A Summer Tickle

A Summer Tickle Exhibition Postcard

Please drop by and see the finished version of my painting used above!

To Paint Like Terrence Malick Directs

I am determined to not write a review of the new Terrence Malick film, Tree of Life. But throughout watching the movie I was awestruck at Malick's flawless and Impressionistic visual construction. A short way through I realized Malick was painting a movie.

Initially I was impressed with the consistent tempo and camera movement carried over to each shot. This movie is about slow things - touch, contemplation and texture, about living and breathing. But for all that it moves. The editing is quick. Each jump picks up on the previous camera's movement whether forward, backward or up. I suppose this could be like a Three-Dimensional implied line or direction. In this case, Malick seems to imply a forever forward or changing direction of living - one that both absorbs understanding and then creates nostalgia to linger on what just passed.

Malick also makes each of those cuts a contrast. Warm hues are always followed by cool ones. Darks by light, and so on. And the tempo of these changes is also changed. It all becomes reminiscent of the way a painter would construct form or space - articulating everything by making changes of different sizes, flatness or tone.

Everyone touches - and they touch everything, a lot. But the camera does to. It doesn't sit back, it sits on shoulders or pulls back. It crawls up stairs in a suspenseful way. The camera is just as inquisitive as the characters are in their own discoveries.

But for being such a long movie, it's impressive how economical he is. The film takes long meandering, surreal turns into the Creation, but returns back to the life of a Texas family. For all this terrain, repeated and lived in for decades by this movie's timeline, Malick still manages to make each shot a separate stroke. Each one an opportunity for something new. In this fashion we are also experiencing the changing lives of these characters - but like the way a painting would, describing something new, or a new understanding of the same thing, with each stroke.

But most of all it's Malick's four-decade preparation for the movie - and the arduous searching for accidental footage of butterflies landing on actor's hands, or birds falling out of nests (with blockbuster actors no less) - that makes Tree of Life so painterly. It's studied and demonstrates classical structure but allows in the most important part: the accidental. Which, executed by a master like Malick, appears as it should on the finished canvas: having the appearance of being flawless and anticipated, but only so because he has spent such a disciplined time examining those potentials until he was able to effectively harness and articulate with them.

"Painting is not dead, it's just hard."

The Things They Carried 2011 Sarah Awad (via Sarahawad.com)

Painting is the latest release in the Documents of Contemporary Art series by MIT. The Brooklyn Rail has a loving review of it here.

The book defends and celebrates the medium - as anything on painting today does. I think it's clear painting didn't disappear and it won't. It's almost as if the original declaration of Painting is Dead was simply to generate good conversation around the complex merits of painting for it's own sake in today's world.

Painting (via The Brooklyn Rail)

An artist in a studio near my own once told me that "installation is where it is" and followed by something to the affect of, "painting is over."

I don't buy it. I stick to painting simply because of it's tangibility - the tactility and almost humming quality of the act itself. And painting seems to involve depths I'll never exhaust.

But I do use other mediums - like photography - to paint. One included article in Painting is Jerry Saltz's The Richter Resolution. Saltz's article laments current painting's handicap on photographic reference. He misses what he calls paintings "weapons of mass destruction" or "drawing, color, surface, touch...."

One of paintings greatest wonders is it's ability to distill information. The medium is inherently about choices. And a good painting directs you and makes you believe in those choices. Meaning also that what is absent is believable too.

Photography does the same, but with different refinement. Painting as an act in itself, as in a repeated process of re-articulating something or re-imagining things, has taught me how to choose and to think. And it's sometimes painfully slow or nostalgically fast. But it carries layers and each painting ultimately has multiple moments of understanding of one thing.

Adding to that notion, The Rail's review ends with the anonymous quip, "Painting is not dead, it's just hard."

Letting Go with Style: Ben Grasso

Construction Proposal II Ben Grasso 2009 (via Phaidon)

Ben Grasso's paintings start as something whole - houses, sometimes tankers, cars or structured landscapes - and then let go into wood planks, shadows and shapes. Most often these things are being blown up or unhinged, as if someone were to introduce a tornado or disaster into the Americana landscape ideals of Winslow Homer.

Untitled (House) Ben Grasso 2006 (via I Heart My Art)

His images seem to straddle logic - or beg to be reconstructed with logic - but actually reveal pretty orderly painted relationships. For example even as unreal those houses pulling themselves apart into a cross sections may be in a literal sense, the pieces cast shadows, the walls and structures exist exactly in space.

It's where Ben Grasso decides with the paint that makes these images so interesting. Those planks of wood or explosive motions become strips of color - and the decisive choice colors making a form in space - become delicious. It doesn't matter after that what violent act surrounds those forms - although that just makes them even more interesting.

See also Ben Grasso's current exhibit at Thierry Goldberg Projects. Or see also Julie Mehretu who takes this into an entirely different abstract idea.

Inspirational Words: Work!

(via Wikipedia)

When I need them most - inspirational words from Ira Glass (via ackackack):

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take awhile. It's normal to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through.

Also, since these are words from a decidedly word-based artist (a writer!), then Semi-Related: The Atlantic's interesting re-occurring column called What I Read. 

Shaun Tan: An Alternate Path

We only have to wash & wax our missile on the first Sunday of every month
(from Tales From Outer Suburbia) (via Shauntan.net)

Shaun Tan is exactly the kind of Illustrator my teachers would have me look at. Tan's images are technically rich, imaginative and steeped in narrative traditions captured from film, books, painting and just about everything. I don't know much about Tan, but a recent NYT Magazine article revealed the kind of artist I might be if I had stuck with Illustration.

