Freedom

The key to acknowledging Painting today is that you have to embark on a self-invention dilemma. Perhaps it may appear "regressive, factionalistic, egotistical and self-satisfied, bourgeois indulgence"..... have you heard this rhetoric before ? Yes you have, it is out of the Marxist-lenin ist copybook ! Well, apart from Nationalistic forms of that ideology today in China and North Korea, the rest is finished !!! Not only old fossils like the USSR, but also the various post-modern formalism that so rendered the medium of Painting over by the de facto TATT in and around 1985, that influence of Nietzche too, is over-strained as well !!!!!

So what replaces it ? You, the Painter, amongst other creative people wishing to contribute to the 21st century of hands-on human imperfection that is not air-brushed by tech or specifically AI ! We have left totalitarian confrontation and have emerged into selective and episodic charismatic authoritarianism that is not permanent nor is it stuckist in a never ending pendulumic swing ! Freedom is by individual self-design, the making of mistakes , the personal distractions and the hard graft that each of us can restore ourselves and find our own dimension and focus by finding a pressure point in your own practice ! Except your inspirations may be diverse and attack it ! This is for the non faint hearted and for the short fuse of temperament , but a collision of surreal displacement thrust next to the incongruous and transcending your own portfolio by arranging its unlikely confrontation ! You have nothing to lose but your own self- imposed limitation !! Modernist Painting has had at least 3 major cycles to it, and this end of 20th century days have delimited you for too long to not grasp your own break-out and break free of all the assumptions of TATT ! This is a search for freedom by expression, a social conquest of I phones and social media and technology that has cramped social expression by visual image from Paint ! This is how we communicate ! Life is short, Empires fall and still we have individual liberation in our need to share, not by money or ideological creed but by the eternal rhythm of our own drum beat ! We've painted for between 40 and 70 thousand years and we still can illuminate each other and combine all our fears, dreams, hopes and lost loves or fallen guises ! Instead of searching for utopia, we should claim our individuality by social communication ! It will swing back quite soon against us , so emancipate what you are now and absorb and prepare to leave your message to those who will need your direction and your inspiration ! We have to learn how to adapt against exclusion, privilege, degradation and abuse, but you have Manet, Picasso, Dali, and Pollock as game changers before us, and some of those guys fought by Paint against 1930s and 40s Fascism and Stalinism - those guys knew how to fight ! I may have obviously missed some amazing Painters like my first inspiration when I was 15 and saw the works of De Kooning in the Pompidou centre, and pulled that thread much later in my practice but as a Surrealist, and not as an Abstract Expressionist !

The fear of being subjected to determinism means you have to evolve always, but make sure you plunder where you are until you know when to move on ! Be prepared to be over or under rationalistic ! Do not let 'burnt-out and cul-de-sac' authority project their nonsense on to you ! This isn't any thing like a class struggle of 1917 October revolution type (that soon corrupted itself ) this is your struggle against form and TATT handing down what you can't do more than what you can do ! This struggle is about reclaiming your self-defined individualism free of the past ! The only 'crisis' is not anything but 19th century industrialisation versus empire versus the break-up of traditional social and intellectual mores that fails you today, and absorbs our sense of new forms of inevitable fate ! The only fate may be on so many levels of contemporary material advantage for example, but the real entrepreneurs are you , the Artist, the Painter of 'the medium' of our humanity that is resolved and disarmingly open, and yes so easily corrupted ! Corruption of Painting is surely a valid part of the life cycle of all episodic Paint explosions ! Each modernist cycle must end with either a whimper or a volcanic fragmentation ! You will have not failed, you will have embraced visual human technology that hasn't really been subjected to a complete massive new form of equipment - life with tubes of paint led Van Gogh to miraculous transformation ! Surely we follow in his steps of low tech medium with paints ,canvases and brushes etc with absolute pride !?! Pick your plein aire or small room like he did if you like !

I have a lot of notes that I was supposed to write out but , guess what, I got side tracked !!! So perhaps soon I will complete this stuff . I dedicate this to my intelligent and yet sensitive father, always an influence sometimes in spite of himself, but I always knew he had my back! Thanks for everything dad.

RIP Professor Michael Peter Hornsby-Smith

1932-2026