tabula rasa

works in progress on the studio floor

There is nothing like working to opera in the studio.  The brick and wood bounce the sound and build it into epic phonic presence, and I have found myself lost in an entire opera without realizing it; all the time painting away in the zone.  I love the largeness of the medium.

As this year draws to a close I find myself considering a move to acrylic paint.  I've used oil exclusively for about 8 years now; I love so many nuances of the medium, -especially its unforgiving nature.  But there are times when my studio time is so limited, and for the sake of expediency I find myself wishing I could stay in a painting for longer at one sitting than I am able to with oil.

It won't be an inexpensive transition to be sure.  But I've found that changing one's medium often changes one's perspective and attack, and by doing so may drill down into the work to discover something fundamental about it.  I feel the need to do this for a bit.

I was out with my daughters the other day and found these 8" x 10" canvases and bought a pack of 10 on a whim.  I decided to try it and see what happened.  There are wonderful things about this work writ large, but there are equally compelling things about it small, so I'm opening myself to the exploration.  I can go buy another 10, some acrylic paint and essentially lose nothing but time.  As I heard an acquaintance say, "paint's never wasted."  It means if you embark on an honest creative exploration with integrity of idea and fullness of spirit, you do good work; even if the work itself fails, you have learned something, maybe opened something up.

It's been a amazing year for the work.  I go into 2013 strong and optimistic, and largely peaceful about life and art.  I'm not one for resolutions, but I hope to give less time and ear to the news about how messed up the world is and to spend that time making it better the only way I know how.

no fear of flying

The relations have left, the house is quiet and slowly getting back to order.  The tooth fairy is paying a double visit tonight.  The after-christmas crash hit with full force and all my wonderful girls are sleeping upstairs.

So damn much going on and so little I can talk about.  Breaking points have been reached, changes are being made, so it goes.  I've tried for years to compartmentalize my life; allowing some people access to some parts and others to an avatar persona I maintain for my day job.  I've realized that this can no longer be; that it sequesters the beautiful, true, powerful aspects of my soul and hides my work from the light of day.  That avatar will soon be dead; good riddance.   I cannot wait to be free of him.

The work in the studio is amazing and true and a painting sold from the Greenville condo model.  There's always that momentary affirmation after a sale, then you cash the check and go back to work and try to push the experience from your mind.  I want desperately to stay on the epic scale, -to make another 3 the same size as the previous ones.  I see it in my mind; all of them in a room, and it is profound.  But there is the pressure to work on a smaller scale, to make works for the smaller budget clients and when the dust settles after the New Year perhaps I will be able to see these options more clearly.

I booked my flight and hotel for NYC in March to see this artist's exhibition.  Just knowing I will be in the city so soon gives my soul wings at a time when I desperately need it.  There will be good art and good times with friends old and new.

I'm in the sweet spot of the calendar year; those days and nights between holidays where everything just feels suspended.   I've been flattening out the blacks on the two 5' x 4' canvases and I'm intrigued by the sense of downward drag of the composition in one of them.  There's something thematic going on, and I am trying to both understand it and not over-analyze it.

I'm attending an Icarus Session on January 2nd in Greenville.  Everything in my life feels as if it is moving toward significant and profound change.  As in art, I feel I don't know what is going to happen next...and I love it.

unknowing

I like not knowing what's going to happen.  You could say I thrive on uncertainty because that tension really energizes me in the studio.  The painting I am doing now has a quality of anxiety in a sublime sense of the word.  Not so much dread as uncertainty and looming transformation.  I saw Wim Wender's "Pina" the other night and felt so connected to her work because it really seemed to stem from a similar place as what is going on in my studio right now.  It feels as if the world is going mad, and yesterday when I got home there was a week-old NY Times opened to the arts section and I saw the most magnificent Matisse paintings and I felt, just for a moment, that the world is not fucked up and evil and twisted; it's just a little skewed and off course, and we need to focus on beauty and magnificence and perhaps begin to look at the unknown more as an encounter with the Divine and less as a menacing force of destruction and doom.

rough cut

studio wall, December 11th, 2012

Last night 'til the wee hours, continuing to pour and stream paint against the sweet blackness.  The forms always surprise me; references to the body, the sea, sky, and the ever-present otherness of what lives within us, always unseen.

