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...