Junebug

Thick Southern air seeps into the skin and soul.  Summertime is candela wrapped cigars and studio doors wide open to the heavy night.  I am a summer painter.  I love the slow heat.  Undulating clouds of thunderstorms and distant tropical storms fill me with renewal and passion and longing.  Twelve-year-old Hukushu to round out the night and still the mind, unwind, and leave the rigors of painting and grappling with form and materials to another session.

Two paintings in various states of beginning.  A show in September to clear the studio of reassurances that come with lots of paintings surrounding me.  There comes a point where they all have to face the wall; one has to recapture autonomy in each new effort.  I have  stayed within the parameters I set last year and the work benefits each time, but I cannot become self-referencial.

My process is the slow grind.  Work and re-work, wait, dry, wait and re-work and wait.  Weeks and months; using accidents but then honing their power into something directed and labored which eventually looks spontaneous.  I am dedicated to the path of simplicity.  Simplicity takes discipline and patience and honesty in one's practice.

There's a growing body of work in the studio.  It is becoming intensely focused and deftly executed and at times I feel that I am watching it unfold and come into being as a passive observer.  I am patient and watchful and have no objective in mind save being in the moment of each work as I participate in the dance of painting.

A second glass and the night is still and quiet.  No trains now.  No distractions of the mundane.  Tomorrow I will visit the studio and see what I have to work with.  I'll push ever onward.   

salt life

I'm on the beach and Andrea passed us by.  I'm watching the trails of lighting flashes in the sky and thinking about the two unresolved canvases in the studio back home.  I was invited to be part of a group exhibition, so more on that when I have dates and more information.

The girls of summer are strewn on hotel beds; all-day poolside and ocean air-kissed sleeping the sleep of children and animals, unfettered by anxieties of the past or future.  Life is new and immediate...these things we lose with age, and try every day to regain again.

The moment.  Painting is so much about being present, patient and watchful.  Every action creates possibility, and denies options.  Make a mark.  This single act of dissidence causes the whole of the universe to rush forward with all the power of its being.  So paintings fail.  Most are not built to withstand, but then, some do.  I'm in the zone.  New wall built, another one will be erected soon in the studio and with it more wall space, more contemplation of this thing, these visions that keep me moving forward and embracing the blessed uncertainty.

Black.  White.  Neutral elements and yet so powerful.  Associations with the abyss and always with me I am looking to Caravaggio and, -as of late, grappling with that son of bitch and his blackness.  No one paints the emptiness so full of presence.  No one ever has.  The Don Voisine show did that for me to lesser degree.  Those blacks were so astoundingly rendered; so technical and precise and each painting so nailed.  Well done, Maestro.  Well done.

And what of this strange split life?  New York every other month?  Counterbalanced by the bucolic daily life and studio and town and Main Street dying around me like countless Main Streets dying all over the nation.  The night is quiet and dim save the trains that thunder through day in and day out.  I watch the cars filled to the brim with coal, then retuning empty, then full again the next day.

But tonight the sea.  Moonlight and surf and stars and thoughts of the work in progress.

the miles

Bronzed and freck-faced girls bowled me over at the doorstep, and home is where they are.  Home and hearth; indeed a form of wealth in this oft-impoverished world.  Heading back into the studio tomorrow night, renewed and strangely free; as though there is no longer pressure; as though there is only open road.

Chelsea days and nights and thankfully no dawns this time out.  Minor misbehaving and nothing more. We marched across lower Manhattan and dozens of galleries, seeing the good, the bad and the inexplicable.  At times one wondered why some works hung under the glow against white walls; and so many white walls there are.  Mad shots and heroism of a sort.  The kind men in twilight years tell tales of to the women who suffer them.  The amazing work as well.  The work that seeps into the soul and gives it light.  More familiar faces each time I go, as I slowly begin to grasp that I, too, am becoming a familiar face to some.

Tomorrow night a cigar and the thickening night air and train whistles, and paint.  Alone and peopling my solitude with memory and exploration and experience.  The evening, the brick walls and wood floor and jazz floating and mingling with my smoke and my visions, twirling and winding back on itself into the rafters.  I've no thought of the future, only the nowness of surface and purpose.

ramblings on process and death

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and there are the nights where I'd rather go to bed at 8:30 than drag myself to the studio.  then I go; and more often than not there is some reward.  it may be fleeting.  it may only end in frustration, but the time's never wasted.

the rigors of painting, this thing I call my practice,  arise out of action and release; call and response.  tonight - a formidable image, and then, just as easily it was gone.  the painting is fragile and the thing can crumble before the artist's eyes.  weeks, months, even years, then..gone.  I love that every decision negates certain future options, and equally, that each mark provides opportunity for another -often unexpected mark.

so one works through it.  perhaps a vista, or prayer, or experience emerges and then before you is the reason for all the doubt and hours spent alone attempting to bring and to listen and see.

for me, my process has blind periods where I must wait.  working wet I have allow drying and allow the paint to explore and overflow and retreat.  I come in the next day to see what moves have been made; sometimes only to look and sit and stand and walk around and listen.  I have come to understand the power of waiting, of being acted upon...of surrender.

one of my freshly-turned seven year olds just informed me this afternoon that 7 is almost 8.  to which my mind answered, "and 8 is almost 18...and 28...and so it goes."  mortality.

