grip

The cold nights are coming.  Tonight I skinned the two large square canvases and managed to size one of them.  It's a formidable size; I cannot span it and thus am forced to contend with it in a very different way than what is comfortable.

I read some old journals, going back to 2011.  I'm not conscious of the struggles until I read old writings.  Reading these entries from two years ago, I was gripped by a certain hopelessness; and while the work continues to get stronger, I find myself always questioning why I put myself through this for seemingly so little return.

And then I drag myself out of the comfortable exhaustion of the day and out into the night and after a few minutes in the studio I lose all sense of time.  I'm not cold, I'm no longer tired.  My knuckles are scraped and nicked and I am alive in a profound sense of the word.  I grapple with these structures of wood and cotton duck and medium and I carve out some little moment of living.  Maybe people get that and maybe they don't.  Who knows why anyone likes anything?

I was speaking with a good friend of mine this weekend and he asked what my daughters thought of my work.  I told them they were honest critics and often their observations made me think because I tend to take them seriously.  One thing my daughters don't really do with my work is say things like, "I see a horse, " or "that looks like a dog."  At 7, they seem to grasp the idea that abstraction can be read without literal or direct associations.  They often will tell me how it makes them feel.  I know a lot of adults who can't talk about art that way, or maybe any more.

square. stations?

The weekend was a blur of furious construction.  I am no carpenter, but pneumatic tools and sunny skies blessed me and three new stretcher frames emerged.  I have decided to embrace the square, for wherever may go with it; stand or fall.  In the journey I have been thinking of a particular space, and these new canvases seem for that space.  As I thought about my intentions towards composition, I suddenly thought of Newman's Stations of the Cross and something clicked.  My fascination with Catholicism as mysticism, -that is to say, viewing it as a non-believer I tend to focus on how transformative space is used to serve spiritual/religious means within the codex of (visual) language.

Growing up a fundy I was deeply moved the first time I walked into a cathedral.  I simply had no context for the wealth of visual imagery and other worldliness of the space.  For the first time in my life I felt that everything within a worship space pointed unflinchingly towards the Divine.  I had been raised in a tradition that viewed ornamentation (ANY ornamentation) as idolatry.  In my artistic journey I have increasingly embraced the visual representation of the spiritual as a pathway to god, or that which moves the all.

I wrestle with it.  I despise pseudo science and I have a particularly aversion to all things fundamentalist.  But some myths are beautiful.  Some stories are indelibly scored onto my consciousness, and I find a power when I embrace them rather than resist them.

So the square.  Limitation and constraint.  Symmetry.  Balance.  The square is difficult for me because the square is authoritative and final.  As I looked over my sketches I considered the stations.  The Way of Sorrow, as it were.  This perspective of religion as a Way is uncomfortable for me, and yet....

So I brave the sub-freezing nights ahead.  I will paint, and wrap, and bring home paints to protect them from the frost.  The work feels good.  Seeing this first square canvas tonight; naked and full of unknown.  It stirred something in me.  I'll see what happens.

the builder

It's late and my hands ache from building.  I completed modifications to 6' x 8' stretcher frame I picked up for free at last year's ArtFields.  They say you get what you pay for; and sometimes they are right on.

She'll hold cloth and shape and I'll haul her to the studio tomorrow.  I'm building four 6' x 6' frames and forcing myself to work in square.  I have resisted it with this body of work and I need to know why.  I saw the square shape and I'm going to wrestle with it in the coming weeks.  It will be a glorious battle.

Another 18 hour day in a long row of 18 hour days.  They blur at times but coming home late with sawdust in my hair and paint under my nails I feel so alive it is hard to wind down.  The alternative is not an alternative at all; burn out, stress out, drop out.  Time in the studio is never wasted.  The exhaustion is always worth it.

I've decided to go completely impractical with the scale of the next few paintings.  Damn the torpedoes, we're making epic shit here.  The road is long and at times demoralizing and frustrating but I always follow the work.  The work knows where to go if I just listen to it.  If I make enough noise then someone will eventually hear.  I have to believe that or else I would go insane.

In a dream world I would be packing up to move to the Winter studio; somewhere towards the equator and the sea.  It must feel so suspended there in the middle of the sun's path.  I know I would.  A hammock, a terrace on which to paint and little else.  Four months of painting as the high sun warmed my bones.  It's late and I am fading.

...I just deleted a long rant so it must be time to give in to sleep.  Those precious 6 hours, followed by the 9 hours of have to, followed by the all-too-short family time and then the studio.  I'm about to be in it.  It's on.

