The Rico Act

more works on paper

untitled, oil on black vellum, 17" x 11", Rico '12

You can see more images from this set here. I'll be uploading another 40 images over the weekend and adding them to that page.

The past few nights have been manic-driven late night hammer-slinging grunt work. I stand in here today and I see the wall of dreams. Next week I will post a picture of "the 50" hung on this wall. I'll have a family studio visit next weekend and then I can re-dedicate myself to what will eventually hang on this wall.

Over the xmas/new year break I had a vision. I started working through it in small, post-card sized canvases and have since taken it to 17" x 11" works on black vellum to tremendously successful effect. That body of work, nearing 100 as of this writing, will live a life of their own. They are on a level of anything out there and I'll find a home for them; and for me. I have no doubt of my success and it has been hard fought.

I'm running on a little over a dozen hours of sleep in 4 days and fortunately the drywall compound has to cure for at least 24 hours. But remember this image. Hold on to it and prepare. Gloves off.

construction time again

Drywall and lumber got delivered yesterday and I worked into the midnight hour. Slept through my alarm this morning but got the kids to school on time and myself to the day job. By this weekend, there will be an 11' x 24' wall along the Eastern side of the studio. I will hang "the 50" in a grid and will post those pictures next week.

With this work there is a sense of absolute knowing, and this is causing tremendous stress in the balancing of two careers, as they compete for time and energy. I feel hapless and helpless in my ability to get the work "out there." I truly don't know how to begin anymore. I've asked for help, but in the end I will have to find it within myself. I have to spend the time researching to figure out where and towards whom I need to direct my energies. It only takes making that one right person understand; that person who is in a position to spread the gospel of Rico. As I've blogged many times, my geographical and cultural isolation does nothing to help my efforts.

the primordial gaze

I'm deep in the work. The associations are obvious: 19th century photography, early x-rays, paranormal photography, deep aquatic life, the celestial. Beyond those thing there is, for me, the freedom...the invitation to breath life and association into the work at will. I see the Why that cannot be answered, the curiosity of the beyond, the ephemeral nature of the now, of life. There are lots of formal things going on but honestly who gives a shit except a handful of painter friends? No, there's something tapped here; something real and visceral and shared. The Sublime and I'm not afraid to say it.

Another 10 tonight and each one is autonomous and self-referential even side-by-side to others. One can look at these for a long, long time.

I took it large to some effect. I prepared another large canvas tonight and we'll see.

Picked up an old book on Mexican art and flipped to this dog-eared passage....

"Between our gaze and the world, images previously produced by habit, culture, museums, or ideologies impose themselves. the first thing a painter must do is to brush away from his eyes the spiderwebs of styles and schools. The experience is dizzying and blinding: the world leaps to our eyes with the innocent ferocity of what is too alive. Seeing without intermediaries: a painful apprenticeship that never ends. ...Asceticism of vision: the hand learning to obey the eye and not the head, until the head stops thinking and begins to see, until the hand conceives and the eye thinks. To see the world in this way is to see it with one's whole body and mind, to regain the original unity in order to win back the original gaze..." -Octavio Paz, from "From Criticism to Offering"; Paris, December 29, 1960

the morning

untitled drawing; oil on vellum, 11" x 17", Rico '12

what the water gave me

It's 9 pm and I've just completed half a dozen drawings and I'm trying to figure out what the hell just happened. For the past few months, I've been using butcher paper as a drop cloth for the small post-card studies. I looked at it the other day, how the paint worked with the slick translucence, and so I ordered some black vellum on a whim. When I look at these drawings tonight I see the physical manifestation of my dream from the holidays. The scale and proportion of these are spot on, and the translucent surface further pushes the x-ray read of these works. I want to go call my doctor and clip these to his light wall just to see them like that.

The lightening rod moments don't happen often, -for some never, way it goes. But this is different. This, -tonight, is a breakthrough; one I can't fully comprehend at the moment other than the hair on the back of neck is standing up and I'm going to type this and make some more to see if this is really happening. Nothing has ever felt so truly my own before.

I'll have to see in the morning, of course. That's the rub of being a night painter sometimes.

I don't want to stop.

It's as if I fully grasp my medium for the first time; it combines all the aspects of my vernacular as a painter. Drawing has been missing from my practice for too long and I've known it. Drawing is the meat of studio work for us all. You've got to put in the time. I have to see how it dries. It reminds of the early work in copper back in the 90's. How it's evolving and changing on its own after I work it.

and the first big black canvas is staring me in the face, "c'mon, what you got?"

Appalachian Spring

The first day of Spring is next Tuesday, but things have already heated up to 80's. The summer will be brutal, and resistance is futile. I work best in the Summer. I love to open up the doors on either end of the studio and paint and sweat and drag the canvases outside. If I could ever afford to build a studio in coastal South America, I would have endless Summers forever.

I got the shipment notification today that my canvases will be here tomorrow. Four big, black-primed canvases to enjoy and contemplate and mark and stain and scrape. Cigar smoke will billow and twirl and the staple of Southern Summer, -Mexican beer, will be stacked in the fridge.

There's a few bottles of good rum at the studio as well for the longer nights when everything seems to work and you have to just sit and wonder at it all.

sunday ruminations

sunday morning coming down like that song by the Man in Black. there's sunlight and jazz and week-old cigar smoke and paint under the nails and these things rip away the veneer of the week. for all practical purposes, spring has arrived and set up camp. everything is in bloom, my allergies are kicking my ass and tomorrow is a holiday; one to be spent mostly here.

there are hundreds of paintings in this space. no one is calling for them, but I keep making them because i can't stop. rebuffed with every attempt at juried shows I try, I guess I should feel discouraged but somehow I just don't. i feel alive and sure of hand.

four large canvases are on their way from somewhere in New Jersey. they are primed black for me and as such they are grab-and-go; a necessity in the madness of time that is marriage, parenthood, job and life. i've blogged many times about how my practice has become more efficient since the girls arrived. there's an immediacy and urgency to being in here that continues to take my work places it never went before. 2009 felt the year I started over, so perhaps I should cut myself a break for not achieving wild success yet.

I haven't painted with a brush for almost 3 years now and it strikes me that painting is, -at its best, a vernacular, -perhaps a creole. when you encounter something new and truly honest on canvas, it generally is also somewhat foreign, otherworldly. you can't fully understand the language, but you get the feeling. finding your voice and all that I guess.

prepped 12 post card canvases this morning in that brooding tar of mars black. so flat and deep and it feels like swimming in a cave lake in pitch darkness; in other words, liberating.

washes, stains, smears and drips and streaks. paint puddled into pigmented pools becomes alive and reaches out and explores and wanders...to be alive is to be in motion. you might not always perceive the motion if the life is titanic. but mountains stretch and breathe, as do oceans.

Clytemnestra I

study for Clytemnestra, 72" x 48"

Publish Postoil on canvas, Rico '12

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.