the beginning of real answers

07. MAY. 2011 We drive to Kanosh. It takes us two hours and I spend the two after that strung to the sinews as I listen to the painter, something working at my soul like a caterpillar in cocoon . . . On the way home I feel, among other things, the inability to speak; I float instead. I am a butterfly. Transformed.

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Brian Kershisnik, besides being hands down the very top of my top five in art, was the one who first introduced me to Belgian Chocolate Milk from Marks+Spencer. I owe him a lot. This month he's interviewed in MormonArtist.

WHAT IS YOUR PHILOSOPHY ON MAKING ART?

I believe in a cosmos in which art, though vital, is not the most important thing. An external moral compass is critical for the art to participate in the great human drama in a significantly constructive way. That external moral compass is not always obviously quantifiable, or even comforting. It is the sum of what truly is. We humans (at least this one) are horribly imprecise and things that move us any closer to the center of the nature of things are good. If something is truly, authentically true, it is bigger than I am and independent of me. I wade in the shallows finding amazing shells which evidence something much bigger than this present experience. Many of the shells are fragments and shards, but some are complete and fantastic—but only the beginning of real answers. Art would do us all a great deal more good if, rather than criticizing, whining, and bickering, or even attempting to provide the answers, it helped us refine our questions.

  

HOW HAS BEING LDS INFLUENCED YOUR WORK?

Discipleship is a conversation, not an event. It is ongoing and influences everything. I actually choose to let discipleship influence the work as it will, and I don’t set expectations of how they are to work together. I have loved, and been loved by, too many great examples of discipleship to name them. I feel that all of my work is religious—very religious—not because I set out to make religious work, but because I set out to be a religious man.

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