breath into water

Hot thick air and silent Main St. outside the door; ashes and droplets of Mars black stain and seep into the 100-year-old wood, like sweat, like breath into water.  You're with me here.  You always have been.  I found the personal and through it discovered the universal.  So these paintings are your poems and stories and struggles and hopes.  They belong to us all, and perhaps least to me once the paint dries.

I don't remember the struggles aside from they happened is all.  This time is fleeting and immediate and I am only passing through it like the cities and towns I've passed through my whole life.  I once told a lover that leaving is simply what I do; no less love, only the constant longing to wander beyond and through and on and on and on.  That's in the paintings now.  That's in the blackness and shadow.  The paint on my shoes keeps my feet on the ground, constant and steadfast.  I can put that longing someplace physical and go back home.

I moved into this space and started a blog about the journey from obscurity.  I always said if I found the answers I would share them for free, but now I don't know.  My willingness hasn't changed, it's just that I don't think anyone would listen.  If I told you it was easy, you would dismiss it.  If I told you it involved pain and personal sacrifice, you'd ask if there were another way.  There's not; either way, that is, another way.

I wanted to row out to the vastness and the unknown where it's dark and desolate and sky meets sea and somehow find something beyond, and then somehow -inexplicably, find my way back.  Only then could I give it away.  Maybe I'm close now, but whether I'm returning or continuing to row out doesn't seem to matter much any more.

There's a stillness to the studio when I'm about to begin a painting.  Sensual and slow and steeped in loss of self.  Things become enhanced, that's the only way to describe it.  So much of it is labor; the building and the priming and the base coats over and over.  Divine labor, heroic at times, but labor nonetheless.  Then that first mark.  Paint on surface and choice and negation and choice and option and over and over and it is forged and carved out of the nothingness.

dreams may come

I received notification of my first museum show, which will open in January of 2014.  As I have yet to sign the contract, I will hold back the museum's name, but it is a regional art museum in SC.  This came at one of those moments when the world seemed black and despair was taking hold of me in a profound way.  The road is long.  It's not for the faint at heart and even the strong face down the demons of doubt and hopelessness from time to time.

The art world is not a meritocracy.  You don't get points for talent or even effort, and my trips to NYC have shown me that bullshit hangs on walls with red dots next it just as often (seemingly more so) than the kick-ass work that belongs there.  There are countless painters out there that are amazing who will never see "success" on any grand scale.  It gets demoralizing if one lets it.

For my part, I have stayed my course.  I've worked alone and in obscurity for a very long time.  At one point or another every friend or family member in my life has politely discouraged me from continuing along this path; for my own good, of course.  I appreciate it.  We don't like to see people we love in pain, struggling toward a seemingly unattainable goal.  But I have always believed in myself absolutely.  Even in my lowest, I have never given up on my work.  I've always found a way.

On the day my daughters were born I made a promise to myself.  It was one of those silent oaths we take in this life that is strictly between ourselves and our Source; that I would stay the course and prove to them by example that they can achieve their dreams.  They don't come easy.  They may even come at great cost, but they can be reached if they supremely believe in themselves and never let anyone (even those closest to them) discourage them.  So when I walk into that museum next year with my daughters by my side, I will feel that I have fulfilled a sacred oath and that I have done something as a father that is meaningful and lasting.

As I've told my painter friends over many beers and tears, I have only ever sought greatness.  Longevity, not fame, is what is important to me.  I want to be a great painter, even if my audience is yet unborn.  I value that more than all glossy magazine covers and art fair headlining that may or may never come.

This is a moment.

And tonight I will go back into the studio, roll up my sleeves, and do the work.

imitations of drowning

untitled, ink on arches paper, 22" x 30", august 2013, Rico

Black gesso.  Black fingers, arms, and washing out the big brush under the Main St. streetlamp hunched spigot.  At the door and I remembered the arches paper, ink, time, turnaround make one, make two, make three.  

And drawing, mark-making, doesn't have to be obviously related, or good, or for anyone.  It's a way of thinking about things; form, materials, flow, movement.  

untitled, ink on arches paper, 22" x 30", august 2013, Rico

Fluidity.  Suspension.  Falling?  Imitations of drowning.    

There are new thoughts, but I'm working through the large canvas on the wall, already titled in my mind...some come like that.  The day washes away into work and hands and sweat of labor.  Painting is wrestling angels, either way there's loss but then again those moments; those moments when one really sees.  

This meandering stream-of-consciousness thought flow ends now.   A beer and Breaking Bad and to bed; and I'm very mortal once more.