Room with a view: Abstract Invitational

 

the bird of war

Paint-stained nails and fingertips on cut, wrinkling hands sun-soaked and blister-palmed.  Punching blacks and caressing flake white to articulate and bend and she rises off the canvas like a bird of war; majestic and hungry.  The terrible can be beautiful.  

There's something menacing here; like the angel that says, "fear not."

We'll dance again tonight.  Paint and smoke and whiskey and these aching hands, bare-knuckled and chipped and ink-stained.  She'll become.  She'll become.  

scene

Today I saw an image; a scene from a studio I know well in Brooklyn.  The artist is a poet, warrior, friend.  His paintings have a physical presence, like someone standing behind you in a room at that moment before you fully realize it.  They are often dark, rough, imposing things with battled surfaces and gristly edges and yet, as of late, I catch a tenderness in them from time to time; a product of fatherhood no doubt, yet also the light of the soul.

NY is calling my name and has been all summer.  It's been too much of one kind of travel at the expense of the other.  Duties here, social and familial; things I don't mind, but still a part of me is always away.

This thing of going to a space and contending with surface and material and image, one wonders how one finds oneself in such a Way.  To listen to a visual thing, this is a strange and wonderful discipline indeed.  Tired hands and stained skin and then the attempt to wind down and catch up on the sleep that seems to always be two steps ahead of me, eluding me from day to day.

Whiskey stones and laundry are the remnants of this day; another day that did not stop, and finds me exhausted and unable to give in to sleep.

Today I saw a scene from Brooklyn.  A promise of another level, making me bring up my game to the next level, and so it goes and so it goes.  A picture of a studio wall that made me want to paint.  That's honor.  It's a glorious thing really.  So I raise my glass tonight to Brooklyn and all the lights on tonight in rooms with paint on the floors and at least a wall, and canvas and books and music and longing and sweat.

after

The opening went very well. Those in attendance were engaged, and the comments I encountered were thoughtful and positive. We stayed up late with one of the artists, his wife and the curator drinking wine into the night.

fastened down to oblivion, exhibition view

I can't speak positively enough about Ann Stoddard's curation of the show.  She brought together six wildly-different abstract artists and created not only a first class exhibition, but a teaching exhibition as well.  The show stays up for most the semester and I hope students will visit (and revisit) it.  It's a show that warrants multiple viewings.

Fortunately, there will be opportunity for multiple viewings.  The Spartanburg Art Museum will be picking up the show in January.  I'm very excited to be in the good creative company that I am with this show, and profoundly humbled to see the work hung in a museum.  

an awful rowing toward god, exhibition view

One of the most interesting exchanges of the evening was with the College's president.  After spending time with "an awful rowing.." he commented that it reminded him of the author's description of his encounter with the afterlife in Proof of Heaven, the story of a neurosurgeon who has a transcendent experience during a coma despite the fact that he intellectually rejected all such experiences prior to then.  I haven't read the book, but our conversation made me want to.  I found it interesting that he made such a connection.

I heard the word powerful a lot last night in reference to my work.  This was tremendously gratifying; both that it stood the test of physical inspection and that it often seemed that people were having a similar experience looking at and being with the work as I had painting it.  I feel I'm on my way.  

letting go

I drove over to the gallery tonight, foolishly thinking it would be empty.  Of course the director and her drones were busy with all the last-minute preparations; the space is alive and bright.  I have to say, the show looks really good.  I found the eclectic collection a bit jarring until I actually saw it hung, and I'm impressed with the curator's vision.

So now the funny part.

The large painting is hung upside down.  I must have wired it this way in my exhaustion last week.  The day job has been brutal for some time now and in my preparations I must have gotten disoriented.  What's interesting is that I didn't notice at first.  I have to say, I think I like it better the way it is hanging.

I've always believed one acts or one is acted upon.  Neither is, inherently, a "better" condition.  There are benefits to each.  In this case, I received one of those gentle wacks to the head from the universe letting me know that I need to let go for awhile and just allow myself to be taken away.  That's a really positive thing at this particular moment of time.

I think one has to keep a certain irreverence towards one's work.  It's easy to take yourself too seriously and something like this could have caused me crazy stress on the eve before a show.  But it honestly didn't.  I sort of feel that everything is right and how it needs to be.  It made me laugh and relaxed me, and now I go into a highly-charged situation (an opening) in a much lighter place.

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.