Each artist develops their own central concerns with their work. They are not handed over to them by anyone else (unless you are carrying on a particular tradition, which is highly unlikely in the field of contemporary art).
Your central concerns are a by-product of the creative process that is a given result of that process. Thankfully each artist has a unique set of concerns that they identify and relate to that no one can claim as theirs. This is another reason artists have an automatic copyright on the works they create. Your central concerns are not ever stagnant or rigid, they will change and develop as your career and work does.
The central concerns in my own work have constantly shifted and changed about throughout my career. Changes in my life have directly affected my artwork. As much as possible I have stayed flexible with these changes and have grown with them only to see my core concerns also change accordingly.
For the first seventeen years of my creative career for example I was a painter with a particular set of central concerns, which then changed dramatically after I began to work with found objects around nineteen ninety-six. I still retained some basic tenets about my work with color, composition and form, but many other core values and concerns took on a completely new meaning.
I became fully immersed in working with these found plastics that I was collecting from the Australian beaches.
I find it incredulous to think how many times I have bent over to pick up the many thousands of pieces of plastic debris that made up that aspect of my art, each piece jostled around for an unknown duration by sand, sun and ocean, their form altered, faded and rounded by the elements.
The unabated dumping of thousands of tons of plastics has been expressed in my assemblages, installations, totems, digital prints, paintings and public artworks. I returned to the beach daily to find more pieces for my artist’s palette.
