running

i used to have nightmares about being chased. this went on for years before i realized that there was a common theme. then they finally subsided. the work i started about 3 years ago now, the work i am still pursuing with these ink on paper drawings, has come from my personal challenges. therefore, instead of running, my work suggests a static point of view, a place of rest and quietude in an environment of mystery and potential destruction.

better images of new work

the struggle to find peace in a threatening world

no definition, from my journal

Defining myself, limiting myself. I've done this sometimes -- a lot of times -- to try and understand myself. But it usually has nothing to do with me. Nature is mysterious. My work is also an exploration of my nature. Always been so self-reflective. This work conveys my fears and my love: fear of the unknown, love of losing myself in a world of my making within the picture plane. Never felt more free. Ironically, I've never been tighter in my work -- well, "tight" is not really the right word. More like I just really get into making the image, so I consider every millimeter of its surface. I feel like I'm leaving other people's voices when I work on these (I don't feel this way all the time). I'm left alone to do my own thing. Worry sometimes that people won't appreciate them. It's hard to know if what I do will be appreciated when I've gone off and done my own thing. But it's not like I'm working outside the conventions of common language. Ironic here too, because if anything, this work is more conventional. There's a clear attempt to describe spatial depth and the presence of light. I don't feel like I have to alienate myself. This is interesting because I think much of what I've done throughout my life, not just in art, was driven by a sad need to alienate myself from others. This work is my attempt to be at peace in an unpredictable world. Life is not about my personal survival. That's extremely precarious. Everyone dies, sometimes tragically, sometimes before they get the chance to experience living. Yet life goes on.

people are ridiculous...and a new piece

"furrow" above....

and as i was flipping through this year's "best of" artforum, it occurred to me that i'll never be able to read all of it, even if i wanted to. it's nothing new, i never read all of the articles. in fact, i'm usually lucky if i do more than look at the pictures. and then i realized that this is just one magazine, just one monthly issue, in a universe of written material that i will never, ever touch.

you can't do everything.

Untitled

Apparently poor webcam images of recent work WILL be posted. I have been active making art, I promise. This one was a fight. Fights can be useful. They may not yield successes, but they can be useful. This is a diptych, and because it is from a webcam, it is a mirror-image of the original.

I'm also beginning a lithography tutorial at the Kala Institute in Berkeley, which I'm very excited about. I'm hoping it will help me to develop my work, make connections, and open up local exhibition opportunities.

changes afoot (but how could it be otherwise?)

poor webcam pics of latest efforts will not be posted. plus all latest efforts are unresolved. light is essential.

killing time

the reflections from my last several posts may have offered some fairly obvious conclusions, but i feel that they are relevant to my work. this notion of 'purpose' has preoccupied my thinking for over a year. all of my thinking on the subject has led me to make light more of an issue in my work. The drawings that succeed seem to allow light to have a strong presence. i've been working on these drawings long enough now to know that the light is redemptive, somehow.

time for a new post

i feel a long way from the paintings i was working on this past spring and summer. i'm resuming my work on the ink drawings, fueled by fairly new (to me) realizations about purpose. it occurs to me that even work of an extreme personal nature like Frida Kahlo's can be relevant to others. in her case, she allows others the opportunity to step into her reality, which says something about the human experience, not just Frida's experience. this is important to me because it means i don't necessarily have to follow fashion, or do political art, or be subversive, or do whatever else people think art should do. it can come from my own personal concerns or discoveries and still be relevant to others.

new mexico, website, psychology

i'll be going to new mexico in 36 hours. this trip comes to me in a month of reflection about my direction in art and life. i've been diligently painting on canvas for the past 6 months, and my assessment is that i still have a long way to go before i'm doing what i want to be doing. and as i write this i think to myself, "i don't know why you can't just do what you want to do." one response to this is that if everyone were able to do what they wanted to do, everyone would presumably be satisfied. and i know that there are many, many people who are not satisfied. so doing what you want to do is probably easier said than done. in any case, i believe my efforts have gotten me closer to what i want to be doing, so it hasn't been time wasted.
my website will be launching in a few days. there are some details still to take care of, and we'll probably be tweaking it even after it is made viewable to the public. the process of creating a website, even while the burden of this has fallen on my generous friend, Jody Tate, has enabled me to gain some perspective on my work in a way i didn't have before. i've always known my work to be heavily grounded in process, but the psychological angle of my work is just now becoming apparent. i think you sense this in some of my performances from grad school where my actions could be described as "futile". the promised land drawings, i think, are also psychological in the way they appear to be a view of some unknown viewer into unknown surroundings.

