Blood Pressure , Abstraction and Lightbulbs

  A few months ago I ended up in the hospital emergency room with chest pains and a racing heart. After a battery of tests they couldn't find anything wrong with me except for very high blood pressure. After a conversation with my doctor she wanted to give me a month to see if I could control what's most likely hypertension and anxiety before putting me on medicine. She recommended that I purchase a home blood pressure checker and to check it everyday. During the first month I began to make some changes which sadly meant getting rid a friend of over 40 years whom became a pain in the ass. Then my blood pressure began to drop. Then I began to practice Transcendental Meditation and my pressure dropped a good deal lower and started to hover around normal which is 120/80. My doctor was surprised to say the least. Sure I still have days where it spikes above normal but then I quickly determine the cause and do something to counter it. One of the causes was not being comfortable in what passes for a coffeeshop today or the arrogance that plagues them, so I stopped going to them. Another cause lately was the artist block I've been suffering with between paintings. To counter that I began to paint abstractions with Gouache in a watercolor pad. No planning, no thought, no expectations, just letting my hand do what it wants on the paper. My blood pressure then began to drop below 120/80.

  Over the last 20 years I've grown to hate most abstract painting. It seemed that so called artists produced them because they were safe, didn't offend, left interpretation up to the viewer, passed as decor, and they sold. In abstraction the unspoken rule is that bigger is better and you can charge a lot more for it. To make things worse is the ridiculous names they're given as an illusion to meaning. What was once considered avant-guard became a mainstream mess for the arts and a decorators dream. After the Action Painters and Abstract Expressionists of the 40's and 50's there are only a couple lives abstract painters that I appreciate. A few brave art critics used the coined phrase "zombie formalism" to describe what's going on. If you look up that phrase you'll find nothing flattering.

  Yes, I've painted abstractions before from 1991 to 1998 but I gave that up when the copycats arrived. I was never able to find my grove with the exception of one 60"x60" painting from 1993 that looked like thousands of fallen leaves in a windstorm. Everyone seemed to love that painting, even my fiancee at the time who asked me "if we ever break up can I have that painting". Little did I know at the time that she was already planning her escape. I wish I taken photos of those paintings because they were either sold, stolen or destroyed. I really wish I remembered how I painted that one but I can't even remember what brush I used.

   Since 1998 I've dabbled in abstraction for a painting or drawing but most of the time they were painted over. And every time I see someone copying a Pollock, Rothco, de Kooning, Krasner, Kadinsky, etc, that hated for abstraction returns. What's now worse is that artists follow the art market which means they mimic what sells at auction houses or what's hanging in the Gagosian galleries. The bottom line is fame but more importantly lots of money. Creativity now takes a back seat.

  I have no plans for these small 5.5x8.5" abstractions. There's no meaning to them besides spontaneity and a form of personal therapy and meditation. I could paint one a day or 20 but I try to keep it around 2 or 3 a day so I don't keep running out of supplies which would just make anxiety and tension rear it's ugly head again.

Now while I'm talking about health and art.....

My very small studio gets almost no natural light so I use a clamp on utility light to illuminate the painting I'm working on. I could never work on a painting for long lately under artificial light because I kept getting migraine headaches. I thought maybe the light was too harsh so I installed a dimmer switch. While I was able to comfortably control the amount of light the headaches returned. Then it came to me, it was the lightbulb. I tried 4 different LED bulbs; frosted, not frosted, different light temperatures. Still the same piercing headaches. Extremely pissed off that something so as a lightbulb was keeping me from painting I went to the hardware store and bought one of the last boxes of incandescent bulbs on the shelf. Eureka that solved the problem !!! After a little research I found that I wasn't the only artist suffering from this and the culprit was the hyper blinking that every LED bulb produces. The more I read the more I understood how these money saving miracles are causing health problems in people and animals, sleep deprivation, damaging plant life, increasing light pollution and adding more toxins and plastics to landfills. All this to just save some money. Seems like a wise trade-off (rolling eyes hard). I plan over the next couple of weeks to stock up on the old incandescent bulbs and hopefully get a enough to last a decade or until they develop a bulb that isn't harmful.

"In April of 2022, The Biden Administration in conjunction with the Department of Energy implemented new standards that ban the manufacturing of most traditional incandescent bulbs past July of 2022 - and prohibits anyone from selling them past February 2023."