"first I'm gonna make it, and then I'm gonna break it 'til it falls apart."

-Echo and the Bunnymen

Spent the first cool night of the end of summer in the studio, working on this larger painting and beginning another in the current series.

After I laid down the base layer of color (the most uplifting red I've seen in some time), I reclaimed the famous orange chair and just enjoyed looking at that red before I started to bury it.

Had some visitors stop by and I realized that I've started re-connecting to the world outside the studio walls. In that peaceful moment, in my chair, I realized that I have been in a state of chrysalis, and that now I am emerging a changed being.

They say that Scorpios go through 3 distinct phases. I have entered into my phoenix stage, where I am both aware of and at peace with the full extent of my powers, and I have realized the largest battles I fight are solely with myself. Despite the catastrophe of my personality over the course of my life, I have survived these attacks of self on self, and now I feel stronger and more confident in virtually every aspect of my being. This applies to the work as well.

If sleep disorders have returned temporarily to my life, it is largely out of excitement rather than anxiety. I feel that I see the road ahead more clearly than I have in years, possibly decades. And if my particular corner of the zodiac is sometimes seen as magical and intense, my recent self-awareness has amped up these energies to particular effect.

I have to say it feels good to begin the arduous process of getting out there once again. I've a way to go in terms of building enough work in this current series, but I expect to maintain my pace. We will see what the response is this weekend and throughout the month as the exhibition runs through October.

I am contemplating resurrecting MDM as part of the website overhaul.

First things first. I apologize for the quality of the photos. I'm temporarily on a PC and the stock photo-editing software in a word, sucks. These two paintings are off to Greenville this weekend for submission to a group show. I'll post the dates when/if the work is accepted.

I'm wrapping them up tonight and we're a go for tomorrow. It's been a crazy week. Someone at my new job asked me when I get time to paint, and I said I had to eliminate extraneous uses of time; namely, sleep. I discovered that sleep is overrated in college. I suffered from intense bouts of insomnia in my early 20's. By the time I moved to California, this had mostly subsided, but at its peak I would be up for 3 or 4 days at a time. When you don't get sleep, you're never fully awake. The strangest experiences ever were usually about day 3, when your body forces a kind of walking REM cycle. I would be walking around, doing stuff, but I would dream for what seemed like seconds. Long, complicated dreams, usually mirroring whatever I was doing, sort of like playing a video loop except you're living it. Needless to say, I loved Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club the moment I read it, though this was a decade after my own experiences.

I confess that hit the wall today. Thus the rambling....

So, back to the work. I borrowed the shadow-box frame from a painter friend in LA. Saw his work in Brooklyn last year and loved the frames. We talked about them on the phone and I'm pleased with how they came out and the extra "umph" they give the work. I feel good about the work.

I was finally able to order more canvases and hope to get back into a routine next week. I'm frustrated with not being able to blog as much as I'd like and the quality of the photos, but I will keep at it. Thanks for reading...whoever you are.

And thanks to those of you who comment and communicate with me via twitter or email. It means a lot to have your support and feedback.

Posted some of the current series on my Facebook page. Got a few thumbs up, which always feels good for a few moments. I'm off to buy lumber to make frames for the two submissions I'll be delivering next week, plus a larger painting I've decided to put in my new office.

I have some medium arriving this week and I can get back to work.

I told a friend recently that I'm ready to take my career to the next level, but I don't really know how to do that. It's been a crazy year, and even though there's lots to remain negative and even fatalistic about, I for one just don't have it in me anymore. We may lose a large chunk of our government to right-wing wackos (yeah, I said it) this november, but well, good luck with that people. As the fab four said, "we'd all love to see the plan."

None of that changes going into the studio and laying it down and spending time letting the work speak. In some ways I feel like this current work is very technical, and yet it seems to have an unprecedented mass appeal. It's arguably the most non-objective painting I've ever done, while at the same time existing as almost straight-ahead landscapes. It's also a hell of a lot of fun to paint, so I see a lot of it coming.

For once in my life, I'm trying hard not to stop doing something because people tell me they like it. How's that for career-pathing?

I'm also really sick of hearing myself bitch and moan about being remote. I love being remote 99% of the time. I love NYC, but 48 hours of it and I'm ready to be in a big, open field by myself, or out on the beach. I don't think the vistas I'm creating could come from my previous life as an urban-dweller. The lack of density I have lived in this past decade has gotten me in touch with my childhood sense of space from the Southwest. The new work is small (by my standards) and ready to hang, so I've eliminated one of the many, and very real obstacles to exhibiting elsewhere.

