always on Sunday

Got back into paintings 1-3 this morning, and they became a lot more structured. Whether this is for good or ill doesn't bother me so much at this point, and a good deal of it may be obliterated by the processes over the next few sessions. I (as perhaps a few of you reading this) keep looking at my painting wall and wondering, "why don't I paint THAT?" Sometimes we don't always see what's in front of us, or more poignantly, what it has to teach us.

I enjoyed what happened this morning but I remain ambivalent, which is my preferred state of mind in here. The worst painting suffers from the seduction of moments, where artists try to preserve that little section here or there in a painting. I have been as guilty of this as anyone, but I am also fairly ruthless when it comes to eliminating something. I don't work from predetermined forms or images, so when they occur I get rid of them as best I can. There's nothing hyper-realistic painting does for me that photography can't.



Speaking of photography, I'm shooting at a lower res in the studio right now to conserve memory and bandwidth. When I get these to a state where I stop working on them I'll offer up some higher quality images. I need some lights and likely some light boxes, but that will have to wait.

As I type and look at the works in front of me, I'm glancing over to the others and I'll likely get into them as well. I was right in what I said at the end of last year, something is definitely happening. Time to ride the wave.

back in the studio

A stolen sunny morning, picking back up where I left off and then pushing on. Canvases 4-6 (above) in various stages while 1-3 take a varnish layer and dry flat elsewhere in the studio. I layer and layer and though it is time-consuming, it gives the final paintings an otherworldly depth for which I my work is becoming known. I re-introduced the tape line today and we'll see where that goes.

It is strange and delightful working with a cache of surfaces ready. It really seems to serve my need to work on many things at once. It was a rough week at the day job, but a rewarding one. I'm feeling conflicted in my realization that I don't have to compartmentalize my life -or my identity into separate existences. In life, in art, I remain open and go where opportunity leads me and innovation allows me. Painting is largely problem-solving; one sets up a puzzle of sorts when making a painting. This is why I enjoy oil as opposed to acrylic. With oil you have to plan, there is a chemistry at work that has to always be in your consciousness. I paint intuitively, and without predetermined imagery. That apparent paradox is probably a metaphor for my whole being, but what can you do?


Remember, you can enlarge any image by clicking on it. The warmth will return tomorrow and so will I.

Blowback for Nikki Haley

For those readers not on planet South Carolina, there was pretty big skirmish today over the fate of Arts funding. Newly-elected Governor Nikki Haley made these remarks in her State of the State address:

The reality is the role of South Carolina’s government in the year 2011 can no longer be to fund an Arts Commission that costs us $2.05 million. It cannot be one that funds ETV, costing taxpayers $9.6 million. And it cannot be one that pays taxpayer dollars to lobbyists, costing us $1.2 million a year.

When you release government from the things it should not be responsible for, you allow the private sector to be more creative and cost efficient. And you allow government dollars to go to the places and people they should.

The proposed elimination of the SC Arts Commission went before the state Ways and Means Commission today and a huge, grassroots call went out to artists statewide. The result? Nice try, Nikki, but not today. I've never been more thankful for Charleston in my life, the Chair of this Committee, Rep. Chip Limehouse hails from there. Rule of war # 1: know your enemy. Did she really think that a politician from Charleston would be the one to hatchet the Arts Commission and make national headlines if our state had become the single state in the Union without a government Arts agency?

But what I really want to address here is the second part of Governor Haley's remarks, the argument of what government should and should not be responsible for. It is popular mythology to suggest that when government turns over essential services such as utilities, transportation, health care and education to the private sector that the people no longer pay for it. In reality, few of these industries are viable in terms of making a profit, and so what ends up happening is that the government subsidizes whomever bought them. So, not only do we lose quality and pay higher rates for these services, but we are actually still paying for them with our taxes; only now those taxes are going toward private profits.

Beyond the fiscal fallacy of Keynesian economics, there is the very real moral question about the role of government in the welfare and protection of its people. Go to a mall or a gated community for a day and ask yourself if you really want to privatize law enforcement. Call your insurance company and while you're waiting on hold ask yourself if you really think that we should put firefighting in the private sector. We are only as strong as the weakest among us as a society. When we discard our poor, our old, our hungry and our disabled we are an impoverished, outdated, empty and crippled empire. There is no basis in human decency for the argument of no government and a completely unfettered market. What I find most ironic is that this argument so often (though certainly not exclusively) comes from people who claim to follow a prophet who lived with lepers (that would be AIDS patients today, people) and associated almost solely with the poor and needy.

As an artist I don't love the SC Arts Commission. I think they are a fat, bloated, self-serving behemoth. But to eliminate our only state Arts agency is a reckless and irreversible act. This state needs culture, critically so.

