THE EVENT
This is the event you won't want to miss.
If you only ever attend one event, you'll want that event to be this.
When we say the event, we mean The Event, with a capital T and a capital E.
When we say the event, we actually mean THE EVENT, with all the letters capitalized.
Or maybe just all the letters in "the," to emphasize that this is going to be the event, with "the" pronounced the long-e way.
THE event you will definitely want to go to, and bring all your family and friends to, and talk about a lot beforehand, although you'll definitely be talking about it afterward, too!
This will be THE event where in thirty or forty years, or maybe fifty or sixty, depending on how old you are currently, you are playing shuffleboard in Central Florida and you say to your friend, "My friend." And your friend says, "Yes, old friend." And you say, "My friend?" And your friend says, "Yes, old friend. I heard you. Go ahead." And you say, "Do you remember, old friend?" and your friend will say, "Oh: I remember." And that is all you and your friend will say or need to say, because in both of your heads you will be thinking the words "THE event," and still seeing all they stand for.
What, to you, is art?
Don't answer that just yet. Allow me to tell you, in part, what art is to me.
Picture a bird. Your favorite bird. The kind your kindly granddad used to watch with binoculars from his big bay window before telling you stories of his charmed and
difficult boyhood, a tear-glint in the corner of his eye. Picture that bird, now grown old, yet still radiant and light of bone, leading a group of younger birds – her children! her grandchildren! her little great-grandbirds! – leading that timid flock toward water, that it might drink of life's nectar.
Picture the innocent family of fowl, full of purpose, graceful in flight.
Now picture a great green World War One cannon, its once-horizontal shaft now at 20 degrees. Thirty. Now forty. Fifty – now sixty! And look how the soldiers are laughing!
It seems there's been a lull in the war. The young men are lonely and bored. Why, they want nothing more than to obliterate some birds!
But now, picture me: raising my arms, but never my voice, and gently yet firmly
saying: "No. Stop. You must not. You must not shoot that flock from the sky. You must not be ones who destroy beauty. Lower that Howitzer, boys. Beauty lies in the letting go! Beauty rests in setting free."
What is art – indeed, what is life – my friends, if not…restraint!
I Am Interested in Beauty
I am interested in beauty. I am interested, especially, in the beauty of the female form. I am interested specifically in the beauty of women as it pertains to how they appear to the human eye when they are wearing no clothes. I am particularly and exclusively interested in examining the beauty of women between the ages of 18 and 29 (give or take) in terms of the beauty they present when not wearing any clothing. I am very interested in the relations between an absence of apparel on the person of the woman, and the effect of that absence on the artist – and, of course, his audience.
Suffice it to say, I find the women I work with today just as beautiful, young, and naked as the women I worked with, say, 50 or 60 years ago. And probably even more so.
