Since it's been awhile, an update is probably in order. I first started this blog as a way to document in part some of the happenings going on in my studio, and so probably the most important update is that I no longer have it! This is not really bad news, or foreboding anything, least of all some kind of abandoning of art. If anything it could be said to be an abandoning of the self-conscious ownership of a place where art is produced, but it's not even that--I simply wasn't using the space as much as I was when I first got it, and realized I would rather use money spent on rent (not that much really, slightly more than it would cost to store all the supplies in some warehouse dedicated to that purpose) for other things. Visiting friends for one, a few short trips to escape the break up the monotony of a regular schedule.

Not included in those trips, that is, trips that require the kind of money I would save from not having an art studio, but nevertheless interesting was a hiking trip I went on, that I found out about via Meetup, a website that "organizes the world's people" for random events and get togethers. Everyone I've met through the site so far is either new to the area or single and looking, which is intriguing in itself, but what I like most is that the events that I've been to so far have been really informal, just the kind of thing for someone like me who has spontaneous bursts of spontaneity. Sure, I'll go on a weekend camping trip with a group of total strangers--who wouldn't?

That trip was suprisingly uneventful--no bear attacks, and no one met the person they're going to marry six months from now. Though I realized at the end of it that despite the apparent diversity of the group--men, women, older, younger, employed or figuring that situation out, we were actually united by a willingness to spend an entire weekend with a group of strangers, and having this in common I found went a long way in smoothing over the edges of what were otherwise very different personalities. The only other thing I took from the trip, besides a need to bring bear spray next time, if only so I can go to sleep at night, was from the conversation on the way over with James, about how we can love some things, and yet never have it occur to us to do those things. This was in the context of a conversation about James starting to learn guitar and sing James Taylor songs, discovering he has a talent for singing he never knew about before, and for me it was about the studio, talking about how after graduating college it never occurred to me, not until I left the city and all its inviting distractions anyway, to get it, to dedicate myself to it, at least for a time.

And it made me wonder what distractions I have now that I don't realize are distractions, and what I will discover I would really like to do when I finally get around to giving my mind a rest for awhile, let the water calm and stop trying to figure out What I Need To Do before I'm whatever age I should have already done it by, stop getting anxious that Kurt Cobain was world famous by my age, stop finding solace in the fact that Barnett Neumann discovered the paintings he would become famous for in his 50s. Stop conflating celebrities with anyone remotely like myself, and yet never stop trying to find something worth becoming famous for, worth devoting myself to, even if fame, the adoration of others would not be a natural consequence of my efforts. It's again this need for approval--not to be confused with love, not to be confused with caring what the people you care about think--where did this come from and how can I quit? Ellen DeGeneres has a fantastic bit about how she's on the approval "patch"--an addiction-battling treatment that releases small doses of approval until she can finally quit for good. This needs to be invented, and me put on a regimen.

This need for approval is at least one distraction, one consistent cause for at least some of my half attempts and failures to follow through on my ideas sometimes. I don't know what the others are, I just know I am tired of my own fleeting convictions, modest intentions, spontaneous spontaneity that are not unlike the marshmallows I've eaten in so many S'mores on so many camping trips. I think I would rather go back to hiking after already hiking because I'm so sick of these S'mores and all their predictable sweetnesses and textures. I do not want to be a dilettante.

In the studio, I discovered that trying to paint without any pretensions is the same as speaking glibly: something will undoubtedly pour forth, but it will usually be asinine. All your soft devotions will stand out against the background, and actually this is actually a good way of finding out about them, but unfortunately not a good way to make paintings. I think it's easy to confuse 'effortlessness' with a lack of effort sometimes. On the other hand, in making a conscious effort, my fear was always that the act would devolve into the affectation of making art. And this did happen sometimes, but in spite of this, some good paintings emerged. Despite my own misgivings about art as product, it's nice to have something to show for some of my time in studio. Maybe the solidity of the paintings is necessary for me before I go on to less tangible things.

I would get a studio again--even if it is in the form of a spare room in some future apartment. I will also go on more camping trips. I would like to hike some more with the people I love, but perhaps also with strangers again, taking care not to be indifferent to who I'm sharing the experience with, but being my honest self with both groups of people. Maybe next time I will fish (I haven't done that in years) catch a couple bass, gut them and cook them on a fire I built. I would also like to write more, maybe some poetry.

I think I finally understand why Las Meninas is referred to as the “philosophy of art”, while earlier this morning, as I grabbed my coffee and wondered if it was safe to drink it as I sped down the highway, a small dog skipped into my lane. And what now? I swerved around the dog (I hope it lived, but don’t expect it survived the cars behind me), but I still don’t know what to do with Las Meninas.

Do I post it here as some self-congratulatory exercise? Do I find ways to inject it into casual conversation? Do I stop every single person I see and ask if they know why it is beautiful, or is that to condescend? Who wants to know in the first place, and is this even shared—even possible to share—or is it for everyone to experience alone?

I think that, like the subject of the painting Velazquez is working on at left, I will never know. I may have a sense of the scale of the painting he is working on, a painting approximately the size of Las Meninas itself, but if Velazquez looks out towards me—towards us—where the king and queen of Spain reflected in the mirror should be, where is the painting of them on this scale? Are we in fact the king, or the queen? Why did Velazquez paint himself anyway, and how is he relaxed while the Infanta Margarita is in a pose she could hold for hours, obviously for her depiction in the painting? Is she looking at us, or her parents? Am I absolved of responsibility for the dog’s death because I did not hit the animal, because someone else forgot to leash it, or am I complicit as a driver; do I condone the existence of highways that are dangerous for wandering animals who don’t know any better? Would it matter if I didn’t own a car? Did that dog really die after all?

