Jason Driskill

Jason,

i looked at your work. i looked for new ideas and found a collection of of borrowed metaphors and concepts. a conceit lacking depth. don’t listen to those who fawn over you for being the gay artist who pushes boundaries. you don’t. is your ultimate goal is to become an art professor? if not - let go. get past the christian family victim coming-out crap it has been done to death. it is not novel, innovative or art - they may be to frightened to tel you that at school. but i sense an sensitivity and an ambition to be famous. you can do better than this wanna be pop graphic dadist cindy sherman gender blending. you could explore your heart and mind and make real art from the core - rather than cliche ridden gay magazine and book cover art. you could be brilliant - open up. kill the yes people because they are killing your chance to change the world. this is said with love and respect from a fellow artist.

 -Daniel

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Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the realness. I don’t think I’ve ever been mistakenly credited for pushing any boundaries. I don’t consider myself to be new or innovative or prophetic, but I’m flattered that you misperceive me as being so ambitious as that.

I would like to look at some other artists that have worked with the “christian family victim coming-out” issues. Help me out with a list of some specific references that I can research?

The uncompromising conflict between sexuality and faith continues to be a huge personal issue for me, as well as the United States. This is my core. I do not feel that any resolution between the two is actually possible, but I continue exploring this awkward (and sometimes humorous) intersection of social constructs.

Who are some artists that you like?

Thank you for your constructive criticism,

Jason

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Jason,

i re-read what i wrote. it was mean spirited and rash. perhaps born out of a frustration of the adulation people get for figurative art. you are talented and your work is far more smart than i gave credit after my first viewing. i prefer non-object (abstract) painting that explores light, color and the act of painting, starting with the theory of color by (gay intellectual of the Bauhaus) Johannes Itten - he inspired one of my earlu straight heroes Wassilly Kandinsky. for me (gay) Mark Rothko is a god. he was never given aclaim during his life because he was gay - he was overshadowed by uber straight and worthless Jackson Pollack. in Rothkos work you can see all the sensitivity of human emotion through color and deceivingly simple simple brush strokes - Rothko achieves what Claude Monet began with his works exploring the concept of liquifaction (the air and light between the artist observer and the subject change the actual perception of color - the actual molecules of light between you and the piece changes the percieved color - what is in fact realty? that which is. or that which we perceive. the arbitor is divine) he explored this theory in his hay stack series and thus in a revolutionary move created abstrast expressionism. of course monet was not gay - but the concept of liquifaction knows no sexuality - have you ever noticed on any singular day in san francisco that a random house will look beautiful because the color is altered by the atmosphere - other days it goes unnoticed. cumulus clouds in the late afternoon in december - the light creates a full spectrum of color - the closer you zoom in the more abstract pure and divine the concept becomes. Back to Rothko in the 1950’s 0 his paintings can make you feel emotion even though they are just fields of color. too bad he wasn’t given proper acclain while alive. contemporary artist that i love are Bonita Barlow who’s studies of light pick up where Rothko left off. her paintings actually change depending on the light source and one’s viewing position. she adds a special medium to the oil paint and sometimes the ashes of gay friends who have died. the work is breath taking in its beauty - it make you feel then think. local gay artist Dan Winks make beautiful color fields employing unique brush technique. his work makes you feel something divine.

i am a classic graphic artist with a sense for balance and form - i like to give people one thing to look at that draws them in - then once captured they see more depth. i also do whimsical line work. with graphics and line i like it to be fresh, strong and erilly familiar yet new. computer graphics allow one to make thousand of edits which sometime weight a piece down - luckily all versions can be saved and when i go back to the original concept doodle or first computer draft - i am astounded by the freshness of the concept and i have to throw out much of my overworked edits - a luxury of our modern times.

as far as direct examples of people working visually with gender blending - most of the people i know did it with their lives as art. it is a hard subject for high art because it is so tied to figurative visual experience and thus witty graphics. so i fall in love with the artists who strip all that away and you see their soul through light and color some of the work is figurative but it is hard to extremely difficult to do - to transcend surrealism and dadism with ironic figurative representation of sexual identity. gay artists are true outsiders with a unique view on the greater society - beginning with childhood we are kept at a distance which allows us to see the whole in a unique way. this lends itself best to writers (Capote, Tennessee Williams, Sidaris…) and much harder to communicate in accessible art - you do so with success - but i want more than surface evaluation - i want to see your soul. gay artist because we are outsiders contemplate these questions and either revel in the material expression that surrounds - fashion, gender bending, display, interior design and graphic arts (Jerome and his portraits are brilliant, wicked and precisely sardonic)- we are more sensitive and perhaps more easily distract by our surroundings - however we are more sensitive to that which is deeper and eternal. your art can break through to that deeper level of truth and teach us all something more about the human experience.

daniel.

p.s. again i apologize for speaking out rashly. on second look your work was more intriguing and polished.

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Hi Daniel,

No worries. I didn’t perceive your message to be rash or mean-spirited. You called out what you saw, and there is truth to what you said.

Your critique does make much more sense knowing your aesthetic values. Rothko is amazing. I’m more partial to Newman personally, because of the figurative (and fatalistic) quality of his zips. For me, the human experience begins and ends with the body, quite literally. The “soul” is intangible, and I’m not convinced that any such thing even exists. But despite my cynicism, I appreciate your romantic love for the sublime, and for Rothko.

Nice to hear from you,
Jason