I raised a glass to Dad last night, who would have been 73 yesterday.  he knew me as many things, but he never knew me as a father, and I suppose that makes me feel feelings I generally keep to myself.  Too long gone, and every year I understand better how very young I was to have lost him.  and then I see that what I say to my daughters is true; that I will always be with them.

my period of depression and doubt seems to be subsiding.  work comes from working, not thinking about it or indulging the ego's whims of fancy and insecurity.  painters paint; end of slump.  we pick up and endure and push beyond.  this odd and wonderful humanity.

and so it goes.

reflections on madness

Reflections on madness; what it means, relevance.  I'm questioning my relevance as a painter.  Then, with the imposed cultural template of Boston...context.  Explosions.  Is this what it takes to awaken the Sleeper?  Sadness.  Why do we look at fire and smoke?  Think about it.  Primordial instincts/aesthetics.

Is madness the inability to discern?  Is one aware of the decent?  Maybe, it's evolutionary.  Process and by degrees.  Or, is it at once?  Is madness blindness?  Or is it the condition which sees all at once and cannot subdivide into parts?  Abandon is not madness.  Ecstasy is not madness.  What of peopling my solitude and personalizing my overwhelmed sense of crowds?   I love New York for the alone-ness I feel; and its profound connection.

Am I worth my salt?  I'm alone and adrift here.  In less than two weeks I'll be booming Manhattan; hanging with others of my ilk.  Here; now; alone and madness.

Pretty?  Violent?  Spiritual?  I see pointlessness and failure, but I am close and in it.  Do I have the chops?  I still feel I can take it further.  I feel I must.  I reject the beautiful out of hat.  (what a phrase!)  I reject the pretty out of conscience

I fear only two things:  lack of freewill and mediocrity.

My day job makes these fears acute.  I am going insane painfully and slowly.

I'm drawing again in my head.  Big black paper with lines.  I see.  I am seeing.  Take that, motherfuckers.

I've seen death half a dozen times.  Show me something new and meaningful.  Let me see.  In seeing there is freedom; liberation.

Madness.

measures

Late night, much rye whiskey and reflection on Serra; the artist, the sculptures, the drawings.. the fucking drawings.  This idea of art compressing, altering, redefining, inhabiting space.  I think of James Austin Murray's show; the collision of surface and light and the volume of space.  Associations with Stella, of course, but only now association with Serra.  I quote:

Since black is the densest color material, it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum and thereby changes the artificial as well as the natural light in a given room.  A black shape can hold its space in relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily.  [italics my own]

Serra contends that, "black is a property, not a quality," and why not?  Indeed.  I make work that physically alters the space it inhabits.  This is interesting to me.  Sculptural yes, I fancied myself a sculptor when I began.  Yet the making of things led me to painting; kicking and screaming at times, but led me to it nonetheless.

Something else; "one cannot take down the Master's house with the Master's tools."  So we forge and hack, and co-opt and guerrilla.  One must be irreverent towards materiality; the formal must be the cage from which we free ourselves.  Is this the whiskey talking?  I think not.  For me, the Spanish masters.. Velasquez, Goya, and the Italian Caravaggio.  I wail against the blacks; the eternal space within the space which recedes and yet always asserts.

I am up against the process now.  I cannot execute the size and scale I want to with my current process of working vertical/horizontal/vertical.  I cannot physically lift and lower the pieces which exist in my mind's eye.  They must be contended with; my most challenging work is work I've had to contend with physically.  Like wrestling angels.  There are many warrior paths; mine is the peaceful warrior Way; discipline, repetition, aestheticism.  How can I engage the plane in a vertical condition?  I must wrestle with this.

More Serra:

[black] holds itself to a more compressed field, it is comparable to forging.

Indeed; the reconciliation between my sculptural intents and painterly practice.  I forge the picture; austere and hermetic and unapologetically concerned with the spiritual through no particular god.  I've been contemplating our instinctual human need for new gods.  It is time.  We need gods and myths that speak to our condition.  We need heroic epic poetry to bring our men and women warriors back across the sea.

