Mary Fielding Summerhays

There is no poetry where there is only facility.  The knowable optical world is not art when it is the culled unmediated transfer of visual reality.  Art is not biopsy; it is alchemy.  It is a rip in the seam of the other world, where a purer reality leaks out, intentionally or not.  An artist is someone who can give that leak shape.

                                                        -   Brian Kershisnik

I love this quote-   I have always found "visual reality" that is so abundant in Mormon art so obnoxious.   It made an easy target for disdain;  But as I've grown up a little and begun to look at art outside mormonism,  I discovered this larger dilema-  My watercolors are pure play- no realism.  Where my oils are neither play nor realism.  They are that alchemy that Brian Kershisnic is talking about,  not even a visual reality at all.  I almost feel guilty painting something so removed from what art is supposed to be.