SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

Here’s my father in his prime time enjoying a Guinness.  I went for a week to play golf with my father, my brother Matt, and my cousin Steve.  This was my first break from the art career in 2006.  My annual ski trip with best friends was stymied as my best boy Bill popped his Achilles during the Turkey Bowl of his girlfriend Shiela’s family Thursday, so all bets were off on that front.  My father went to Scotland with his dad when Gunny was 60, so this was a trip my Dad has been talking about for years as he is now 60.  We flew into Shannon, stayed in Doolen and Ballybunion.  We played Doonbeg, Lahinch, Cashen, Tralee, Dook, and Bally bunion.  It was all golf all the time.  We saw the Cliffs of Moher, took a seeweed bath, and experienced some remarkable Irish folk music.  The people of Ireland are downright friendly, polite and their prism is an enchanting take on good living in an interesting way for this type A New Englander.  Pub culture is paramount and seems to establish in the Irish a family way of engaging with community that the United States in its disparate nature does not offer as a national whole, as Americans enjoy their rugged individualism and pocket themselves off in their respective cultures while generally respecting and meshing with other subcultures to varying degrees.  There is a good natured element to the Irish that explains their fame stateside and accounts for my best friendships with a number of Irish descended Americans.  I read somewhere that in our time the Irish populus is 4 million and Irish Americans in some blood form constitute 30 million or 10% of the American populus.  Ireland has more beautiful shades of green than any place I’ve ever been before.  The cloud cover is mesmerizing, although thankfully we weren’t soaked with the exception of one rainy round.  In a family of athletes I am the one artist, so when I go to the family we do sports.  I find many parallels between art and sports that a lot of artists and athletes don’t seem to get or care much about.  A nice golf shot is like a solid period on the easel.  Both disciplines chase perfection in space, although in art one starts with a blank slate and in sport one has a course or a team to measure oneself against that defines itself in a number at the end of a given time frame.  Both disciplines require intensities of health, vision, and focus.  My best art is made in my best state of physical and mental focus. I have to step up to the plate with my best game face and bring to my canvas a statement of clarity and strength.  Good paintings can go bad quickly as with any sporting affair, although paintings and sculpture can remain open for years whereas sport, as with other art forms like music or theater, are confined to the time space of a given performance.  A resonant sporting performance occurs in an instant, whereas many resonant creative products by painters, sculptors, writers, composers, directors take years to wring through the mills of a particularly powerful and stubborn vision.