Energy Flow

Decided to delete the youtube video of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Energy Flow” for a couple reasons. First, because I realized I would rather show videos or music in person or with some at least some kind of explanation, versus lazily put it up on a blog, and second, because I can’t handle the appearance of youtube’s default interface here. I realize how ironic this is given the appearance of this blog, but I can and will change the design of this site eventually, while with embedded youtube videos there isn’t that option. For the record, blogger’s default designs do a good job of saving people from themselves.

Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Energy Flow”

Barnacles on the whale

15" x 20" watercolor on paper



15" x 20" watercolor on paper



15" x 20" watercolor on paper



15" x 20" watercolor on paper



6' x 4' oil, gesso, spray paint



15" x 20" watercolor on paper, newsprint

sin título

Sometimes I wish I were more of a poet. Then I wouldn’t be tempted to use the phrase “words cannot express…”, an expression that is really a cop-out of the time and effort it takes to find the correct words. A poet knows there is no direct relationship between words and feeling like a painter understands not to paint the urn but the light that it scatters and is filled with. And if the net result of even the best poetry is that sometimes words fall short (another cliché!) then that is the beauty of writing. But I think a good poet knows how to restrict themselves to only a portrait of sentiment—like a portrait of a person—and they are never concerned with explaining so much as drawing out something like its essence. I'm reminded of J.M.W. Turner’s never painting to show he ever understood what he was witnessing so much as “what it was like”, and like him, I think the best poets trace the faintest contours. Their marks never touch yet we somehow we can see the line, imagine the volume and feel.

My latest thoughts in studio are not inexpressible so much as all occurring at once. I think I still need poetry: The paintings. What few have been made. What medium/Why have I seemed to abandon even thinking about the possibility of other mediums. Although that’s not true, what about the plastic bags formed into seashells that you can put your ear to and hear the ambient sound of the stores they came from? The photos with vomit? Two ideas that keep circling in my head like sharks forever about to eat the diver that is my fear of either embarrassment or the possibility of never actually making either idea happen. What about what I've done already? What is true and what’s ugly?

There is the question of how to best express myself. That is the goal isn’t it? If all art is about death somehow, then showing knowledge of one’s own mortality—the ultimate “truth”—is always also self-expression. But that is not enough somehow. With the watercolors… a few reviews came back to me as surprise that I would paint something like that, and I immediately understood I was making anonymous paintings, which, even if any were beautiful, and the creation of beauty a noble pursuit (which is not always the case), the distilling of beauty from an empty paper and head was in some way untruthful, and therefore not art. Like all kitsch, they proclaimed eternal life.

God bless Banksy. My second favorite quote from him is where he says art cannot happen in a studio, sitting at a computer with Photoshop open, revising and cropping the final result, and my first favorite is when he says that saying “let’s just stay in tonight and get pizza“ is the death of all art. I’m not a nihilist, but I love pizza. I also hate protest, but not because there is nothing to be angry about so much as protest is an obsolete means of achieving anything. Banksy graffitis two men kissing or an oasis through a “crack” in a wall on the West Bank. And what revolution is he the author of? I don’t hate him at all—actually I love him—but the art, as always, is the flower budding from the soil of human civilization, and not the other way around. I hate it when I sound conservative.

The moral imperative is not standard, or a given. And modern art is a gift. No one is forcing it down your throat.

11/30

(originally posted 11/30/09)




At top, a 16" x 20" oil painting started a few months ago, around February. Bottom: a 15" x 20" watercolor I made within the last two weeks. More to come…

Continued identity crisis

(originally posted 10/26/09)

While this blog worries whether it is a design blog, an art blog, an “anything goes” blog (the weakest of the three), whether you would still love it if it were fat, I will post some watercolors:

These are all 15" by 20":






So many squares because I started each one based on observations of a square fan in the studio. From that starting point, several pictures, and a more or less successful dive into the subconscious, a good old-fashioned strive for the tension of illusionistic space and flatness, and also there's probably some subconscious Sharka coming through, with her Germanic love of rules—both the lines and the laws—and geometry.

Some of these look like landscapes, which Sharka also seems to be working on, although hers are explicit amalgams of both psychological and physical landscapes. My third from the top is a city I think, although that one is certainly overpainted, and second from the top appears to be a romanticized image of the American West, which is strange since I don't particularly like Westerns, or the 19th Century generally. Can you dislike a century? In fact, the only movie depicting that time period I can recall liking is Dances With Wolves, but the frontier in that movie is the plains of the American Midwest, not the deserts further on. I think that’s a wigwam at the top, painted by accident. And actually it only became a wigwam after I turned the painting on its side.

Joyce’s main criticism of these two paintings is that I was not judicious in my use of color. She’s probably right. I am very much about watercolors now because of the speed with which you can cover the paper, and not the colors themselves. I think I was hoping that through an “arbitrary”, automatic use of color, some other accidents might surface that would reveal something the images and ambiguous spaces created by the forms and composition did not. But Joyce is right to point out a certain color-apathy may be showing more than any fruitful abandon, and, full disclosure here, I did choose colors based on value and not hue, which kind of like buying a swiss army knife for the knife only. It serves the purpose, but why not just use a plain utensil?