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.