lost in the words

the artist's studio, via Instagram

Strong few sessions over the last few days, four paintings in play and ready to stretch another two.  I look forward to the holiday weekend with lots of uninterrupted studio time.  New associations come into play- anatomical, disruption, and also constant themes - entropy, collapse.  This is one of my favorite studio spaces to-date and I look forward to all the ways it will grow with the work.  Happy to have finally found my work home in this town.

These new paintings feel at once abstract and at times veering toward representation of some thing; though what is unclear and unintentional.  Also, as though the composition is falling apart but sustained...in stasis.  There is a tense balance, a discordant symmetry that is just enough off to feel organic and even disturbing.  Ever toward the sublime.  

The false Fall

"Halah", oilbar on paper (from sketchbook), 2018

Early days of false fall, cloudy and craving layers but temperatures still climb into the 90's.  This week I attack old inventory in the studio to make room to work; no mercy.  I end my days with a single work in the sketchbook, exploring, ever onward, thinking in this shorthand that perhaps only I can see as paintings in another medium and different size.  NYC is calling, but I fear it will be 2019 before I return.  The staid slow local scene may come more alive here as things cool, but I miss the madness of Chelsea and roaming the night with my brothers in arms.  

Color is coming.  It has wandered back into the work of its own volition during my forced hiatus from a proper studio.  I'm curious to see how it translates, but this one feels like a real step toward that honest exploration.  I've been feeling the need to sit in on life drawing again; it helps me think clearly and it is ultimately humbling.  Work comes from work.  

My thoughts are of ancient cities, once-mighty empires whose names are all but forgotten.  Their great cultures reduced to dusty bones and pottery shards.  Art endures because it tells the story, and stories endure long past conquests and wealth and powerful kings.  City names that now sound like prayers, whispered into the nothingness in a desperate half effort to assert what we all long to hear, "I was here.  I lived and loved and accomplished and committed and failed and died.  Remember me."  

The Mill

Taylors Mill Studio, Greenville, October 2018

Epic progress last night, but a long way to go before up and working.  I spent the evening unpacking, rediscovering a life boxed 10 months ago.  It's interesting that the little things are what make it feel like my space: brushes, my banged up hotplate for cooking rabbit skin glue, small favorite tools with the well-worn imprints of my hands.  Placing everything based on two decades of experience, knowing how I will reach for them and listening to how the space itself wants to be; this is the process of discovery and interaction.

It struck me what an odd vocation this is; moving into an empty room and making it into a creative space -I daresay a sacred space.  The feeling is built out of what I bring; until then it's merely 4 walls.

 

 

The long road home

The strange journey that began last year is only now coming to a plateau.  My tenure at GCCA was brief, the studio proved too small and the distance too great.  I abandoned the effort in early fall of 2017, and left on good terms with the community.  We finally sold our house in Clinton and found a great house in Greenville this past May.   The journey was fraught with many setbacks and obstacles, but at long last I may finally have found more suitable studio space locally.

In early December I closed the Clinton studio, exactly one decade after moving in.  To be in a studio for a long period of time is a powerful thing.  Work and energy combine to create a space where the soul can open up, and the W. Main St. studio will always be an important historical space for my career, even though it went completely under the local radar there.  

As I prepare to move the last element of our lives to a new city, I feel relief and release.  I have been working out of a utility closet in our new house for months, and am ready for a proper work space away from home.  

I hope to find out Tuesday if the new studio is a go.  The Rico Act will resume its regularly scheduled broadcasts as I start over in a new art scene.  I'll also be monetizing my Instagram account and offering more online purchase offerings for my work.  

These 9 months "off" have given me perspective and new ideas that I can't wait to explore in the new studio, but mostly I can't wait to get back on a regular work schedule.