Artist's Resume
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MAKER'S RESUME |
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Glenn Scott Michaels |
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| A Maker's Statement: |
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I make artifacts. Artifact, derived from the Greek words for skill and making or forming, neatly conveys the intention to join meaning and form synergistically, either for personal pleasure or for the edification of a larger community. The very format of the word, artifact, is tremendously suggestive: art is fastened to fact by an i. The i is, metaphorically, the hinge that enables articulation. It represents the creative consciousness. My i is no longer young. This little it has noted: · Most don’t notice. Some look. Fewer observe. Fewer still see. Hardly any think it really matters. It matters. · Much is not clear. Much that is clear now will prove to be an illusion, later. Conversely, the illusory is generally clearer and more easily known than that which passes for certainty. My artifacts are a record of what my i has observed. I received them as gifts and offer them in the same spirit. |
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ARTIST'S BIO: SELF-PORTRAIT IN MYTH |
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| An angel fell, perhaps Lucifer, the fire carrier. Or maybe Icarus, who brushed the sun. A dog barked and whirling in mid-air, splashed a window into diamonds, then disappeared. The Poet keened. The Artist wept. Another child crept from dust to paradox. The doors of mystery spread uncompromising arms. The envelope sealed itself. There is no hunger like birth and all the relatives came to the feast. The table buckled beneath the silver and the salads. While memory limped off in search of empty plates long since locked away, the honored guests helped themselves to fruit and cake, eating with their fingers. Innocence was still born, that is, born anyway, despite the immolation of the hallowed hosts in swamps so deep with sorrow that only bootless hunger had walked away alive. Hunger had married a mirror. Innocence, a confluence of famine and privation, grew thin and polished, like army boots, whose black skin, baptized by sputum, bleeds reflected light. Shattered by visions it could not reflect upon in safety, the mirror leapt from the roof. Twice, the story goes. But Humpty-dumpty, who brooks no competition, insisted that the mirror reassemble itself. This it did, though scars accuse it still. Hunger is a super glue. Thus Innocence grew up an orphan, though its parents had only almost died. Wandering from book to book, Innocence banished the reality of paradox for the clarity of make-believe. Belittled and belabored, benighted and bedeviled, our Orphan - blind with visions - somnambulated through the house of flames to the cottages of the misbegotten, on the urban edge of the city of contempt. As flames leapt from that city and the palisades were drawn tight, the misbegotten befriended our Orphan. Black skins and black souls, all have light in common. There is no safety in numbness. Light and hunger. Hunger and light. The dance of the Orphan on the shifting soils of a mobius world brought it to the land of crosses and , eventually, the land of kraut. Hungry, starving, famished beyond speech, the Wanderer fed on the sanguine fruit of a maculate face. Screaming like a cannibal harvesting itself, it plunged relentless knives deep into the moist meat of inherited flesh for the pleasure of expiation. How the light burned this razor shriven roast. Maddened by light, hungry, hungry, the Wanderer fled to mirrors for forgiveness, which mirrors cannot give but only share. High upon a precipice, where lepers go to cast dice with Neptune, our whittled Wanderer sought the succor of a smarmy salesman. Pierced and helpless with secondhand tears, the Wanderer discovered the Holy Grail, the chalice chased with gold and stars, bright as a mirror, clear as light: the song that seekers sing while smiling at sobriety. The quest. The quest. Between light and hunger, hunger and light. Through doors too narrow for monsters and gates too great for the weak, dealing death to miasma myths in the labyrinthine courts of misanthropism and fear -- hunger’s ancient hold. Full of incantations, quivering with song, the Magician hung himself to dry beneath a gibbous moon. |
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I would like to acknowledge special individuals whose contributions have my efforts possible. |
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