work

anyone can start something. it's much more challenging to stick with something over a long period of time -- to face the criticism, the self-doubt, the financial constraints, and limitations of time and working space; to persist despite embarrassment and repeated failures. this all somehow enables the work to become bigger than oneself. my current work is not bigger than myself right now, but i feel that it could be someday if i stick with it.
i recently saw a documentary film by werner herzog about two mountain climbers. it documented their preliminary climb en route to two himalayan peaks, which they intended to climb in immediate succession. this apparently had never been done. i realized watching this film that i had become somewhat numb to feats like this, which i attribute to sensationalism in the media and the commercialization of everything in the world. in the case of mountain-climbing, for example, there are now tours of mt. everest. in my lifetime i remember when only a handful of climbers had ever made it to the top. this documentary was shot when such feats like this were much riskier than today. when the climbers finally left for their real adventure and had to leave herzog and his crew behind, the scale of their challenge became immediately apparent to me, and i was struck at how it could be possible that these two minuscule humans could conquer these peaks. but they did. of all the things i've seen in the world, somehow i became aware, in a way i hadn't been before, of the power of human will.

slow

i reached a point of reckoning about my latest work at the end of august. i have no light to shed on how this has changed, or not changed, my thinking.
i have been doing some small drawings the last few days.
i plan to start more ink works for the "Promised Land" series tomorrow or the next day.
my website is scheduled to launch on September 21.

louise glück

here's a poem by louise glück, who i saw in santa fe for a poetry reading once. her work is tough and elegant at the same time and often about nature (and us as humans by implication). i thought the following poem related to some of the forms i'm creating, particularly from the promised land series:

Elms

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

website and update

working on my website earlier this week has provided an opportunity to revisit past work and consider it in relationship with my current work. my history of art-making can look inconsistent and disparate at times, but there are recurrent themes. for example, lines pop up in ways that reflect an interest in pattern, borders, gesture, branches, and striations in natural and painted forms. one small body of work from 1997 is a series of small drawings made up entirely of more or less straight lines moving from left to right across paper with horizontal orientation. my site-specific sculpture, mudquilt (above), from Land Arts in 2002, was a "quilt" of pleated mud balls formed by scraping the semi-solid surface of a dry riverbed with my fingertips. here again, there are lines. a much utilized technique in my painting is to pull a brush through thick, unmixed acrylic color, causing the paint to form linear striations of color, resembling the layers of sediment which hardens into rock.
there are also other recurrent themes, or interests, processes, inspirations: working with semi-viscous material, physicality of process and material, and attraction to the unpleasant (the gross, dangerous, and controversial), just to name a few.

doodle and words

here's a computer doodle of a recent painting (because the camera is in south africa with my significant other). the following words are in regards to the painting, not the doodle. the central form becoming much more aggressive; colors range from the sickly to the synthetic. the colors aren't necessarily ones i like, but i choose them because they deserve a place.

the latest

working on a 40"x66" painting now (3 more canvases that size stretched and waiting in the wings). the increased size makes me wilder. feels more like grad school.
i had stopped doing large-scale, expensive work after i left grad school. i could only see the path i was on leading to serious physical injury and a broken bank account. i went back to working on paper, working without color, and working in much smaller scale. maybe this was good. i had a renewed interest in working within a 2-d picture plane.
but now the work is growing in scale once again, though it is still (so far) consistent enough to still be considered part of the same body of paintings i've been working on for the past 4 months or so. the more i work on this series, the further i can feel myself moving away from what i believe are mainstream interests. but when i think about this, i have often not been interested in mainstream interests. i mean, i still love abstract expressionism, which has never fared well with mainstream viewers.
unlike grad school, this time i want to see what happens when i stick with the picture plane.