Exhibition announcement

Kimono, oil on canvas, 48" x 60", Rico '13

My work will be included in a group exhibition at Presbyterian College's Elizabeth Stone Harper Gallery this Fall, entitled Abstract.  The show opens September 12th and runs through November 29th.  There will be an opening reception on the 12th.  The show has not been promoted to any real extent; partly due to the fact that the College cut the Director's position to third time.  It is a terrific gallery space, and though I do not yet know with whom I will be sharing the walls I'm excited to be showing in my "home town."  

If you've seen my work in Greenville, please make the short trip down.  If you attended ArtFields, you saw my work in the HUB space, and another large work will be exhibited in this show along with 3 works the size of the one above.  

I'll be switching out the current piece at Art & Light Gallery for this one, and I'm excited to have Kimono seen publicly.  It's a pivotal piece in this body of work; an important one for potential collectors.

If you're reading this blog and live within a few hours, I hope to see you next month. 

Arjuna

Arjuna, oil on canvas, 48" x 60", Rico '13

The path of doubt and relentless self-questioning is the road to light.  Perfection is an illusion perpetuated by those who profit from having the masses chase unattainable desires.  Desire is the path to anger and pain.  Capitalism must create desire in order to feed itself.

I believe ambition can be healthy.  I differentiate goals from desire because more often the journey to one's goal is far more satisfying than the attainment of one's desires.  That is why millionaires try to become billionaires; having is never as satisfying as getting there.

The day job is in a state of acute crisis.  Finding grace and resolve in the midst of tumultuous freak-out and widely-held frustration and pressure is, to my mind, the mark of a man.  (see Kipling's "If").  I devote my energies to many things, often at once, and this crisis will pass because I will resolve it.  I have come to understand that no problem is unsolvable; there is a spectrum of potential solutions to any situation that runs from the completely undesirable to the absolutely desirable, and finding the point on that line is simply what I get paid to do.  I have always worked to learn before working to earn.  Every job I've ever had (and I've had quite a few) has held a lesson within its experience.   This one has taught me to deny the impossible.  I've become fearless in the face of unraveling chaos, and in the end this has made me a better artist, a better father, and a better man.

Arjuna has been a difficult painting.  Not because the process was any different; it wasn't.  It has been difficult because I had to destroy a good painting to get to it.  That moment of destruction was fraught with anxiety and doubt, but equally a sense of absolute liberation from expectation and comfort.  I divested myself from self-assurance and anticipation.  Painting is best when it's blind; I love uncertainty.

A friend of mine painted a painting called The Way of Hardship.  It's a terrific and powerful painting, one might even say sublime, and I've sat in front of it many times.  I've come to think that it is a visual representation of the artist's Way, and I mean specifically the painter.  We tend to seek out resistance more than other artists (except maybe writers, but that's another post).   The path of most resistance can be destructive.  But it can also be a path to enlightenment, if only fleeting, which most enlightenment is anyway.

The work right now is about doubt and struggle and choosing paths from divergent options.  This theme seems to be recurring throughout the past 20 months or so.  I'm embroiled in a struggle to find something, though that "thing" is elusive.

returns

Slow night but courageous; painting into the safe, destroying to build, allowing the paint to lead the way without judgement...or perhaps against it.  Bright, big moon cloaked in deep prussian blue black clouds of night like the sky reflecting on the ocean far away from the shore.  It is the creator's prerogative to obliterate and flood and burn away; even the beautiful.

The full studio is a dangerous place.  Work must struggle against the tyranny of aesthetic and its reassurances.  Each new picture is an autonomous entity, rightfully so; heir to its own being and presence.

Unexpected breeze blows through the studio, carrying Miles and echoing the horns against the brick and wood and floating along with cigar smoke into the rafters and visual memory for another night when the hot wet thick air returns.  August is coming.

Sometimes the artist must struggle in order to forget what s/he knows; about life, about love, and art.  Forget and play.  Forget and make marks against the comfortable and the known.  Forging out into the icy sea to feel one's course through the walls of frozen oblivion-makers, like skyscrapers in the city.

Smoke and sky.  Slow burn of dried leaf curls and rises as do thoughts subdued by action, repetition and waiting.  The paint bleeds and blends and pools and now it dries a mile away in the darkness; white and breathing and vulnerable and naked.

Charcoal-stained fingers from page after page of exploring line.  Line, form, weight, gesture; fundamentals of the practice that serve to ground and to humble and to connect eye to hand, circumventing thought and mind.

It's good to be back.

Junebug

Thick Southern air seeps into the skin and soul.  Summertime is candela wrapped cigars and studio doors wide open to the heavy night.  I am a summer painter.  I love the slow heat.  Undulating clouds of thunderstorms and distant tropical storms fill me with renewal and passion and longing.  Twelve-year-old Hukushu to round out the night and still the mind, unwind, and leave the rigors of painting and grappling with form and materials to another session.

