Is this what it's all about? Things present and things past? Of course it is because the future is never here. My search is as complex as I witness. I hope to find humor in it all because without humor a lot is unbearable. Not all. There is so much joy in Mudville too. Random as this all reads, please remember there are moments of mystery I wish to share with you. Now is such a moment. All I can do is live by being here being now.
Failure is always an option. If failure were not allowed I would tread too carefully, thus reducing the chance of accomplishing the substantial. Here I am, writing my blog, in the afternoon, away from the studio; this because a dentist appointment distracted me. That appointment took a good part of my morning. Dreadful, but necessary. Today I am going to write only a little. I want to be there, not here. I want to be making art. No promises as to the level of substantiality that today will produce. The mix-up in my timing has confused my natural energy because of the disruption to my bio-rhythms. This loss is a residue of rushing to and back and getting this blog written. In a few minutes I will finally walk into the studio at a time later than my body and my soul desire.
Critique of yesterday's work: Two very good drawings! When I awoke this morning I believed I would be writing about the occasional transitional failure. I thought yesterday's work had failed. Writing this blog, posting these images, has saved me from despair. These works are OK! They are transitional, yes. But, they are authentic in their enlightenment. I know more than I did the day before! I problem-solved. I made real the spatial ideas I wrote about in yesterday's blog post. I have a need to drive the artifice of space laterally, back and forth, in and out. Yesterday I tested this need. Today images crackle with the plunge into space that I so desire. Instead of the melancholy feeling of deficiency, I now feel better for the effort, and the results, I show here.
There are things I cannot control about myself. New to painting "2016 No.4" are the supports that appear to physically balance the central form. I could not stop myself! These supports insure an object, such as this one depicted in this painting, would not tip (if it actually existed in our gravitational based reality). Is this really necessary? After all, this painting represents its own internality and not that of the real world? Yesterday's drawing feels like a shift in direction. It has a cleaner impact on the viewer than most of my recent work. It is sparse, more direct in the relationships of its forms. I am never satisfied with any direction I take. I am a "yes, but..." person. Testing alternatives will never end with me. I will never be able to say, with absolute authority, "I will not do that again!" This definition of "internality" from Wikipedia: Most proud I am of the tactility exhibited in the painting "2016 No.4". My level of tactile conscious is rapidly expanding. This measure, which is so much a part of oil painting, has always been important to me, but has not always been easily available. Struggling for emotive and authentic forms has preoccupied me far too long. I welcome the enhanced sensuality of touch that is now part of every mark I make. A major goal is to allow this complementary tactility to be equal in importance to form, composition, light, and color.
Yesterday was a good day for me. All three of the images I worked upon have emotional stature. That is a great measure of success! Startling it is that I have come this far. Before writing today's post I revisited one of my past blog posts from May 2, 2011 about a painting of mine that reminded me of the "Grand Odalisque" by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. I am not the same guy as I was then. At this moment I have no desire to make paintings of nude women, nor do I think of past paintings in this genre. In any case, yesterday's drawings were me reminding myself of who I am right now. I am building my art through questions and answers. Obviously, nothing is definitive, nor does that which I do today predict that which I will do five years from now. Whatever will be, will be...
Phil Spector, and his "Wall of Sound", has been in recent news. Not because Spector's work, as music producer, is exemplary, but in contrast to the magic that came from the work of the "The Beatles" music producer, George Martin. Martin passed last week. Spector did produce the last Beatle's album, "Let it Be". Martin did the rest and the best. Phil Spector has no influence on me, but looking at the painting "2016 No. 3", perhaps analytical cubism, as exercised by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, does. While I was painting I did not think about this connection. When I stepped away, looked at my day's work, it felt obvious. Picasso and Braque faced the same problem as I. How do you make a flat 2D canvas play well with 3D forms? (See one of Braque's solution at the bottom of this post.) This dichotomy, of 2D versus 3D, is an endless problem. Annoyingly, my concern for solving it, makes me feel trapped within the bindings of 20th Century Art when I am here in the 21st Century. I have to deal with it! That is what I tried to do with yesterday's drawing. I am following something deeper than Art History. I am following my intuition, born out of all I know and all I have lived, from education to my worse emotional experiences with my parents. Such is the stuff, and the grandeur, of making art. This was a week of self-intimacy. Everything I did led to self-acceptance. This can be seen in drawing after drawing. Even the newest painting forced me to accept my basic impulses and interests. I write "even the new painting" because when one looks at this painting my insight is not obvious. What you don't see is how its failure, particularly in the background's lack of rapport with the foreground forms, hit me like a hammer on the intellect. It screams, "This ain't right!" So the obvious problem is me versus the structure with which I must work. The actual structure is two-dimensional, but the visually, emotive structure I place on the 2D paper or canvas is invigorated by its three-dimensionality. I have pointed out in this week's posts, as I referenced Masters like Cezanne and Monet, that I am not alone with this dichotomy. There are models out there, created through lifetimes of work. This brings me squarely into my self-importance. It is important that I pursue this problem which I have begun to address. It is important because it has become incontrovertible that this is the manner I must use to express who I am, the way I see, the way I feel. Yesterday's drawing took another jab at it. I felt exhausted by the end of my studio session, which tells me this has been a week of enervating insights. I am proud, but not happy or satisfied. I have faced the challenge, accepted it as true. There is a vast amount of work to be done!
