Down from "ninety-nine" (part 3 of 5)

 For me, it’s exciting to guess what everyone might think about when they look at my artwork; doubly so to know what everyone might be expecting.  I do know that whatever you are expecting to see from me isn’t what you’ll get.  There’s a lot of misconceptions that everyone already has and they are all because of me; it was designed that way to begin with…it’s how people get excited about things.  But the reality of it all is that when you see the artwork, there will be confusion…not quite instantly but confusion none the less.  You will all wonder and think about what you’re looking at and why you’re looking at it.  You might even find a way to ask me to answer some of those questions for you.  You will probably expect that there is a perfectly rational reason that I have done what I did and there most certainly is.  You might even understand that everything here is very harmless because you understand that sometimes an artist has to reach a little to find inspiration (especially an artist that enjoys creating confusion almost as much as he enjoys creating the artwork itself).

On so many occasions I have hidden things in my artwork that maybe someone dozens of years from now will find and realize that I was either a genius or a very obsessed, over zealous fool with more delusions than the average Betty Ford resident…whichever the case, I take it as a compliment.  However, this series, of which there are enormous opportunities to hide well placed messages in do not have any.  Everything is face value and straight forward and I believe that might cause many problems.  Let me try and explain; see, when I hide cryptic messages within complicated symbolism, people have a choice…they can look very hard to see exactly what I meant when I did it or you could very easily just look at it and enjoy it for what it is without having to understand any of it.  By taking beauty for beauty’s sake, you don’t ever have to have the burden of knowing something that you might not have wanted to know.  This time, I just didn’t give you the choice and that I believe is what will cause the most problems.  It’s human nature to want to know – if there is something that’s worth knowing anyway.  It’s very much like when someone reads one of those headlines on a tabloid at the supermarket; you don’t need to be specifically interested in who it is to want to know what they are talking about; just the hint at something more is all anyone needs.

I could take the high road and tell you before hand that none of it means anything but I’d be lying.  It’s silly to think that anything I do could mean ABSOLUTELY nothing when I created this artwork but I will say that it would be very irresponsible if I didn’t explain that sometimes it’s also human nature to want there to be a much better story behind it than there probably is.  It’s funny, sometimes I get emails asking me about what I meant by something or someone asks me what I was thinking or even who something was for and when I tell them, they are always disappointed.  I will admit, just this once, that I probably over play it down because I don’t enjoy starting problems and trust me, in the past I have started some useless battles just because I put some lines on a piece of paper for someone else.  I hope you can understand a little better about why I tone it down about who I do certain artwork for…but I think of it like a secret that I made sure I wouldn’t talk about.  I don’t want war…you can look at my artwork and know I stay away from conflict.  I just know that this series has the potential to cause a little hurricane of issues but you should really just take it for what it’s worth and not think to hard about it; just love it or hate it for what it is – trust me, life will be much more enjoyable if you do.

-jason.

Here you go-another promo- tomorrow, part 4 of 5-