I received good news this morning and even though I blabbed on Facebook I will keep it quiet here for now.  This isn't about that, this is about the work; the daily work.  Going home with paint under one's fingernails and exhausted and a nightcap and sitting and wondering about it all and how it all went down.  Painters paint.  So I put in the studio shifts when I'm tired and don't feel like it because tomorrow will bring its own set of obstacles.

work in progress, Rico '12

I am coming up on my 5 year anniversary in this studio.  Far and away the longest I've ever been in a studio and it's worn and weathered like a favorite tool that you instinctively reach for without considering.  You know its there and you know what it can do.  I'm fortunate to have made the rent for next year.

The good things, -the breaks, happen while you're busy doing the work and not thinking about it.  I've come to think that success surprises everyone every time it happens if they have half a soul.  The random phone call from you dealer while you're on your way through life and suddenly there's a moment of validation that you try to savor and summarily squash and move on with it.  It makes no sense; there's no figuring out what you did when or why someone liked it.  They could have just as easily ignored it, hated it or dismissed it.  It isn't you, no matter how much the ego wants you to believe it.  I've done this long enough to not confuse lucky with good, and to never dismiss being lucky.

The images in tonight's post are shorthand; rough cuts that enable me to get my first thoughts crystallized.  I'm loving where things are going.

reparations

It's late and there was paint laid down tonight and major surgery to the last large canvas.   The stretcher bars had dislodged from the weight and sheer unwieldiness of its size.  One had snapped and had to be fused.  In retrospect they needed two vertical cross braces and three horizontal.

All week I've been laying down the most amazing flat surfaces and since I took the large one off the wall I plan to flatten the blacks significantly.  It will float the white in interesting ways.

I have been thinking about a horizontal piece, -the first of this body of work.  I gessoed a page in a sketchbook and played with white oil paint straight out of the tube.  I'm looking for a black-paged sketchbook to facilitate my thought process right now.  I've been thinking of doing more drawing and works on paper to finish out the year.  I'll need to work through the horizontal orientation, but I'm thinking of a  78" x 216" painting in two panels.  I have it in my head and it won't let me rest.

Smoked a PDR maduro tonight and enjoyed the crisp autumn darkness.  The town has hung its Christmas lights and the whole of the square is lined in white illumination.  Family will soon start arriving and the semester's end is in sight, though I still have a long and stressful road up to the very last.

The work in the studio now seems inexhaustible, and this is a new experience for me; I tend to go from one thought to the next without concern or interest in consistency.  For the first time I feel I am building a body of work that is both personal and interesting for me in the long term.

This weekend will yield serious work, potentially something new as I learn from and respond to each new painting.  And as I write this now I am even thinking of different ratios for the paintings; much to consider as night turns to day again...

the Decembrist

December.  I've journeyed through the current body of work for this entire year; sometimes with clear vision and often being surprised.  Try as I might, I can't write about it yet, and perhaps that's why it is still interesting.  I have two more modest-sized canvases in the final stages of black surfacing but I find myself wanting to go even larger than the works that flank me in the photo above.

I'm always seeing things differently, and discovering things in the studio.  The one thing I have noticed over the years is that I oscillate between very etherial work and very painterly, visceral work.  Two aspects of self perhaps, or maybe as simple as I get bored with one and want to do the opposite.

I've been able to develop independently here in the middle of nowhere; had I been living for the last decade in Seattle, or Memphis or New York, I don't know that I would have reached the same conclusions as I have in this studio.  The sheer size of my studio here is unique and wonderful for someone at my career level.

I feel utterly rejected here in SC, and this is a source of much frustration.  And while I get acclaim from my peers on both coasts, that hasn't translated into representation or shows.  I don't want just an art dealer, I want a true believer.  Maybe that's too much to ask in this economy, or even in the current state of affairs of Art and it's relationship to money.

I foresee myself continuing to do this work through the next year, though it will undoubtably change.  I'm looking forward to the semester break and hoping for the unseasonably warm temperatures to continue.