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*

Boom, shaka...laka?

When I speak their language I fail

See me drift mid-sentence

Know where I am headed:

Between pages, between glances (how geometry was born)

Past that blinding light, there must be something to see

once your eyes adjust

The energy within and the energy around

Places your waking life has stolen

Something inside, something that must be freed

A rotten edifice that must be destroyed

A celebration hall, festooned but uninhabited

An abandoned house, deep within the woods

The flickering of light on the leaves

dancing, almost mocking

as they obscure but become your vision

A bed of many fabrics, an array of elixirs

Make-believe, a silly place, a sudden place

a realization, a recognition

a premonition, a pattern writ

A space destroyed with a wave

of an indelicate hand

A radical light, a power

A skeptic searching for a potent spell

Where any object can take on this living quality

this breathing color

This THING, this thing that sneaks up on me

This strange beauty that lurks around the corner

This shape-shifter of meaning, this house of lunatic potentials

and renegade spectrums and spectral renegades

You and I, the only eyes

You and I, the spark, the source

You and I, so patient, so HUNGRY

Picasso at the VMFA, notes, thoughts, etc part 2

So I tried to approach the Picasso show with fresh eyes. I ignored most of the biographical content in order to simply look and respond to the work. The first piece that I felt a deeper engagement with was a painting of 2 bubbly abstracted figures copulating on what appeared to be a desolate seashore. The copulation wasn't sensual it was more violent, like they were attacking each other. What was so striking to me was the transformation of the scene. The background is simplified but not abstracted in the same sense as the figures. To me, this created a dissonance that was both exciting and melancholy. That doesn't seem to translate at all in this little jpeg. That dissonance really traps the figures in time in a way that seemed eerily familiar and somewhat ugly.

Two other pieces affected me in a similar way: there was a painting of a light in a wine bottle juxtaposed with a goat skull figure. He painted the emanating light from the candle in the wine bottle. Next to the painting was a sculpture of the same scene but with the rays of light made into physical brutal spikes. This represented to me another brutal transformation of the known physical, experienced world into limbo. I distinctly got the impression with these pieces that I was seeing a wholly realized, if terrifying, alternative reality. Not just the idea of an alternative reality, the actual thing. Like I had a portal to it.

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.

Disciplinarian

So awkward trials gave way to a return to order, or a return to the need to organize thoughts, palettes, methods and the studio. I feel good about this- or I should say, I feel that intuitive pinch that tells me that this is correct. I think there can be this push to throw the baby out with the bath water in studio practice, when things aren't adding up, to keep asking 'why, why, why??' and continually redefining oneself unnecessarily.

Perhaps we do this in an attempt to hide our weaknesses from ourselves or in an effort to get somewhere quickly. Usually it drives us into increasingly tighter circles.

In either case, I'm glad to mix a wonderfully traditional palette with a full range, rediscovering some subtle colors that I appreciate in nature but haven't mixed specifically in a long time. Mmmm...purple. Yellow. And everything in between....

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....

Eve Ascheim and Kiki Smith

I am completely paranoid that people distrust and fear abstraction. In the Weatherspoon Art Museum this weekend, I went to look as the Eve Ascheim show and people just cruised through that gallery. I must remember that it is not my job to proselytize or carry the flag of a particular doctrine. If I start worrying about other people too much, my own work will never grow.

I'm just saying....talk about leaving room for the viewer! Her work was really inviting to me, that's why it's so surprising that everyone was zooming through. There was this surprising warmth in the paintings, or cleanliness without sterility. I felt relief in looking at this work, relief like some kind of mental stress or anxiety has just been removed. Like you woke up in a different (and better) room.

Kiki Smith is difficult for me, I won't lie. Several pieces in the room really challenged me while others fell completely flat. I should point out that these were prints. I think the pieces were the most interesting when they moved further away from more literal trappings of folk-tales and mythology, etc. The more the pieces move away from that, the more you can feel the presence of those myths.

If you're near the area, check it out.
Images, top to bottom: Eve Ascheim, Untitled and Convergence.

Kiki Smith, My Blue Lake.

my first first Friday

The first couple of stops I made on Broad street left me wanting a little more...grit, I think you might call it. The work I mentioned in an earlier post, Rebecca Murtaugh's, turned out to be seductive, sure, but that is where the work remained for me. Her pieces were beautiful objects.

