unfinished business

paint-stained sneakers

My day in Atlanta was beautiful and peaceful and full of connecting with people.  It was good to see friends and to see how people continually are growing and growing up.  Accolades are nice, I won't lie, but after all that it is time to put it out of my mind and work.

I ripped back into it tonight and it didn't come easy but it did come.  I'm winding down as Winter approaches, I can already feel it.  I wish there was a studio in Mexico waiting for me; a place to ride out the cold and paint by the sea.  

Tonight I'll smoke a cigar and think about what worked and what didn't and what went down and wrap my head around how all this laying down of paint can be so flat and dull or so full of living energy.  The trains are coming through this little town and there's jazz on the speakers.  I'm still in a t-shirt so I can't complain yet.   The stillness is a rich full wind for my ragged sails.  I'm amazed how true I have stayed to my course, and now I feel that a long-sought after shore is near.

delivery day

Tomorrow morning I will rise early, as I do most days. I'll bag the three small paintings I just wired and signed, pack the van with one of the Forest and the Sea paintings, and drive to Atlanta. The work will be available at Nandina Home Design, and we will see if at last I am able to get traction in a market I have tried to find a way into for years.

It's strange for work to leave the studio unsold. But it is right that people will see it, -it should not live here like a captive. I feel I am nearly at the end of one journey and immediately beginning another. Time will tell.

My studio in Atlanta was subterranean; a vast, concrete tire warehouse in which I lived illegally for 4 days a week for close to a year. The nights were pitch black, cold and often uneasy. During that period, I broke away from working with metal and began the journey to paint on surface. I always found it symbolic that a block away was a historical marker for the surrender of Atlanta to General Sherman.

...and now I will drink another Sapporo and get ready for the day.

time away

Life comes in; there you have it. Days turn to weeks at the blink of an eye in my life now, so weeks away happen and I feel that tense-empty feeling creep up and take me over. Time away is good, it has the ability to give eyes in a way. Frenetic pitch is good too, it leaves no time for doubt and questions and analysis...action has its own seduction.

I sit on top of a large body of work now. It was an ambitious process, a Dare of magnitude and significance and, in the end (but I'll leave that to others to decide) of some possible importance in the oeuvre of Rico.

In my angry moments (and there are some, yes indeed), I paint to kill Warhol, to kill Jasper Johns, to kill all that nudge-nudge-wink-wink crap that makes great poster art and feeds our cynicism and endless appetites for the so-called new. Burn it. Toss Koons and Hirst on the bonfire and let our vanities grow cold and hungry once again. This is about PAINT. What it can do, what it has yet to discover, unveil, instruct, alter and offer. Paint on surface; no pretty edges to offer up illusion. The Unclean, there for you to digest -if you can, if you have the stuff. I don't do it for me, and I am unabashedly spiritual and shamelessly in search of the Sublime. If these pursuits amount to a career death sentence, so be it.

When I look at the work in the studio now, the words of Motherwell haunt the space..."an art stripped bare," exposed, naked before you like Manet's Olympia. Approach it, -gauntlet thrown-, bring it if you feel you can. I do this shit, I don't play at it. I'm going to break it all open, and that is my word.

fostering creativity

A quick personal note today. Ever since they have been physically able, we have let our daughters dress themselves. I love watching them get ready in the mornings because it is an extension of play and develops their creativity. I've been keeping up with a lot of the fashion week coverage, watching the runway photos and so on, and some of the combinations they come up with rival anything I see in Paris or New York.

When I look at fashion street blogs, I often think to myself, "that person's parents let them dress themselves as a kid". My wife sometimes recoils at the color combinations, but to me it seems they are exploring an endless universe; that is what color is for me. I think it is so important to let children play, and part of that play includes playing with identity and personal style. Soon the social pressures of school will begin to shape what they wear, but hopefully they will have built a great sense of their own style by then and can weather trend and conformity.

They seem naturally gifted with an ability to create dynamic collisions of texture and pattern that I find tremendously exciting. (I mean, sparkly red slippers pretty much go with everything, right?) I know some parents view their children as extension of themselves, or at least comments on themselves, but I've always fostered autonomy in my children. Partially this is because they are twins, I suppose. Partially it is because I believe that a clear sense of personal autonomy and healthy self-love are the only paths to successful relationships later in life.

I'm fighting a cold and lost this week of studio work, and I'm traveling next week so I long to get back in there and get some closure. Things look promising for the new year and I look forward to where the work takes me.