I have been thinking lately about what an artist owes his or her audience. The audience shows up; they volunteer their time and attention; they make themselves available to see, to be moved, to change. The artist is asking for a tiny fragment of the life of the audience.

This is a moral responsibility. How can it be discharged?

I suppose there are many ways. I have always thought I owed my audience the best and most profound ideas and images I was able to summon.  But as I made these offerings, I found that I was boring my audience. 

The root of the problem was apparent – the angel Damiel expresses it well in Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire:

“It's great to live by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity, only what's spiritual in people's minds. But sometimes I'm fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth. I'd like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say Now. Now and now and no longer forever and for eternity. ... At last to guess, instead of always knowing. To be able to say ah and oh and hey instead of yea and amen.”

Some artists grasp from the beginning that the substrate of their art is not oil paint and canvas, or bronze or marble, or what have you, but entertainment. For my part, it took me a lifetime. It took me thirty years to learn that no artist is too good to entertain his audience. Without entertainment, without moving the audience, no channel opens to communicate all those other essential ideas and images. 

I learned this principle, and later I embraced it, and later still I practiced the techniques of entertainment. For all my technical skills, I am still shaky at making a thing that meets its first obligation to its audience – to hold their attention.

Human beings pay attention to stories. Not just in writing and theater, but in pictures as well. Conflict is the root of stories, and conflict plays out as struggle. To struggle, one must exert - the protagonist and the antagonist exist in a state of exertion. Jacob wrestles all night with the stranger in the desert. 

To hold the attention of the audience one must oneself exert, and capture the sense of exertion, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual.

For this collection, I wanted to see how my fellow artists responded to the concept of exertion, to the call to raise the energy of their work. Each has brought their own interpretation to the question. 

Some understood it as I intuitively understood it – a state of muscular effort on the part of the central character, as in David Morris’s drawing of a model in an unstable pose, Jeffery Mathison’s sprinting sunlit figure, Sheryl Boivin’s drawing of a woman straining mid-workout, and Elena Degenhardt’s ecstatic vision of bubbles swirling around a vigorous swimmer. 

Others grasped exertion in the sense of conflict, and present figures in conflict with their environment – such as Emma Kalff’s woman versus menacing landscape, Evan Goldman’s peculiar man in the mountains, and Lisa Rickard’s Atlas-like allegory. 

Several artists took inspiration from performance; Ingrid Capozzoli Flinn and John Hyland reference dance, while Daggi Wallace coordinates color and pose to evoke either singing or a shriek. Patricia Schappler portrays a boxer practicing – one of the few artists to submit work rooted in sports.

There were a few sui generis pieces: Amy Gibson invokes anxiety with concealment and thorns and Lorena Lepori creates a similarly distressing image through a woman tattooing her own neck. Geoffrey Lawrence creates a disquieting modern interpretation of Saint Christopher carrying the Christ child. 

Finally, there was Sarah Gallagher’s highly rendered portrait of a woman with an ambivalent expression and a shadow cutting across her throat. Beneath the seeming serenity and repose of this image there lies a struggle, the nature of which we cannot determine, but only feel. The image not only opens itself to interpretation, but demands it; we cannot tell what is going on, but we know that something is. In seeking answers, we, the audience, begin to exert as well. Gallagher demonstrates the use of entertainment as substrate, as portal to all those other transcendent things we crave for our art to communicate.