the machine

I went back into the large painting on Saturday, with not unsuccessful results. I'm developing greater control over the flow and getting a better handle on the desired viscosity of the paint. After many studies and two attempts at taking it larger I will likely use acrylic paint as a ground with some raw pigment added to get into deeper blacks. I can then put down a layer of alkyd followed by a thin layer of black in oil. What gets interesting is the response of the white to the wet surface and with the added bleeding effect of more mineral spirits. But the ground, -the surface, needs a cold, flat uniformity.

I bought a large masonry trowel and this was used to good effect. Scale and proportion; it all comes down to being able to make relative marks by utilizing the proper relationship to the scale of the studies. That's when it works. For what I want to do, I may have to make my own monster palette knives. So far I have not seen anything large enough.

It feels like things are going so slowly with constant interruption to studio hours. But soon the spring will come, my wife's show will go up, and time will once again be an ally. Until then...

the fire

Locked out of the studio for the past week and a half has me self-destructing, and underscores that fact that I paint as much to survive and be human as anything else. Visited Charleston and got the painful reminder of the Art World I choose not to live in, albeit in micro chasm. The problem with what the internet has done to people's notion of proximity is this: everywhere now thinks it is the shit. Don't get me started on Greenville...where? exactly.

There is something magical and self-expanding to getting on a plane, bus, boat, car and going someplace that scares the bejesus out of you...preferably alone and knowing no one there. Those experiences let you find your core, the sum total of your own wretched self-ness and the excavation of "I". If you're not in it, you're not part of it, and in the end it is easy to complain, criticize and dismiss from a safe distance. that's why there is so much vitriol on newspaper blogs in the comments section.

I was fortunate enough to sit in on an improv workshop with my wife on Sunday and I was struck by something our friend Greg, the workshop leader, said afterwards. he said he wasn't interested in making decent theatre. he would rather it be horrible or brilliant than decent. the highest compliment I can give art is when it makes me want to make art. that's the real stuff. everything else is vanity and bullshit, no matter the price tag.

I don't care about anything but making significant work. i have realized that may take the rest of my life and it may come with numerous heavy prices in addition to those already paid, but it really doesn't matter. so much undone right now in the studio waiting for a thaw. rejections and dismissals aside, i answer to me and me alone in the studio. at least i know what i'm looking at and how to see. fits and starts come, always there are interruptions -well deserved and well-meaning, but interruptions nonetheless. i'm riding a razor blade in those perfect moments of focus when time falls away.

watching theatre students struggle with the unknown aspect of art was revealing. i forget why it's scary to pedestrians sometimes. possibly because I like the scary. I like the unknown, the potential for abject failure, the risk of soul and fortune. it makes me feel alive to watch/conjure this living thing called a painting...like flame, like fire one must tend it but it always wants to escape and consume or die out completely. the moments in the fire are the greatest moments of living.

the winter

i was recently denied another juried exhibition. par for the course to some degree. i thought i had selected every factor carefully, but in the end i did not make the cut. correction: my work did not make the cut.

i am feeling horribly adrift at the moment. my wife's job is tenuous as academia continues to turn away (and cut) the Arts. we dodged the bullet last year, but we both fear that the budgetary and cultural gun is still fully-loaded. the pressures of this and kids force me to reconsider my life's trajectory almost constantly. i've been hammering away at this art thing for two decades with only limited success and no representation. there comes a point where the resources (financially, emotionally, and spiritually) become too thin. sustainability is in question.

location is undeniably a factor, but since my location is not likely to change in the immediate future I must accept this factor as a significant impediment to any success. my work is not appreciated in this region, and that seems unlikely to change.

i'm also at odds with what i see when i look at the galleries/art world in that it seems another wave of conceptualism is in full force. i call it "idea art" and the term is derisive. complex ideas manifested into soulless, sterile art school art. with the death of Don Cornelis yesterday I'm thinking a lot about soul, and that is something i feel my work has always had.

i believe in outdated notions like the Sublime, the life force within art and the role of the artist as shaman/spiritual guide. social commentary is always a part of my work, but it is never at the forefront or obvious. i was punk once, when i was a teenager and having lived through that movement i don't see the merit in re-living it. the NYC of the Mud Club era no longer exists. it is a city that will, in my lifetime, have no poor people in it.

all this can come across as sour grapes and it isn't so. the conflict (and anger and frustration and hopelessness) are internal. they are issues within, not without. i will always paint, but increasingly i find that i no longer have the energy to attempt disseminating it to an audience that could care less. i don't even know where to begin any more.

my travels are on hold as my finances stabilize and we as a family look ahead to the next round of budget cuts by the College.

