 Drawing 02·12·2021, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches Is this drawing a Fable? Is it an abstraction? I do wish to tell stories. I do not wish be a figurative artist (been there, done that; see CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ). I do not wish to use natural representation. What to do? The drawing I show today questions my motives. This drawing represents an image far afield from our touchable reality. However, it is distinctly abstracted from our own world. You could walk into this place. It is an effort that holds interest, but it does not satisfy. More questions, more answers, will come today.
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 Drawing 01·13·2021, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches What am I doing? I am looking carefully at the space between the lines, the negative space. I am filling the page with carefully considered forms, forms created by pencil lines. These lines, inherently, leave gaps between one another. These gaps are emotional spaces, ones that create light and darkness, good and evil. My current research is investigation into the emotional satisfaction, personal self-expression, that I may obtain from the space between the lines.
 Drawing 11·08·2020, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches  Drawing 10·21·2020 (state 2), pencil on paper, 20x16 inches Here I am. I find failure and success in everything I do. Yesterday I revisited the drawing from 10/21/2020 (directly above👆). I made it simpler. I made it more to the point. I am learning that meaninglessness must be removed in order to express accurately. Look back at my blog post of 10/22/2020 to see the earlier version of this drawing. It is obvious; I removed the falderal. Right now, this paring down to true and essential has become my most important work. Then how did I create the drawing at the top today's page? Drawing 11·08·2020 shows the complexity of my thoughts, which are relentless, but (perhaps) distractive, and annoyingly about composition, but not meaning. Simple clarity of expression is most important. Complexity must be abandoned. Complexity occurs when my thinking steers toward pattern, not emotional significance.
 Drawing 09·01·2020, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches Adolph Gottlieb has instructed me; simple contrast can create complex, emotional images. Yesterday's drawing was one experiment in that direction.  Adolph Gottlieb, "Levitation", Screenprint, 30x22 inches, 1969  Drawing 08·06·2020, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." This was written by the Dutch Philosopher, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Among humanists he has enjoyed the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists". This remark goes right to my ideal; an artist's task is to be king of visual communication. An artist's work is one of research, seek and find. If the rest of mankind does not do this daily work, then we, as artists, have the responsibility of a king. I give you yesterday's drawing. I am educating myself; Like any teacher, I hope my viewers will follow along. My drawings are getting stronger, more precise, more clearly emotive, more intellectually satisfying, more engaging. I do not want to be king. I want to be among the many who communicate through the visual references I send their way.
 Drawing 04·19·2020 No.1, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches  Drawing 04·19·2020 No.2, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches My focus is moving toward page organization; I desire immediate, full engagement of the viewer. This cannot be achieved without the viewer's first encounter being head-on impactful. I will continue to explore this problem. My looking for answers will never end. You will see me exploring, drawing by drawing, painting by painting. Yesterday's drawings are steps along my way on the path that is this investigation.
 Drawing 04·12·2020, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches Yesterday, while in the studio, I heard Samin Nosrat say, "I actually like constraints. I think it makes us more creative." Samin Nostrat is the author of the cookbook, "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat".
We are all living in a time of home restriction, personally centric space, and social distancing. What remains is isolated creativity. Exhibits are cancelled. Galleries are shut. I am in the studio. I made this drawing yesterday. It moves toward an emotive realization of space: negative, positive, two dimensional, artificially three-dimensional. It is in contrast that makes for emotion; negative versus positive, and real two-dimensional space versus the artifice of three-dimensional space. This take I show today, this drawing from yesterday, moves closer toward my recent creative insight: I am moving toward robust expression of all I am able to express on a flat two-dimensional surface. The constraint of aloneness is good for finding my truth; right now, our world insists on the loneliness of self-dependence for self-expression. Over the last weeks I have taken risks. I have made many drawings, most very different than the image I show today, Yesterday's drawing is a result of that search, a search through nonsense and failure and some success. I have been in the process of sorting out authentic emotive and intellectual representation, sorting it from the nonsense that resides in my head. For me, nonsense must be seen to be recognized as nonsense; then it can be tossed away. This is my creative process. I like the drawing I show today because it is closer to my personal reality. Making falderal is easy. Making substance is difficult. This drawing has substance.  Drawing 03·27·2020, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches Paying attention to emotional truths is the diminution of bias. Truth telling is the work of a true detective. A true artist is a true detective. Yesterday's drawing succeeds; its process was one of truth detection. I refused to accept less than emotive truth. My job description demands more of the same. Practice is required. More to come.
 "Clever Liars" (2020 No.1, state 01), oil on canvas, 56¼x45¼ inches {"Clever liars give details, but the cleverest don't!" -anonymous}  Drawing 02·22·2020, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches I have often referred to the feigning of the third dimension on a two-dimensional surface as artifice. Here is it again, in a new painting, and in a new drawing; both are products of yesterday's studio session. The painting is aptly entitled "Clever Liars"; its third-dimension is a lie. My quotation is an old one, one with no known author. The idea is "details" diminish the cleverness of a lie. Too many details in a lie diminish its acceptance in marriages, business, and politics, not so in art. The more detail in a drawing, or a painting, the more the viewer accepts the artifice. If you don't believe me, or if you don't see this in the work I post today, view the 2014 watercolor painting by Anselm Kiefer, below; you can feel your eye fall into Kiefer's painting, scoping back until the eye hits the artifice that appears to be a sunset. This use of the third dimension is very important to me. I find an image which engages the viewer because it insists upon being seen with a third-dimension, a grandly accepted lie; the lie of depth on a flat plane, forces the viewer to think actuality, i.e., the viewer has an additional incentive to believe the image before them mimics reality. They fall into the artwork as people fall into a con job. I have been told the greatest cons are those the "mark" believe they have determined to benefit themselves; the mark determines they will benefit by causing a loss to the con-artist; the "stooge" thinks the "grifter" does not understand how he, the "confidence man," will lose when the "sucker" goes ahead and takes the bait. FYI: A confidence trick is also known as a con game, a con, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko (or bunco), a swindle, a flimflam, a gaffle, or a bamboozle. The intended victims are known as marks, suckers, stooges, mugus, rubes, or gulls (from the word gullible). When accomplices are employed, they are known as shills.  Anselm Kiefer, "The Evening of All Days, the Day of All Evenings", watercolor on paper, 2014  "Inertia to Movement" (2019 No.6, state 3), oil on canvas, 64.5x64.75 inches {"Emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light, or from inertia to movement, without emotion." -Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious", 1955, translation R.F.C Hull} The two Carls believe the same thing; i.e., Jung and Mehrbach. There is no change from darkness to light, or from inertia to movement, without emotion. It is me that I seek. I seek me by practicing the best means I have available, my emotional responsiveness. I like the changes that occurred yesterday in the painting Inertia to Movement. Here is witness to my accepting emotional response as responsibility. In this painting the layers of mess are contrasted with clearness and light, they exist in contraposition, one to the other. Through holding two opposing conditions simultaneously this painting exhibits one as true if, and only if, its contrapositive is true. Contraposition |
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February 2021
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