The question of the day: Am I multiple in personalities? OR Am I slowly honing-in, unraveling, clarifying, my one, true personality? I prefer the later as correct. If you go back, to day one of this blog (July 17, 2010), you will believe you see a different personality at work. No, it's me! The message I am learning, as I do this work, day after day, is I am a scrambled personality. It is not easy to perceive the nuances that make up the driving force that makes me who I am. I am stripping away the clouds, the fog that obscures my true passion in living. Yesterday I took a step, stripped away a bit, strongly realized that touch is more important to me than sight. How can this be? I am a visual artist, yet I enjoy touching more than seeing! Let me ask you. Which do you enjoy more? Seeing your lover, or touching you lover?
The two drawings seen here today allowed me to feel all around the imagined forms I created on two-dimensional pieces of paper. During the making of these drawings the imagination of touch was very strong, enjoyed. Acknowledging this feels like profound insight. Being as convoluted as I am, the idea of insight could be delusional. Too high a level of biomorphism bothers me. I believe strong biomorphism forces the viewer to think of animals and insects and extraterrestrial aliens (as depicted in films), rather than clear-sightedly being involved with composition, color, and forms. I want the viewer to visually dive into my art, be consumed by its reality. I don't want the viewer to think about external references. I want them to be here, now. Is this possible? Not completely. We all live in a world of forms and color. Our references are demanding, both intellectually and emotionally. Those who find spiders an emotional conundrum probably see a spider in "2016 No.14" (although it only has four appendages). I see a form stretching itself, forcing the space into three-dimensions. I am hoping this causes spatial tintinnabulation, making the absence of form ring, as if the air itself is alive. This is me trying to enliven the third-dimension of negative space on a two-dimensional plane.
I discovered a new verb today: Chillax! It means "Chill & Relax". I believe yesterday's work denotes behavior similar to the meaning of this compound verb: I am chill-fully relaxing into the basic driving forces of my emotive visual world. There is within me a desire to be figuratively referential, but not too much. I also crave the visual power of three-dimensional space. Together, the reference to a figure, and the reference to three-dimensions, is visually, persuasively, forceful. Some of you may look at yesterday's work and think of the British painter Francis Bacon. I do, and I don't. This is my work. Bacon's is relentlessly figurative, mine is not. Obviously, I, like Bacon, require a means to define abstracted three-dimensions. My images occur within a defined three-dimensional space, contrary to the flat, two-dimensional canvas. I know these reproductions look small on your screen ― don't forget to click on them for enlargement.
Yesterday's drawings appear to be about the artifice of space. I am questioning its possibilities. Unusual in the first drawing is the direction of light (usually I rake it from right to left, but in this one the light crosses diagonally, from lower left). The second drawing plays with line leading to forms, front to back. The lighting in the second drawing is neither important or interesting (it is the contrast in values and shapes that are interesting). The third drawing swoops the forms from front to back, rotating them in space as if on a diagonal arc. So, yes, these drawings vary in their questions about structure. I am exploring the emotional and intellectual affects of invented forms in three-dimensional space. This 3D space is, of course, artificially depicted on two-dimensional pieces of paper. 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 am encountering an expected major problem for an artist with my propensities. How do I integrate the background with the robust forms I create in the foreground? This is a problem because of my natural desire to create sculptural forms. Why don't I just make sculpture? I tried that. I did not like it. It takes too much time to manipulate large forms, as well as enormous studio space and enormous cost. There is also color. I love color. I also love to control and manipulate light. Playing with light crossing forms is so much more direct in drawing and painting than in sculpture. So, here I am. I must deal with the inherent two-dimensionality of canvas or paper as I produce artificially drawn three-dimensional forms. To make the actual 2D work well with the artifice of 3D is not an easy task. It took Cezanne a lifetime. I am committed to this. It looks like abstract forms may allow me to research more directly with this 2D/3D problem than having to worry about the efficacy and meaning of actual forms, human or otherwise. At least, that is how I feel today.
This drawing is more "head-on" than I have been making recently. Even my last few paintings read more like landscapes, or room-scapes, then facades. This reminds me of Claude Monet's artistic development (see three examples below). Early in Monet's career he was very interested in the third-dimension of the landscape, as in "The Road from Chailly to Fontainebleau" (1864). By mid-creed Monet was making facade-like paintings, as in "Rouen Cathedral" (1882). Monet concluded his career making absolute facades, as in his many paintings of "Water Lilies" (1919). I am thinking about facades versus 3D-scapes because I am trying to work through this inherent conflict in picture-making. Yesterday's drawing is more a facade than the drawings from the previous day. I mentioned Monet development, but the "Father of Modern Art", Paul Cezanne, instinctively understood painting as facade. Even his earliest work screams with "I am flat" (after Monet's work, see Paul Cezanne's "Orchard in Pontoise" from 1877, Cezanne died in 1906). To conclude, the flat plane forces an artist to deal with a picture's ultimate insistence on two-dimensional composition. I am working out this dichotomy within my artistic nature. I definitely have a problem to solve, given my propensity for manufacturing the third-dimension while scratching and feeling the surfaces of rendered forms. |
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April 2024
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