An inelegant haiku

Being has meaning

If you can't sense it you are

In your own way, brah

Another New Game

Called, "Free Love"

First open the box. Set out the lovely pieces and the game board. Have a few sips of wine.

Then everyone who decided not to play the game shames the players until they close the box, set it on fire and pretend it never happened. 

A New Game

Called,  "What People Want"

in which the players walk up and down a long hallway

trying to make something

then as soon as they have anything

they throw it at another player

saying the game's catch-phrase

"Is this what you wanted?"

Points are awarded by style

and how much trash you create

Occupado

It’s time to notice again

the air-

and the perfect weight

to each of your colours

how your shadows stick to the bone

tied, occupied, speaking for you

It’s not like lovers might say-

in the locking of eyes

but in the whole, and in each of us

how the light

stretches over cheeks and nose

flashing of hair and fingers

inseparable from the flux of objects that clothe us

following the undertow of singular movements

becoming plural

raising of glass, leaning in, looking over—

I’m in wonder again,

and so casually.

I’m miming the actions of a person talking

And some words do come out, I think

I’m trying to stay here

“in conversation”

Knowing if I sink from it, I will lose also

This other awareness

That has crept in, like pleasure

Like heat rising.

We cannot have a metaphysics

I’ve read over and over

That line, and know it to be true

and also useless.

Because nothing will stop this program

of translation:

how might I move each of you into

The pictorial

so— outside of, or in spite of

or perhaps parallel to?

your bodies.

I can’t have it.

but you are full, not finished, open.

The program runs on.

It is night.

Darkness isn’t empty

It’s the gestation of dawn and it’s familiar colours

But these are better.

They are the promise and the mind

of colours

the root and the world

as it created colours

And the best part is, friend:

They are us

Innocently (how have we managed that?)

Rolling haphazardly out of some communal nest

Rubbing our eyes at the first sign of sun

And banishing sleep

Let me say it another way, there are many angles in:

The colours you carry now

are somehow the accumulation, the full knowledge of what makes them.

They are not superficial to you

in this moment.

But they are equally fresh, as if their first sighting.

How y’all managed to do this

On a Sunday night, here

is a mystery, congrats!

Or we just say: it’s winter into spring

It’s earthlings, animals, it’s life.

Collab

Go to there

Do not speak, to me 

Make silently, do not speak

There, to me

Your eyes may gently

Linger on

The grit of the page

Linger on, a silence

Not dark

a vastness waits for us

A sustenance, In silence

We intuit 

We hope

We feel its rumble in our shaking knees

And we form strength in unspoken 

Unbound

Unions of making

Does this riot gear make me look fat?

I found this great essay of a dadaist talking shit about painters...bear with me folks, or don't...but I got really excited by this last night:

    "Oh those dear fellows, Maurice Denis and Charles Guerin. What a kick in the ass I'd like to give them! Oh jumping Jesus Christ Almighty! How phony is the ideal of Maurice Denis. He paints women and children all naked amid nature, a thing that you simply do not see nowadays. To look at his paintings....you'd think that children brought themselves up and that shoes could be resoled for nothing. How far we are from railway accidents: Maurice Denis ought to paint in heaven for he never heard of dinner-jackets and smelly feet. Not that I find it very bold to paint an acrobat or a man shitting; on the contrary, a rose executed with novelty seems much more demoniacal."

    "The chief thing that will be noted at the Salon is the place that has been assumed by intelligence among so-called artists. Let me say right at the start that in my opinion the first requirement for an artist is to know how to swim. I also feel that art, in the mysterious state corresponding to form in a wrestler, is situated more in the guts than in the brain, and that is why it exasperates me when, in the presence of a painting, I evoke the man and all I see is a head. Where are the legs, the spleen and the liver?

    That is why I fell nothing but disgust for a painting by a Chagall or Jackal, that shows you a man pouring kerosene into a cow's ass-hole, when even real madness does not appeal to me because it manifest only a brain, while genius is nothing but an extraordinary manifestation of the body.

     Henri Hayden. If I speak first of this painter, it is because Madame Cravan's hat went into the manufacture of his paintings. And manufactured it is indeed. Everything in it is out of place, muddy, crushed by the cerebral. I'd rather stay under water for two minutes than face to face with this painting: I should feel less suffocated. Values are arranged in it, to make a good impression, whereas in a work that issues from a vision the values are merely the colors of a luminous globe. The artist who sees the globe has no need to manipulate his values, which will always be false. Hayden has not seen the globe, for he has at least ten paintings on his canvas.

