Junebug

Thick Southern air seeps into the skin and soul.  Summertime is candela wrapped cigars and studio doors wide open to the heavy night.  I am a summer painter.  I love the slow heat.  Undulating clouds of thunderstorms and distant tropical storms fill me with renewal and passion and longing.  Twelve-year-old Hukushu to round out the night and still the mind, unwind, and leave the rigors of painting and grappling with form and materials to another session.

Two paintings in various states of beginning.  A show in September to clear the studio of reassurances that come with lots of paintings surrounding me.  There comes a point where they all have to face the wall; one has to recapture autonomy in each new effort.  I have  stayed within the parameters I set last year and the work benefits each time, but I cannot become self-referencial.

My process is the slow grind.  Work and re-work, wait, dry, wait and re-work and wait.  Weeks and months; using accidents but then honing their power into something directed and labored which eventually looks spontaneous.  I am dedicated to the path of simplicity.  Simplicity takes discipline and patience and honesty in one's practice.

There's a growing body of work in the studio.  It is becoming intensely focused and deftly executed and at times I feel that I am watching it unfold and come into being as a passive observer.  I am patient and watchful and have no objective in mind save being in the moment of each work as I participate in the dance of painting.

A second glass and the night is still and quiet.  No trains now.  No distractions of the mundane.  Tomorrow I will visit the studio and see what I have to work with.  I'll push ever onward.   

salt life

I'm on the beach and Andrea passed us by.  I'm watching the trails of lighting flashes in the sky and thinking about the two unresolved canvases in the studio back home.  I was invited to be part of a group exhibition, so more on that when I have dates and more information.

The girls of summer are strewn on hotel beds; all-day poolside and ocean air-kissed sleeping the sleep of children and animals, unfettered by anxieties of the past or future.  Life is new and immediate...these things we lose with age, and try every day to regain again.

The moment.  Painting is so much about being present, patient and watchful.  Every action creates possibility, and denies options.  Make a mark.  This single act of dissidence causes the whole of the universe to rush forward with all the power of its being.  So paintings fail.  Most are not built to withstand, but then, some do.  I'm in the zone.  New wall built, another one will be erected soon in the studio and with it more wall space, more contemplation of this thing, these visions that keep me moving forward and embracing the blessed uncertainty.

Black.  White.  Neutral elements and yet so powerful.  Associations with the abyss and always with me I am looking to Caravaggio and, -as of late, grappling with that son of bitch and his blackness.  No one paints the emptiness so full of presence.  No one ever has.  The Don Voisine show did that for me to lesser degree.  Those blacks were so astoundingly rendered; so technical and precise and each painting so nailed.  Well done, Maestro.  Well done.

And what of this strange split life?  New York every other month?  Counterbalanced by the bucolic daily life and studio and town and Main Street dying around me like countless Main Streets dying all over the nation.  The night is quiet and dim save the trains that thunder through day in and day out.  I watch the cars filled to the brim with coal, then retuning empty, then full again the next day.

But tonight the sea.  Moonlight and surf and stars and thoughts of the work in progress.