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