"Artists are optimists!" you said. Naturally I agreed with you. Under withering Christmas lights your statement dimmed against the neon shadows of COVID signage. En route home I repeated "artists are optimists" as if repetition would turn to revelation like the mantra of Hail Mary's & Our Father's I unwittingly murmured in the turned-sod graveyards of my adolescence. Pessimism had always been my friend. Raw, cut, wet clay is a beautiful thing up close & on your knees; especially topped by green shoots of life stomped by freshly polished black shoes. My personal experience of being an artist & being with artists is crushing pessimism; selves embossed by the depths of a narcissism indelibly engraved by the past--pessimism being a symptom of the past, of experience, of gravely want & woe, body upon body upon body, Amen. Optimism is pessimism amen-ded. Popular culture's dependency on binaries tells us we are either this or that. Choose or die! Such binaries don't exist. Does that make me a pessimist or optimist? It's strange how we balance the scales of difference on either/or when one extreme begets another: left & right, night & day; friend & enemy; love & hate; fact & fiction. A corrective to such binary rivalry is needed. The seeds of pessimism come from the highest, redest, ripest apple that falls from the tallest, thinnest tree to plummet past the waxy green & polished blacks that hedge the clay rectangle of our deepest fate. There, beneath the beneath, the apple cracks on impact. Seeds disperse & fruitful despair blossoms. Beautifully dark & deep in colour & grip, pessimism is a baroque bouquet that entangles the feet of the fallen & risen. Falling & climbing, climbing & falling, the optimist falls from fantasy to meet the pessimist, halfway, climbing from reality.

Jeff Wall, The Flooded Grave, 1998-2000, transparency in lightbox, 90 x 111 in.