I really didn't feel 'at home' with any of the work I saw until I got to the Church of the Crystal Light. I wonder if this is just a superficial bias of mine- preferring a setting of informality to the polished veneer of the other galleries.

Nah.

Interesting work is interesting work. The scattered wall piece, made up of what might be called visual and textual 'one-liners' became more than just 'one-liners'. How? I think it was in the volume and diversity of the blips and blurbs, the spontaneous, scrawling feel of the whole piece. Each addition was different than the last in content, in material, usually scale, etc. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that each 'statement' up there was done by a separate person. If that's not the case, damn....bravo. It was unpretentious and fresh, subtly aligning itself with politically minded sensibilty while simultaneously pointing out the ridiculous behavior of such people, or at least, their all encompassing statements.

Also included in that show were two wall paintings (Maya Hayuk) that were seductive in grittier way than the 1708 gallery. It's not that I have something against the meticulous or rigorously ordered as a rule- but like everything else, it's all about how those aspects are deployed. To put it simply, I thought Rebecca Murtaugh's works were closed to me while these wall paintings remained open.

The Transmission gallery offered me the best paintings of the night. It was immediately clear in viewing Alexis Semtner's work that the 'bar' of the whole evening had been raised, or at least, here's someone "really moving some paint around". Her work is such an interesting balance of control and release, surface and illusion. As a show, the inclusion of another installation by Maya Hayuk fit well just formally, tied as it was to a grid but not rigidly so. I guess it was also refreshing in hindsight to see work that looks at geometry in a non-purist light (both Hayuk and Semtner).


"Optical Illude this Biatch" by Alexis Semtner (rt)
"Teen Center" by Maya Hayuk (below)

Reading Rainbow - Rauschenberg leads to Harris

This book I'm reading on Robert Rauschenberg keeps apologizing that he's not as shocking as he would have been in the late 50's, early 60's. Sure, probably not. Especially his later work in which he really tried to address the media assault. It's not his fault that the really relevant work centered around that subject would be addressed more fully by those who were born in the 60's. However...his early work to me is timeless. Maybe non-painters are tired of this kind of talk by 2008:

"I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown....I like to start working...when my sense of efficiency is exhausted".

But I'm not. This kind of thinking is still relevant. In fact, the only thing trying to make it irrelevant is our fad-oriented culture (art world included).

Rauschenberg did not plan his paintings. Continual discovery = genetic makeup of paintings. This is why they can still appear so fresh. He offered you an alternative way of seeing your world by bringing outside objects into the works, and HOW he used those objects NOT to build up a representative whole (thinking cubist collage) but with "apparent indifference to their situation". Object is place is object is painting is color is mark is place...etc. Now that is simultaneity.

Stupid rabbit hole, now I feel like I need to talk about why that perception of simultaneity is worthwhile. You know what-- I'm going to leave that open, sort of...

I also picked up a book at the VCU library called "Discrepant Abstraction". I picked it up casually at first and flipped to an article called, "Quantum Ghosts: An Interview with Wilson Harris". Here's as far as I got:

"His novels breach temporal, geographic, epistemic and other boundaries to advance a complex mantling of inner and outer apprehension, narrative dispatch meeting metaphysical enquiry meeting lyrical compression meeting gnostic demur."

What you say??? So I absolutely had to go check out a copy of his first novel, "Palace of the Peacock". Wowowowow. If your sensibility is anything like mine, pick it up. Compression/Expansion. Our location in the book, or the story, I should say, haha-- I just picked it up as I was thinking of where I was going to go with this sentence and read-- "crash and collide and collapse". Yes, our placement in the narrative crashes, collides and collapses. The 'lyrical compression' seems to be key to my understanding of the book, acting like seductive vibrant colors do on my eye or vocal harmonies in music. You might find beautiful passages in any book, sure, I might even be able to wield one or two-- but Harris is acting like a maestro or shaman, wielding a force. There is no western 'overlord/author'- we are carried on a current.

"The boat shuddered in an anxious grip and in a living streaming hand that issued from the bowels of earth...The outboard engine and propeller still revolved and flashed with mental silent horror now that its roar had been drowned in other wilder unnatural voices whose violent din rose from beneath our feet in the waters."

"The rocks in the tide flashed their presentiment in the sun, everlasting courage and the other obscure spirits of creation. One's mind was a chaos of sensation, even pleasure, faced by imminent mortal danger."

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.