Some argue that the private sector should fund the Arts. Guess what? They do. They do so generously through grants, endowments, sponsored exhibitions and commissions. Virtually no museum show in the world could be mounted without the support of some corporate or private sponsor. The most elite of private sector deem the Arts to be of worth, and the governmental subsidies which keep them afloat are meager at best. Thus, the wealthiest among us are in favor of at least some government funding of the Arts. Moreover, artists have been state-sponsored for centuries. Artists we consider to be the greatest in history would never have survived if they depended solely on the market. Does that mean they were not great? Does financial viability determine the worth of all things? Or does a Great Society implicitly demand great culture and great art?

Some say the Culture Wars are back. I say they never left us. But I do know that when times are darkest, people need what good art has to offer the most. Art reminds us of who we are and what we can be, and sometimes what we have become.

holding pattern

The nights are slow and I have been shut out for some time. I long to get back, yet I go through this every Winter and I should accept the reality that these first 2 months of the year are generally a wash except for the warm snap here and there. I tend to use these months to research and learn about artists I haven't known (or known well) before. I was at last able to pick up the book on Philip Taaffe, "The Life of Forms" and it was providence which led me to it.

I have a box of medium and paints waiting by the door for the first break above freezing. The break will come, and the paintings will move on. I am sidelined because that is what is to be at this moment. I will (and always do) come back with a vengeance.

I have a small work which needs to get done for a traveling exhibition. I have yet to start physically, though I've been working on it for a few weeks in my head. More on that soon.

Taaffe's work uses pattern and motifs in a delightfully cerebral way. The work contains a power, but not in the sense of what we (or at least I) tend to think of muscular painting. It's very meditative, very direct in a Zen-like way of being direct but also saying something on many levels which isn't apparent immediately. There's much to chew on, much to consider.

scrawled note found in sketchbook

To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

-Frank O'Hara, from To the Harbormaster

out in the street

when I'm out on the street, girl

well I never I feel alone.
when I'm out in the street, girl
in the crowd I feel at home.
the black and whites they cruise by,
they watch us from the corner of their eye.
but there ain't no doubt when we're down here
we ain't gonna take what they handing out

-Bruce Springsteen

My studios have generally been in the industrial or forgotten parts of town. In each of the spaces I've worked, the streets are either spooky quiet or the sound of sirens and trains fill the night. I think I long to be with the people but somehow end up being a phantom. Sometimes I long for comrades; artists who will drop by with a bottle and fresh eyes to release me from my exile.

I get lost. I have enjoyed this sensation for as long as I can remember. It is a fleeting sensation, but in these moments I confess I feel a vigor and electricity of life that is difficult to explain. I love painting because in its best moments it feels like jumping off a cliff without being able to see the water below. I can begin knowing, or I can begin without any objective whatsoever, but there is always that moment when I look at a painting and realize that I have no idea what to do next.


Generally, this is when I start to pack up and head for the door...and often when I turn around for one last look and find myself an hour later with a tray full of paint-soaked implements seeing something I had not seen before.

My process if filled with that sense of encounter, and that is what I want people to feel with my work. I seem obsessed with the idea of encounter, the phenomenological experience that is both ineffable and deeply shared. I might not get there, -now or ever, but that's what's behind it. That's the drips and stains and splatters and smears on the wall you so often see on this blog. I was here. I made these things. I will be gone and this is my record. This is my story. Maybe some part of it is yours as well.

mediated

As one might expect, I read a fair amount of art blogs. Like most people today, I read them in a variety of formats over several devices. An interesting effect this has had on my perception is specific to viewing art. It struck me this weekend, as I stumbled upon an artist I had never encountered before, that the work looked really interesting and muscular on my small laptop screen, but once I got to work and looked it up on the big monitor the work became far less dynamic.

I'll be the first to say that ALL art suffers in reproduction. There is no substitute for seeing art in person, and that goes for high Renaissance as well as Abstract Expressionism. Documenting my work has been a source of tremendous pain and frustration my entire career, as the best work I make defies simple photography. I abandoned the medium of copper mostly because it was impossible to convey what it looked like in 3D, real-time. That turned out to be a good decision for a number of other reasons, but the frustration has remained.

In looking at art on the internet, I've developed a bit of sympathy for the galleries. I simply cannot imagine looking at dozens of artists' images and trying to discern what is "good" or at least in-line with that gallery's program/stable. Do I think the review process is flawed? Yep. But my sympathy/empathy remains.

Day 2, canvases 1-4

there's the moment I quit being careful and things truly begin. sometimes, every day in here feels like the first time I've ever painted, while other times -picking up an ongoing painting, feels like continuing a conversation with an old friend. you know the ones, years can pass and within minutes of seeing each other it feels as though you lived the lifetime of memories you share just yesterday.

i feel a groove starting once again. though the week ahead has cold nights, somehow something inside has decided that freezing my ass off is incidental and that the moment is now. Agnes is here, watching the cars and trains pass by the open loading door. It's warm enough for a cigar and time to sit and watch this process unfold. some headway was made, i paint fast as if possessed by a mortal urgency.

i'm incorporating motifs, something quite frankly I've never had the guts to try. i remember many many years ago an art professor friend of mine said my work reminded him of Matisse. i remember i was fairly indignant about the association at the time, and it's taken years to understand the reference. from the perspective of process, I'm a lot more...mechanical i guess is the word, than I'd like to admit. repetition, repetition, and then some new possibility occurs to me.


