juice

I'm here and the studio is quiet and I'm looking at 6 paintings and I feel that I am looking at something potentially new. My camera battery is out of juice, and I had planned on a pure photoblog entry today, but perhaps without the concern for documentation I was free in a way I didn't realize.

There are times when a Corona at noon is about the best damn thing on the planet, and whatever went down today was/is transformative. None of these are finished, but I went somewhere today, somewhere I don't think I've been before. I'm not sure how this will play out, but I'm up for the ride.

My initial explorations a few weeks ago with stencils got me thinking about silk screening and today I tried a technique that takes the philosophy of that process without its objectives/results. Something that has always interested me is using existing tools in very different ways. What I was thinking about today was denying the visual assumption. So whenever I see a painting becoming dictated by the visual assumption, I try to get rid of that assumption. The brain is always trying to take power over the eyes in art, and the biggest challenge I've seen with college-aged painters is that they must be taught to see and not just look. We anticipate patterns, we look for balance and symmetry. Abstract painting has the potential to challenge those anticipations/assumptions and in so doing, allow us to see differently. What I'm concerned with is seeing things in new ways, ways unconsidered or even unimagined. We need this in the world, we need this in our country right now because the paradigms as we know them no longer apply. To my mind, I don't paint for other artists necessarily, I believe I paint for politicians and scientists and those who can exert influence on the engines of culture. It is my greatest hope that someone will be lost in one of my paintings, -the way one looses themselves at the ocean or in the mountains, and some new thing will occur to them.

I am not interested in making meaning. I am interesting in creating the opportunity for meaningfulness.

I'll come back to work tonight, hopefully I can find the charger and get some pics up tomorrow.