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.

en sueños

I dreamt I walked through my studio. There was nothing in it but giant painting walls, and on each was a 5' x 7' black canvas with ghostly abstracted gestures and forms. The works hung two feet off the floor and towered above me.

Readers of this blog (all half dozen of you) know that I am cigar enthusiast. Like everyone who has ever smoked, I'm fascinated with the twirls and undulations of the smoke itself as it floats up into the random currents of the air. I was thinking of this a few weeks ago sitting the rear gardens at dusk.

When one brings the images and forms of dreams into the physical world, there is always something lost in translation, but I have also found that if one allows for this there is something gained that takes those ideas and breathes life into them in a very different way. To me, these initial studies bring to mind x-ray imagery and paranormal associations. They seem more specter-like than smoky.

I love paint. I love what it can do and what it never fails to show me in terms of new possibility. The 50 are in some ways archaeological; they are about reduction and uncovering a historical record within each picture. I spent all morning on a single piece, watching it change a dozen times into decent pictures before obliterating it over and over and over.

My time with that body of work is nearing an end and it remains to be seen if I'll continue it into next year when I thaw out the studio. Whether or not I will realize these ambitious canvases from the studies shown here is yet to be known as well. These are the first drawings; a shorthand of concept and a familiarizing of the hand to the mind's eye. All I know is I'll be buying a few dozen of these post-card canvases next week, a couple of tubes of black and white paint, and we will go from there.

friday flow

while the whole moves, and every part stands still

oil on canvas; 24" x 24"; Rico '11

It's amazingly warm and sunny and the work flowed today. All 50 canvases have paint on them and are in various states of completion. The black studies are drying off to the side, waiting for the next movement to begin.

I peeked in a space today that I happened upon while walking Agnes. It would take an amazing deal for me to leave this space, but eventually I do want to own my studio outright. I have the dream building in sight of the present space, but that requires selling consistently at a much higher price bracket than I do now. Not impossible, but not here yet.

Today is thank a teacher day, and I am indeed thankful to my teacher Mark Raymond Anderson. He was one of the first people I met when we moved here ten and half years ago. He was immediately someone I could bounce ideas and opinions about art off of, and his canonical knowledge of art history is both formidable and like an endless fount of learning. He helped me become the painter I am today more than any other person I know, and though we did not become the friends I had hoped we would, I owe him my respect and gratitude.

I was an adult when I went back and took undergraduate art classes. I squeezed my teachers, -all of them, for knowledge. I made them prepare to come to class, because they knew I would press them if I disagreed. I always viewed the study of art history as a choose my own adventure book; being able to look out over the vast cannon of centuries of art always gave me comfort that I was joining an important Way of craft and perception. I worked my butt off in school, at times from the prideful need to be the best, -ruthlessly if need be. It is true I crushed a peer every now and then, but only if I perceived them as lazy or apathetic. In retrospect perhaps I should have been more gracious, but what is done is done.

for maybe what was disappeared into ourselves

oil on canvas; 24" x 24"; Rico '11

back to the woodshed

There are dozen paintings glistening with fresh paint lying in various states of evolution/birth/creation on the studio floor and the painting wall.  The dream of 3 nights ago haunts my vision; I saw the studio full of gigantic paintings and I walked amongst them feeling the canvas and smelling the paint.  

Sometimes it comes like that.  Not often, and I don't believe in waiting for inspiration anyhow.  But sometimes it happens like that and there it is and you have to; the only sin I believe in is hearing the call and choosing not to answer it.

So I pulled out the last of my post-card-sized canvases this morning and we'll see about bringing those visions into the physical world.  

For now, there's Donald Bird on the speakers and it's cold as I sit and type.  These mornings I always think of Pollock trudging out the barn and firing up the dream.  At his best, there wasn't even a nice glass of whiskey waiting as reward for the day's effort.  Paint is resilient, that's what I've found out working in here for the past 5 years.  It can take what you dish out, no worries.  The worst kind of painting treats materiality with preciousness.  I've no tolerance for it, not in this era.  

It's time to get moving again, the damp cold is seeping through the layers and numbing my fingers.