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Why inside the box and not outside the box thinking?

  • Writer: Stephen Hornsby-Smith
    Stephen Hornsby-Smith
  • Jun 18
  • 4 min read
Colorful abstract bird with intricate patterns on black background, featuring geometric shapes and dots. Two smaller patterned birds below.

Physical parameters aren't meant to restrict creative thinking; in fact, it is often the conflict between the limits of the size of a canvas that emphasises the universe outside it!!! Or are you a paradox individual who likes to disassociate the physical with the creative and original? inner and outer conflict? Indeed, why not see how science and atomic science are (like a Painting) the concentration of energy!!, just as visual drama can energise and not sanitize!!?? We are not confined in Art; we are not the Anthropocene Zoo that Art houses and official galleries present Paintings as? We always are releasing the wild uncontainable back into the wilderness! So, you don't have to release any species of wild animals back into the wild, you've got to stop putting them in a cage in the first place!


Why polar opposites as the cage to imprison? Figurative or abstract aren't the only story of Art! Why think inside the box when you can think outside it? Why relegate 19th century views of Painting by 20th century Cold War thinking? Like Acid or alkaline isn't the only contribution to science! Is dissolution, dilution, dissolving or degrading the only alternatives? How did medication treatments develop? By experimentation and happy and unhappy accidents! Is preventative medicine the only form of medicine? Evolve and anticipate as well as experiment and not analogue thinking and de-evolved Art assumptions or over reliance on AI will prevent dependence on state-of-the-Art today superannuation tomorrow! Why should we be relying on the rats Art race of new tech? Penicillin was invented with the discovery of a mould that could cure’ but would it have been invented otherwise by standard procedure like lab work using (restricted to polar opposites) assumed boundaries????!!! Colour blinded thinking won't tell you much about the colour spectrum will it!


Black and white criteria for Paintings are bespoke but as general laws of Art are false and invalid values because they exclude and not open-up a fuller and wider range of perspectives! So why would TATT exclude contemporary experiences of hacking, trolls, fake news, issues of AI, socio political and economic reasonings in the greater Painting philosophical enquiry of a visually curious mind? Why exclude, marginalise or even criminalise the major Art medium that resisted the extremes of Stalin, Hitler Mussolini, Franco, etc and got labelled 'degenerate' for their sins by such evil doers, only to then get unceremoniously kicked into the long grass by an ungrateful ATT? Or was it concerned that Painting was too influential? What? Both yesterday and today, the only medium that could be reconciled with that burden? TATT are hardly a team player, are they? But not even considering someone's work but relying on second hand player, third party information to consider it, is wilful negligence!! Art is often an individual pursuit for answers that cannot be understood or accepted except in an individual's cultural Artistic practice, and therefore we are not literally team players but we are mutually both supportive as well as capable of herd instinct - Painting is just one of many that have occupied that terrain! Kick us into the log grass and we'll throw our paint back at you, even if, no, especially if we can ruin your expensive tailoring! It will improve your camouflage of myopia!


Why do we think inside the box and not outside the box in contemporary Art especially when it impinges upon the canvas of Art - the medium of Painting? Why do we use animated 'Computer Games' to resolve such issues in the X box? Someone else is making users so addicted to visual, even lifelike simulations, in which they are over-fixated and under-stimulated, leaving them unable to handle real visual drama in the 21st century Painting which engages on a variety of cultural levels that you can't avoid or settle on a quest with or without a fellow gamer dependent AI junky!!! I mean, if just to detox from Xbox, let alone get something of substance on an elevated plane (that will still bring you a full Art History of gore and blood if needed) and as a producer or as well as a consumer, that is not money sensitive!?! The full terror of history and all its invasions and all its horrors are more explicit and more metaphorical (if that's your thing ) to bring you to some understanding that visual impact doesn't have to be reliant upon a PhD or make you into a 'ninja warrior Lord of Vice and punishment!! ' When I said think outside the box, let's start with outside the Xbox!


Painting is open not closed, inexpensive but not cheap, personal but not public, sometimes angry and yet elevated, not a money maker but a significant and dutiful contributor, that enables you to create your own interpretation of all that the 'diary of humanity visualised' is capable of and inflict no one else to your thoughts and feelings if you so choose! Silence in front of a Painting is the precious moments that you can distort or emancipate or hate or feel envy etc... What am I saying? Of course there are no limitations with Painting's access to unique universal subject matter, where you get to use all the virtues and all the deadly sins that mankind is capable of, and no one can hear your own private thoughts and you can absorb the world in them! That's thinking outside, actually not just outside but beyond the box into unlimited unfiltered possibilities!!

 
 
 

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