scrap

I took a utility knife to two 6' x 6' canvases tonight, destroying 3 months worth of work.  I have no problem admitting failure, nor do I fear it.  Failure teaches.  Coming out of it, I skinned both frames with new canvas and skinned two additional.  I've got sizing on everything and it's all drying.

There's a seduction to destroying one's own work; especially when it hasn't been seen.  The world will never know.  Some aspects of my process are secret, and I've learned to keep them that way.  There may come a day when someone wants access, but for now, I'm free to do as I please.

I solved the problems, and I've addressed the failures and the dramatic use of a knife was to ensure that I wouldn't flinch.  I had to burn my ships at the shore.  I know where I'm going now, I can see the way.  There's this moment  before another leap when I feel all alive and tingly and short of breath.  That's when I know it's really something.  I've never seen work like this before.  

I'm halfway through my day job break.  I accidentally read a calendar entry from work yesterday and it took all my facilities to push it back out of my consciousness.  This year has an exit strategy; a line in the sand.

Interestingly, I'll have four canvases in essentially the same stage of development.  I see the attack.  I know how I'm going to approach them, but the next few weeks are all surface prep.  I have 10 small (10" x 10") canvases coming this week to work out the process on.  I'll show them to the Greenville dealer if they are any good, but for now they are tools.  I'm not feeling poetic tonight.  I'm in a place of uncertainty and I'm anxious to see how this all goes down.

The year unwinds.  This is my favorite time of the year, the space between christmas and new year's.  The world seems slow and optimistic.  I haven't a clue what is going on in the world, or at the day job, or politically or anything else.  I'll paint, I'll spend time with friends and I'll find a way to make this space expand into months instead of weeks.

The SAM show is on the horizon now.  No word on the opening date, but likely the 16th or 23rd of January.  I hope it goes well, and I hope it's well-received.

uncertainty

il primo fallimento [the third station], (in progress), December 2013

There is no satisfaction in art.  Not in the making, and not in encountering.  At the very least, a work of art should leave you uncertain.  There should be some amount of anxiety.  Martha Graham called the creative process a "divine dissatisfaction."  Artists live in a state of uncertainty; we are by our very nature not satisfiers .   

Failure is essential to the artistic process.  Without repeated and progressive failure, there can be no growth, and without failure whatever you're making isn't art.  I like to be surprised in the studio.  I prefer a state of ambivalence where I may even be frightened or hesitant about what I see; what I've done.

The Stations series is taking me into that darkness.  I did not anticipate what working with black on black paintings would be like, nor what they would look like.  There is an eerie subtlety and haunting sensuality to this work; but that's speaking about impressions, not process.

The process involves laying down lots of paint and taking it away.  With the white on black works this gave way to forms, but with the black on black, the paintings become as much about what is absent and what has been removed.  Fitting from a theological perspective I suppose.

condanna [the first station], (in progress), Dec 2013

My initial experimentation with the process caught me off guard.  The works were not what I had anticipated but a the same time so much more.  As one would expect, they are incredibly difficult to photograph.  There's a pathos to them.  There's a sense of naked humanity and transcendent emptiness that I find very difficult to express in words.  

sticks

via Instagram

Paint sticks and the big black sketchbook and bourbon, alone in the parlor.  Fire and dog, hearth and home as the tired Odysseus; weary from the semester and its toll.  Black on black my thoughts; trading in subtlety, perhaps waxing intellectual against my better judgement.

There's something fine about oil paint across surface.  On paper, it glides and clumps and drags: roads, I am always on roads after all.  There's the work.  The work that is rigorous and hard but that is liberating in a way that nothing else is.  I tend to happen upon.  Yet I put myself there in the first place, and happenstance then becomes a constructed sum of intention and opportunity.  When we prepare ourselves for chance...well, there you have it.  

struggles

I have been working on the first two stations since late October.  I have found that black has to be contended with, at least in this case.  I confess I'm struggling; perhaps overthinking, as I wait and discover where these paintings want to go.  Much progress today, things are beginning to click for me.

I've said many times that work comes from work.  I'm not a big believer in inspiration or those lightening strikes moments in creation.  The best ideas/revelations/observations come in the moment of doing, when the mind is hyper-focused and attuned.  I am coming to terms with just how large of an undertaking this series truly is.

I'll build two more stretcher frames this week and skin them toward the end of the week or next weekend.  With 4 in play, I think I can begin to see them differently.  I was excited to move the two together on the large wall yesterday.

Black can be academic.  It's heady and intellectual from a painterly perspective.  It shows everything and what I'm most interested in right now is eliminating everything from my paintings and simply getting to the essence.

I took a long drive yesterday, down the two lane back roads and rural highways across to Union and back.  The pleasure of driving alone in a responsive car with no destination in mind is something too many people never experience.  That oneness of man and machine is sublime; a way, like painting, that enables one to lose themselves and reach intense universal awareness.  It is a like being naked in the ocean, lying on your back and looking at the stars; as if there is no beginning or end or separation from self and sky and sea.

So that's my head space for this work.  To take away everything until I reach the point of fragility and entropy and then to somehow stop it just before that moment.  To find the where the painting is about to collapse and stop just shy.  No color, no form.  Oneness and meditation.

two in the night

Two canvases in play, I smoked a cigar in the brisk night.  Good work tonight, and the weight of the past weeks felt lifted.   Black has a spiritual presence; as if the absence is itself being.  I can get distance now with the space cleaned out.  I can see.

There will be much paint thrown this week, good paint to purpose and meaning.  Quiet house and warmth now after the dampness of the evening rain seeped into my bones.  I've built walls to make room, I'll build more painting storage this weekend and wrap and store the large paintings.  Over the next few weeks I'll have 4 to 6 paintings in play; moving in and out from one to another like a boxer.  I feel purpose and direction again.

the black paintings

I managed to build a new wall in the studio over the long weekend, and now have much more room to work.  The temperatures this week look as if they may cooperate and I will rush into the studio when they do.  I have two, 6' square black canvases there now waiting.  I've been wrestling with where to go next, but as I have considered it and after bouncing it off a friend this afternoon, I know that I have do the series in all black.

I guest curated an online series about art and mysticism.  I think selecting the paintings for that series got me thinking about my influences and about painting and of course being in the studio and making work...work comes from work in that way.

I've never hid my love for Goya.  His Black Paintings are very much an inspiration; though I stumbled upon this series rather than decided to do it.  I also love Rothko's black paintings, perhaps more than anything else in his oeuvre.  The final "sign" was the weekend I posted the picture in the last post.  There was an article in the NY Times that same week about Ad Reinhardt's black paintings.  It seemed all things pointed to it, and while I momentarily worried about being derivative, I realized that these will be very much my own.

There's a lot of work to be done.  At this point I think it would be ambitious to think I can finish the series in a year.  So I am embarking on something epic in scope, as the paintings are epic in scale.  Like the best journeys, I don't know exactly what it will end up being.  I don't know if I'll stick to strict squares or incorporate other shapes and ratios.  I don't even know if these first two will end up even being good paintings or if they will be experiences that end up in the trash heap.  Some do.