Perhaps I object to the possibility of the non-objective. Perhaps is the question. When you look at today's drawing, do you think of real-world objects, or is it truly non-objective? Even Willem de Kooning named many of his paintings as reference to landscapes; yet I think of de Kooning as the supreme non-objective painter. "The Intervening Tick" (2018 No.6, state 4), oil on canvas, 49x33 inches {"Is that where wise men want us to live; in that intervening tick, the tiny slot that occurs after you have spent hours searching downtown for that new club and just before you give up and head back home?" - Billy Collins, "The Present", from "New Ohio Review" 2017} In yesterday's blog-post I expressed fear over the upper sky-like portion of my recent drawings. In those drawings the "sky" was untouched. i.e., White Paper! There is no "White Sky" in the drawing I show today. Today's drawing makes me anxious; It makes me want to move on to my next painting. Two paintings are on my work-wall, both in the process of problem solving. Yesterday The Intervening Tick took a great leap toward realization (see its state 4, above). Chocorua is almost done (it requires a little bit of brightening & a little expansion on its upper edge). When either of them, The Intervening Tick or Chocorua, move off my work-wall, I will begin 2018 No.7 (not yet titled).
One of my constant regrets in living is my inability to react quickly to a stupid or divisive comment made to me. I must mull. Nothing comes quick and easy. I strike at my drawings and paintings with quickness, criss-crossing in search of forms, space, and composition, but I admit to sometimes missing a bigger idea during my activity. Yesterday I was fine with my drawing... for about 10 minutes. Look at it! After the 10 minutes of mull, I became conscious of the blank white-ness of the ground in upper half of the drawing. I had neglected the ground in the upper-half while in search for the stuff in the lower-half! The forms do play well in the upper-half, but I am uncomfortable for the lack of attitude behind those forms. The comment I made about not reacting to another person's stupid comment is apropos; I think this drawing would be better if I scratched out the ground in its upper-half. Vincent van Gogh learned this. Van Gogh learned slowly too; it took him two years to get from the blank sky in his 1886 drawing (see below) to an animated sky in his 1888 drawing. Van Gogh's solution to a blank upper-half ground is informative in regard to my concern about the white upper-half of yesterday's drawing. Van Gogh continued to learn to his final days — his last paintings and drawings are magnificent! Slow walks in the woods can reveal strange, incongruent objects — things that just should not be there. Thus comes my art; thus comes the competition between primeval and contemporary.
"The Intervening Tick" (2018 No.6, state 3), oil on canvas, 49x33 inches {"Is that where wise men want us to live; in that intervening tick, the tiny slot that occurs after you have spent hours searching downtown for that new club and just before you give up and head back home?" - Billy Collins, "The Present", from "New Ohio Review" 2017} I have found more lucidity in my vision. I am emboldened. I am relentlessly continuing without trepidation or fear. My enthusiasm for art-making is increasing; it increases because I feel I know what I am doing. This is not an intellectual knowing, but a feeling of consistent knowing during the act of making art.
"The Intervening Tick" (2018 No.6, state 2), oil on canvas, 49x33 inches {"Is that where wise men want us to live; in that intervening tick, the tiny slot that occurs after you have spent hours searching downtown for that new club and just before you give up and head back home?" - Billy Collins, "The Present", from "New Ohio Review" 2017} My life is dominated by art-making. A close second is poetry. Then follows punditry. At times it gets all-mixed-up, i.e., thinking without being convinced. It annoys me when a person believes they clearly know correct from fallaciousness. The dictionary defines a "pundit" as "an expert in a particular subject or field who is frequently called on to give opinions about it to the public" and "an expert, authority, specialist, doyen(ne), master, guru, sage, savant, maven, buff, whiz." It amazes there is such thing as a pundit in this world full of limitations. Punditry is 50% correct. It is like flipping a coin. Me, I am artist. I don't subsist on punditry, but I am a pundit to myself. I prefer poetry because it exudes self-doubt. If I was absolute, sure of my ideas, I would have one great idea and I would make one great painting. Alas, not being sure is a good thing. I am busy with questions. I am busy with answers, a multiplicity of answers. I am a poet. I am not a pundit.
"Chocorua" (2018 No.5, state 5), oil on canvas, 36x54 inches {"A substitute for all the gods, This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one's shadow magnified, Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high, The shadow of Chocorua" - Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar", verse XXI} My worries about my complexity never ends. Am I too complex to be authentically sophisticated? I feel yesterday's work went extremely well. Is an artist ever sure he is doing excellent work? George Braque was asked the same question by the young painter Nicolas de Staël, who visited Braque in his studio. Braque's answer, "You don't!" Quadric In mathematics, a quadric or quadric surface (quadric hypersurface in higher dimensions), is a generalization of conic sections (ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas). It is a hypersurface (of dimension D) in a (D + 1)-dimensional space, and it is defined as the zero set of an irreducible polynomial of degree two in D + 1 variables (D=1 in the case of conic sections). When the defining polynomial is not absolutely irreducible, the zero set is generally not considered a quadric, although it is often called a degenerate quadric or a reducible quadric. In coordinates x1, x2, ..., xD+1, the general quadric is thus defined by the algebraic equation: which may be compactly written in vector and matrix notation as: where x = (x1, x2, ..., xD+1) is a row vector, xT is the transpose of x (a column vector), Q is a (D + 1) × (D + 1) matrix and P is a (D + 1)-dimensional row vector and R a scalar constant. The values Q, P and R are often taken to be over real numbers or complex numbers, but a quadric may be defined over any field.
(from Wikpedia) You never know. Here are a couple of possibilities that may work. Asking a lot of questions leads to a few good answers.
Something has changed. There is spiritual upcoming in my work. It feels less about composition and more about emotional depth. This is exploration; it is not fait accompli.
"The Intervening Tick" (2018 No.6, state 1), oil on canvas, 49x33 inches {"Is that where wise men want us to live; in that intervening tick, the tiny slot that occurs after you have spent hours searching downtown for that new club and just before you give up and head back home?" - Billy Collins, "The Present", from "New Ohio Review" 2017} A photograph was published in my local newspaper; it shows a father and his very young daughter (perhaps 4 years old) on an ocean beach. The forms of the father and daughter occupy approximately just 10% of the photo, dead-center. They are hugging, mugging for the camera, the ocean's horizon is absolutely horizontal and absolutely centered, cutting across and behind them. This photo was the inspiration for my new painting, The Intervening Tick. This photo struck me hard: the figures dominated my attention despite their relative smallness. I thought I would give this idea a try. Yesterday's drawing was a study for the painting. Like the painting, there are definitive forms on a ground and background.
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April 2024
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