And now, Boston.  Madness and tragedy.  Senselessness.  Can art [Art] counteract ignorance?  I believe it can, or else I go mad myself.

the rains are coming

Work is the preferred state of man.  Jobs are socially imposed constructs; they are seldom related to work but instead are directly tied to production and monetary compensation.  There's a reason a hard day's work in the yard, or garage or studio feels different than a day on the job; no matter the job.  It is because work is done for self and for betterment and for purpose and only tangentially for outcome.  The studio is work.  I lose track of time there.  I become immersed in the process of doing and seeing and listening and being when I am in the studio.  Paint.  Putting paint onto surface and taking it off and moving it around and watching it become, fall apart, become again; these are meaningful activities and meaningful purposes.  Art, the product of work, appeals to us precisely because it represents something tangibly different from the lack of truth from our jobs.  Even if, in the capacity of performing one's job some thing is made (more likely produced); it does not hold the life force of that which is wrought from work.

Painting is work.  Bloody knuckles and strained hands and tired eyes from honest labor in the service of the work.  I find it amazing when people from very different walks of life from my own find this quality in my art; I believe in that moment they see the work.

I don't care about illusion.  I never want to disguise that this is support and ground and surface and paint.  I've nothing against my West Coast brothers and sisters with their finish fetish, but it's not for me.  I love the raw, poetic edge of a canvas.  It is the anthropological record; the blood and bone and sinew.  It would be a falsehood for me to attempt to hide it or paint over it.  I inhabit the raw, bloody land of history and enslavement and war and struggle.  The work must breathe with this inhabitation and its ghosts.

The rains are coming.

And there is a cigar and a porch and whiskey as the big drops wash away the blood and sweat and struggle into night.

march on

Jocasta, oil on canvas, 60" x 48", Rico '13

Notification came from Carolina's Got Art, a large, duel-Carolina juried art exhibition.  I confess I was surprised at the decision (submission above), but ultimately all juried shows intersect an audience at a moment of time and place.  There's no reward in wondering why; it is a judgment and one takes it and moves on.

I finished crating my entry to ArtFields this afternoon.  It's wrapped, boxed and I make the journey to beautiful Lake City on Friday, apparently in the rain.  Though I envisioned a perfect storm, alas I was rebuffed by Charlotte this time.  I will wage another campaign, albeit through another process.

Clearing the studio of work is always a positive experience.  I hung two of the smaller paintings on the big wall and I feel really great about the work going on right now.  I have two canvases in process, one is ready to go the next time I get into the studio.

I lose this week to my wife's tech week for her play, but there are always the stolen moments.

Overall, I feel so fortunate and so focused.  The setback today was unexpected but not substantial.  If everyone liked my work I would have to seriously re-consider what I'm doing.  It shouldn't be easy to like; there should be barriers to it.  I think of Gauguin, "the ugly can be beautiful; the pretty, never."

new york stories

I first went to NYC when I was 20 years old.  Times Square was the manifestation of every cautionary tale from my fundamentalist upbringing brought to life and writ large; hookers, pimps, dealers, hustlers, junkies.  It was dirty and dim and sketchy and I took those first steps along the yellow brick road toward my own Oz.

In the times I've returned throughout the years, I think back on that first impression and it makes me smile.  Walking through the post St. Patrick's Day parade crowd in Times Square in heavy wet snow on Saturday night on my way uptown was nothing like that first encounter.  (I got a high five from Batman, for christsake).  New York, like all great cities of the world, gets under your skin and into your blood; and there is a part of me that is home there like nowhere else.

The Ides of March, James Austin Murray's solo show at Narthex Gallery did not disappoint.  There will be more reflections on that in the weeks to come; it's still so new in my experience and so powerful in my memory.  A friend said it best, "it is the perfect combination of art and space."  The work belongs there.  It inhabits the space in an intensely powerful way while somehow managing to coexist with it.  It is solid, significant work, -by far the best painting I saw on the walls my whole visit.

I've spent the last 15 months or so shedding.  Like Bird, I reached a point where I felt I had to withdraw for a time and find my voice.  I may be no Charlie Parker to the visual art world, but I've got chops that ain't like nobody else's.  It feels time to climb into the ring, to live or die by the intensity of personal vision and unyielding tenacity.  I may get a few beat downs along the way, but the world will never see what I make no effort to show it.  Now I know that it has to see it; that's why I'm here.