finished painting

so here's the finished painting.

process

back in the saddle again after about a week's hiatus. i'm at the point now in this series where i can work toward perfecting my technique and editing out all the unnecessary elements. here's another process shot. ideas in my mind: gas, pollution, chemical waste, the color of poison, warning signs.

more...

images and words

these are a couple of works i finished recently. i'm continuing to explore processes that incorporate both chance and deliberate mark-making. i'm also staying with centrally-focused work, because it's not variation in composition that interests me at the moment. it's the peculiarities of form that i want to spend my time on.

painting

me: my work is intended to provoke contemplation about controlling the natural world. but i don't think my work does this. so, i wonder if this is what i'm after. i wonder if it's worth pursuing if i'm just trying to convince myself that it's what i'm after.

so, in the meantime, as i'm trying to figure all this out, i'm just painting.

spectacle

my statement of purpose from my last post has opened up a number of issues i'd like to address. one is the connection between my current paintings and my performance work from grad school, which culminated in the center for contemporary arts performance in santa fe (titled PAINTING COMPLEX, image from this performance shown above, along with a pic of a recent painting). this performance probed the line between entertainment and bodily harm. the spectacle, initially smelly, messy, funny and unruly eventually became dangerous to the point where audience members had to at least consider intervention. either that or run the risk of being implicated by the performer's (my) potentially self-harming actions. although my current paintings do not invite this kind of audience participation, there is still a sense of ruin that occurs amidst the spectacle. i think about exotic butterflies captured and exhibited under glass. i've seen things like this before, and it's utterly captivating. i would argue that a lot of the fascination has to do with the fact that the butterflies are dead. damien hirst incorporated dead exotic butterflies into some of his paintings, because he understands the pull of our morbid curiosity. in the case of my performance, people cheered for me with each successive physical feat. they urged me to press on, and, i believe, wanted me to push up against my physical limits, even while some, late in the performance, urged me to stop.

i'll finish this post quoting myself from the previous post: the central form in these paintings suggests exotic specimens presented as a kind of spectacle on account of their strangeness. underlying the spectacle is a veiled fear of the unknown that imbues the work with a menacing quality. ultimately, it is not nature that is on exhibit, but our fascination with the way things look.

trial and error, what i'm after, and the memory of jim steven

the large painting i started yesterday is destroyed. it developed in a way contrary to my objective, still vague to me, and it is precisely because my objective is vague to me that the painting developed the way it did. actually, it's not so much that it developed in an undesirable way as it got off on the wrong foot. in any case, i couldn't succeed with the painting because i didn't know what i was after. in earlier posts i've tried to state my goals, but the effect i want my work to have on viewers remains undeclared. this makes it unnecessarily difficult to achieve successful paintings. it's also something my mentor, the late jim steven, tried to hammer into me when i was an undergraduate at the university of south carolina. there is a deep-seated personal issue at play here, which is why it has proven to be so difficult for me throughout my career to be clear about my objectives. the issue is my fear of failure. i'm trying to defeat my fear of failure by doing work without over-thinking, which is usually where my fear takes hold. this approach has had some success. but i still need to be clear about my objectives. i'll try here: the work is intended to provoke contemplation about controlling the natural world. the central form in these paintings suggests exotic specimens presented as a kind of spectacle on account of their strangeness. underlying the spectacle is a veiled fear of the unknown that imbues the work with a menacing quality. ultimately, it is not nature that is on exhibit, but our fascination with the way things look. in some cases, the central form looks vaguely morbid, but not blatantly so. what if it were morbid and we just don't know it? what would this say about our intrigue? it is not my intention to judge this striving to control what we do not understand, only to point out that it is there and to provoke further contemplation.

above i mentioned jim steven. i found out about 2 months ago when i tried to contact him through USC art that he had passed away. he had been battling lung cancer for years. i had suspected this had happened, but the news was still deeply upsetting. he was my first mentor.

