St. Christopher

untitled study, 4" x 7", oil on canvas board, Rico '13

"Hang on St. Christopher through the

smoke and the oil, buckle down the rumble seat

let the radiator boil..."  -Tom Waits

I submitted work to ArtFields, an interesting endeavor in the small town of Lake City, South Carolina.  It is my first attempt in a very long time to exhibit work in the state in which I have lived for over a decade.  The moment felt right, the work is ready to be seen and so I stuck my neck out.  I'll update this blog in a couple of weeks when I hear the panel's decision.  Either way, I will pull no punches about the process, the festival and the quality of work exhibited.  They want to make some noise.  So do I.

My head is in NYC at the moment.  I found out there will be a large Basquiat exhibit going on while I'm there and I look forward to seeing what else is on the walls.  My Greenville dealer is coming down next week for a studio visit, so that will be what it is.  Always a pleasure to host Teresa, she is one of those rare people who genuinely loves, and I mean loves art and artists.  There are times I wished we both lived in another part of the world; I feel we could move a tremendous amount of paintings.

I've been down with health issues all week, despite my overall healthy lifestyle.  There are parts of growing old that don't bother me one bit and there are parts that completely stink.  Death is the price of life, no one avoids the long march into night.   I hope I go in my studio with stained fingers and the paint still wet on whatever I was working on. 

Between the cold and illness I haven't worked in over a week, which causes tremendous internal stress. I've so much to do, several works in process and I need to get back in the studio for these things and my own sanity.  I hope to catch a break this weekend.   Until then I hold on.

drift

"Buffalo 2", in progress, oil on canvas

60" x 48", Rico '13

There's this sense of living with the work.  I don't know how to explain it; I start a painting and it is like I'm searching for which note will come next as I play.  That's the thing, -one feels the way through; it isn't prescribed or a picture in the head thing.  It's organic.  Paintings evolve and for me it is almost a call and response relationship for weeks or months or years.  Paint is laid down.  Sometimes in earnest, sometimes tentatively at first (though one has to overcome that immediately).    I do a lot of looking.  Eventually I see.

This one wouldn't let me go.  Thought it was nearly done last year but it wasn't.  I painted out huge swaths of it over the weekend because I wanted that openness in the composition.  I wanted to take it right up to looking incomplete.  Maybe that's how we are; that's the human condition.

I'm becoming more interested in gray.  

New canvases arrived today, along with black gesso and tubes of Mars black.  I can't stop now, I'm in deep.

voice

The rain came down on the tin roof of the studio last night and there was jazz, mournful and ethereal, filling the space.  I had deemed a painting lost just before the New Year, but decided to go back into it and keep in it.  It is slow going but it it coming.  It feels like sculpting stone, as I've had to chip here and there and wait and look and try to see.

A cigar and a nice Roija and contemplation as the paint dried.  I looked over some of the newer studies; I looked around the studio and I felt a sense of singularity -a sense of voice.  There are those who say that there is nothing new.  I say that when one is open and honest and seeks out their voice, that expression is unique in the universe.  It has never been and it will never be again.  I've no concern for novelty for its own sake.  I try to stay open and to paint through.

I've been in this studio for 5 years this month.  It is a second home, a respite to a working father and husband and gentleman.  It is my Byronic island where I detach myself from the world.  There will be construction this month, a new wall on the south side.  The space will change, but I am changing and my work is changing and evolution is fitting and natural to the sustained purpose of things.

 

the spiritual in art

currently untitled, oil on canvas, 60" x 48", Rico '13

I came of age as a painter when it was unpopular to take up the mantle of Mark Rothko and the Sublime.  Perhaps that is one of the reasons the path appealed to me, I've never been very good as a conformist; despite my best efforts,  I inevitably allow my contempt to show and then it's all out in the open.  But I think that one of the functions of art is to connect us to alternative realms of consciousness and shared experiences.

It's not just about beauty.  I'm interested in magnificence and wonder.  The oceans and mountains stir in us the sensations of both admiration and fear.  Nature, as anyone who spends time outdoors will tell you, must be respected; and there's a heavy price for not doing so.  I have a deep love of the epic and vast landscapes of deserts and oceans and the arctic.    They are to me the places of the gods, old and new.  I'm concerned with the primordial and divine, even though I practice religious abstinence as a rule in my personal life.

I don't know that I've gotten to that place yet in my work, but I feel I'm getting close.  I don't care about cleverness, -I loathe it in art to be brutally honest.  I respect work that is powerful and muscular, or ethereal and fluid, and defies itself; whatever that self may be.  I believe that so-called color field abstraction is the great unfulfilled promise of the Ab Ex movement.  It was snuffed, -not because of the exhaustion of its ideas, but because of the fear of its mysticism.  Hard edge and geometrical abstraction, -to my mind, won the day because it is far easier to be intellectual than to trade in matters of the soul.  I have nothing against that kind of abstract painting, I have more friends and acquaintances that paint in those styles than paint like me.  Being an exile, I have the freedom to associate with painters I respect, and that in fact don't seem immediately related to my aesthetic, even though they often are in subtle ways.  I like good art.  I hate bad art.  The "style" has jack to do with whether a painting succeeds or fails; it's what's behind it and in it and what comes through it.

I'm an artist because I'm invested in working toward the perfection of my ideas.  I may not get there, but it doesn't really matter.  The journey will continue to transform me and perhaps a few others along the way.  I may never sell another painting and there are times when that is so incredibly liberating.  When work sells it gives voice to all those other aspects of self that try to come into the studio: the critic, the procrastinator, the naysayer and the conformist.  The best work I've sold has sometimes been undocumented, and there's something fitting about that.  I can't refer to it as a template. I can't ever look at it again and say, "yeah, I should do 20 of those."  Working towards the perfection of my ideas means that the work leads the way.  I follow it; sometimes unwillingly, sometimes in wild abandon.  I don't paint like I did 8, 5 or even 1 year ago.  There is a vernacular, -I suppose that's unavoidable and perhaps that is what people refer to when they refer to style.  It's my manner of painting, but it isn't conscious.  I repeat themes, but I attack them differently as I learn from each painting.  I believe that every painting should be autonomous in the studio.

I was thinking today how fortunate I am to have to grapple with doubt as often as I do.  Some never doubt themselves or question their existence, and so far in my experience I find them to be not very interesting people and often quite tedious.  Fundamentalists of all persuasions are the worst; there are few traits more tiresome in a human being than certitude and self-righteousness.  But to have to climb into the ring against yourself, that is to my mind the measure of man and the essence of an artist.  You can't fake yourself out, and you can't really ever cheat your art because your soul will not give you comfort if you do.  There is what Martha Graham called "that divine unrest" that drives the true artist to push through and beyond and to keep going when it feels like they are all alone in a place no one will ever see or know, much less understand.  I believe one has to go to those places and bring it back and put it up on the wall, or on the page, or on stage.  You have to take us as the audience on that great quest.  It may be the closest some of them ever get to a real quest in their lives.  That's the artist's charge.