garde -ism will save us from our own inattention. It can only provide a means to open our minds.

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My art props up no institution to tear down. No rabble to chastise. No revolution to stoke. No worldly cause to support. Rather, it presents a language to construct in hopes of building an audience to support a field of endeavor in need of triage. I’m proud that it looks to me cozy and inviting as a set table and a home cooked meal, modest, loving, and unapologetic, evoking days crafting geckos as a child, pretty and pleasurable, satisfying and personal, with a note of paint-by-numbers Pop Art for good measure. I’m excited about the possibilities the medium holds in store. Smaller, they would be like little gems experimenting with color. Bigger, and they would be like printing out a canvas instead of painting one, the numerous beads dissolving into a luxurious texture. Later I can try leaving holes in them, and more outlandish shapes. I even love the labor, based as it is in the bodily effort of a repetitive task in the pursuit of making something indulgently worth seeing.

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I hope the work makes an impression. Because while museums still receive foot traffic, and galleries make sales, gone are the days of anything like a coherent art scene. Thousands of aspiring artists flock to a few respected auction sites that offer millions of works for sale and little hope. Curators consistently assert that bafflement in the face of contemporary art is the best available understanding. Historians flatly assume that fine art will continue being made simply because it is a basic biological function of society. But how can art survive the crisis of faith it reaches once its experts lose sight of aesthetic discourses that do not accuse the art world of cultural fraud and intellectual bankruptcy? There are easier ways to justify creative endeavor than serious self-criticism, even if the avant-garde wasn’t wrong about our need to pursue freedom and the ability to challenge ourselves. Art has always had a day job, and its pros could always fall back on the corporate grind of prettying sales pitches to fit recent trends.

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Regardless, I sincerely believe that an experience that enriches life is its own reward, and one worth describing. Philosophizing be damned, finding enjoyment in something must be taken as genuine evidence of the presence of real value. Theorizing be damned, I like looking at what I make, and beauty should be appreciated wherever it's found and however it got there. I only wish there was a way to say that in today's world that didn’t sound so trite that any art expert worth his salt  would dismiss such an idea out of hand with a squirm. I’ve sought an aesthetic and a medium I find to be attractive enough to last and spread through our community on its own terms, proving itself in the ecology of our ideas as bread proves in a drawer. One day it may deserve a place as an art historical touchstone or household name, if it is privileged enough to have such a fate. Either way, I'm already proud of it. And in the meantime, I make no demands, I only pose a query: You there! I'm here. Do you like what I like too?

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And if you have time to discuss further, what do you find most rewarding about them? How would you describe it? I will always encourage people to make, view, and appreciate art. Even to go above and beyond that, towards coining terms for discussing it, and writing down their reasons for loving the works they love. As a one-time art history doctorate student, I cannot overstate the extent to which studying art expanded my mind and opened my heart to the lives being lived around me. And now as a maker of art, I can present that heart for your judgment. If you should like my work enough to purchase it, it’s a simple and wonderful fact that I’ve met with success in staking out a life for myself alongside you. One that I enjoy, and one that offers a path to enjoyment beyond myself. Art can do that, even if it can’t save the world by transforming it all at once, with a wave of its masterful hand. Art can nonetheless enliven life, and welcome you into it, as an integral peer within the grand fabric of indeterminate promise.

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