I worry that I am a product of modern Science Fiction or that I have seen too many photos of landscapes on places like Mars. Yesterday's first drawing reminded me of this fear. Dare I say this? (Because I may influence your seeing.) Is that a landing pod parked in the middle of a landscape on Mars? Recently I saw the movie "The Martian" (starring Matt Damon). But I also grew up in Southern California. I know desert landscapes well. Perhaps I made "Drawing No.2" to alleviate my fear of depicting extraterrestrial scace-scapes.
More important, I began a new painting. This one began with my joy of inventing surfaces and forms. On this relatively small canvas I scratched and carved out forms with an acrylic marker. I consciously tried not to create a composition reminiscent of a landscape. It is more like a wall. We shall see where it goes from here. First let us look at my work. Then we will look at "The World's Worst Painting." Unlike Donald Trump, I will not simply call this painting an inflammatory name. I will tell you exactly why I believe it to be a very bad painting. My work from yesterday Knowing is like falling down a sinkhole. You don't know where you are going to end up. You do know if the slip, the slide, and the fall, feel right, or wrong. Yesterday "it felt right." It is like the trail of a coffee bean, from tree to brewed cup. There are many possible routes. Only one route will make the best cup of coffee. Unfortunately that route is rarely taken. I am trying to go the best route. I am learning to know. I am learning to react quickly to missteps. It is in the acting, the reacting, and the acting again, that makes a quality painting. "2016 No.2" may be finished. Yesterday's drawings are also a result of this iterative process. If you like baseball analogies, here's one: I have been practicing my swing. The drawings are practice. But the real game is in the painting. Yesterday I got closer to the most efficient way to hit the ball in order to make it move where is serves itself best. It is in the light, the form, and the composition. It is the translation of paint into energy of light on form and space. This is my acceptance. This is the place I want to be. Back to the sinkhole analogy: I began this quest not knowing what I wanted, or why I wanted it. I jumped in because I wanted something. After a multitude of drawings and paintings I finally acknowledged that which is important, that which I seek in the jump and fall. Here it comes... Yesterday's work tells it well. It is not about the human face or figure. It is about touching the very energy within seeing. Energy clarifies nuance. This is the world we live in. Visual perception is our primary response to inhabiting this world. Replication of actual objects is not most important. Definable objects, by their unequivocal interpretation, distract from the essence of reality. Truth is perceived in the energy. That is where the visual is authentic and has lasting meaning. The World's Worst PaintingAfter my extended discussion above, about the energy of light revealing form and composition, I show you the negative of the this. These paintings by Eric Aho, now on view at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, are black holes without light. They suck away energy. They place a misconstrued black rectangle in front of the viewer. There is nothing there but black. These "black holes" are, perhaps, interesting to astronomers. They are, however, devoid of truth. These paintings are called "Ice Cuts". I acknowledge, I am talking from my viewpoint. There are paintings in major museums which are also devoid of the energy of light and form. They too exhibit black holes, devoid of meaning. Painting is about meaning. If one paints black as black then it is nothing but black. No reference is made. No story is told. It is absence itself. It is not about life and living. If it does not discuss life and living, than why does it exist? Art is about life and living. Let me show you a great painting that uses black, pure black, the same pigment as seen in Eric Aho's "Ice Cuts". Take a look at Claude Monet's "The Grenouillère". In contrast to Aho's painting, Monet's painting energizes the viewer with light and life. Monet's "The Grenouillère" is reproduced immediately after Eric Aho's work. I end this discussion with reproduction of another miserable painting. It too has a black hole. This painting is famous, at least in Boston. It is by John Singer Sargent. Like Aho, over and over again, in painting after painting, Sargent did not see well. He used black as black, not as a harbinger of light. It is terribly annoying to see its misuse. It sickens me, perhaps because it feels like death. There is nothingness there. With Monet, black sings light, energy, and form. |
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April 2024
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