I think maybe painting can unlock you

"My mind is like a mosaic of rainbow-colored memories," says Angela Missoni, the Italian designer who is celebrating her 21st year as the creative director of the house her parents built in 1953." (From The New York Times Style Magazine, Sunday August 19, 2018, p. 116.)

I have begun sorting artists into two camps: those born before television and those born after: BT and AT. This kind of time-dependent divide might be as useful in determining artistic achievement and influence as the designations' BC and AD once were in separating the pagan from the spiritual.    

There's no industry that more blatantly blurs the distinction between art and commerce than high-fashion, though it's not as fun to look at as real art. What's interesting however is high-fashion's dependence on the magazine, a failing form of print media--one must turn 70 pages in the Times Style Magazine before reaching a table of contents, then another 20 or so pages to reach anything resembling editorial comment: one must thumb through ad after ad, often double-truck ad, and all in color. High-fashion of course is also dependent on another dying form of marketing communication--the Big Event, the runway shows, the debut of new seasonal lines, the models, the media courtside and being courted...

What's the point of it all? To celebrate clothes that won't be worn by real people, modeled by models whose names will be forgotten next season but whose tattoo's will remain (in a careful reading I counted 26 tattoos among the models featured in the print ads), a gesture, I suspect, of trying to curry a sense of normality regarding the featured fashion, as if to say 'these are real people' no matter that they're wearing unreal clothes.

What does fashion have to do with art? Next to nothing, but sometimes it's fun to look at it from a distance.

When I look at high-fashion in the Times Style Magazine I look at it from a distance. Soon, I want change my clothes, slip into a pair of old jeans torn to shreds on the knees, the black t-shirt I bought at an inn in Iceland, the $39 blue Uniqlo sweater, and get down on my hands and knees to start painting.

Painting, 2015, author's collection, on loan to private residence, Portland, Oregon.