     A bit of good advice: take a few pills and purge your spirit; do a lot of fucking or better still go into rigorous training: when the girth of your arm measures nineteen inches, you'll at least be a brute, if you're gifted."   [Cravan, Arthur. "Arthur Cravan: Exhibition at the Independents." Dada, the Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. By Robert Motherwell. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981. 5-7.]

     Arthur's said two things I've been unable to articulate: the importance of the whole body in painting (the anti-quip) and the essential quality of a vision. There's no reason to summarize further. However, it also brought into focus the desperate, narcissistic neediness that exists now...well, everywhere (because when do you read a contemporary writing like his?). Not to say that I want to cultivate being an asshole, I actually think I'd find that nearly impossible. Not only is it just against my nature, but I suffer from the same fear of confrontation that most people do: a fear that is probably more a fear of being wrong than it is a desire to be nice.

     Back to the point, I want to cultivate being an asshole at the right time because being nice in our culture means fuck-all anymore. Maybe we could drown all the actual assholes and teach all the nice people to say what they actually think. There, culture saved. It probably would because I bet most of the actual assholes are at the ground zero of planet destruction stroking their persian cats. What a lovely image. Oh wait, there is no ground zero for planet destruction anymore. Hyperobject

     To bring it back to peacefulness, if you confront me about something I've done that you don't like or understand maybe I can:

1.) shed some light on my motivations

2.) realize you have a point and change my thinking

Here's a video that speaks to this narcissism by artist Ryan Trecartin:

Center Jenny (Aubrey Plaza is in this)

It will make you feel pretty dirty but there are some perfect moments in there.....I think worth sticking through for the whole thing.

VMFA Fellowship!

Well, I've been telling them for years... but the VMFA has finally concluded that I am, in addition to being a number one cheese deliverer and chicken tempura distributor, a professional painter!!

Since I do love a list...

WHY THIS IS RAD

1.

2. While this photo was taken in Joe's adjacent studio, the temperature is the same...you get the point

 

3. Holla

Forest Bathing (fear not the landscape)

I'm still here! Let's see if I can beat my two posts a year habit in 2015. Unlikely, but hope springs eternal, even for boneheads.

More incremental progress in the studio as per usual. I sold some paintings at the end of last year which gave me a little buoyancy to carry me into what will be a new body of work.

I'm done apologizing for the landscape that constantly appears in my otherwise 'abstract' work. I'm not even sure to whom I was apologizing or why!

What made me accept this into the image? Because, even though the idea of painting mimetically from the landscape feels like the wrong way to go, I still find myself building images in the manner of a landscape. I find myself doing this not just out of habit- let's be clear. I broke myself of that habit and found some interesting results in grad school and beyond. This penchant is coming from another desire in me: to put it simply, to relate to the landscape. And let's be real, these "landscapes" are still pretty damn abstract. I was taking inventory of the things I set out to accomplish:

1. I want complex space in the work.
2. I want the colors I see in life (even if I don't need to paint the object)
3. I want to seduce the shit out of the viewer (people do love the whiff of the familiar or archetypal)

Of course, I could still do all three of those things without allowing the landscape in.

4. I want the paintings to have a clearer (but still enigmatic!) relationship to that which is visibly universal.

Enter the scape! The change happened in paint first, as it should be. I painted over this small piece that just never quite delivered and ended up with the most bizarre little "street scene":

While that had me scratching my head, I painted this:

which is decidedly tree-like… sorry for the glare
and then this:

which is probably the most traditional painting I've done in a while...

I'm not saying these are great, but they are little footholds, and I want to go somewhere new. Also, I like the idea of giving the viewer a foothold also...right before I pull it away and go somewhere far out. I'm piecing this together with some other changes, resolutions, etc:

5. To pay more attention to varying textures
6. To build more patterns of mark-making (not so many one-offs)
7. Pay better attention to value

From that comes this:

I need to fix a composition issue there... but Omicron Theta IV wasn't built in a day....
I'm thinking of titling that one the Holy Mountain after one of my favorite movies. Too much for one post. Maybe I'll beat my two post a year record after all.

All Up In the Grey Area

The favorite dance of a painter is what happens after someone asks, "What makes a work of art meaningful?" or "What is the meaning of this?"

