Picasso at the VMFA, notes, thoughts, etc

First of all, I'm not entirely sure Virginia is ready for 1910 based on the conversations I overheard. For example: "Well, TO ME, that just doesn't look like it should be in a museum". To me, that just shows that you're completely unaware of what it is an artist is trying to do. Drawing is thinking through the hand. Picasso's drawings are of interest because you can see that thought process in a stripped down form. Also, *BACKHAND*.

This is not to say I don't have questions, concerns, preoccupations with the show also. Unfortunately, I can't seem to separate my personal studio preoccupations with what I'm seeing at the museum. So let me get that out of the way and come back around to the show....

It's a problem of purity, a problem of everything's permitted so therefore nothing seems to matter in particular. This feeling is not limited to the studio. Within the studio, this is translating into a problem differentiating art from fashion. The general distinction is simple and well-understood: art carries meaning where fashion carries superficial contemporary aesthetics. But the specific is tricky, as always.

I'm craving a method, a recipe. I'm tired of what feels like random achievement. At the same time I am wary of abstraction with a system behind it. I'm also feeling very seduced by contemporary fashion. It just happens to reflect back my own sensibilities. In 5 years I'll be out of fashion, it's just coincidence, the wheel turning. Unfortunately, my own yearning for meaning manifests as an urge to mythologize. It's very hard for me not to jump straight from that urge into primitivism and symbolism. I keep hovering around the native american and Ife exhibits at the museum like some kind of nerdy ghost. Of course, this sort of thing happens to be in fashion right now. Are you feeling my frustration yet?? It does seem important not to be reactionary also.

Part 2 after work...where I will bring this all around to Picasso, I swear.

seek to uncover a mystery color

The prospect of moving forward with your work can often feel like trying to perform magic, like trying to turn a wall into a door or window. You know you've done it before, but was it a dream? The questions you had put aside coming running to your ankles like little gnomes. Some of them are nasty little buggers!

The work I showed in Greensboro this fall was my first body of work post-grad school. I wanted to continue down a path of these strange deliberate marks that build up an uncertain and fantastic space. It was also very essential that I effectively stop myself- that I test my intuition to recognize something that works before I move past it and take the painting in another direction. There were two paintings that went past that mark and ended up being interesting, but more like my previous work.

I strove to make it a show about color, to use combinations I had felt to be important or rich internally but had previously left to the will of the painting. In other words, I somewhat let color be the dictator this time. Color certainly is the biggest of those gnomes and it tends to bite. Why is that? Because it's hard to talk about. It's very infuriating. You can find bits of text here and there that start to hit upon the importance of color.... (the 'haptic space' of Francis Bacon paintings)....but you still have to put it all together for yourself.

Everyone loves and talks about synesthesia, including myself, but there are particular reasons why this is important to painting. Dur, people, it's about illusion. When your brain senses the illusion of space but knows it to be a flat surface, it makes this great contradiction that your mind responds to by trying to involve all of your other senses. I know this happens in music too, through a different means but through an aspect that is as basic to music as flatness v illusion is to painting/imagemaking, but what is it? What is chromatic music? I keep thinking I've found the answer to this but I just find examples of it working....

Dagnabit

<----'Portal', by me.

Le sigh. Every so often I stumble on an artist who has done something I not only think is interesting and enjoy- but is doing something with a material that I could see myself doing. This is a strange experience. I guess this Friday I'll see this woman's work in person and can actually talk about it:

RebeccaMurtaugh

Big differences, sure. My work isn't as polished- a quality necessary for the weirdo humor it carries with it. This work is also further removed from painting, although she's totally one of those painters who just happens to work with 3D materials. Not a negative, just an observation.

And, of course...the title of her show here in Richmond is SEDUCTIONS which is TOTALLY a word I played up in a recent proposal to a gallery down the street. Lucky for me, SEDUCTION is only half the battle. Lunacy, the other??

I am quite literally, talking to myself. Despite prejudices, I really have no problem with this fact.