1st stage

here is the first stage of a 4'x6' painting, the largest painting i've attempted in 3 years. the second and final stage will be filling in between the vine forms with delicate paint strokes. i'm trying to achieve a contrast between concentrated material and action in the center and methodical mark-making around the center. i feel that this allows the work to be direct as well as subtle. i intend to convey wild nature in this first stage. the second stage essentially "frames" nature, which calls into question the ways in which we perceive and understand nature. gardens are framed nature. landscape paintings are framed nature. audubon's studies of wildlife are framed nature. in my paintings nature is not illustrated, but conveyed by chance occurrences in the movement of acrylic color. it is also referenced by the network of tendril-like forms. the work in the second stage of the painting brings nature to the world of artifice; the world of human experience. the end result should be visually engaging and slightly awkward -- fitting the world of nature into the package of human understanding reveals more mysteries than answers.

the center

the center is focus. it is confrontation. the gravity of this point is authority. nature, on the other hand, is wild and center-less as a whole and in general. there is always tension. there are points of concentration in nature, though -- suns, black holes, etc. there are currents; patterns. a germinating seed. a flower. an explosion. a beating heart. a still heart. what if the center is part heart, part flower and part spider? sort of like in the movie, the fly. recognizability offers some degree of comfort. it also suggests control. what about unidentifiable things? my inability to know whether i should feel scared or relieved or elated, etc. intrigues and unnerves me.

art assessment

the lack of funds and fan base makes it difficult to determine the right path. trusting myself has never been easy. i have no intention of being a martyr and alienating myself from the public because of my ideals. i really do want to do work that people can appreciate. sometimes i fear that there's not enough in my work for people to relate to. i feel this is more true about my acrylic paintings than my ink on paper works. at least those have a strong sense of space and light. they also more closely reference natural forms such as vines and branches. the acrylic works are abstract, so whatever interest they have depends on relationships between colors, shapes, textures, etc. within the picture plane. i believe meaningful experiences can still be had from abstract painting, but you have to have a brand of abstraction that works for today's audience. someone who i think does this is the german painter, tomma abts, whose painting is shown above. her abstractions are graphically strong, hard-edged and have moments of 3-d illusion. these are all qualities that relate the work with graphic design -- except that in her works formal relationships are the paramount concern instead of a means to an end. people encounter the work of graphic designers on a daily basis far more than they do of artists (even though, i admit, that line between the two is vague at times). this makes the language of her work a language most people already understand and acknowledge as part of the world we live in. they can easily move on to the substance of the work without having to learn her visual language.

i think you have to sacrifice something to make good work. i'm afraid that my recent efforts with acrylic have been too self-indulgent. there must be some effort to strike common ground with viewers, and this is something i have not done with the paintings yet.

pg 147

out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope. -don delillo, from white noise

the thing

it might be hanging there. hairy. oozing. shrouded in darkness. swimming in vines and growth. the kernel. the seed. lying dormant, but not dead. never dead. it's prehistoric. it's science fiction. it's eternal. life feeding life. the bones the sinews the tissues. it's perverse. the relentlessness of it all. in the wake of civilization, even. in defiance of religion. the blood and guts take with them this knowledge despite the soul, which formerly laid claim to truth.

perspective: a new painting and some referential artists

(from second image) ross bleckner, cy twombly, anselm kiefer, terry winters, brice marden, piet mondrian, joan mitchell, philip guston

materialization

there is power in giving tangible form to the intangible. if i may be autobiographical for a moment -- all too often i have been satisfied with the notion that "i could do" something rather than doing that thing. i've probably painted about 35 paintings since march of this year ranging from 24"x40" to 35"x50". i have never produced work so aggressively or quickly, and i'm surprised by a phenomenon -- the more i produce, the more i understand the importance of producing my work.

things

a fungus in a patch of leaves. a wasp nest in tree branches. ruins overgrown with vines. the colony. the unit. the cluster. veins searching outward and stemming from a common channel. nodules. blight. disease. lichen. mold. cell growth. viral growth. burl. tumor. weakness seized. organization. organ. organic. organize. (all from Greek "organum", "an instrument or tool"). implied labor. the labor of life. the strange order of things....

