WOX. Who are we and why do we use this Community...by ronthroop.

Greetings good people of Steem and especially the World of Xpilar community! My name is Ron Throop and I am writing to support @stef1 and her request that I tell about my ascendance to the Steem blockchain and World of Xpilar.

The following is my formulated artist statement that I send to galleries when soliciting my work:

I live a quiet life in and outside a cedar shake cottage by the shore of Lake Ontario in Oswego, New York (United States). Each day I awake predawn with a charged exuberance that begins to wane with the rising sun. By afternoon I accept failure as a routine chore of this modern day art “business,” keeping myself upright through supper and doing the dishes. At dusk I take dreamy walks with my wife Rose down to the lake, so lucky to have love even if career success is a crapshoot unto the big sleep. Oh well. I paint. I write. Then night and restful slumber to another day of sublime torture.
I am a naive, intuitive painter and work with an uncommon desire toward self-liberation, yet also communion. I am in the world and out of it depending on my mood for the day. I paint quickly, and seek success in the practice, for I am hyperactive by nature and want to find and hold onto natural rhythms. Very rarely do I draw with any instrument besides the paintbrush. I change style often because I am hungry for originality. Artistically, I strive to perfect my limitations.
I work in the traditional style, with the simplest ingredients. Easel, paintbrush, and paint (acrylic and oil). To me, color, expression, and freedom of the brushstrokes is tantamount to my success as an artist.

Always Six Seasons at the Table for the Magnanimous Narcissist 2018. Acrylic on window, 36 x 36"

Where I live and the love connections are true, but the other stuff is artifice. Truly, I wake up each day without a clue and too much anxiety for a mind that should have developed more in tune with nature. I regret that I am always reacting rather than just “being”. This has made me a reliable nonconformist and able freethinker, yet unfortunately, more tight and hermetic than my expressive side desires. Hence social media and an outpouring to all and sundry who aren’t always ready and willing to receive gushings from the innards of a close friend, let alone a stranger.
Facebook has been a torture and I leave it often, only to return again and again because, in a world gone wrong, friends and family have forsaken true relationships for daily like-like-like doses of Zuckerburg dopamine.

Rose and the Amateurs at a recent open mic. Rose, my wife, with beautiful voice, and friend Mike on lead guitar. I’m far right with the false confidence photography can sometimes achieve.

I came to Steem last February after I quit Facebook for the fiftieth time. I did a Google search on social media alternatives, and noticed Steemit actually gave something back to efforts of “giving into”. I had (and have) very little understanding of blockchain or cryptocurrency, but it all looked like a fun game, earning tokens for posting art and musings. I went through the motions of secret codes and keys and made my introduction. I think I tagged “steemitnewbie”, and within a day @stef1 at @art-venture wrote back and told me of #worldofxpilar, and how to tag so other folks could see my art posts. I have followed her counsel for the most part, although I regret that I do not post more often, nor peruse the community in depth. I am a working painter, writer, househusband, and grandfather. These passions must come first if I am to make it in this world.

Sledding with Natalie

Teaching Fiona Proper Etiquette

Every morning I check Steemit for notifications. If one of my posts gets resteemed, I feel a whole body blush overtake me. My entire adult life has yearned for kindred spirits. Success for an expressionist comes when people next door or half way around share his or her point-of-view (and vice-versa of course). It’s recognition of communion that is impossible to disconnect from, though it lies dormant in so many of us whose lives are under duress, fraught by competition and endless one-upmanship.

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theater, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent, shameful conspiracy (the more shameful because it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artist. They are suffering from the fact that art is not the primary, moving force in their lives. They are suffering from the act, repeated daily, of keeping up the pretense that they can go their own way, lead their lives, without art. They never dream—or they behave as if they never realize—that the reason why they feel sterile, frustrated and joyless is because art (and with it the artist) has been ruled out of their lives. For every artist who has been assassinated thus (unwittingly?) thousands of ordinary citizens, who might have known a normal joyous life, are condemned to lead the purgatorial existence of neurotics, psychotics, schizophrenics. No, the man who is about to blow his top does not have to fix his eye on the Iliad, the Divine Comedy or any other great model; he has only to give us, in his own language, the saga of his woes and tribulations, the saga of his non-existentialism. In this mirror of notness everyone will recognize himself for what he is as well as what he is not. He will no longer be able to hold his head up either before his children or before his neighbors; he will have to admit that he—not the other fellow—is that terrible person who is contributing, wittingly or unwittingly, to the speedy downfall and disintegration of his own people. He will know, when he resumes work in the morning, that everything he does, everything he says, everything he touches, pertains to the invisible poisonous web which holds us all in its mesh and which is slowly but surely crushing the life out of us. It does not matter what high office the reader may hold—he is as much a villain and a victim as the outlaw and the outcast.

—From Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller

World of Xpilar is a place for me to share art and its ideas with others. Art expression is in every one of us. We need avenues to take us there and find out for ourselves how absolutely necessary it is to express ourselves as human beings.

I hope you are awarded community of the month!

Ron

Poet in the Grass 2016. Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16"