In this age of infinite accessibility, where you can buy one of fifty-thousand identical sculptures at your local super-store, in this age of television and teflon, in this age of megabytes and microphones, it is critical that we remember imagination. Because imagination, like a three-toed tree sloth, is a creature that takes its time. Imagination gets lost in speed. Imagination becomes an orphan whose parents are devoured by the Cyclopean giants of deadlines, traffic, business obligations, and the necessities of survival.

Because painting is chaos transfixed, it has a lesson to teach. If one by one we can transfix our chaos, channel our bewilderment, and preserve our individual passions, only then do we become a part of the art of existence. By transfixing chaos, I mean paddling through the rapids with both hands and a diabolical grin. I mean dancing out of the frying pan into the flames and back again. I mean reciting poetry to police-men. I mean taking life only as seriously as death takes you. Because, my friends, life only happens once, but art happens for an eternity.

If you buy a painting, it may auction in a century for the price of a planet in a nearby solar system. If you utter some remarkable phrase, a journalist may document, and thus make it perennial. Whether you make it or buy it or bake it or breathe it, art persists. When you pause to stare into the eyes of a painting like Autumn Mask or The Etruscan, you take root in one moment of your life, and in so doing stop the madness that often overwhelms us. I once worked in an emergency room where they used a device called a de-fibrillator on heart attack patients. This device stopped the human heart when it had developed berserk patterns. By halting this heart-static, the pacemaker cells were given a chance to re-set themselves, to begin afresh. Art serves a similar function; it is the de-fibrillator of the soul. The most natural value of art may be its ability to ensorcell us to stillness. A stillness where we can regain our true rhythms, our pulse, our indefatigable drums.

I am honored that ARTEXPO SOUTH MIAMI has given me the title of artist of the Millennium and feel that with the title I should offer a prediction of the upcoming epoch. My prediction for the next millennium is that art and love will be the only frontiers where computers will not supersede humanity. Believe me, they will be doing everything. But in a thousand years, I am confident they will not be able to paint the type of paintings you see here tonight, they will not be able to surpass the inherent inventiveness and congenital creativity of any one of us. This said, I would like to thank ARTEXPO for giving me this resplendent occasion to showcase my work. If Van Gogh had been given such an opportunity, I am certain he would have refrained from cutting off his ear. I would like to especially thank ARTEXPO President Jorge Garcia, for his auspices and nobility. Using my powers as the Primordialist Prince I officially dub him The First Primordialist General, devoted to the cause of furthering fine art in South Miami.

I must also thank the mothers in the audience. This is not to discourage the fathers, who help us with silent strength, who give us fertilization and other braveries. But in the end it is the matriarchs who endow us with art. Their studio is the womb, and after nine long months of ultrasonic preliminary sketches, they paint us in a burst of inspired pain. For this, they are indeed, to be thanked.

I ask each of you who have heard my words tonight to adopt the orphan of imagination, be it your own neglected imagination, the imagination of an artist whose work touches you, or the imagination of humanity as a whole. It may seem a strange proposition to adopt your own or someone else’s imagination, but I ask you, in your own creative ways, to become an orphanage. An orphanage of imagination. In this way we are all connected. In this way we are all a family, embraced in paint, suffused with sculpture, and housed above the hallowed ground of art.

© WOLFF, 2000