For those handful of people that I know have followed me from the MDM blog and have a sense of the arc of my work in the past 3 or 4 years, I think there is a new maturity in this recent stuff. I'd like to hear from you. Not flattery either, just observations. Part of this blog, as well as MDM was about transparent process. Part of that process is a fair amount of self doubt and inhibition and even hesitation. Until recently, I held back on some approaches I wanted to embrace. Now I feel a new confidence and focus. I just need to figure out how to translate that into getting me and my work to a broader audience, preferably in person.

Took apart the large table last night and stood it up as a mock-up wall. I've been kicking around some reconfiguration ideas over the past few months. Long trip to Mississippi, and I've had a hard time bouncing back this week. I don't travel like I used to, though I enjoyed the journey immensely.

I got an exhibition call from one of the Greenville arts groups I was a member of last year. I'm going to submit a couple of the current works to their group show, and see how they are received. I've honestly no idea.

I had some time to sit and think about the studio and next year. There's much to be said for a room of one's own. Even with the loss of working time due to extremes in temperature, I am able to work for 3/4 of the year in bad years and more normally. During my frantic periods of production I tend to churn it out, so it still seems worth it.

Yeah, Greenville. Sort of a crap shoot really, the last show (gallerist aside, who was wonderful) was a glorious waste of time. But I have reworked the brand, so to speak, and these current paintings are smaller and to me at least, distilled. They pack a lot of presence into a more compact visual space. I feel the price is fair, but again the Greenville market surprises me (not always pleasantly) when it comes to sophistication....nuff said in a public forum.

Felt good being back in the space last night after so much of the last month out. Reminded me how vital the studio practice is to my over all health and life.

I'll be driving across the blazing southland in a few days; time on the open road in solitude. I grew up in cars; my earliest memories are the strange inverted silly string of telephone poles and power lines against endless blue, humming by the backseat window of a mid-60's Volkswagen beetle. In those days, each exit was a mini-portal into another world - a distilled essence of the community on whose fringe it sat. While there was certainly a vernacular to those spaces; the gas station, the greasy spoon restaurant, the errant "adult" bookstore or beat-down strip bar for truckers, each one exuded character and occasional mystery. I took it all in at 55 mph, stretched out across the backseat with a favorite comic book, and the solid drone of highway just underneath the thin floor of German steel.

It is said conformity breeds contempt. When one drives across the land now everything looks essentially the same. You can almost identify the corporate package. There's no way to tell if you're in Bakersfield or Biloxi from the exits or the architecture...only the terrain and the sky can offer that revelation. It is as if the old spirits are desperately trying to whisper beneath the sprawl, "when you can no longer see us, you will all lose your way."

When I moved back to the South from California, I rode a mid-70's police bike along route 66 and across I-40. Me, the road, what few bags I could carry. I had lost all my possessions twice in my short life in San Diego; first to what I thought was love, second to a crack-addicted roommate who wanted to be a porn star. Since then I've always traveled light, and I can say I'm a lot happier.

When you travel by bike, you experience the road very differently. I outran mammoth weather fronts in Texas and Oklahoma, was sidelined by a tornado in Arkansas, and pummeled by rain in Tennessee. I can't say I'd do it again, at least not in my life's current incarnation. But were I to lose it all, I'd probably stick a 1% patch on my old leather and head back out onto the unending road.

Yet somehow I stumbled into a damn-near perfect life, and despite the many struggles I often write about I feel fortune most days. I'll always paint, even if I never sell another painting. As much as I'd like to be more successful as an artist, long ago I adopted what I consider to be Picasso's greatest lesson - make a lot of art, then make a lot more. If you can't be brilliant, be prolific and wait for something to stick.

I realize that I am hindered by place. There is no denying that. Yet I am equally liberated by it, free to make work that is self-contextual and shielded from the ever-shifting currents of what Art is Now, and the slow, agonizing and seemingly eternal death of painting. Though I'm currently out of medium and canvas, I'll bounce back next month and keep going.

Every painting teaches me something. There's something to that.

Mississippi awaits me this weekend, then back through Birmingham and the hot road to Atlanta and back into the palmetto state. The road trip is an art unto itself, I guess. The peculiar birthright of those us in the 48. All you need is a place to go and a way to get there, a fortitude to weather obstacles and an openness to discover what's along the way and sometimes take a diversion. That and a cache of excellent tunes as a personal soundtrack.

