The New Arts

It was just starting to get cold outside in the forest. I was spending my days painting during the day, in communication with my thoughts and nature. Six months previously as I began to start my art practice in painting, and my days were spent studying Van Gogh and Monet, and exploring color. There were birds outside, and in the early morning light there was not a sound in the forest, it was beautiful. Often I would calm my thoughts, listening to a visionary prayer sung as The Origin of Fire by Hildegard Von Bingen: A mystic visionary who had been with me for years, always calming me, in silence in the peacefulness of the storms around me, in my mind. I was calm. There was something about her work that really fascinated me while I was in art school. The context of the work, mystical and mysterious, was a departure from the concept of art that I was learning about with the turn of the century, well last century, I remind myself.

I don’t remember exactly how this happened, but somehow I began to explore the digital reality of what I will call the New Arts. I started making virtual reality exhibitions of my work, I shared what I was doing on Twitter, and then I found it. A hashtag that was a portal into the current work being made by other artists, the #NFTcommunity. What I found there was everything I had always been looking for. A portal into the most revolutionary new forms of making. Digital sculptures, hybrid mix media works, and the absolute best artists I’ve ever found. I didn’t need to find the perfect city to make art, as I had always been searching for. Moving so many places. This was it. Like mystical and spiritual art, this provided a new context, and that context was everything. The new arts do not wait for appraisal or acceptance for the work their creating. The context of the communication of the medium allows for a rapid growth structure that can almost be blinding in its pace. Spending an hour researching and looking at the art made here, you realize that the world is moving so fast, with such incredible leaps of the context of art, that you get the sense that what is termed NFTs are something much deeper than that. It’s freedom of expression at the speed of light.

I don’t even remember how I found them, but I began to find a group of artists that I resonated within my own work, @meppomaru, @GareebAadmi666, Blackout Punks and the pixel art community and its critics. As a collector I have purchased two pieces so far, and I plan to get some of @meppomarus work when I have a bit more funding. I have in my collection one of Aadmis works and a Blackout Punk. It’s vital to support artists as well as make your work in this field as an artist. It’s a community. We support each other. All the art I’ve seen can’t be listed independently. There are just so many artists who blow my mind every second I’m on Twitter. I’ll focus on these three because they represent three distinct and individual currents in the work I’m finding, pixel work, neo-impressionism, and visionary sculpture. The other work I’m finding is so vast, so individual, that searching the NFT community you are reminded of the limitless individual creativity within all of the artists making this work. It’s vast. Each work is almost sublime, and when you look at all of it together, it is as vast as space, unending and constant in its revolutionary forms of making, and expression. Each line and every form and structure.

@meppomarus work that I found focuses on discreet movements of the brush, often finding a base of simulation of impressionist techniques. Like Seurat she moves in short bursts of color, building into a vast symphony of individual pieces of color compositions. She often posts her process and you can begin to get insight into her work through what she shows in her making. It is irreplaceable. There is absolutely no way anyone else could make the work she does, it’s so balanced and resonant with her own work across each individual piece. I followed her work for almost a month, watching as she went from piece to piece, daily, in the expression of a girl with a witch hat, no more magical than the spell of art that she made as she filled the canvas with dashes of color. This was impressionism at light speed, it’s exhilarating to watch. In here subject matter we find a variety of everyday experiences, the girl multiplied into various forms, at a laundromat, relaxing on the beach, tending a garden, and enjoying a walk outside, often with a black cat, like our own. What happens in this individual exploration, as a viewer? For me, it offers a sense of the magic in everyday life. If this central figure or expression across each individual in her explorations, she is, herself, creating something like magic.

What is magic? Its concept is so mitigated by popular considerations of the term that it loses its potency, the language of the description of the concept isn’t even appropriate to have a word. I can’t answer what this term really means. I find it most often in the arts, but in the work of the music I’m listening to as I write this, that Von Bingen was just as much in the every day that she was in the careful contemplation of her belief in the mystical reality of her God. What is the Origin of Fire? For Von Bingen, it means something only expressed in the arts and also in dedication of the science and experimentation. The New Art is also like this, each expression through technology a subtle interaction between engineers who design the applications, the communication device of programming technology, and the tools the artists use. This is artistry on an infinite scale, a combination of science, technology, and the arts, that defy categorization.

We often take it for granted. Every second we’re online we are in a state of incredible flow of artistry between everyone who works in this field. It’s a constant revolution that is unending, transforming rapidly, and while I can’t contain in a single post just what this means, take a step back and imagine everything that we’re doing that is uncategorizable, in this state you realize the sublimity of the everyday. There is no everyday, and in this context @meppomarus work reminds us that every experience of our day-to-day life is transcendent. It reminds us that every experience is just as careful, rapid, and fast as existence itself. I purchased, after looking for so much work over the last month, one piece that I could find that was absolutely beautiful that I could purchase.

All of @GareebAadmi666’s work resonates with me, I’ve never found an artist that resonates with this kind of reality, and just as @meppomaru finds a space of limitless expression in the painting work, Adamis work finds an expression like this in the field of digital sculpture, so careful and considered. It reflects a sense of calmness even in its transcendence. It is just as much in a field of photography as sculptured forms, often finding a base of open space just as vital to the compositions as the form itself, often in complementary of subtly monochromatic tones that are broken by flashes of colors that break the silence of the surrounding environment into color interaction that is inventive and subtle. There is no art I have found that is like it. The overall work seems meditative. Often the sculptures have as their contextual focus, few figures or individual studies. The effect is one of intimacy. We are invited to study every careful movement of color and form, and as a focus on the human body we can find an individual form of expression that is in a sense, a contemplation. It’s quiet, calm and contemplative.

In this work, I find a sense of the ineffable like that expressed in Butoh, but calmer and more penitative. Like Butoh, there is wide open space in each of these works. There’s a kind of performative work in each of these motions, you can almost feel like there is movement in each of the works. It suggests movement or anticipation of motion, you almost watch the paintings as much as you look at them as photography. Perhaps it is moving in slow motion, so slow that you can’t perceive it, maybe it moves over time in a way that transcends time, maybe it takes centuries to move a single moment. While writing this I tried to find something that would focus my criticism, I found some of Morton Feldman’s work that began to approach it, but I couldn’t find any music that can approach this work, like Butoh, it might be silence, as there is no silence. There is an open invitation to reconsider everything around us, a place of calmness and contemplation, of some of the questions of our time.

Criticism is important, and I don’t want to lessen the absolute vitalness of this form. I often read criticism in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington post to get a wide sense of perspectives about the state of our world, all of these modes of expression are vital to understanding our world. When I looked at the Black Out Punks, I was reminded of something Charles Blow’s column a few weeks ago that asked me if there was a more subtle discrimination of color itself, to be considered. How often is blackness as a color feared? For me, as I sit writing this in the morning, still pitch black outside of our home in the forest, it reminds me of its true reality. Each moment there is a street light, or a window through what I imagine someone is waking up, it reminds me that in the calm of night, you can see the light that is around us in every moment. It is always around us, the sublime and indescribable, but we can begin to trace its forms, an unending expression, the arts and our world, in every moment changing, as vast and shifting as the clouds in the sky.