Eric Slough:
About the Artist
Email the Artist

 
click image for larger view
oil on canvas
24" x 48"

Why Art

Watching specials on animals, I have seen monkeys that make tools to help get food, weapons to protect themselves, divide a group and wage war and learn sign language. I have seen birds that can talk, count and know colors. Most pet owners would verify their pets grieve, love, hate, contemplate behavior and much more. To say the ability to invent art is what separates us from lower level evolving species is a truism. Without early man creating symbols from thought, there would not be recorded history. Early humans did not start with an alphabet or numbers, but drawings to represent things in their lives. As human thought evolved, these symbols became more complex. Looking back on the art and the intellectual levels of cultural development it is easy to see a correlation. Just as the thought precedes the action, art, as an invented illustration of thought, has and always will be the foundation for an evolving culture. Without the use of art as narratives to educate the masses, I doubt our culture would have evolved. In our recorded history, until the last couple hundred years, the common people, or what we now call the middle and working class, were not thought capable of learning to read. The people were taught how to think through art. As a benefit to us, the art that has survived is a record of past cultures. Human intellectual development is reflected in the technical evolution of art. As artists became more aware of the details in their reality, which now defined as developing emotional intelligence, they created new techniques to illustrate these new awarenesses. This art made it easy for new ideas to travel through multitudes of people like fire. This is still true today. As seen in history, if a ruling party can control the art of a society, it can in essence control the way the society thinks. To stifle art in a society is to limit their future. We live with this as a constant battle in America. Through art we can have a view into the future that cannot be ascertained through mathematics or described with language.

- Eric Slough 

Fade

I try to breathe
Memories overtaking me
I try to face them but
The thought is too much to conceive

I only know that I can change
Everything else just stays the same
So now I step out of the darkness
That my life became cause

I just needed someone to talk to
Always too busy doing something else
You were never there for me
To express how I felt
I just stuffed it down
Now I'm older & I feel like
I could let some of this anger fade
But it seems the surface I'm scratching
Is the bed that I have made

So where were you
When all this I was going through
You never took the time
To ask me just what you could do

I only know that I can change
Everything else just stays the same
So now I step out of the darkness
That my life became!

- Mindy Gene Lunsford

click image for larger view
oil on canvas
24" x 24"

- Eric Slough

Could the cause of all evil by judgment? Our mental sciences tell us that anger is at the base of all that we define as evil. One cannot be angry unless we have judged something to be wrong, and wrong or evil like life itself is forever being redefined. As more of our evils are being redefined as mental and physical illnesses we have less and less evil. At the top of our evil, at this time, are terrorists, both abroad and here with our fundamentalist bombings and our hate crimes. It would be ironic if our judicial were to evolve to define evil synonymous with self-righteousness. Judge not lest you be judged would take on another meaning. If evil had not been defined would it exist.

- Eric Slough