Fail. Risk Again.

Large canvas fail. It happens. There is always this mixed sense of frustration and loss, and then one moves on. Frustration in that laying down the black took a month, loss in the sense of both materials and losing this living moment itself.

I posted a new album to FB with some of the studies so far. You can view it here. I think you can see what is lost in translation. I think where I went wrong was two fold; improper tools and not enough restraint. The tools are an ongoing search, I've been looking at masonry trowels and they hold some potential in terms of recreating my use of palette knives. Proportionally, they should be about right. This was also a funny ratio for me at 6' x 4'. I may try a few trusty 5' x 4' canvases and see if it feels better.

To an extent, without failure there is no real progress or growth. It never makes it easy, however. I'm doubting myself as of late; feeling that sense of being cut off, wondering if I will ever connect and get my work in front of its audience. Doubt, doubt.

There's snow in the forecast this week, and maybe that is the vision I need even it prevents working in the studio.

no more thoughts now...

a horse by any other name

There is so much on my mind and as always I wonder if this is an appropriate medium. As of late, I'm thinking not so much. In truth I'm exhausted by electronic media. In the end I think it pulls a certain amount of energy away from more productive avenues of expression. But I'm willing to admit that maybe it's just me.

So, SC primary, no surprise. People who are upset by this live in a bubble. Period. If you haven't noticed that white, rich, conservative America is indignant and in full panic/fear mode, you should put down the NY Times and get out for a walk once in a while. Call your grandparents, call your parents. Go talk to your richest friend. They are freaking out. Make no mistake, Gingrich is a formidable adversary and if progressives don't think he stands a chance they are dead wrong. This country IS that desperate and crazy, and probably more so than most realize. Newt turned racism and philandering into character strengths on live television. This man is not to be dismissed, nor are the symptoms he represents in the national consciousness to be ignored. For my money, I still see Romney as the nominee, but he has to get his shit together and stop being so damn smug and slick and, -here's a wild thought, try standing for something. Preferably something that can be reduced to a sound byte.

In the art world there's a lot of ink and bandwidth being spilled on Damien Hurst, and to be honest most of it is not good conversation. A rich artist who makes art for rich people who got way too famous way too young. End of story. The shift that has taken place in the last 50 years or so is more interesting.

Rich people used to want to be around artists (or at least have them around). They made dinner parties interesting, they imparted a certain cool factor onto their hosts/patrons and so on. A few of this upper echelon of society actually thought that art (something they themselves were incapable of creating) was worth fostering and protecting and paying for. I am not naive enough to suggest that the affluents' goals were purely altruistic and for the "betterment" of society, except that sometimes they actually were. What happened post-Warhol is that now artists want to be around (and be) rich people, and rich people only want to be around themselves. The contemporary artists court the vapidity and self-absorption of society, -not as a means to an end, but as the end itself. They look forward to the droll dinner parties and yacht cruises. The shift is subtle, but significant. The old saying goes that you cannot serve two masters, and art is a jealous one to be sure.

We're told in America that "there is nothing wrong with success". It is what we are supposed to strive for, after all. But success has become synonymous with money, and lots of it. This is a problem. This is a false truth. Sure, call me a poor outsider, that's fair. But consider this; life is an endurance sport. You can come in early and come in big, but you die in the end just like all the people who didn't give a damn. No amount of money or power or celebrity or walled community can protect you from the fact that you will die; it will be inopportune, and it may well even be pathetic and insignificant. Worst case scenario, you will do it alone and won't be missed all that much.

If I wanted money, I would paint horses for christsake. You can't go wrong with horses. It's easy. I could spend the summer in Aiken and paint a crapload of horse pictures, maybe even some polo drawings and I could quit my day job by the end of the year and have galleries from Savannah, Charleston and across the state calling me all damn day. Make the best-selling ones into cheap giclees and by a mountain home. Hey, maybe this isn't such a bad plan!

Where did we get the idea drilled into our heads as Truth in this country that we deserve comfort, luxury and wealth and endless resources that we can use up at our whims? What about that makes us "great"? What part of greed is difficult to understand? What part of "love your neighbor" is vague? We live in a snatch and grab culture that cannot have a candid discussion on its own shortcomings, much less its sins. Our national art has become that which reinforces these fear-based fantasies, and give permissiveness to unsustainable lifestyles which exist only at the expense of the less fortunate.