I've got 4 canvases in play as of today, each will begin to pull apart and take its own journey. funny the things artists return to without knowing or even thinking about it necessarily. there are times when if feels as though something is trying to show itself to me. that's the moments i like best.

in my youth i experimented with a great many experiences. the frustration was always that I wanted desperately to bring something back, something tangible that anyone could see and get some sense of where i had been. painting does that, and i guess that's why it took hold of me.

Day 1, canvas 1

The Winter has the brightest sun, which warms the wood and brick of this old railroad warehouse. I can see my breath in the thin air, but I'm sheltered from the wind and elements, and once moving I seem to be lost in the making of things.

I got the base laid down, a hot goldish gloss which will eventually disappear except to add depth. I love mornings in the studio, they have become such a luxury in my life. There was a time when I painted first thing in the morning, and I would love to return to that schedule some day. For now, I get these stolen moments on weekends and I work nights.


I learned a long time ago not to quantify what I do. If I can get in here for half an hour, I take it. If things are too wet to work, I'll draw (or blog). The important thing is being here, because as nice as inspiration is, it is nothing without being able to execute one's visions when it comes. Showing up and getting dirty is the only road to somewhere.

Live

The Rico Act will now be coming to you live from the studio. This has been more difficult than it should have been, and it has been a long time coming. Beginning this weekend, I will be able to post with the paint still fresh and hopefully from that head space.

There were many reasons for this decision, but primarily I wanted to focus on process and the work and really bring my small audience into what goes on in the studio and how it goes down. Over the next few months, I'll be painting within the restriction of a 24" x 24" canvas and seeing what happens as I deal with that restriction. I know it is leading me somewhere, and I wanted to chart that journey in real-time.

Right now there are 5 boxes of canvases sitting here and a single blank canvas hanging on the painting wall. I've quickly realized that I need two more active painting walls to keep any sort of rhythm. I'll also need a horizontal drying area. Suffice to say, things are gonna get heavy, and I'm all for it.

It's freezing, but the sun will shine tomorrow and I'll open the doors and let the cold out and once I get moving it won't be bad. It begins. It begins.

I'm supposed to be in New York tonight. The painter Mark Zimmermann has an opening in Brooklyn tomorrow night and I desperately wanted to go. I love his work and had the privilege of visiting his studio in 2009. All the snow and ice has, -somewhat inexplicably, made me miss the city all that much more. I have friends who'll be there for fashion week, but at this point even that seems like it won't happen. I am feeling an intense need to get out of town, but also a greater need to lock myself in my studio and work on these canvases and see where I end up. I have no idea what the 40th or 50th one will look like, but I hope by working with a standardized format I'll push into new territory, something completely my own.

I saw an interview with Anna Deavere Smith, who recalled meeting Brice Marden upon returning from a trip to Spain and seeing Guernica. "Where are our war paintings?" he reportedly asked her. Where indeed. Marden is in his early 70's. We will lose him in my lifetime, and so a whole new time for painting is opening right now. The critic Jerry Saltz tweeted (yes, tweeted!) that art can change consciousness. Maybe so...

new year

How have ten years gone by? In the summer of 2001, we moved to this tiny town in South Carolina. I could have never anticipated the changes this decade has brought. At first, I resisted the change. I rented a studio in Atlanta (3 hours away), spent 4 out of 7 days a week there (sleeping illegally in the subterranean, unheated space) and watched as my work slowly moved from metal oxidation to painting. Back here, I re-committed to my family and took two years of art classes at the small, liberal arts college where my wife's job brought us. After my final, unsuccessful round of applying to graduate school in studio art we found out we were pregnant with twins. The ride has never slowed since, not even for a moment.

In 2007, I was working in a friend's garage as a make-shift studio and begin to see the work really move into something different. At the end of that year, I procured my current studio and now here I am beginning my forth year there. Last month I ordered 50 canvases to be built and shipped. Never before in the entire journey to this point have I ever had materials, space and time all align. There has always been a deficit of at least one, and often two of these elements. The concert of these factors along with where I see myself and my work in this moment is unprecedented.

The canvases begin shipping tomorrow, so hopefully I will begin painting this weekend.

To say I was depressed at this point last year is a gross understatement. I was deep in the hole, and as the year progressed I wrestled with whether I could even keep the studio, or even if I wanted to paint any more. Ultimately, here I am. We persevere. We stand and carry on and sometimes this is only because we don't know what else to do. I have friends who suffered tremendous and devastating personal loss a year ago, and yet they are still married and still living and moving on. The human spirit is a tremendous thing.