There's freedom in that.

ill fares the land, oil on canvas, 40" x 30", Rico 2010

I was riding back from a fellow painter's Brooklyn studio one night last fall, heading back into the city. The conversation turned toward Diebenkorn; the quiet but pervasive influence, the subtle yet powerful force of it, -Ocean park of course (though I prefer Albuquerque). The name keeps coming up, in other conversations, other mentions, always on the tip of everyone's tongue.

I got turned on to the work of Stuart Shils over the weekend, so that adds another layer...3 instances a trend sort-of-thing.

I can't deny the assertion of landscape which is coming into my work. Traveling without moving, or so it seems to me.

So there's another half dozen canvases being shipped to the studio for August. I'll get back from Mississippi (goddamn, Nina) and I'll keep going. My wife asked if I was getting ready for a show...I hadn't thought about it. Haven't been looking (or asking) as of late, so I think it is far from my mind. I'm glad I canceled the Charleston show earlier this year, though I wonder if have a place there at some point. Hard to know. (Wondering if I'll ever have a place anywhere some days).

I'm anxious to get up to see Matisse. We've got a big family wedding in September that was a sledgehammer hit to our finances. What are you going to do? I'll make it.

Found myself relaxed yesterday afternoon; good friends, great food, beer and an impromptu thunderstorm...(love those dixie storms). Watched the new Criterion edition of Mystery Train last night and got sentimental for Memphis, -which is just a false emotion on so many levels. Started my morning with Hood Internet's remix of Ice Cube's today was a good day. So it was, so it was.

week 1

week 2

week 3

Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916, oil on canvas
8.5" x 11.75"

The time has come to brave the heat of the City and pop up to NYC to check out Matisse at MoMA. Don't ask me how or when, I've got a little time yet. When I saw this painting recently, I knew I had to get up there. I haven't been profoundly moved by a painting in a very long time, but something in this, -even in reproduction, just grabs me. It's hard to explain; it's not like I love every moment of this picture, yet everything works for me at the same time. Is Matisse the answer? It has happened to other artists before me; traveling to the great museum and encountering another painter's work and then...everything becomes clear.

Yeah, it's 100 degrees here too, I'll be in the museum all day anyway.

Leaving the Corner Office

Today is my last day at the job I've had for the last 5 years. Tomorrow I start a new job, two blocks from the studio. There is the widely-held illusion that "successful" artists don't have day jobs, but all the one's I know do. It may not be working for someone else, they may lecture, write, do workshops or something like that, but those things certainly constitute a large portion of their lives spent doing something else for money.

We all find what we can do, and we make time for our real work because that is what gives our lives meaning. I feel very fortunate to have found another job in this economy.

In truth, I love change. I thrive on it. So I'm in arguably the healthiest place I've been in a long time. The studio work is flowing, though I am largely ambivalent about it still.

The current office is now emptied of any presence I had here. It looked much better with my large painting and favorite potted plant here. Raise a glass to new beginnings.

(click any image to enlarge)

i'm enjoying the tape on these paintings. something works about it. i am tempted to leave it, and to let it become part of the whole. i'm not interested in illusion, -my paintings are things, physical objects made by human hands and force of will, and sometimes little else of consequence. something about the tape left on is interesting to me...it makes the painting an artifact.

The heat index is 108 degrees as I write this. It's around 95 or so in the shade. It's only June. Dear god.

I tweeted last night that I am struggling with the new work and feel like a sham. The only clear choice is keep making it. That's what I do, I just keep going. Long after all the evidence has been presented as to how futile this pursuit truly is, I keep going. I honestly don't even know why anymore.

I can say it's not mere habit or routine. I go to great lengths and overcome much just to keep doing this. On some fundamental level, I really mean to do it, -there's real intent at work. Sometimes the futility gets to me. Everybody has their days I suppose.

Two weeks from today I start a new day job, and I'm incredibly thankful for this. My current situation has been deteriorating for the past year and intensely so for the past 6 months. It's the internet, so I'll leave it at that. The change is a positive one, and I'm excited. It is a modest change but enough to keep the studio should I decide to go that route next year.

More images next week. All these current paintings have so much paint on them now that I can no longer tell which was which, or what pictures I've posted. Of note is that the only vertical one suddenly became very Forest and Sea-like. Just sort of became it, and I still don't know what to make of that. I'm enjoying moving the paint around, piling it up and scraping it off. I wish I made slick, pretty paintings sometimes, but it just won't come. To me, there is always an underlying brutality and barbarism to them...but maybe I'm just seeing myself. I've been parading around as a normal person for so long now I even believe it myself sometimes. To change now just seems vain and hypocritical. Funny how we attach ourselves to our sense of self and to that facade of personality that it has taken us a lifetime to erect.