Category: Forms

Hither & Back

7/10/2023

Drawing 07·09·2023 No.1, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches

Drawing 07·09·2023 No.2, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches

The Importance of Negative

11/8/2022

Drawing 11·06·2022 No.1, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches

Drawing 11·06·2022 No.2, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches

I have been so much about the positive that I have had difficulty mastering the negative. These drawings are exceptional because they contain positive forms that animate the negative space in which they reside.

Two Steps Forward, Step Back (?)

10/6/2022

Drawing 10·05·2022 No.1, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches

Drawing 10·05·2022 No.2, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches

Me feels these drawings are a step backward. They do fill the page with adequate compositions, but they do not partake of the greatest pleasure available to me. It give me greater pleasure to feel large solid forms, rounded 3D forms. I desire to dominate the spaces I create with populations of felt 3D forms on 2D surfaces.

Becoming Whole

6/16/2022

Drawing 06·15·2022, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches

The trend appearing in my work is me grabbing onto meaningful forms residing in meaningful space. I go into into that invented place in order to find meaning and personal truth. This makes sense to my deeper self. It is me recognizing my personal, idiosyncratic wholeness. Yesterday's drawing is a step toward acceptance. In this drawing I see truth in forms and truth in their spatial residence; these entities, and their space and place, reflect personal recognition of reality.

Processing Reality

2/24/2022

"Silence, Exile, and Cunning" (2022 No.1, state 5), oil on canvas, 45½x57 inches, {"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning." - James Joyce (1882-1941), "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916)}

Real is what real does when personal reality is accepted. I am in the process of accepting the animus of myself. Philip Guston said to me, "You really enjoy inventing a world full of little abstract forms and figures." Guston said this with glee (as he viewed one of my student paintings, see below). In other words, Guston recognized my most basic motivation before I had accepted it. For years after Guston’s comment I continued to squirm, search, look and wonder. Now I return, now I accept the truth of my mentor’s observation. Philip Guston’s recognition of me finding joy through invention of forms and figures is worthy of my acceptance. I denied a truth seen by this mentor like a child who chooses to deny the wisdom of his parent. Guston knew me better than myself. Now I am seeing my acceptance become real in the painting, "Silence, Exile, and Cunning”!

"Objects & Me", oil on masonite, 1978

In Need of Special Sauce

2/22/2022

"Silence, Exile, and Cunning" (2022 No.1, state 3), oil on canvas, 45½x57 inches, {"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning." - James Joyce (1882-1941), "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916)}

Right now this painting, "Silence, Exile, and Cunning", is nothing special. It requires some sauce, special sauce. That will happen today. This painting lacks my dreamscape. I dream of playful building blocks. places seen within my mind's eye, forms deeply related to my personal panorama of visual excellence, things I want to see that do not exist.

At War with the Pig

1/24/2022

Drawing 01·23·2022, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches

For today's post, I considered many titles: “Dirt Does Not Save the Soul” and “Too Much Want” and “Less is More” and “Thick in the Head.” I settled for the one you see at the top of this post.

I can not help myself. I love to make marks. I love to draw. I love creating new forms. I love forms which emote memories of things past. But, when I look at my work, I see complicated. Simple is better. Simplification is necessary. I want to hit the viewer with great first impressions, ones that last. I want simple messages to myself, ones I immediately understand. I am the primary viewer.

The drawing I show today should have been pared. There is an extra form. I am referring to that little one, the one that resides above the major form. I’d say this extra form is like a limbless torso, with a sombrero. Rather than erase, repair, I will make another drawing. The next one will be simpler.

By the Way, looking at the painting, "Gonna Speak to the Crowd,” one more step is required. I thought I was done with it. No. A simple tweak is required.

The painting, "Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up”, requires several more steps.
Stay tuned. Check back in a couple days.

Lastly, I am trying to simplify my sentences as well. Yeah, language is the same as drawings and paintings; less is more understandable.

Desperately Seeking Universality

12/14/2021

Drawing 12·11·2021 No.1, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches

Drawing 12·11·2021 No.2, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches

These drawings are research efforts. They desperately seek universal emotive impact. I seek emotional visual statements, statements not confused by dominant forms. Substantive negative space is required to give positive forms potency by juxtaposition.

Chug, Chug, Chugging

12/1/2021

Drawing 11·28·2021, pencil on paper, 20x16 inches

Try to look at this drawing as non-representative. I make a plea for abstractive, non-reality because this drawing has an improbable distraction, the body-two legs-neck-head confusion of its major form. I won't make a drawing like this again! I don't like figurative distraction. So... if you can escape the distraction, of something vaguely figurative, you will see a fine drawing, a drawing that deals with compositional movement, space, and form.

IT is IN the NEGATIVE

8/11/2021

Drawing 08·10·2021, pencil on paper, 16x20 inches

It is not the forms we see that inform; it is the absence between the form, the negative space between the residence of forms, that makes information. I know this. I am working to feel this. I am working to make my knowing into real visual information. This is one more tick to be ticked on my list of quests. There is (i) centering. Now there is (ii) negative space as potent information. If you doubt my reasoning, take a good look at works by Egon Schiele.

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