I perceive my “inner artist” as a separate, mysterious entity with boundless energy that wanders mostly hidden in the recesses of my mind, and regards me as simply the “meat person” to carry out its wishes…which is fine by me.
Philosophically, I’m a big picture kind of guy. I find the parade of daily headlines—indeed the whole of human history—to be inconsequential compared to the wonder of existence itself. The atoms needed to make up our bodies were forged by unimaginable forces of heat and pressure in the cores of collapsing stars! Then, after billions of years of primordial trial and error those same atoms were woven into our DNA molecules, the custodians of instructions for the highly orchestrated assembly of the most complex thing in the known universe: the human brain. And we each get to have one! But even this amazing structure is superseded—by orders of magnitude—by the phenomenon of intelligent self awareness we experience within our minds. It’s a phenomenon that resists quantitative explanation, but I think it’s a perpetual illusion that sustains our perception of ourselves from cradle to grave. Bottom line: Our imagination hosts our sense of who we are!
From my own inner experience (epic dreams, for example), and the relayed experiences of others, it appears we have virtually infinite powers of imagination. What an awesome tool to have at our disposal!
I realize I’m probably asking *way* too much of artmaking, but I’d like my work to have something to do with appreciation and celebration of this freakishly astonishing phenomenon I experience each and every moment I’m alive—as I observe firsthand my very own complex system of atoms contemplating the cosmos that forged them billions of years ago!
“We are the universe, observing itself…”
I’ve been a full time artist since 1995, with studios in the beautiful Willamette Valley of Oregon. I’m fluent in several media…off the top o’ my head, the list would include many years of silk screen design & printing; graphic design (traditional & digital), logo design; drawing (countless life drawing sessions); printshop manager; letterpress and offset press operator; acrylic painting (including portrait commissions); many years as a professional wood sculptor; making highly detailed brass dies for the embossing trade; large sculptural lamps; along with my partner and fellow artist Jackie Hurlbert, in 1995 we founded/managed a national high-end handmade ceramic tile business and I sculpted over 300 bas relief designs for it (sold the tile biz in 2014); moldmaking, casting, patination and finishing of various media; large scale kiln-fired ceramic sculpture; hand hammered/riveted aluminum sculpture; and creating and selling one of a kind artworks through several regional fine art galleries…a broad background which has lent itself to cross pollination over a wide range of media.
In decades past, the script has been:
• dive headfirst into learning a new medium
• then use it to create marketable artwork
• then make multiples/variations to sell to make a living
…a process which has historically broken down to about 3% creative vs 97% repetition/production.
So on this current jag into digital artmaking, I’m looking forward to flipping those percentages! My inner artist is lovin’ it, too…because I’m finally making good on promises made to it for decades. I hope a few of you 8 billion people out there will stumble across this obscure little outpost and decide to follow along to see what else shows up here in coming weeks & months. I’ll be curiously watching right along with you—if there’s one thing I’ve learned about my inner artist, it’s that there’s no predicting what it will want to make next! (nor would I want to know…where would be the fun in that?!?)
Take care out there!
—Steve Eichenberger
