BL: So Mister Artist, you have been a professional painter for almost thirty years; can you please tell me what art is?


BDW: Listen Boris if you are going to ask me such hard questions I think I'll pass on this interview. Okay, I can see by your distorted facial features you want me to be serious. The problem is I can't answer your question!


BL: Oh, c'mon Nard you have been an artist for as long as you have and you can't tell me what it is you are doing?


BDW: Bernard...if you don't mind! What's with this Nard? Anyway of course I can answer it: I'm doing art!


BL: Okay, from now on I'll try to address you as Bernard, after all, you are my elder, if not wiser. So Bernard, may I ask you how you can say you do art, but can't tell me what art is?

BDW: I may not be wiser than you but at least I can see those are two different questions. What I do is art, however ask me what that is, and I can't tell you! Sure I can give you a glib answer and say something like...'Art is the materialization of imagination," that sounds good, but it doesn't discriminate art from any other type of human endeavor. Actually to be quite honest I stopped trying to answer that question a long time ago. I'm more interested in the difference between crummy art, and good art or great art.

BL:Okay, I'm interested it pursuing that, but right now I would like to explore some of the reasons behind your reluctance to define what art is.

BDW: Reluctant? Who's reluctant? I just think all the definitions I have arrived at are flawed or limited to certain relative conditions. And that's also true of all the ones I have read. You want a definition of art okay I will lay one on you. Art is a materialization of imagination, which when you experience it, takes you beyond your expectations of how you would experience it, no matter what kind of object it is, or what its function is suppose to be. In fact, the lower your expectations, the more lifting or intense the experience is.

BL: Wow, that's pretty good! So why did you play it so coy Bernard, like you couldn't come up with a definition of art?

BDW: I'll tell you why I was reluctant. I was reluctant because that was a completely meaningless statement. Listen Boris, a few years back, my next door neighbor in the apartment house where I live, a little old man who was about twenty years my senior, introduced himself to me in the lift and said he had heard from our building superintendent that I was an Artist, and he mentioned he was an artist too. He added that he sold his stuff every friday in an outdoor art market. You should of heard him when he announced that to me, you could feel he was proud of belonging to the fraternity of 'artist'.
He said he painted "nature." I soon saw my neighbor's work. They were landscapes of the Hallmark or Greeting Card variety. They were enjoyable, decorative, and perhaps a bit kitsch (in my opinion) and they were fairly well rendered in oil on little canvas boards. Their only fault was, after the first minute of looking at them you probably would not notice them for months if they were hanging on your wall.
But does that mean they weren't art? He sold on the average of one hundred and fifty dollars a week worth of paintings to people who thought they were buying art. Does that mean they were buying art? I think it does.
By the way I have many friends, so-called serious artist; artist who show in galleries who have sold none, or only one or two paintings in their lifetime. So does that fact make my neighbor a more professional artist because he sells more, or are they professional and he isn't because they show in professional galleries? Van Gogh, only sold one or two paintings in his life time. Did he only become a professional artist when he sold those two painting shortly before he died? If we knew what art is we could maybe answer some of those questions. How can we answer what an artist is unless we can define art?
The best I can come up with is art is what people say they have done when they say they do art. But that won't satisfy many of my more elitist, acquaintances, or friends.

BL: But the term art must mean something--it must signify something?

BDW: Of course it signifies something for every person who uses the term. The only problem is it may mean different things to the different people who use it, or they may not be able to put into words what they mean by the term. Moreover, some people may be doing what others think of as art, and the person doing it never thought of it in those terms or never would.
Consider this Boris, we talk about 'Children's Art' but little children don't think in those terms. Sure they will run up to you and say, 'Look, mommy and daddy, look at my picture...' or 'my painting' or 'my drawing' but they won't say until later in their 'lives 'Look at my Art'. Those kids do that stuff for the sheer joy of doing it, they don't do it to do art. Karel Appel saw that stuff, and put himself in that same consciousness place, inhibited his academic habits, or whatever, and came up with his child-like pieces that so many people admire. An alternative explaination is phenomenologically Appel stayed a child in some important ways.

A number of years ago I saw a documentary film that knocked me off my feet Boris.It was about the 'art done by women from small villages in India. Those woman painted the inside and outside walls of their huts and areas of the land around them with paintings. The paintings went the range from semi abstract to non-objective. And some of them were some of the greatest art pieces I have ever seen. Most of the people in the audience gasped with wonder when the camera focused on one of those pieces.
The narrator explained, that those women covered those pieces and changed them a few times a year. You see doing the paintings was a form of house work. First the women cleaned their huts and yards, and kept them orderly. The paintings represented their attempts to get the energies impinging on their family orderly and harmonious. Their sense of when a piece does that is intuitive. When it fails to do that or stops doing that the piece has to be changed. By the very nature of how that process is conceived, they are short lived because the families' situation and karma are in flux like everybody elses in the world. So in their view its ridiculous to be attached to a piece that is no longer balancing out the energies well. Therefore some of what might be the greatest art in the world is in a state of rapid cycles of construction and destruction and will be seen only by a small circle of people. I understood that some of the houswife 'artists' thought their pieces were offerings to mediating gods and goddesses who in turn saw to the harmonizing of the energy because they were pleased with the gift; however, the less literal houseswives felt their pieces themselves mediated and worked on the karmic energy field.

BL: We are onto a very rich subject area now--I guess it has to do with values. It seems Westerners are always trying to hold on to things that they find uplifting and that gets all mixed up with ideas about property, rarity and material value. I sure would like to rap somemore about those things but this after all is a blodge and we have to cut it short...Maybe you will let me interview you again in the next few weeks some more about this stuff....

BDW: Sure, I'm open to it, we'll see how it goes and what type of feedback we get....maybe someone out there would like to raise some questions...

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