The dance has developed over the ages, not because the artist lacks the answer but because the answer so often does not satiate most people asking. Here's the pattern: question is asked, response is delivered, querent stares (if they're nice they'll try and help you out), artist stumbles on words because things just got awkward, querent looks skeptical, artist gets freaked out and blurts something vague, unintelligible or just completely unrelated.

That does sound like a "me problem", doesn't it? Well, yes. But once I recognize a pattern like that, I fall right into it.

AND WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

If anyone read this blog, I would no doubt get all kinds of responses to this...but the common zen-savvy answer goes something like:

A painting simply is meaningful if it is more than the sum of it's parts: that the whole somehow transcends the crude bits. 

Another version I've read/heard/experienced is:

The painting looks back at you.  OR The painting has a real palpable presence in a room.

So maybe now you understand why this answer is not acceptable for a lot of people. You now have a whole area of grey…a wide chasm for debate to ensue over which piece in here is meaningful. This is in contrast to the lens through which we usually view images, namely, "Do I like it?" The real reason this, "the painting has a soul" type answer is eye-roll-inducing to most people is:

1. The answer is fluid (changes even within a single viewer)
2. The answer relies on a judgement from the viewer (varies between viewers)
3. The meaning is not reliant on a single particular technique (although the meaning does arise out of the technique used). In other words, there is no hierarchy of technique aside/outside of the painting.
4. It carries the whiff of the metaphysical- and that is a polarizing whiff, believe-you-me. Yes...I suppose it is scary to think we might not know and control everything about our existence.

THE POINT

A lot of strange, new exciting experiences can develop if we fight this impulse to immediately dismiss that which doesn't immediately ring your bell. We might even...grow *gasp*

The Annotated Artist's Statement (Kelly's Real Deals)

I want to create images that populate the gap between the seen and the unseen. 

*****You might think this sounds pretentious but in reality, it's true. I am actually trying to do make paintings that do this because I am trying to grasp at meaning to this existence. I have locked onto something (the painted surface) that I find completely enigmatic and I've got to know what the next image becomes. It's not that I think that it'll be some masterpiece, it's more like excavating. Less pomp, more curiosity.

To do this, I create images that fluctuate between readings: potential horizon lines buckle and multiply, forms remain open and colors mimic then defy the known world in the same stroke. 

*****So what you're looking at seeks meaning in multiplicity. It's really ok and intended that it doesn't look like anything right off the bat. It's also perfectly ok to see certain things in it. If you look at it, see a certain kind of landscape, for instance, but then...the resemblance recedes....it's not really that landscape, but it is, but it isn't, etc. That fluctuation, the living between states of recognition- that is what I'm trying to communicate. Now, how that fluctuation makes you personally feel is, well, personal.

Too much text, here's an image:

Through these images, I am searching for a way of seeing that bypasses language in favor of a enlivened sense of discovery. 

*****Do you ever see something in the distance and you can't quite make out what it is...and it looks just, really exciting to you? That "what IS it?" excitement is a huge part of abstraction for me. Usually when I find out "what it is" by driving or approaching closer, it looses that magic quality that it first had. Also, when people talk about a "childlike sense of wonder" it speaks to the same idea. A young child may not even know the word for a certain object yet so they are seeing everything freshly, in terms of color and form only. I believe that kind of wonder is something to hold on to, so I'm trying to create a way to do so, even if just on a painted surface. 

I wanted to write this because I feel trapped by the artist's statement. In art school we were encouraged to write a certain way, a way that is very academic, duh. I don't have a problem with this kind of writing because of what it is, but I have always felt compelled to annotate everything in a more conversational manner but was shot down. Writing in an academic way when you are striving for something that is, let's face it, far-out-as-shit compared to everyday endeavors ( I don't know, like gardening, cooking, crafting, fixing a car, building anything, anything with a known and functional result/set of parameters) can be a total turn-off. 

In showing something you consider art, instead of an impenetrable wall of text, you kind of need a wading pool into that world, and not because people are too stupid to get it but because it's just a totally different way of looking at objects. We come in off the street and we don't know how to make that transition. I say WE on purpose. I have the same problem as anyone else with this. I'd really like it if artists and professors could acknowledge this, the art world would be better for it. I can't look at any work of art and immediately "get" it. That's just not the nature of the dang thing. That shit be subtle, yo!

Too much text. Here's an image:

winter's end

You have the freedom to make whatever you want to make. What will you make?

The problem with the freedom to do "whatever" is just that. There are NO bounds. The wilderness is wild, baby.

