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The first time I saw the work of Hans Ladislaus I was judging an exhibition for a local art center. From a large collection of journeyman efforts, sprung this evocative image of eyes and a fragment of face, expanded into three panels. I couldn't pull myself away. Later, as I suffered over the forced efforts of the usual suspects, I found myself returning to this extraordinary image again and again.

Subsequently, I spoke with Hans about writing an article on his work, but he told me 'I paint to put my kids through college'. He suggested I find someone with more authentic motivation to write about. I have heard artists rationalize financial failure by suggesting that successful careers are a 'sell out', but I've never heard anyone reverse that sentiment: Here was a successful artist suggesting that the fact that he was selling well, indicated that his work was somehow less authentic!

For a moment I questioned my own motivation in choosing to write about Hans. I recalled when I'd first watched Spielberg's ET and those kids on bicycles took flight. I'd hated the tears that welled up in my eyes. Despite being moved, I felt manipulated by formulaic tricks. When I first saw a painting of Hans', I'd experienced great emotion, too. Was I just fooled? He's painting for money! Was I simply being manipulated by another puppet master?

Commenting on validity of an artist's work, critics have always distinguished between the expression of art and its communication. Those who simply sit in the studio 'expressing' are thought to be narcissistic and self-indulgent. Those who only define their work by the market are considered to be pandering and thus lacking in some intrinsic authenticity that comes with 'listening to the muse.' So there appear to be two separate aspects to the experience of art making. One is personal expression, and the other a social experience of communication.

In the privacy of the studio, artists access an interior reality that separates 'what is,' from 'what might be'. It's a personal process which refines individuality, externalizing the dream which is one person's interpretation of the many ways we might perceive our world. Choice defines our potentials: We choose, not from all possibilities, but from human possibilities – the ones that allow us to do what we must to thrive.

Whether our environment is aquatic, mountainous, desert or frozen we humans have adapted to survive all corners of the globe, through choices. We've developed as many ways of eating as there are edible foods. We've created as wide a variety of hunting implements as there is prey. We've developed moral rules for cooperating, but many different permutations of those rules. We change even apparently fundamental principles when a particular world view begins to fail. We even change the gods we create to deliver those principles, all in response to the needs of people in time and place.

However, the most challenging adaptation we have had to make, is to each other. We compete for mating rights, for resources, for territory, but we also cooperate for those same needs. The entity we define as our human 'self' expands and contracts to include or exclude others. We name ourselves a family, a village, a state, a country, a race, a gender a species, or simply a point of view. We cooperate with all those who comprise 'us' and compete with all who are 'them'.

Strategies, morals, and rules are communicated in action, in language, and in art to those with whom we cooperate. We communicate visions of our choices. We dream the hunt on cave walls. We portray our gods on chapel ceilings. We orchestrate the themes of our existence in song, hymn, raga or symphony. These models of what 'might be,' spread individual experience in emotional contagion throughout a community. An embraced song, an evocative image, an iconic object, each embody the proposition of a way of seeing that might become a new social consensus.

Art leaps out into our social world, transforming the expression of an individual, into a communication – a psycho-social chain letter, tests, stimulates, challenges and offers novel options and ways of seeing, to other individuals in society. The process of art making expresses the duality of our human nature: We are individual and we are social. The self we define grows and shrinks during a lifetime to encompass many, to include, to exclude, to embrace, or to slay.

Within us, there is a part of the self upon which we project art – an image of ourselves as others. The bridge between artist and community is a bridge between self and other. Like speech, art exists to communicate. But the contents of those communications are the personal constructs of individual human minds, at once selfish and selfless – listening to inner voices and outer ones – building and destroying those visions and alliances by which we might transcend ourselves.

While pandering to the expectations of a crowd creates the disingenuous clichés that torture the sensibilities of those seeking innovation, still, the inner processes of art making are social by nature. The works of Hans Ladislaus, like the works of all authentic artists, are the products of a hermetic dialog – social questions and personal questions, asked and answered within an individual, probing the tenuous ethers of what might be. Fully formed, the art work is launched out into the world, a mutation of perception, a hopeful monster seeking a niche in a changing cultural environment. Whether that 'message-in-a-bottle' reaches another shore, and communicates to another individual is an issue of fashion, time and place.