I first went to NYC when I was 20 years old. Times Square was the manifestation of every cautionary tale from my fundamentalist upbringing brought to life and writ large; hookers, pimps, dealers, hustlers, junkies. It was dirty and dim and sketchy and I took those first steps along the yellow brick road toward my own Oz.
In the times I've returned throughout the years, I think back on that first impression and it makes me smile. Walking through the post St. Patrick's Day parade crowd in Times Square in heavy wet snow on Saturday night on my way uptown was nothing like that first encounter. (I got a high five from Batman, for christsake). New York, like all great cities of the world, gets under your skin and into your blood; and there is a part of me that is home there like nowhere else.
The Ides of March, James Austin Murray's solo show at Narthex Gallery did not disappoint. There will be more reflections on that in the weeks to come; it's still so new in my experience and so powerful in my memory. A friend said it best, "it is the perfect combination of art and space." The work belongs there. It inhabits the space in an intensely powerful way while somehow managing to coexist with it. It is solid, significant work, -by far the best painting I saw on the walls my whole visit.
I've spent the last 15 months or so shedding. Like Bird, I reached a point where I felt I had to withdraw for a time and find my voice. I may be no Charlie Parker to the visual art world, but I've got chops that ain't like nobody else's. It feels time to climb into the ring, to live or die by the intensity of personal vision and unyielding tenacity. I may get a few beat downs along the way, but the world will never see what I make no effort to show it. Now I know that it has to see it; that's why I'm here.
So I come back into the daily grind recharged and transcended. Good art always makes me want to paint. Being in artists' studios always makes me excited and on fire to return to my own. Shots in the pub and much bantering about art and paint and space and form, it's time well spent...always. But painting is what unites us. Time in the studio getting in and getting down; that is its own realness.
practice stillness
Althaea (in progress), oil on canvas, 48" x 60", Rico
I was able to get into the studio for a long session yesterday and made tremendous progress on two paintings I've been working on; one since last year and the other since February. I am fighting a cold I'd very much like to rid myself of before my NYC weekend.
I read one of my favorite art blogs and there's much to see in Chelsea, so I'll ask if anyone wants to make a day of it with me. Basquiat is top of my list.
The rare times when I'm able to log hours in the daytime make me wonder what my work would look like if I did this full time. As it stands, I can hardly keep up; I'm limited only by time and materials. Increasingly I can afford the materials and I keep myself well-stocked, but time is always against me. With oil, time is a medium in and of itself. I love that paintings take multiple sessions, because coming in and out of a picture enables me to see more than I would if I were able to plow through. Sometimes I miss acrylics for their immediacy, but mostly not. I'm interested in the Way of painting; the eternal journey towards perfection that manifests itself in daily practice. Keeping it slow means I spend most of my time looking in an attempt to see.
Something is reoccurring in the pictures as of late, these wide passages of emptiness; gaping orifices that recede into blackish void. They remind me of Caravaggio in the overt reference to the Nothingness; that backdrop of our conscious lives and the curtain that will eventually fall on each of us. Light and motion punctuated by eternal stillness. I think about the placid lake we hiked around on Paris Mountain last month. How ripples dissipate and stillness is itself a presence. Since the beginning of this body of work I have noticed references to the anatomical and the sensual. They often begin as gesture drawings, which of course also reference the body and nature. I don't think about these things in the studio when I'm painting. I attempt to clear my mind and paint with the non-mind. I'm interested in what the paint wants to do and I try to follow it. But here at home on a Sunday, I take a moment to consider.
11 days
In 11 days I'll be in NYC, attending the opening of the artist James Austin Murray. The show is a culmination of a year's work; a site-specific installation cum painting exhibition. I've watched the beginnings of this body or work through its evolution at the famous Bemis Center in Omaha, NE. Murray's work is menacing, beautiful, epic and powerful; it combines brutal physicality with a masterful dance with light and illumination. The deep grooves in his blacks bring associations of crowding around records in my teenage years; the ritual of taking in the album cover, the liner notes, the sleeve and the vinyl itself as visual and aesthetic experience. They are both terrible and wonderful to behold; and that's through reproduction.
Facebook has been on fire over the weekend with a posting by the online curator Art Orbiter of artists' studios from around the world. For me personally, to be included in any post with Miquel Barcelo, one of my major influences, is a tremendous honor and delight. It's so great to see all the different spaces in which artists practice. Before my current studio, I was reminded of the many studios I've had before; storage spaces, garage, extra bedroom, basement, subterranean tire warehouse, loft apartment. I stuck with it in the times between studios as well. Who is Art Orbiter? I may have a clue, but I'll never tell.
My own show opens next Thursday at Art & Light in Greenville. I ran into one of the other artists, a well-known printmaker whose work my wife and I have collected for years, and we found out we're in the same venue, the Hub, at ArtFields.
I submitted Jocasta to Carolina's Got Art this afternoon, so my potential reach in April extends far and wide across the Carolinas.
Tonight I'll brave the cold and sit on our front porch and smoke a nice maduro with my Japanese scotch. And still I rise.
Facebook has been on fire over the weekend with a posting by the online curator Art Orbiter of artists' studios from around the world. For me personally, to be included in any post with Miquel Barcelo, one of my major influences, is a tremendous honor and delight. It's so great to see all the different spaces in which artists practice. Before my current studio, I was reminded of the many studios I've had before; storage spaces, garage, extra bedroom, basement, subterranean tire warehouse, loft apartment. I stuck with it in the times between studios as well. Who is Art Orbiter? I may have a clue, but I'll never tell.
My own show opens next Thursday at Art & Light in Greenville. I ran into one of the other artists, a well-known printmaker whose work my wife and I have collected for years, and we found out we're in the same venue, the Hub, at ArtFields.
I submitted Jocasta to Carolina's Got Art this afternoon, so my potential reach in April extends far and wide across the Carolinas.
Tonight I'll brave the cold and sit on our front porch and smoke a nice maduro with my Japanese scotch. And still I rise.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)