Well …. I worked on this painting all evening – Starfish of Hope.

Starfish of Hope – Marshall Sponder 48″ x 56″ Acrylic and Oil Pastel on Paper

This is what happened – I had a great time painting Starfish of Hope – assembled 4 pieces of paper and used Acrylic colors (Cobalt Blue and White plus some Perm Green light) – the paper was wet for a while – worked the painting in – paper buckled a bit but I thought – maybe it’ll dry faster if I hang it on the wall (big mistake) – anyway I did that  – and pointed a fan at my work.

An hour later – it was mostly dry and I spent the next 4 hours painting non stop with oil pastels and then with turpentine – back and forth.

About midnight – I had enough – the result is what you see before you – I cleaned up, photographed my Starfish for both Facebook and my own blogs, and then proceeded to take the Starfish of Hope off the wall …except … part of it was fused with the Wall!

Oh well ….. I did the work off – but not without some damage to it.

However, I’m not sorry – though I was chuckling – that I put all this work into, perhaps one of my more interesting experiments – and glued my painting to the wall – but hey – so what – I worked out what I needed to in The Starfish of Hope – got something to gel inside of me.

And it harkens back to thoughts I had when I was younger about Conceptual Art and also the work of Jackson Pollack – in Conceptual Art – the work exisits mainly as a concept and in Jackson Pollack’s case, his work was often done on unprimed canvas using commerical house paint – not the best materials to use if you want work to last a long, long time – but I’m not sure he cared how long his work would survive – that wasn’t the point.

At the end of the day, weather Art lasts a day, a year, 100 years, 500 years, 1000 years, 2000  years – it will decay or be destroyed, eventually – that is just as it is -and should be.  In the case of Conceptual Art – and maybe this includes my iPhone artwork – we’re just bypassing making something physical – but ……. even if you make something physical and tangible – it will only exist for a time – and then dissolve back into “nothingness”.

Given that persepctive – I figured, as I left the studio tonight (little over an hour ago) that it really didn’t matter my Starfish of Hope has holes in a few places (I can fix that – maybe); it’s more important that I had fun and worked out some ideas – eventually, I’ll do these works in a more a more careful way – but for now – the gratification of just doing them and working through the energies that are all bound up – is enough.

Besides – I put all my creations up on the web – like ..here, and so, I can’t really say that my work is conceptual – even the iPhone art – it exists as computer memory on my iPhone, and on the servers who host this site – it’s replicated all over the internet and onto other computer systems and desktops – along with mobile devices – one can’t say that is not physical – it is.

With work being done and uploaded immediately – so anyone can see it – it’s less imporatant that some of it gets messed up, after the fact, or not – since it wasn’t done to sell or even give to anyone else – at least, that’s not my intent at this time.

So … I didn’t really mind my work got messed up a little – I learned something – that’s the most important thing – maybe the only thing that really matters.