Paintings by Ira Upin

These ideas are notes I write to myself from time to time. They represent my overall view of life and what I do:

- It’s about insecurity and confidence at the same time. The confidence comes in the isolation of the studio, knowing how to make an image the way I imagine it I want it to be. The insecurity comes with trying to put what I do in the context of it’s relevance outside of my sanctum. Does it mean anything in the world at large or the art world realm where we try to make our professional way as artists? Does it connect? Why keep doing it if it doesn’t?
- Singular and unique story telling, not illustrations of the famous or the currently topical newsie subject matter. That’s what makes for a powerful, timeless, and important narrative. There is a narrative tightrope to be walked. With less common storylines that connect collective understanding, it is more difficult now to find easily recognizable imagery that carries metaphorical power that most people would understand with out becoming hokey or glib.
- It’s about randomness and our inability to control that randomness. Things happen, anything can happen and we want somehow to control it. But in the end we really can’t. The tightness of the way I work seems a futile attempt to exert that control.
- Art needs to have meaning, to be done as if it’s existence can change the world. A lot of art gets too caught up in the weeds of “art for arts sake”, art about art, and art lingo/jargon. I don’t know much about that other than the endeavor of making art at it’s core should be pure. When it’s done with that motive it takes the artist as he/she is making it and subsequently the viewer, to somewhere new and exhilarating.
- Fashion is ephemeral, so I never concern myself with what is fashionable, which in the end puts me in and out of fashion depending in what decade my work is being considered. I’ve been doing some version of the same thing for 50 years – narrative as the frame combined with the visual as the draw, the hook.
- At the elemental level of life itself, if you stop and think, everything is essentially something we do to keep ourselves busy between birth and death. The in between is the variable from one person to the next. Are you decent, are you compassionate, do you seek truth and a clear understanding of reality? Those are the questions I ponder to justify my life and what I do with my time.
- What makes us what we are?
- I relate to this quote by Fellini “I put myself at the service of my fantasies.”
- Art should have quality of craft, clarity of purpose, and meaning.