LOOPING to CIRCLES to LOOPING

["Rick Walker (Loop.pooL)" <GLOBAL@cruzio.com>]

Stephen wrote:
"Speaking of circles, remember how the artist Giotto got his commission to
do
work for the Vatican... by drawing, by hand, an allegedly perfect circle.
This mnemonic is in more places than we're willing to admit I suspect. :)"

As long as we've gone from Loops to Circles,  I love this anecdote (and
please forgive that this is a gross paraphrase).       A journalist
interviewing Pablo Picasso said, "You are the acknowledged greatest artist
of the twentieth century.  Whatever you paint or draw, people instantly 
know
that it is a 'Picasso'.
Consequently,  how do you draw a 'Picasso' circle?     To which Picasso
replied "I sit down and try to draw a
Perfect Circle.   Since I am an imperfect human being, what comes out is a
'Picasso' circle"

Along similar lines,  Brian Eno was asked whether he worried about
maintaining creativity constantly, to which he purportedly replied,  If
every human being on earth who could physically comply was given a piece of
white paper and a red crayon and told to draw a picture of a house and a
tree, every single drawing that was produced would be absolutely unique.
There would be no two drawings that are alike.   Yet, houses and trees are
not made of white paper and red wax, so each drawing would be a creative
interpretation of the what a house and a tree look like.   Every human 
being
is creative, whether they want to be or not. Consequently, he said he 
didn't
worry about being creative.

My point following these anecdotes is that the only thing we must do as
artist is to 'put it out there'.
We live in a very dysfunctional and perfectionistic culture that says you
should only put energy
into any endeavor if you have a chance to be the best (to win the olympics,
to sell a million records, to be the
fastest guitar player).   There is very little support for people to just
make music or write songs because it is good for the soul to do so.
Consequently,   the piano that used to be in many homes in America has
virtually dissappeared, funding for musical and art education has been
drastically cut back.  We have, almost entirely
stopped singing or whistling as a culture in public.    This is madness!!!!

Consequently, I consider it a political and spiritual act of defiance to
aggressively put our art 'out there'
so that at least younger people in our culture have some kind of 'healthy
artistic' template to work off of
as they grow up.

I just like to do it with looping (he says bringing it back to topic at the
last possible moment ;-)

Yours, in cultural fomentation,    Rick Walker (loop.pool)

PS  I've told these anecdotes so many times to students and young artists
that I know who were worried about
people accepting their works that I have completely lost the source 
material
that they came from. Consequently,
I know that I have probably altered each anecdote unconciously.  Does
anybody know where these quotes reside in books?  I'd love to reacquaint
myself with the 'originals'