What does art mean to me? I never really think about the "meaning" of art. Yet, obviously, that's what I do. I've always felt that the initial impetus had much to do with curiosity, which reaches back to my childhood. Children, by nature, are curious, though without the intellectual capacity to understand why. Ezra Pound once remarked in a BBC interview, that without curiosity, the artist is dead. That seems about right. Whether it's a poem I'm working on or a picture I've snapped, it all has to do with the curiosity I feel without thinking about it. I don't presume otherwise. The end-result should "astonish" me; a favorite word of Cocteau's. If I'm astonished by what I've done, then I know I've been somewhere in the making of it, but not during the making of it. Only after the fact. If I'm not astonished, then I've failed in the making of it.