So I come back into the daily grind recharged and transcended.  Good art always makes me want to paint.  Being in artists' studios always makes me excited and on fire to return to my own.  Shots in the pub and much bantering about art and paint and space and form, it's time well spent...always.  But painting is what unites us.  Time in the studio getting in and getting down; that is its own realness.

practice stillness

Althaea (in progress), oil on canvas, 48" x 60", Rico

I was able to get into the studio for a long session yesterday and made tremendous progress on two paintings I've been working on; one since last year and the other since February.  I am fighting a cold I'd very much like to rid myself of before my NYC weekend.

I read one of my favorite art blogs and there's much to see in Chelsea, so I'll ask if anyone wants to make a day of it with me.  Basquiat is top of my list.

The rare times when I'm able to log hours in the daytime make me wonder what my work would look like if I did this full time.  As it stands, I can hardly keep up; I'm limited only by time and materials.  Increasingly I can afford the materials and I keep myself well-stocked, but time is always against me.  With oil, time is a medium in and of itself.  I love that paintings take multiple sessions, because coming in and out of a picture enables me to see more than I would if I were able to plow through.  Sometimes I miss acrylics for their immediacy, but mostly not.  I'm interested in the Way of painting; the eternal journey towards perfection that manifests itself in daily practice.   Keeping it slow means I spend most of my time looking in an attempt to see.

Something is reoccurring in the pictures as of late, these wide passages of emptiness; gaping orifices that recede into blackish void.  They remind me of Caravaggio in the overt reference to the Nothingness; that backdrop of our conscious lives and the curtain that will eventually fall on each of us.  Light and motion punctuated by eternal stillness.  I think about the placid lake we hiked around on Paris Mountain last month.  How ripples dissipate and stillness is itself a presence.  Since the beginning of this body of work I have noticed references to the anatomical and the sensual.  They often begin as gesture drawings, which of course also reference the body and nature.  I don't think about these things in the studio when I'm painting.  I attempt to clear my mind and paint with the non-mind.  I'm interested in what the paint wants to do and I try to follow it.  But here at home on a Sunday, I take a moment to consider.

11 days

In 11 days I'll be in NYC, attending the opening of the artist James Austin Murray.  The show is a culmination of a year's work; a site-specific installation cum painting exhibition.  I've watched the beginnings of this body or work through its evolution at the famous Bemis Center in Omaha, NE.  Murray's work is menacing, beautiful, epic and powerful; it combines brutal physicality with a masterful dance with light and illumination.  The deep grooves in his blacks bring associations of crowding around records in my teenage years; the ritual of taking in the album cover, the liner notes, the sleeve and the vinyl itself as visual and aesthetic experience.  They are both terrible and wonderful to behold; and that's through reproduction.

Facebook has been on fire over the weekend with a posting by the online curator Art Orbiter of artists' studios from around the world.  For me personally, to be included in any post with Miquel Barcelo, one of my major influences, is a tremendous honor and delight. It's so great to see all the different spaces in which artists practice. Before my current studio, I was reminded of the many studios I've had before; storage spaces, garage, extra bedroom, basement, subterranean tire warehouse, loft apartment. I stuck with it in the times between studios as well. Who is Art Orbiter? I may have a clue, but I'll never tell.

My own show opens next Thursday at Art & Light in Greenville.  I ran into one of the other artists, a well-known printmaker whose work my wife and I have collected for years, and we found out we're in the same venue, the Hub, at ArtFields.   

I submitted Jocasta to Carolina's Got Art this afternoon, so my potential reach in April extends far and wide across the Carolinas.  

Tonight I'll brave the cold and sit on our front porch and smoke a nice maduro with my Japanese scotch.  And still I rise.  

ink

It's been slow going due to my personal travel and the cold nights.  I have another 48 x 60 ready to receive paint, and hopefully I'll get in this Friday during the warmer daylight hours.  My wife starts her rehearsal schedule this week, so I bought some white ink and black arches paper to be able to do some work at home.

I'll hear from the ArtFields venue this week and hopefully get some logistical details at that point.

The day job has me completely stressed to the point of losing sleep.  Combined with not being able to get into the studio, my emotions and anxieties are close to the surface.  But I have everything ready to go in the studio when I get that break of time and climate.  I basically work outside, which is why I love the summers.  If I can move some work in next week's show, I hope to begin some of the construction projects which will help me combat the cold months.  I've noticed some discoloration of the whites if I try to paint below 40 degrees.

I'm excited about the ink drawings, -excited to embark on a period of drawing; period.  I was looking through book of Richard Serra's drawings this weekend and they are superb.  He is an artist who constantly draws, and it shows in everything he does.  It's our brains' lifeline as artists.

This work is getting stronger.  I finally feel I have the blacks right, which took the better part of year's worth of effort.  I'm anxious to see where it takes me this year.