I thought I’d call this posting ‘Love and art,’ until Schedule C reared its lovely head this week.  Now that I’ve squandered the better part of valor on spreadsheets and gov-speak, I feel the flush of fait accompli.  Very swank.

Let me first assure you the collage you see here is neither a figment of your overtaxed mindset nor a sacrilege of the artist’s work.  At Water Color Visions resides a view of the pristine original by Walt Campbell, who also happens to love doing taxes.  

Now for my true confession: halfway through the Tax 08 marathon, I realized I was in some kind of familiar flow that felt like - no! - art.  Honest.  Since then I’ve been thinking about the strange bedfellows of taxes, art, and love. 

Taxes.  You filter the past year’s monetary exploits, weed out irrelevancies, distill it all down to its essence.  Create a document that communicates to its beholder, the IRS, exactly what you’ve lived and breathed, financially, per annum.

Art.  Choose from the abundant chaos of your inner world.  Which elements are required by the work you’re engaged in?  The beholder of your art won’t get the message unless you are painstaking with your tools and talent.  Your document - the canvas, the lyric, the sculpture - asks you to be truthful about you.  Otherwise, your art is evasion.

Love.  Let’s not talk about pseudo-love, the falling-in-and-out of bankruptcy where you don’t really know the object of your passion but you have a pretty good idea what you want from it.  Fantasy, not to mention itness, isn’t love.

Love.  Tell someone,

‘here’s who I am, what I think, how I feel, what I take in and what I give to my passions.  Look, I’m very careful laying this out for you, with palpable evidence to back it up, because I want to live in our country, contribute to everything we both value, be straight with you.‘ 

Love is transparent and, of course, reciprocal.

Love, art and taxes are paid in full with certain inalienable rites of spring.  And they are never done, as we plunge headlong into the abundance of chaos.

Graphic Susan Weber
Watercolor Walt Campbell, 'fleurs d'amour' used with permission