Horse-ranting aside I feel depleted. I'm going to pull the plug for awhile and wait for warmer weather and go to the studio and see where it goes. The work is not moving in ATL, but people are seeing it. I've always found that market tough to break into. I'm not discouraged, partly because I don't feel owed anything, and partly because I know the work there is good. I can afford to wait. I can afford to continue to make work and push myself further beyond my comfort and pre-conceptions and crutches of art. I'm simply saying that this revolution may not be tweeted.

the way out

Second coat of mars black on the larger canvas tonight; temps will stabilize enough for the next 48 hours to prevent any nonsense or issues. 6 more studies, titanium white on mars black. thinking of washes with a sniff of blue or umber to cool or warm and explore this thing that is happening.

process-wise this is a quiet and sublime -almost meditative kind of painting. no apologies for influences; celebrate them, push beyond if i can. and the drip, yes it starts there, then knifed around following the line/form/figure? ghostly associations still resonate....the ghost of what?

kids at my mother's, wife at work slaving away on syllabi for next week and I here cigar and a calm emptiness and a rare open expanse of time before me tonight.

time. as a parent it means something completely different than it once did.

a family wedding prohibits me from making the jet to LA next weekend for the Kingston show and catching my buddy in the studio laying down their new record. but there is now. and i seem to have found something tonight; a way out and a way into. unabashed and on a direct line of painterly legacy. there's something to these and it caught me unaware on my way to other things. but this time I said yes to the detour. ...there's that word again.

i love the times when things like viscosity and surface are all that matter. important things, to be sure. with the reduction of palette to black and white, so many other things become clear. obvious references aside, these owe to a creole of painterly vernacular.

and maybe that can only come through me. there's a thought.

end of days

Last day in the studio this year, and what a year. I finished my friend D A Adams' new novel last night, to my mind his most mature work yet. A line jumped off the page while reading it, and while I know he didn't pen the sentiment I'll give him credit for putting the thought in front of me like a roadmap, "luck is opportunity meeting preparation." There you have it.

One thing I've learned through the years is you have to be prepared when those opportunities present themselves. The word "yes" is one of the most powerful in the universe, but to say yes, you have to be ready. High quality of images of latest work? Yes. Do you have a card? Yes. Do you want to collaborate? Yes. The studio discipline cannot be overstated, but without the ability to get what is in the studio into the hands of those who ask for it, however offhandedly, it is little more than a monastic life for one's own pleasure. It doesn't become art until people see it.

I was able to work on some more studies today and the large painting is dry enough for a second coat of mars black. I'm ambivalent about the studies today; there are moments to them, but I will have to practice to get what I see inside my mind down on canvas. I'm playing with different whites and different blacks, but so far I love mars black the most. I need to move some work to buy the canvases I want built.

Alone in here the train rolls by and the sun warms me through the loading door. The chill is leaving the plank floor and the bricks are ochre earth tones from the light coming in. There's Howlin Wolf on the speakers and a cigar beside me and this year ebbs into another. I moved in to this studio in January 2008, and I sat in the loading doorway and wrote in my sketchbook that I was home. Despite the issues, I love this space and I've never felt more at home or more productive in a working space. I experience the same joy every time I walk through the door.

Within the next few weeks I will build some new painting walls, a horizontal painting surface and do some much-needed cleaning to get ready for the large work. Housekeeping yes, but necessary to be able to stay focused. The winter will set in, but so be it.

the divine unrest

too many old fashion's tonight and my thoughts are distant and yet centered. over many drinks I once asked the painter Mark Zimmermann, "where are the heroic paintings?" An accusation directed at self more than an indictment on the "art/Art world" but no less so I suppose. Where indeed?

I walked into the studio today, the big black painting surface-dry, the smaller ones still wet to the touch. The time makes me think. The necessary pause, the Waiting in a Tom Petty reference makes one..or provides one the opportunity to ponder.

This stroke.

Line, form, drip, intent on surface. What is this? Affirmation, yes. Given. but and yet, humanity, something sacred long passed over. hand. human hand on surface. shamanism. the job of the artist is to bring it back; to go and to bring it back for the tribe (the willing) to experience. We live on the outskirts. you must seek us. this is not new or novel or modern. this is primal. art is primal. pigment. alchemy. life. god. spirituality. truth...if we're lucky.

we must paint. no rational. no over-arching idea, concept; conceptualism makes me want to take up arms and I have held them, fired them and I know, i want to take up arms. AK-47 in a Minnesota basement, but I've told you that story....now, now I bring bombs and those bombs are visual, some would say aesthetic. my work; I come by the sword. I live by the sword.