abstraction

my current paintings are abstractions. they are further removed from representation than my ink drawings. it's difficult to explain the significance of work that is abstract. the work is still influenced by conflicts with religion and nature, and the forms that come out of this struggle are these paintings. i believe that there are still forms and formal relationships that challenge what we know, or think we know. and when any form sits on the edge of knowledge or belief, then there is power.

more painting...

william butler yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

ambition

"If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it." John D. Rockefeller said this. I have been thinking about this quote a lot lately, because it relates to art as well. Do I want to be famous, or do I want to do something more substantial with my work? I've often confused success with the former, but since moving to San Francisco, I've considered with more focus the purpose of my work, not just for me, but for all those who encounter it. I believe that there is still a role for thoughtful images, and I hope to create some. So, while much of the content of my work is about my own personal challenges, questions and sensibilities, I intend to convey these things in a manner that makes them accessible and meaningful to others. Maybe a more concise way of stating my general goal is that I intend to influence people's consciousness. It's not the same thing as "social activist" art or interactive art in the way this term is normally used, but I think it can still be as significant. The next question is: "in what way do I intend to influence people's consciousness"? This is a tougher question than how I define success or whether or not images are still powerful enough to make a difference. It's a question that only arises if you believe that images have power and that artists have a choice in the matter, both of which I do believe...but I'll have to get back to this a little later.

new painting

here is a new painting that i still don't quite know how to evaluate. here's a portion of what i wrote in my journal:
it's more decorative. clearly finished. clean. not layered, but direct. there is tension b/w vague sense of representation and raw materiality of medium and straightforwardness of techniques. seems to reference plant life and art nouveau stylization. can easily see this as a stained glass piece b/c black foundation still visible b/w marks, separating them. does not appear to describe depth -- the black showing through and "once over" painting style keeps it flat. but there is subtle underlying violence that's hard to pinpoint. it's not b/c it's over-the-top or ironically beautiful. it's too understated for that even though worked. colors are not garish even though metallics and interference colors were used. it's modest but it's still curious. it's all so much about directness of marks and letting paint swirl and move on it's own. it's gentle, but something prevents it from being strictly decorative. my personal response to the material of paint and the task set to myself of describing pictorially my relationship with religion and the natural world. the way i've used paint makes this work as much about the medium of paint as it is about nature. the work is elegiac for a changing and disappearing nature as much as a celebration of it. the paint is nature itself. without sadness.

chelsea art

this image from kim dorland is representative of his show currently up at freight + volume. some of the paint advanced 6" from the support and was held in place by long screws. the smell is the first thing that hit me, and then the excellence of the works themselves. i felt like this was very convincing work about our relationship with natural spaces and the misconceptions of the word "natural." another great show was jacob hashimoto at mary boone. these works behave like relief paintings on the walls. each piece is made up of hundreds of small wood and paper constructions, which resemble paper cocktail umbrellas or small kites. the image created by the conglomeration of these "kites" is saturated with color and feels claustrophobic. some of the images appear vaguely representational so that some figure/ground relationship can be discerned. for example, in one work smoke appears to be emanating from a smokestack or, in the one above, kites congregate at the bottom of the space revealing a field of red sky above. these were deeply compelling works, which ultimately left me pondering the issues of space and over-population. more info from these artists can be found at the galleries' websites:
http://www.freightandvolume.com/
http://www.maryboonegallery.com/

1st post

This blog provides a way to present and post updates on my current body of work, entitled "Promised Land." This work is an investigation of nature as seen through the lens of religion, particularly my personal experience with religion, which reveals not nature, but a hope for salvation, a fabrication of idols or a fulfillment of prophecy. At stake here is an intimate relationship with the Earth's true natural environments. Also at stake is an acceptance of responsibility for our influence, positive or negative, on these environments. In the gulf between the world around us and the world of our fantasies lies the suspended anticipation for the fulfillment of promise.