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.