Creative Destruction

Saw this piece of art ("Pater Noster" by Sean Landers) at the Denver Art Museum a few weeks back (for more pictures of the painting, check out a photo album here). The basic premise is that the artist started writing brief "diary entries" in a way that formed a series of patterns on an immense piece of canvas. He started the work when he found out that his father had terminal cancer, and it ends shortly before his wife is to have their first child.

The result is a fairly stunning amalgamation of sardonic commentary ("I have to confess that I'm fucking great. Sorry if that rubbs [sic] the wrong way."), navel-gazing ("Tennis on Tuesday, the start of my new health routine."), and a heart-breaking kind of matter-of-factness ("I hung this canvas a year and a half ago. Since then, I got rich, my dad died, and Michelle is pregnant.").

I'm not sure why this particular artwork struck me as so fascinating. Much of what is written is the kind of banal reiteration of daily routine that is everywhere regurgitated at the end of the day. Then again, maybe it's the artist's lack of pretense that is so compelling, focusing as he does on the root - not the symptoms - of pain.