Carrying the Fire Forward
Journal Entry: November 13, 2025 – 7:22 AM
There is a quiet responsibility that lives beneath the daily work of artists. It appears in the studio as a vague pressure, something felt just in the bones when we pick up a brush or turn toward a blank page. It is not the pressure of audience or commerce. It is something older, something that has passed through the hands of countless makers before us.
The more I think about it, the more I feel that one of our central tasks today is not merely to create, but to stay deeply connected with our own living artistic community. Not only locally, but across continents and languages and wildly different cultural lineages. We need each other and depend on each other. Because if history teaches anything, it is that artists and creatives are often the ones who end up carrying a civilization’s soul into the future.
Governments rise and fall. Empires fade into dust. Technologies transform and overwrite one another. Yet again and again, it is the works of makers that survive these storms, sometimes by miracle and sometimes by the thinnest thread. A carved figure tucked in a burial site. A fragment of melody passed down through singers. A story written by lamplight. A shard of pottery. An embroidered cloth. A poem recited across generations.
These small gestures accumulate into the memory of a people.
To live as artists now is to inherit that responsibility. Our job, in the broadest sense, is to discover, preserve, practice, and embody the enormous diversity of cultural treasure that exists in the world. Not just as admirers, but as stewards. Not only seers and makers, but also scribes, archivists, storytellers, and bards. We are part of a long relay across time, carrying a flame from one generation to the next.
When we think this way, the work becomes larger than our studios or our individual lives. Much has already been lost or forgotten. Much has been distorted or diluted or taken out of context. The only real remedy is continual reinvention and continual devotion, a willingness to keep plowing forward even as we look backward with care.
We cultivate our craft in order to keep culture alive.
We reach toward each other in order to keep culture connected.
We create because creating is how memory survives.
If the future of humanity’s cultural heritage rests in anyone’s hands, it rests in ours. Not as a burden, but as a calling. Not as a duty, but as the privilege of being alive at this moment in history, with this much beauty still left to safeguard and this much work still left to do.
Beautifully said. No pressure, but a responsibility to send our voices out into the ether as a document of our time, place, existence.
Have a wonderful time in LA!
I've often said that those of us who collect whatevers.......we are the keepers of history. I've been so drawn to objects beyond my own culture and need to stop and think if I could/should use some objects in my assemblages. I've taken a few older pieces apart for just that thing as I realize that an object used is a valuable antique for example, I recently took off this antique Japanese fighting protection mask (Kendo Mask) I had used in a piece over 30 yrs ago. While the piece of art was a good piece according to my standards, I felt it wasn't conveyed that I was honoring this beautiful mask object the way it should've been, and somehow years later felt like appropriation which normally I'm not woke in that regard, but this time, I just wanted to enjoy the mask for what it is standing alone.