I began making art very early. At the age when one usually starts to confront the world, I gave it up. Later I took it up again, when I had to begin anew. I’m still at it, twenty years on. With art, I went as far as getting drunk and gorged on it.
Now it seems clear to me that art will not save the world — this art. Nor this world. But perhaps it will give us breath to keep on hoping. I’m wary of art that claims to give answers, and I hold that swapping poetry for an astonishing product will not free us from blindness.
I still admire painting, for as Joan Walsh Anglund1 wrote, a bird does not sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
-
Joan Walsh Anglund, A Cup of Sun (1967); a line often misattributed to Maya Angelou. ⤶