Unravelling continues... This process is linear; it is forward, step by step, with an occasional backtrace to double check it all makes sense. This feels good. It is rewarding. There were times when I wondered if my great efforts were worth their enormous dilution of time. Effort is worth it. I know better with each mark and stroke. Yesterday's efforts continue to look to negative space as emotional conductor. I want my viewers to feel my work as I feel it.
In a few days you will see a new page on my website, MEHRBACH.com. It will become my Catalogue Raisonné. I have prepared its first four reproductions. Henri Matisse once quipped something like this: "If you ever get confused, go and look at your earliest works. They will instruct you, they will teach you your real interests." That is exactly the effect the beginnings of my Catalogue Raisonné are having on me. I now understand the reason the art of Ellsworth Kelly is driving me. It is purity of emotional statement; it sings beautifully, speaks honestly, to me — I understand it; I want to emulate those deep, profound emotions that Ellsworth Kelly reveals in his work. Yesterday I took another step toward my personal panorama; these are direct, emotional statements, but not as purely emotional as I know I can achieve. Negative space, as a felt, instructive substance, is becoming one of my goals. Three Paintings by Ellsworth Kelly"Look!" I am becoming exceptionally aware of negative space; inside and outside of negative space reside emotions, power, profundity, and intellectual clarity.
I am going to post regularly to Instagram, again.... I am carl_mehrbach on Instagram. Instead of posting to Instagram as parallel to these Blog Posts, I will be using Instagram as an on-the-go, show-you-my-process, site. I will be posting while in my studio; works will be shown in process; albeit relatively poor reproductions compared to the refined ones you see here and on my official website.
Yesterday's drawing was a leap for me. It does playful things with negative space. I feel inspired and energized; very deeply mindful. Finding playfulness in process feels excellent! 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. I am working hard to feel myself through my drawings, one contemplative mark by one contemplative mark. This is a grandiose effort. It requires mindfulness beyond anything I have experienced before. The forms themselves, made by marks of a pencil, are just a portion of the self-empathic problem I am making an effort to solve; the space between each mark, and the space between each form, carries enormous empathetic weight. To fully engage the meaningfulness of this journey is daunting. These drawings are the beginning of very special art; I am beginning to make art as communication of nuanced, momentary feelings, to myself, and to those who view my art. My art is becoming a true record of my living, feeling, thinking, learning, and making.
The drawing I post today exhibits an intellectual and emotional jump. Here are kinetics, here are all kinds of space, from three dimensional and two dimensional space to negative and positive space. This drawing encounters every sort of space a viewer can perceive.
I am acutely aware of my failure to use negative space most effectively. I become acutely aware of my failure when I view master drawings, such as those of Philip Guston's (now on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City). Philip Guston happened to be my most important mentor. I studied with Guston for two years at Boston University (MFA 1979). Awareness of negative space is awareness of one's own personal, emotional space. Visual emotional communication is marks on blank paper or blank canvas. The emotional communication occurs by variation of marks and forms, and by the space left between those marks and forms. My drawing from yesterday does not do this poorly, but it is not as potently communicative as I want it to be. I failed to fully succeed because I did not effectively describe the stress between forms and marks; consequently this drawing does not feel as much as I feel. The crushing solemnity of negative space brings woe. Buddha's awareness informs me; suffering is innate. Suffering allows me celebrate negative transformed into positive. Negative can be black, or white. Here it is both! Yesterday's drawing came in surprise and continues in surprise. That's what effective art does; it lasts and lasts, as does suffering. Great art calls for interpretation and reinterpretation. Francis Bacon, the modern painter, said, "I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility." This idea speaks to this drawing and everything that comes forward, out of me. Suffering creates.
"Gunfire Across My Consciousness" (2019 No.5, state 10), oil on canvas, 48.5x32.5 inches {"My mind is just like a spin-dryer at full speed; my thoughts fly around my skull... Images gunfire across my consciousness... I jump in awe at the soul-filled bounty of my mind's expanse." -Christopher Nolan, Irish Writer on his reasons for writing "The Eye of the Clock", in November 8, 1987 "Observer"} There is something magical and emotional about the negative. Forms dominate both the drawing and the painting in today's post, but it is the negative, the areas without form, that sing in emotional stress. The forms punch out of the negative, speak loudly in positive voices. Consequently the forms punch enthusiastically, in and out they go, undeniable they are. This would, and could, not happen without astute realization of negative spaces. I believe yesterday's drawing is one of my most fully realized. It was born in mindfulness. Its exudes delicate interaction between individual forms, forms against one another, forms against ground. Elegant they are, both painting and drawing, both are loudly original, loudly me!
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May 2024
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