Creativity unbounded is not really creativity. Why you could create and recreate and hypercreate exactly everything and a hurly-burly of everything is as useful as a whole lot of nothing. Binding creativity has a much better outcome. Tying the hands of the artist is like tying the hands of Houdini. The fun, the trick, is watching him get out.

I want to avoid calling myself an artist. That's a confine I don't want to impose on myself. I don't deny the word for humility's sake. Humility has limited service. It's just a reasonably useless word.

I have imposed a constraint on my art. Or rather, let's call it a project. Of morality, Rousseau (the philosopher, not the customs officer cum painter), says it is best to fence ourselves in. Absolute freedom is like a little bird with really big wings. It doesn't fly. I have fenced myself in. But I am not alarmed. I am eager to find out what I will do with my own limitations.

My intention is to Chronicle the Ordinary. To create an archive of my habitation. These are the chronicles of the ordinary, the minutiae of my life. And I hope that the altogether effect will be stronger than any individual word or image. I am looking forward to the alchemy of the whole thing, -- here's an art college word --,the gestalt of the collection.

Creation is working within a system, defining that system, then challenging it and rising within it.

Regarding the minutiae of everyday life, I was forced to read Albert Camus' L'Etranger (or Outsider in English) in high school. I had to read the English book first for the meat and the flavor. I read the French, or tried my best to pretend to, under duress. But there was an idea in it that I remember. Or two ideas. The first was that it's unacceptable for men not to cry at their mother's funeral. And the second, and much more interesting, was an idea he expressed about death. That death, or something akin to heaven, was the infinite sensory memory of all that a person experienced in his life. I got the idea of a sort of hyper-memory. Not just the things you remember remembering. But the record of everything. The fiber of your carpet, each fiber. Grass under your feet. Each blade. The smell of Spring's resurrected earth. The pitch and timber and infinite sound of a chirping bird so that your memory wraps itself around, invades, passes through everything. So that even the discorporated memory of even an infant unlucky in life could pass through everything infinitely. It's the most reasonable idea of life after death I have heard.

Perhaps, to some degree, I am trying to capture that idea in my regular living life, even still constrained by my body. That in itself is an entirely illogical motivation but it is not the only motivation I have.

SS