Part two in a series.

I’m walking in the wide-open doors of a big pumpkin-colored steel building just off East 7th Street in Austin, carrying a piece of art. I was fortunate enough to be one of 19 artists whose work was selected by Andrea Mellard, Curatorial Associate at the Austin Museum of Art, to appear in Cantanker Art Magazine’s third annual summer catalog & exhibition here at the Pump Project Art Complex.

Ms. Mellard decided our work fit the show’s theme, Anxiety, and the state of mind Cantanker suggests “marks the current zeitgeist as we collectively hold our breath.” In their Call for Entries, the magazine’s editors had asked, “What does it look like to confront this anxiety or escape from it all together?”

My contribution, Going to Heaven, is an old arch-topped, whitewashed window frame, about 3-1/2 feet high by 2-1/2 feet wide, the sort that might have been salvaged from an old church, although this has nothing to do with the title. I covered its large glass pane with rotogravure photos from the first half of the twentieth century, creating a collage that depicts dozens of people falling from the sky and about to plunge into a rocky cove where smiling children splash and play.

Looking closely at the precipitant humans in Going to Heaven, you can probably spot some Anxiety going on. Even three-time Olympic Figure-Skating Champion, Sonja Henie, looks a little worried as she cranes her neck backward to see choppy waters rushing up at her.

The problem is, not only does the title, Going to Heaven, have nothing to do with its being on an old church window, but also, 1) I usually hate themed shows, 2) the piece was well underway before I even got the announcement, and 3) I don’t feel at all anxious about going to heaven.

Of course, as my wife, Alison, and I chill under Pump Project’s Big Ass Fan (www.bigassfans.com/) and chat with Exhibition Coordinator, Debra Broz, I don’t admit to any of this. But it’s one of those dilemmas we artists deal with on a regular basis.

Most of the time I’m happy to be making the art I make. This is probably because I didn’t go to art school, where I might have learned what I should be making. Instead I go about my work, blissfully ignorant, making found-object sculpture and collages that are not au courant, but a little too reminiscent of works by the Surrealists from almost a century ago.

They’re certainly not ironic enough, political enough or topical enough. I guess I’m still a little too hooked on beauty, if only that beauty I see in my raw materials. But I’m also too wrapped up in the delicate process going on inside my head to make any kind of cogent statement.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I understand the validity of saying something in one’s work, since, also dating back to a century or so ago, that’s been a perfectly legitimate motivation for art making. Alison is herself an emerging artist, one whose work responds to her time living and working in the South Pacific among former residents of the Bikini Islands, displaced by our weapons testing after World War II.

But between her very meaningful work and that of other contemporary artists, I sometimes feel a little out of it. That’s when I have to remind myself that we as artists each draw on our own motivation for creating, our own calling, so to speak. For the time being, it appears I’m called not to make statements with my art (maybe because I already make statements aplenty when I write). Rather, I am compelled by the work itself. I look at an object and imagine how it might be appropriated for the creation of another object completely. It happens without a concept, message or any attempt whatsoever to fit a theme.

I wonder if any of this will get back to Andrea Mellard and the folks at Cantanker. Or worse still, the legal heirs of three-time Olympic Figure-Skating Champion, Sonja Henie. Suddenly I’m feeling a little anxious.