Two paintings in various states of beginning.  A show in September to clear the studio of reassurances that come with lots of paintings surrounding me.  There comes a point where they all have to face the wall; one has to recapture autonomy in each new effort.  I have  stayed within the parameters I set last year and the work benefits each time, but I cannot become self-referencial.

My process is the slow grind.  Work and re-work, wait, dry, wait and re-work and wait.  Weeks and months; using accidents but then honing their power into something directed and labored which eventually looks spontaneous.  I am dedicated to the path of simplicity.  Simplicity takes discipline and patience and honesty in one's practice.

There's a growing body of work in the studio.  It is becoming intensely focused and deftly executed and at times I feel that I am watching it unfold and come into being as a passive observer.  I am patient and watchful and have no objective in mind save being in the moment of each work as I participate in the dance of painting.

A second glass and the night is still and quiet.  No trains now.  No distractions of the mundane.  Tomorrow I will visit the studio and see what I have to work with.  I'll push ever onward.   

salt life

I'm on the beach and Andrea passed us by.  I'm watching the trails of lighting flashes in the sky and thinking about the two unresolved canvases in the studio back home.  I was invited to be part of a group exhibition, so more on that when I have dates and more information.

The girls of summer are strewn on hotel beds; all-day poolside and ocean air-kissed sleeping the sleep of children and animals, unfettered by anxieties of the past or future.  Life is new and immediate...these things we lose with age, and try every day to regain again.

The moment.  Painting is so much about being present, patient and watchful.  Every action creates possibility, and denies options.  Make a mark.  This single act of dissidence causes the whole of the universe to rush forward with all the power of its being.  So paintings fail.  Most are not built to withstand, but then, some do.  I'm in the zone.  New wall built, another one will be erected soon in the studio and with it more wall space, more contemplation of this thing, these visions that keep me moving forward and embracing the blessed uncertainty.

Black.  White.  Neutral elements and yet so powerful.  Associations with the abyss and always with me I am looking to Caravaggio and, -as of late, grappling with that son of bitch and his blackness.  No one paints the emptiness so full of presence.  No one ever has.  The Don Voisine show did that for me to lesser degree.  Those blacks were so astoundingly rendered; so technical and precise and each painting so nailed.  Well done, Maestro.  Well done.

And what of this strange split life?  New York every other month?  Counterbalanced by the bucolic daily life and studio and town and Main Street dying around me like countless Main Streets dying all over the nation.  The night is quiet and dim save the trains that thunder through day in and day out.  I watch the cars filled to the brim with coal, then retuning empty, then full again the next day.

But tonight the sea.  Moonlight and surf and stars and thoughts of the work in progress.

the miles

Bronzed and freck-faced girls bowled me over at the doorstep, and home is where they are.  Home and hearth; indeed a form of wealth in this oft-impoverished world.  Heading back into the studio tomorrow night, renewed and strangely free; as though there is no longer pressure; as though there is only open road.

Chelsea days and nights and thankfully no dawns this time out.  Minor misbehaving and nothing more. We marched across lower Manhattan and dozens of galleries, seeing the good, the bad and the inexplicable.  At times one wondered why some works hung under the glow against white walls; and so many white walls there are.  Mad shots and heroism of a sort.  The kind men in twilight years tell tales of to the women who suffer them.  The amazing work as well.  The work that seeps into the soul and gives it light.  More familiar faces each time I go, as I slowly begin to grasp that I, too, am becoming a familiar face to some.

Tomorrow night a cigar and the thickening night air and train whistles, and paint.  Alone and peopling my solitude with memory and exploration and experience.  The evening, the brick walls and wood floor and jazz floating and mingling with my smoke and my visions, twirling and winding back on itself into the rafters.  I've no thought of the future, only the nowness of surface and purpose.

ramblings on process and death

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and there are the nights where I'd rather go to bed at 8:30 than drag myself to the studio.  then I go; and more often than not there is some reward.  it may be fleeting.  it may only end in frustration, but the time's never wasted.

the rigors of painting, this thing I call my practice,  arise out of action and release; call and response.  tonight - a formidable image, and then, just as easily it was gone.  the painting is fragile and the thing can crumble before the artist's eyes.  weeks, months, even years, then..gone.  I love that every decision negates certain future options, and equally, that each mark provides opportunity for another -often unexpected mark.

so one works through it.  perhaps a vista, or prayer, or experience emerges and then before you is the reason for all the doubt and hours spent alone attempting to bring and to listen and see.

for me, my process has blind periods where I must wait.  working wet I have allow drying and allow the paint to explore and overflow and retreat.  I come in the next day to see what moves have been made; sometimes only to look and sit and stand and walk around and listen.  I have come to understand the power of waiting, of being acted upon...of surrender.

one of my freshly-turned seven year olds just informed me this afternoon that 7 is almost 8.  to which my mind answered, "and 8 is almost 18...and 28...and so it goes."  mortality.

