CHICAGO IS ART

Brief Discourse On A Black Square

Tattoos are keys... and curse. For every new key, you may have to find a new lock...

After the ink was set in Hemet, California in 2004, it was not long before the name Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) came up.
A Russian "Suprematist" who believed in extreme reduction: "The object in itself is meaningless… the idea of the conscious mind are worthless… I want the supremacy of pure feeling." 

Images that spoke to him offered no reference at all to a particular reality, and yet were everywhere in reality. He wanted non-objective objectivity/representation. Attached to nothing, and larger than art.
 

This man's philosophy and other's like it were not the direct inspiration for this work- a 2in. x 2in. solid black square- yet the very unique obstacle that inhibits an explanation of this tattoo from being "brief" perhaps, is the same that offers it the appeal and intrigue of something timeless.

By nature physically small, occupying little space and offering only basic details. The only important detail, is that it has the ability to have as many or as few details as it likes. Hence the fluidity of something solid, forced to move thru time.
2x2 inch solid black square turned rectangle with the stretching of skin caused by the lowering of my right arm. Offering a mercurial portrait that accompanies fascination and illicits curiosity. Strangers ask why and receive at best a loose understanding of the inherent ideas that drive this tattoo's renewed impermanence and fresh imperfections.

Located on my writing arm, the tattoo is meant to reflect in part the great openness revealed to me as a writer. (Vacancy or gap- paradoxically represented by the blank white page.) A welcome return and a belonging to a world which exists only in my vision, and perhaps then only to satisfy a need to create and by creating, destroy.
 

The breakdown of this theory offers an illustration of the duality of non-existence. "Something is nothing, nothing is something."

As the philosophies of ideas, knowledge, and science weave remarkable patterns within and beyond themselves, the simple becomes the complex becomes the simple again, and thus the impossible possible.

Humans experience, on this vast and remote island Earth, pressures and burdens that dominate but do not necessarily inhibit their daily lives. In everything from the near 15 lbs of atmospheric pressure exerted on them at sea level for every square inch of their bodies, to the invisible, often heavier palpable emotional weight associated with our love for and duties to one another.

Each force finds a way to balance the others.
 

Among these seemingly esoteric ideas, a universal and uniting constant remains. Deeply rooted in a cosmologist viewpoint, the belief that our origins began from the largeness (relative to us) of stars and nebulas and galaxies, and the combining of the elements made inside them to create the innovative soliloquy of the human race and of all things we ourselves encounter and make...

It is that we are a stardust microcosm, and being such, we are bound to return to the fold, even amidst its continued great expansion. The infinite is to be discovered in the infinitesimal.

Tattoos done with intent have no choice but to sink close to the soul, seeking both a way of embracing without capture the life-affirming zen-like tenants of unattachment and impermanence; and of faith and healing- the giving of oneself to the knowledge that all will be returned to its rightful place in the "end", when, what and wherever that may be. Toward knowledge gone unobtained, yet exposed and available to the opened mind, go notions soon made manifest.

No good ink goes unlived.