Winter is an uneasy time in the studio: there's no heat so I don't want to stretch new works and painting in gloves can get tiring by early March. I end up with a lot of time to muse on why I approach my images the way I do. Before the frost set in completely, or while I was still willing to brave it, I painted a couple sort of dead-pan realistic paintings: 3 small still-lives that are completely divergent from the rest of my work. I initially wrote this off to as siphoning the tedious, precious-making part of my painterly instincts off of the purer more intuitive approach I covet. Well, now I wonder.

My work has been about play- but maybe, just maybe, thinking this way has limited me. Isn't what I seek is much bigger than 'play'? I've always had a difficult time articulating the subtle meanings to my paintings beyond the obvious. Don't get me wrong, I know what they are...but finding the right words and communicating them in the .5 microseconds that the average human is capable of listening, well, proves difficult.

But here's a bit of it:

What seems like play, is actually an awareness of absurdity, an awareness of approaching madness, annihilation created by the exhausting sameness of modern existence. The sheer scale of modern existence creates anxiety; anything repeated so many times: whether a product, an action, a cultural phenomenon, serves to remind me of my smallness. There is no denying this smallness, so I must accept it.

So what is the result? My reaction? What image does painting take in the face of the behemoth?

Stubborn playfulness. It says, "you want me to have an easily digestible meaning, form or message: so I won't. I will celebrate the nonsensical right along with deep beauty" It says, "you will never stop primary experience, joy, wonder, or intuition. You will never stop my searching for meaning through images." I realize that this kind of thinking entails a MUCH more diverse approach to mark-making, forms, colors, everything- than I've fallen into. Perhaps a bit of styling has crept in....perhaps it's time to destroy to renew....time to be brutally honest with yourself....you could do more to make what you're after....offer something small and tender in the face of the behemoth....offer something sweet in the midst of the chaos....YES studio YES spring.

Baby? Bathwater? A lesson.

Last year I made a lot of new work but didn't spend hardly any time trying to get it into galleries. At the beginning of 2013 I got really freaked out from not having any shows lined up beyond the local coffee shop.

What followed from this was a great deal of worrying about my work in relationship to being 'out' and for sale. That's dangerous thinking for a painter not dealing in pure decoration or illustration. So I went through half a dozen iterations of what my new work was going to look like. I wobbled about in these various directions, getting about two steps in each of them before reaching an insurmountable conflict with each one.

I had surprising revelations in the middle of the night, I drove to the studio convinced over and over that I'd really nailed it this time. I collected materials for 3D collages that never materialized, bought a mirror for a self-portrait, some really wacky colors of Gamblin paint and the list goes on. It's not like I haven't made anything interesting in the last five months. I have. It's just all over the place, just like old times- which scared the ba-jesus out of me.

I remembered something said to me about change in the studio- basically, that the work you make during these times can be embarrassing and revealing but that it MUST be so for a time. So I tucked this advice in my cap and kept on, forgetting the other half of the advice: that you must be a master of what you have, not what you think you ought to have. More simply put: don't get ahead of yourself.

Then I visited to my own website for an unknown reason. A surprising thing happened- I responded to my own work. It turns out that I am actually getting a little closer to what I set out to do, to make images that are strange, beautiful, playful and hungry. It's not perfectly there, there are gaps and room for growth but- those are opportunities!?! Why did I jump ship in January?

Fear. Insecurity- because I didn't have what I felt I was entitled to have. Even though I have built my life around a certain ideal: being true to making art and damn the consequences, I suppose it's much harder to walk the path than build the trail. Your ego sneaks in and demands attention, you begin to want what others have or feel really stupid for doing something different. Something alone. The 'being true to making art' part is hard enough, but the 'damn the consequences' is much easier to exclaim than to slog through.

Just another instance of self-analysis driving one in circles. You'd think I'd have learned that lesson. Well, it's not as if I haven't learned anything through painting in the last 5 months, just not as gracefully as I would've liked. Let the following be known henceforth:

CHILL the f@#! out.

Do YOU really want to do this? Or is there an outside pressure here?

Don't rush whatever it is you're working on.

The commencement dictates the final result.

Leggo that ego.

Pieces at the VMFA: Susan Rothenberg

Here's an idea:

Interviews with painters that currently have a piece up at the VMFA. Starting wiiiith....

Susan Rothenberg

Now find her piece!!! It's a ricocheted stone's throw away from weddings on any given Saturday. It'll probably be gone now that I've posted this. There's a clue at 26:26. Also, notice how at 23:35 the interviewer adeptly avoids a very illuminating quip from Rothenberg regarding her practice.