I raised a glass to Dad last night, who would have been 73 yesterday.  he knew me as many things, but he never knew me as a father, and I suppose that makes me feel feelings I generally keep to myself.  Too long gone, and every year I understand better how very young I was to have lost him.  and then I see that what I say to my daughters is true; that I will always be with them.

my period of depression and doubt seems to be subsiding.  work comes from working, not thinking about it or indulging the ego's whims of fancy and insecurity.  painters paint; end of slump.  we pick up and endure and push beyond.  this odd and wonderful humanity.

and so it goes.

reflections on madness

Reflections on madness; what it means, relevance.  I'm questioning my relevance as a painter.  Then, with the imposed cultural template of Boston...context.  Explosions.  Is this what it takes to awaken the Sleeper?  Sadness.  Why do we look at fire and smoke?  Think about it.  Primordial instincts/aesthetics.

Is madness the inability to discern?  Is one aware of the decent?  Maybe, it's evolutionary.  Process and by degrees.  Or, is it at once?  Is madness blindness?  Or is it the condition which sees all at once and cannot subdivide into parts?  Abandon is not madness.  Ecstasy is not madness.  What of peopling my solitude and personalizing my overwhelmed sense of crowds?   I love New York for the alone-ness I feel; and its profound connection.

Am I worth my salt?  I'm alone and adrift here.  In less than two weeks I'll be booming Manhattan; hanging with others of my ilk.  Here; now; alone and madness.

Pretty?  Violent?  Spiritual?  I see pointlessness and failure, but I am close and in it.  Do I have the chops?  I still feel I can take it further.  I feel I must.  I reject the beautiful out of hat.  (what a phrase!)  I reject the pretty out of conscience

I fear only two things:  lack of freewill and mediocrity.

My day job makes these fears acute.  I am going insane painfully and slowly.

I'm drawing again in my head.  Big black paper with lines.  I see.  I am seeing.  Take that, motherfuckers.

I've seen death half a dozen times.  Show me something new and meaningful.  Let me see.  In seeing there is freedom; liberation.

Madness.

measures

Late night, much rye whiskey and reflection on Serra; the artist, the sculptures, the drawings.. the fucking drawings.  This idea of art compressing, altering, redefining, inhabiting space.  I think of James Austin Murray's show; the collision of surface and light and the volume of space.  Associations with Stella, of course, but only now association with Serra.  I quote:

Since black is the densest color material, it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum and thereby changes the artificial as well as the natural light in a given room.  A black shape can hold its space in relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily.  [italics my own]

Serra contends that, "black is a property, not a quality," and why not?  Indeed.  I make work that physically alters the space it inhabits.  This is interesting to me.  Sculptural yes, I fancied myself a sculptor when I began.  Yet the making of things led me to painting; kicking and screaming at times, but led me to it nonetheless.

Something else; "one cannot take down the Master's house with the Master's tools."  So we forge and hack, and co-opt and guerrilla.  One must be irreverent towards materiality; the formal must be the cage from which we free ourselves.  Is this the whiskey talking?  I think not.  For me, the Spanish masters.. Velasquez, Goya, and the Italian Caravaggio.  I wail against the blacks; the eternal space within the space which recedes and yet always asserts.

I am up against the process now.  I cannot execute the size and scale I want to with my current process of working vertical/horizontal/vertical.  I cannot physically lift and lower the pieces which exist in my mind's eye.  They must be contended with; my most challenging work is work I've had to contend with physically.  Like wrestling angels.  There are many warrior paths; mine is the peaceful warrior Way; discipline, repetition, aestheticism.  How can I engage the plane in a vertical condition?  I must wrestle with this.

More Serra:

[black] holds itself to a more compressed field, it is comparable to forging.

Indeed; the reconciliation between my sculptural intents and painterly practice.  I forge the picture; austere and hermetic and unapologetically concerned with the spiritual through no particular god.  I've been contemplating our instinctual human need for new gods.  It is time.  We need gods and myths that speak to our condition.  We need heroic epic poetry to bring our men and women warriors back across the sea.

And now, Boston.  Madness and tragedy.  Senselessness.  Can art [Art] counteract ignorance?  I believe it can, or else I go mad myself.