Growing up, I took great satisfaction in reading. These days, I feel like I have seen and read so much that it is hard to find entertainment in very much. The work that is being created for audiences today is hobbled. Commercial work must have a large enough demographic to be commercially successful. Owners, shareholders and investors are not interested in creating art for art's sake.
For some reason our current mode of story telling seems to need to give us a complete picture. The mass market isn't entirely comfortable deciding the ending of a story, or filling in the blanks. The core values of our stories are also finite. Things such as passion, love, honor, duty, integrity, betrayal, obstacles and successes are such fundamental truths to human storytelling that by the time you've seen them for a decade or so, they become worn down. There are not enough twists on the chords to make me sit up and take notice anymore. How many television shows set in New York do we need, how many movies set in California?
Art - on the other hand, has really passed society by and seems to at the other end of the spectrum. Artists are only creating work for artists. At some point, we caught on to the idea that we could change the world through art, but really, has it helped? What does a rectangle mean, what does a color mean? Nothing. It can only suggest or hint or guess, too often away from the truth.
Pictures and artwork and picture making used to be woven into religion, and mysticism, and faith and storytelling, but now we have illustration and shallow comic books and even shallower cartoons. Is there any happy medium between exploring and entertaining ourselves as artists and entertaining and playing with a viewer.
The imagery I weave are the things I love, stories, ancient places of the sacred and profane, places of battle and defeat and victory. Gods, scientists, soldiers, heroes, masks, faces, monsters, goggles, and armor. I would love to be the puppeteer, the Merlin, the witchdoctor, but I don't want to write the script for the play.
I just want to set the stage and then push the actors out into the audience and see what happens.