Certainty, Certainly Not

The past year in the studio has been a lot more straight-ahead than previous years. It's one thing to spend a great deal of time in there- tearing ones hair out, shamanessing all over everyone, questioning oneself to the point of paralysis but it's quite another to go in checking your insecurity at the door.

Ok, it's not that easy. I've just gotten better at maintaining the right mental state. I would compare it to meditation. When your mind wanders back to that arena that you've learned through experience isn't helpful to creation, you just return to quiet center, as one would a mantra. It's also like driving a car, constantly making minute corrections in order to keep moving forward.

None of this has helped me get my work out particularly, but that's another skill set and certainly a New Year's resolution.

There was another change that happened this year. I discovered that I was relying on painting ideas that I hadn't actually done yet as some sort of mental crutch. I would think, "Well, even if this doesn't work out, I have this other thing" without actually making any move to create this 'other thing' and thus not fully committing to what I was working on. When I realized I was doing this, it was a little embarrassing. It's as if I had to fluff myself up to stay positive. Well, there's got to be a way to stay real with yourself without tearing yourself down. There's got to be a middle road.

My solution was to do a couple of these 'other things' promising myself that I would withhold judgment. That no matter what it looked like that I would just stay above it somehow. If I wanted to continue down one of these paths, I just would- I wouldn't analyze it to death. I'm just going to let it happen, having actual faith in that thing I claim to have faith in: intuition.

The Invisible Pyramid

I seem to have this skill of stumbling upon the weirdest books at second-hand shops that grapple with our place in the cosmos. Here are some bits of poetic language from my recent find, The Invisible Pyramid:

"time glimpsed through a blowing curtain of dust"
"Man himself is the solitary arbiter of his own defeats and victories"
"compulsive vertigo of vast distance and even more endless time"
"I dream deeper, slipping back like a sorcerer through the wood of time"
"We no longer stare at the stars or think of the unreal. Do not repeat this. I think we are animals."
"Indeed the cloud itself was symbolic. It represented time in inconceivable quantities--time, not safe, not contained in Christian quantity, but rather vast as the elemental dust storm itself."
"a silence so profound, a silence so complete that the soul feels penetrated by a sort of religious terror."
"Man cannot restore the body that once shaped his mind."

"Out of a spoken sound, man's first and last source of inexhaustible power, would emerge the phantom world which the anthropologist....calls culture. Its bridges, towers and its lightnings lie potential in a little globe of grey matter that can fade and blow away on any wind."
"A name is prison, God is free"
"To speak of man as 'mastering' such a cosmos is about the equivalent of installing a grasshopper as Secretary General of the United Nations."
"Nature gambles, but she gambles with constantly new and altering dice."
"the flaw is in the vessel itself"
"Infinite love cannot be expressed in finite room. Yet it must be infinitely expressed in the smallest moment...Only so is it in both ways infinite."
The price of living:
"It is, though overlooked, the discontinuity beyond all others: the separation both of the living creature from the inanimate and of the individual from his kind. These are star distances."
Captain Ahab: "All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad."
Buddhist saying: "Thou canst not travel on the path before thou hast become the path itself."
"Men may....use beautiful or deathly machines and yet have no true time sense, no tolerance, no genuine awareness of their own history. By contrast, the balanced eye, the rare true eye of understanding, can explore the gulfs of history in a night or sense with uncanny accuracy the subtle moment when a civilization in all its panoply of power turns deathward."
"...because with understanding arise instruments of power, which always spread faster than the inventions of calm understanding."

I'll keep updating this post as I read!

Titling

Sometimes you can be so close to your work that you don't see something really obvious.        
For example, today it occurred to me just how important titling my work is to the work itself. I realized this when I decided to make a list of reoccurring phrases that I use in my songs and paintings. What I have so far is:

Radical Light (from a poem by A.R. Ammons)
Myth of Boundaries (from an AMAZING book by Wilson Harris)
Frontier (a word I use for paintings that have a really novel space)
Wilderness Surface (a phrase I use for paintings where the novel space is primarily created through texture)
Portal Pusher (break on through to the other side, baby)

SO???
Hm. I guess I'll just keep on collecting words. To live you need books, words to save and keep with you. Words trailing behind you when you walk, floating above your head when you sleep. To die, you won't need a book or prophecy. These are words you can't save, although they'll be the bridge to the next living soul who picks up your golden track.

