Dennis Hollingsworth

About This Blog

(Look. This is my serious face.)

This summer will mark an anniversary of five years of blogging and there must be some significance to the fact that it is only now that I'm finally coming around to formulating an explicit statement of purpose for this weblog.

One might think that such a statement would follow once people began querying my identity such as when Trevor of K'aleb?l Blog asked who I was. I responded by creating a timeline biography. I didn't want to plug in the regular biography/resume thing. My galleries have that for you if you want to see one.

People periodically kept asking me about the purpose of the blog as time went on. I wanted to keep the definition of it open as long as possible... but then conventions crystalized quickly and there are types emerging in the weblogging world. People seem to be wondering what kind of blog this was and when they didn't wonder, they seem to assume that this blog is like all the others.

This is my declaration of independence.

- I want to treat this weblog like a sketchbook. It is not a diary.

- This blog is not a career instrument, all appearances notwithstanding. Career stuff for artists should be learned and quickly forgotten.

- This blog is not a news aggregator. It's more like: "Hey, check this out..." It is a rough record of my curiosity.

- This blog is a way for my galleries, my friends and guests to visit my studio virtually. It is a way to keep in touch since I am so fortunately flung out around the world.

-This blog is a way to see the paintings in another light.

With cameras and stuff.

- This blog is a kind of bibliography for the paintings in the studio.

I have come to rely on the weblog for titles and reflections on or of content. My titles are hyperlinked. I like that very much. Such a practice unites the paintings, the blog and the life I reflect into the blog in a very interesting way... for me that is (#8). By doing so, I think I have both a less specific and a more specific relation to content and the ultimate signification of meaning in the paintings.

Sweet. (Head, nodding.)

- A blog is its' own art form. A literal -albeit virtual- expanded field.

It's the tip of the avalanche of the information age, its' conventions are evolving and to apply expectations as to what is a norm or standard of disposition of weblogging in general at this early date is either asinine or merely misguided. Text, photos, video, come what may and come it will, to be sure.

This blog is free. Gratis. Wild West. It is uncharted and even more boundless than our unregulated art world itself. It is outside that big, bad boogie-man called the marketplace. Hands clean of filthy lucre. It is wonderful that so far no one knows what to make of it and it is simultaneously a bit mystifying to me why artists at large haven't yet taken to it with gusto.

Trouble in paradise?

Pues, nada.