"The more elaborate art works become, the more they tend to distance us from the void that preceded their creation. We need art to keep us in touch with the passage from nothing to something, from emptiness to meaning. That transit figures, by analogy at least, in every constructive action we attempt."   ---Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle  (Dec. 09)

     In reading Baker's review of a show, what struck me about this statement was the notion that art (in its many forms) comes out of "nothing". In my state of blissful ignorance about first causes, I suppose one can be a "creator" without being a "creationist", and learn to love the void--whatever that may be--like the revelation of finding negative space in a drawing and realizing that what brings a figure, a shape, to life sometimes is the space around it, the stuff that's not there.