Paul - thanks man. Didn't come across Carl Lazzari, but I wasn't there until '90. Heh, they were going to call it City University of Newcastle upon Tyne, until someone pointed out what the acronym would be.

Primorge - Artist is one of those subjective terms, and although i wouldnt claim any authority to prescribe it for others I should have qualified how the term is meaningful to me. I dont really want to get into a debate about universally accepted definitions. To me the term artist describes an individual who's drive is to explore the 'what is' and the 'what could be'; to observe, represent, re-interpret, imagine, question, resonate, inspire. For a moment i was going to suggest a search for truth, but transparency & honesty at least are fairly key attributes i guess. Artists live and breath this vocation every day or whenever they can, but they do live it.

For me this is as much about ideas as anything else. As RorrKonn suggests, its not specific to painting, music, writing or any such discipline. Some of the people i consider great artistic minds have no relationship to traditional 'Art' forms at all - one of my best friends is a social entrepreneur & media maker, and i consider him an artist because he fits most if not all of the criteria above. Ideas can be spoken in conversation (thats why its called the Art of conversation), and i truly believe this qualifies. Does all this mean that anyone can be an artist? Yes, of course....but not everyone is (even a few who think they are IMO). 

i guess i'm a little hard on myself because i do, from time to time, approach my activities in life in this way. But most of the time the work i do is as a traditional & digital commercial artisan - skilled, but servicing a commercial master and not my own exploration or ideas. I'm not anti-market or anything, but I don't necessarily believe in or trust a market based ideology. Its an important distinction in my world, and i do beat myself up for it. Money should not be the primary goal of the artist in my mind, even if we do all have to turn a buck one way or another.

Probably the most artistic thing I've done of late is a self-portrait at the age og 40 (couple of years ago now). I set out to take a good hard look at myself and present an honest account of where i was in life. The resulting painting was intended to be quite haunting. I chose to paint in that specific form & style  rather than do a multi-media piece or series of photos because i felt it was indicative of a growing sense of self-satisfaction i'd had in the commercial work i was doing for years - of which, when I stopped to question the intrinsic creative value, I felt was in truth lacking in integrity and somewhat vaccuous & meaningless. Its like many of those dark old Victorian portraits of proud middle-class business men, except I'm depicted in my cosy TV dressing gown in a pathetic moment of realisation that I've not done any of the things I set out to do.  Most honest bit of painting I've done since art school. 

'officially sanctioned' in visual art terms to me didn't really end until the advent of the web. You were always dependent on the Church, the aristocrisy, the salons, the gallery owner, magazine publishers etc. Always exceptions to this, but now anyone who has some kind of access to the internet can share observations & ideas, write a blog, publish a graphic novel or post a render in an online gallery. There are always material pre-requisites to this, but generally speaking there's a wide-open stage for getting your ideas out there and influencing a vastly greater potential worldwide audience. 

The brush-strokes thing is just aesthetics, not at all definitive of being a good or bad painter at all.

 

PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.

                                      www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com