I know that's a bit depressing, but I saw an opportunity to expound on some lyrics and I took it! "Softly, softly you fall apart. And you won't need, a book or prophecy. Words you can't save."

Without poetic thinking, language is just a crude tool and a prison.

Keeping it Snappy

As someone who is predisposed to an unhealthy amount of self-analysis, here are some of the things I consider to drive away the fear/anxiety and keep the studio practice spritely:

Joy gives you power.

My variety of painting is like any necessary human expression such as singing or dance.

Fuck it.

It's about play, so how are you getting so down about it?

I know I've made something worth saving before. It will happen again. Have faith.

You are totally freaking free!! This is your chance to make real all or any of those things bouncing through your skull.

Don't be impatient. Let the painting reveal itself to you through the ACT of painting, not just in THINKING about it.

Judgements you make don't need to carry so much positive or negative weight. This is from a part of you concerned with illusory ideas of success/failure. As long as you're thinking of those ideas, you certainly won't make a good painting!

Portal Pusher

In the constant ruminating over my paintings, I keep thinking about hitting the pavement. I think about that peculiar sensation, the sudden awareness of the physical. It's funny, I used to think the more appropriate scenario was the moment during a jump (or fall) just before you start to come back down. No longer! Mind versus asphalt.

What the hell am I talking about?? I'm talking about multiple takes on reality. On the one hand, I am desperate for magic, desperate for a portal, or a sudden change. I know that I occasionally experience something beyond the sum of whatever is unfolding, but I lack the ability to describe it. It's me, floating away on my bicycle. It's my mind before hand touches canvas.

On the other hand, I am hyper-aware of the impossibility for a real examination of this magic. The impossibility of fully and really passing through a portal. I know that it slips away as soon as you turn to see it head-on. I know that I'm a damned fool. It's me, kissing the ground. It's paint hitting paint, swirling, scraping, pushing back.

It's not a dignified battle. It's mud-wrestling. Painting isn't dead, it's the perfect medium for the times. Moving paste around a flat surface, sometimes pretending it's not actually flat. People ask, why can't people write music like Mozart now? Because the world he wrote to/for/about...that's not our reality. Tough nuggets. 

Ann Coxon Quote

"The art of 'falling without hurting yourself' is about developing a skill. It is about letting go of rigidity and inhibitions, making a statement, a leap, yet landing scathed. For an artist, this translates as learning to be confident in one's ability to express oneself, remaining strong despite the vulnerability of continually revealing inner thoughts, desires, feelings or motivations. From then on, it's about making a habit of creating, continuing to develop and to 'hang in there' day to day."

-Ann Coxon from her book on Louise Bourgeois

The Space Between

It hit me like a hammer today (again) that painting/drawing really comes down to describing relationships (duh). I guess I always know that even though it may not be in the front of my mind.

I looked around my studio today and realized that what I'm chasing right now is not a play off of a landscape-type space in order to describe an unspeakable feeling, not just a "new world", but some very discrete forms and their relationship to one another. Usually, lately, I build a whole space, rising up together...but I'm getting back to bluntness and silliness holding hands and staring at you from the canvas. It's a relief that I realized this more consciously today because now I can go after this idea with more focus.

This idea, that painting is about relationships can get really complex really fast when you consider that painting/drawing can be 'about' not only the relationships between people (with or without actually depicting them) but also relationships between existing physical forms. This is where my mind usually gets blown. Can I really examine, explore, describe the unspoken between people through abstraction? I think yes, it's possible. Can I really do all this and also utilize the conventions of pictorial space? Is it necessary? Should I completely drop all conventions and be more 'purely' abstract? I think the reason I turn away from that idea is that the relationships that I want to explore are between myself, another person(s), the entirety of physical space and the viewer.

The problem also arises when I realize that I'm approaching this from distinctly different ways. 'Radical Light' for example (a painting that is already is on the blog) is about the relationship between myself and the well...planet Earth. More specifically, it tries to make real the character of ecstasy (insufficient word) and awe (insufficient word) that I experienced. But these recent paintings seem to actually kind figurative (with the exception of one). The forms aren't scapes, they are more like characters, like the work right after grad school. Anytime there is a change in the studio it has me scrambling for answers. But also, these might just be different 'modes' or categories that just exist in my practice and maybe I should just embrace them both! The Radical Light paintings and the Negotiating Distance paintings.