Committing to art

Two years ago -- from late December 2009 to March 2010 -- I spent a few exhausting but rewarding months in the Guggenheim from eight to sixteen hours a week working as an interpreter for Tino Sehgal's artwork "This Progress."  I say "working," but making the piece come into being felt more like an intense form of play.  There are plenty of descriptions of Tino's work (the Times review of "This Progress," for instance) so I won't bother recounting it here.  What I'm interested in this New Year's Day is recapturing why, for me, making art is so laden with meaning, insight, and pleasure.
Each December I carve and block-print holiday cards.  I've done this for years.  This summer for the first time I began to paint with a brush, usually cards I use to thank dinner hosts and the like.  Most of my designs are simple arrays of stripes and polygons, half-conscious responses to work by Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, or Donald Judd.  But not long after starting to experiment with painting on sketchbook pages, most often rough, blurry abstractions drawn from memories of hiking in the White Mountains or walking in the Botanical Garden, I had the epiphany that I suspect happens to most painters when they're about twelve years old: I realized the complexity of the flow and drip of the paint on at the tip and up and down the edges of the paintbrush, how little I understood about controlling it, and how stimulating it was to feel that for an instant I had controlled it, that I'd managed to get a line or an arrangement of lines and color right.  The deep sense of rightness, which I experience both as a capacity of reflective judgment and as an instinctual reaction, is much stronger when working with the paintbrush than when carving and stamping printing-blocks, especially when multiple colors are in play along the brush-hairs--or brush-tines, as the case may be, since I am so unskilled that my paint clumps, making my paintbrush look rather like a paint-fork.
In his review (abstract) of the enormous De Kooning show up through next week at MOMA, Peter Schjeldahl noted that when you look at a De Kooning painting you feel "anchored." That word captures something at the heart of my sense of rightness (or wrongness) when I paint a line.  Something about the relation of line to line (especially in my Stella-like stripes) reinforces my sense of myself in relation to the object.  But this does not, importantly, lead to egocentric self-reflection: I am not feeling more myself.  I am feeling myself in relation to something else whose motivations I need only pause and reflect upon (if I'm willing and able to devote some time to it) in order to grasp.  Which makes me leap to the question -- what values and expectations go into creating that sense of anchored questioning?
Jeremy Tanner, an art historian I met this summer at a conference on aesthetics in London, commented in his TLS review of Richard Neer's study The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture on the "informing polarities" that Neer sees in Greek image-making: "surface/depth, presence/absence, body/soul."  This year I want to dig into the informing polarities of image-making in both politics and art, and I think I will gain insight into them by making more art.