There is no rest for the artist. The Divine Unrest, as Martha Graham put it. Always anew, always an undiscovered country. We push because to stand still is to die. If there is anything worthwhile in my work, let it be that when people see it they step outside of themselves for a moment in time and perceive in a new way.

Tomorrow will begin with a pediatrician visit and a choreographer sleeping in our home. I will paint. I will lay it down and bring it. I will buy a ticket to NYC and I will stand a breath's distance from de Kooning and perhaps I will drink heroically with formidable painters and smoke a cigar on the water. It begins.

black december

There are a handful of great American cities; world class places unique and irreplaceable as they are authentic. They can be counted on one hand, -maybe two. The Holy City made its way onto my list this week and into my heart as well. Lots to think about over the break.

Now it's back to work. Everything is wet. Put another coat on the study-sized canvases and just sat and contemplated the larger black one tonight; cigar and Donald Byrd and me and the rain and timelessness of it all. Hundreds of years we've been doing this thing called painting, and sometimes (perhaps unfortunately) called Art. There's a loss of self, but there is also the absolute presence of being, -one is never more present than when one is lost in activity. The rain and heat are retarding the drying more than anticipated. The cold air tends to dry it out more quickly, but now that the humidity has gotten in under the wet paint...we wait.

Mother-in-Law in town and so there's opportunity to get in here and not be missed. Me and jazz and stillness of black.

We spoke of Turkey the past few days. Walking across the street as they fired up the wood stove and we waited for the fresh coffee so unique and splendid as the call to prayer crackled over the bullhorns atop the mosques. Narrow sidewalks and bustle/anywhere-in-the-world-ness of all big cities but then the strange, other-ness of it all as well. Hagia Sophia; there I was standing in one of my damned art history books and it was even more of everything. Then on the Bosphorus in the Modern and seeing the post-war abstraction re-interpreted through another culture's lens. I remember it changed me, the best compliment I can give a place I guess...depending on the change.

Rain on the tin roof deafening tonight.

This work wants to see the world too. It needs to get out of here, I know that. Travel, make people understand, use the narrative of my life and this place and the sublime absurdity of it all. It's more singular than I realize, all of it. Probably better than I give myself credit for too in my humble or insecure moments.

and I feel as though I was born in the backseat of a car and never stopped moving; i can never stop moving; far from home.

scent

Mars black. Damn.

Walked into the studio last night and the smell of it hit me, -each color is specific to the nose. Looking at this big, black, flat surface...it does something, there's a world inside. Oddly, the dreams continue; I'm pouring and staining in the white and it undulates and bleeds and curls and pools.

authenticity

Day 1:

Started 6 studies with a ground of chromatic black and a hint of prussian blue. Black. All that comes with it too. In oil it is one of the most challenging of pigments to have in play. Given the pre-21st century nature of my studio (unheated, uncooled) there will be challenges.

There's a large canvas I brought out and dusted off and we'll see how the week ahead looks.

A friend said of the previously-posted studies, "they look old, like from the late 40's or 50's." so be it, i own it, let's move on and see what happens. these are for me, eventual canvases too big to sell now anyway. it's about authenticity, doing what is honestly within and doing it service and honor.

off to charleston next week for the night, a belated anniversary celebration. good food, drink, walking, away. looking forward to the warm week ahead and time with the girls as they reach christmas frenzy. life it good.

blacks

My paints and medium were damaged in route and so I'm on hold for now. Not much to say, I'm waiting and I'm ready to lay down paint and held off placing an order for the large canvases until the new year. I was playing with ratios in my journal and am now thinking of a 90" x 66" canvas, essentially expanding 6" in each direction. Also still considering 84" x 72" but I will have to work on some studies to see how it plays out with less vertical thrust.

Either way, it looks like I'm going to be building some new walls in the studio.

Also really amped to play with the blacks and whites. Thinking about the black ground differently than i was before; previously had thought about getting a spray shop to lay that down, now I'm digging the painterliness of working that large by hand and all that comes with it. these pictures are going to take ages to dry! but that's what makes the white do its thing so delightfully as it seeps and stains and expands itself into and on top of the blackness. thinking about Caravaggio of course, those abyssal black spaces that careen into holy oblivion. thinking also about that Goya in the National and the flake white that is so transcendent and living.

(Movable walls?)

reading lots of ee cummings for no reason at all but then again for letting go....

No travels in January, having to wait until Feb and then see what's happening and pick a coast and jet. Auto plane tickets and monthly gallery hopping, studio visiting, painter talking...at times heroic. Got invited by a friend to hang in the studio while they make their record and looking forward to that. So different and then also the same.