measures

Late night, much rye whiskey and reflection on Serra; the artist, the sculptures, the drawings.. the fucking drawings.  This idea of art compressing, altering, redefining, inhabiting space.  I think of James Austin Murray's show; the collision of surface and light and the volume of space.  Associations with Stella, of course, but only now association with Serra.  I quote:

Since black is the densest color material, it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum and thereby changes the artificial as well as the natural light in a given room.  A black shape can hold its space in relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily.  [italics my own]

Serra contends that, "black is a property, not a quality," and why not?  Indeed.  I make work that physically alters the space it inhabits.  This is interesting to me.  Sculptural yes, I fancied myself a sculptor when I began.  Yet the making of things led me to painting; kicking and screaming at times, but led me to it nonetheless.

Something else; "one cannot take down the Master's house with the Master's tools."  So we forge and hack, and co-opt and guerrilla.  One must be irreverent towards materiality; the formal must be the cage from which we free ourselves.  Is this the whiskey talking?  I think not.  For me, the Spanish masters.. Velasquez, Goya, and the Italian Caravaggio.  I wail against the blacks; the eternal space within the space which recedes and yet always asserts.

I am up against the process now.  I cannot execute the size and scale I want to with my current process of working vertical/horizontal/vertical.  I cannot physically lift and lower the pieces which exist in my mind's eye.  They must be contended with; my most challenging work is work I've had to contend with physically.  Like wrestling angels.  There are many warrior paths; mine is the peaceful warrior Way; discipline, repetition, aestheticism.  How can I engage the plane in a vertical condition?  I must wrestle with this.

More Serra:

[black] holds itself to a more compressed field, it is comparable to forging.

Indeed; the reconciliation between my sculptural intents and painterly practice.  I forge the picture; austere and hermetic and unapologetically concerned with the spiritual through no particular god.  I've been contemplating our instinctual human need for new gods.  It is time.  We need gods and myths that speak to our condition.  We need heroic epic poetry to bring our men and women warriors back across the sea.

And now, Boston.  Madness and tragedy.  Senselessness.  Can art [Art] counteract ignorance?  I believe it can, or else I go mad myself.

the rains are coming

Work is the preferred state of man.  Jobs are socially imposed constructs; they are seldom related to work but instead are directly tied to production and monetary compensation.  There's a reason a hard day's work in the yard, or garage or studio feels different than a day on the job; no matter the job.  It is because work is done for self and for betterment and for purpose and only tangentially for outcome.  The studio is work.  I lose track of time there.  I become immersed in the process of doing and seeing and listening and being when I am in the studio.  Paint.  Putting paint onto surface and taking it off and moving it around and watching it become, fall apart, become again; these are meaningful activities and meaningful purposes.  Art, the product of work, appeals to us precisely because it represents something tangibly different from the lack of truth from our jobs.  Even if, in the capacity of performing one's job some thing is made (more likely produced); it does not hold the life force of that which is wrought from work.

Painting is work.  Bloody knuckles and strained hands and tired eyes from honest labor in the service of the work.  I find it amazing when people from very different walks of life from my own find this quality in my art; I believe in that moment they see the work.

I don't care about illusion.  I never want to disguise that this is support and ground and surface and paint.  I've nothing against my West Coast brothers and sisters with their finish fetish, but it's not for me.  I love the raw, poetic edge of a canvas.  It is the anthropological record; the blood and bone and sinew.  It would be a falsehood for me to attempt to hide it or paint over it.  I inhabit the raw, bloody land of history and enslavement and war and struggle.  The work must breathe with this inhabitation and its ghosts.

The rains are coming.

And there is a cigar and a porch and whiskey as the big drops wash away the blood and sweat and struggle into night.

march on

Jocasta, oil on canvas, 60" x 48", Rico '13

Notification came from Carolina's Got Art, a large, duel-Carolina juried art exhibition.  I confess I was surprised at the decision (submission above), but ultimately all juried shows intersect an audience at a moment of time and place.  There's no reward in wondering why; it is a judgment and one takes it and moves on.

I finished crating my entry to ArtFields this afternoon.  It's wrapped, boxed and I make the journey to beautiful Lake City on Friday, apparently in the rain.  Though I envisioned a perfect storm, alas I was rebuffed by Charlotte this time.  I will wage another campaign, albeit through another process.

Clearing the studio of work is always a positive experience.  I hung two of the smaller paintings on the big wall and I feel really great about the work going on right now.  I have two canvases in process, one is ready to go the next time I get into the studio.

I lose this week to my wife's tech week for her play, but there are always the stolen moments.

Overall, I feel so fortunate and so focused.  The setback today was unexpected but not substantial.  If everyone liked my work I would have to seriously re-consider what I'm doing.  It shouldn't be easy to like; there should be barriers to it.  I think of Gauguin, "the ugly can be beautiful; the pretty, never."