blank slate

Stretched and sized 2 more large canvases over the weekend, a brutally physical process in which I impart a substantial amount of my DNA into my work.  Let's just say that there will be no disputing authentic Rico's from fakes.

With aching hands and scraped-up knuckles this morning I look across the studio at pure possibility; there's something so beautiful about a blank canvas; especially so with two.

I complain about location.  I do this too much, though it is certainly a factor.  The biggest limitation on me, -on anyone, is myself.  While I step up my game every time I walk into this space to work, I hesitate outside these walls.  There is no one coming to find me, of this I am absolutely certain.  It is not even that rejection bothers me so much any more, I think it is simply that natural human tendency to resist change and to avoid the unknown.  What if I were incredibly successful?  What would come with that?  How would my life need to change and am I prepared to make those changes?

Yes.

Looking at this big black painting I see something really amazing and to an extent magical.  The fact I live with it day after day and that this quality is not diminishing says something about where I've gone with it.  Where I'm going is still unknown; and that's the real magic.

studio tonight

swimming at night

she thinks she can warn the stars (for e.k.)

108" x 78", oil on canvas, Rico '12

Here's a preview of the big black.  I'll photograph it properly tomorrow, but this is an exclusive for the half dozen people that read this blog.  After weeks of wrestling with this painting I feel I found my groove.  Tomorrow I'll start building the next one.  And so it goes.

I painted this for a friend whose daughter died.  Six days on the earth seems such a short time, but no one can own time.  As parents we assume a natural order to life and mortality, but in the end it is only a bold assumption.  I felt this spirit needed to be writ large, and today is the anniversary of her death so I wanted to lay it down tonight.  

And I'm spent, and I need to sit alone with this epic poetry for a time as the day falls away.

wandering in blackness

I've spent weeks with this large black canvas now, slowing applying thin layers of medium and paint.  During this time I've been trying to address the logistics of exactly how to move paint around such a large area that replicates the way I did it on small sheets of vellum.  I've had a couple of "ah-ha" moments and it's just been practice, practice.  The big canvases mess with you; it's a lot of work and visual real estate to screw up, so there's the pressure that weighs down creativity.  For my part I've been struggling to get the surface where I want it before the white gets laid down.

The demons of doubt and disappointment and frustration have descended on me and I feel like St. Anthony in that famous etching being ripped apart and consumed.  Try as I might, I can't catch a break; I no longer even get rejections, I only get silence.  Being ignored is far worse than being rejected because there is no closure; you're just left wondering.

There is nothing new under the sun; and so much more so with painting.  There's always some artist you never heard of somewhere that did what you're doing.  The best one can hope for is authenticity and hopefully that authenticity may afford a new vista for the audience, the artist and painting.  So back into the 100 degree studio I go, and I keep searching myself for that authenticity and honest expression onto surface that will break open my own ways of perception.

It's less stalling and more free falling.

Just one more second before pulling that ripcord, just one more, one more, one more.  The farther and faster I fall the quicker time becomes; the more the urgency is felt.  Let go of all that I know and accept the reality of my current being; hurtling toward oblivion at 9.8 m/s/s.  Because art/creativity should be dangerous.  It should come at a price, and a high one at that.  If you're not in some way risking your soul then you're not doing anything a monkey with a brush can't do.  You've got to be pulling g's up to the point that everything is about to fall apart and spin out of control, and then you've to pull out and touch the endless blue.

It's time we took painting somewhere again.