Jean Micheal Basquiat

Jean Micheal Basquiat is the last great poet and painter. Or at least I hope so.

The 80’s were all about icons, in large part because of Andy Warhol, who was the first person to become his own brand.

Like a lot of artists, Basquiat struggled with drug addiction and when he was thoroughly rejected by the art critiques of the time, it had a strong impact on his mental health. We lost him too soon.

Basquiat was rejected because he was black. Maybe it was because the critics didn’t understand his “language” but I feel like is language is pretty universal. It is, however, hard to put into words.

What I always come back to with Basquiat is that I can’t stop looking at it. I feel like I look at it for a million years and still see interesting things that I hadn’t noticed before.

This leaves me asking myself about the definition of beauty because definitions can be fun to examine and crack open in new ways.

Maybe beauty is more about the arrangement of the parts than it is about the parts themselves.

A pile of trash engages with and is shaped by forces of chaos and chance. That aesthetic of randomness is actually very difficult to render.

To see the way birds take off from a wire, or the way trees grow along a mountainside, is to see this complex nature of randomness clearly. I believe that this aesthetic of randomness, chance, inequality, the chaos that is the swirling story of life, may be fundamental to all great forms of art. It may be what art is always searching for.