Illustration by James Edwards (via UMassd.edu)

I dropped my Illustration degree during my fourth year. Since I've always believe some of the best painters are Illustrators. I naively distanced myself from "commercial art" and painting brought me somewhere else. With years perspective, I'm not making those sorts of declarations anymore.

But what I admire about Shaun Tan are his sensibilities - all while pursuing a lifestyle incorporating the same craft as me, but pursuing it from a commercial angle. As Carlo Rotella in the article notes, painting is a private endeavor for Tan, more of "pure science, more about the act of painting" and Illustration pays the bills.

And making art in any form has still brought Tan to the same place as I am as a painter - that is, simply aware and hungry for things:

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car and you try to see it's car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.

As the article notes, Shaun Tan has recently won an Oscar for co-directing an animated short based on his own children's book, The Lost Thing, and he has one problem I do not yet relate to: offers to make films and propel his career elsewhere:

I'm not dying to make a feature film which people around here can be surprised to hear. It's about money and therefore audience, and that's somewhat counterproductive for me. I kind of like not having to feel that the work's going to be successful. Money does buy you time, it's true, but I have time now.

It's his implied pace of working which I truly relate to. Simply using time to develop. I remember one teacher of mine, James Edwards, taking on a daunting serial textbook Illustration job. Something about the way he described it seemed nostalgic for freedom to make independently. But he was still painting and it still made him into a great artist - that is, he had learned how to look.

I'm not sure if I would ever had been successful with Illustration, but I see with or without it I still made it to the same point.

Dubble-u. En. Wye. Cee.: Radio as Background

Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich (via NYC Observer)

Having the radio on while painting is like reading a book by laying your head on it. Or, rather, what I'm trying to say is that sometimes you listen but most of the time it just fills the air with soothing, consistent rhetoric and voices. You can't ever quite be completely listening while painting. Or vice versa.

But what does happen is that something sticks and rises to the surface of your memory later in the day. In that process of creating something, that sound sticks in your brain like a leaf falling into wet cement - or paint. And it's in that respect that I compare it to reading a book by osmosis.

Here are two things gleaned from public radio today. The first, was actually something read about WNYC's RadioLab which reinforces how I think about constructing a painting.

"Normally a reporter goes out and learns something and writes it down and speaks from knowledge" Krulwich added. Jokes and glitches puncture the illusion of the all-knowing authority, who no longer commands much respect these days anyway. It's more honest to "let the audience hear and know that you are manufacturing a version of events"

The second, is a poem read by Caroline Kennedy and Ira Flatow on Talk of the Nation. The poem is by Constantine P Cavafy, and was chosen by Kennedy for her new book, She Walks Through Beauty. I'll never read the book - but the poem (overheard in a strange moment of defeat and while eating a sandwich at the studio) speaks more to the entire pursuit of a craft:

Photos: Through a Fence

Untitled (Through a Fence) Stephan P. Ferreira

Stopped near a noisy machine shop to shoot some photos through their fence. The fence forced me to look close and got me thinking about shapes of light. I thought less about taking photographs and more about looking. The muffled and repetitive clanking nearby was sort of meditative.

Untitled (Through a Fence) Stephan P. Ferreira

Many more at the Flickr page.

Self-Actualization in the Studio

Untitled (Finished State) 2011 Stephan P. Ferreira

Recently I have stopped holding myself to results and starting admitting what doesn't work. I have tried to be patient and allow habitual accidents or tendencies to exist - or disappear. I am also trying to document the working pieces of my paintings - because they usually become swallowed up by something else. Those pieces end up existing for mostly my benefit and just adding to some sort of understanding later applied elsewhere.

So much of painting is more than results, it is the creating of a map of multiple understandings. I've realized I want the inaccuracies and mis-understandings to all exist in the result. I just haven't figured out how yet.

Sarah Awad MFA Thesis Exhibit

Habitation 3 2010 Sarah Awad (via Sarah Awad)

Catch this MFA Thesis exhibit if you live in the LA area:

April 14 - 22, 2011

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 14 from 5p - 8p

New Wight Gallery, UCLA

Artists Include, Sarah Awad, Alexis Hudgins and Greta Waller.

I have been interested in Sarah Awad's paintings since finding them on Visual Inventory last year. I've lived them subsequently through bad reproductions tacked up, frozen on my studio wall. My interest in them has changed and since her work has grown.

Figures and architecture pieces appear in Sarah's work, but the paintings become mostly about the shape relationships within those things. Her paintings are full of the qualities I hold back on: heavy strokes, electric color, decisive abstract color fields and messes. As the few versions of Habitation show, these are playful and investigative. She's being a student and that's something I often forget to be. Sarah's work shows me that there is still a lot of risk I can take with my own.

(This post was originally published on 2/7/11 and since been revised.)

Photo Diary: Rainy day at the SF MoMA

Kelsey beside a little Miro

It was tremendously rainy in San Francisco. We ducked into the MoMA. Kelsey immediately pointed out the Museum's awesome thematic placement of works. The collection highlights don't ever look to be on display in mass. It was especially refreshing to see some large scale Abstract Expressionists, often only one work per artist like Rothko juxtaposed with a Rauschenberg.

The best thing about the museum seemed to be it's great use of space: smart placement of art at the top of stairways or around curved walls in such a way to highlight the pieces strengths.

I surprised even myself and took a big interest in a Matthew Barney site specific piece permanently on display from the Drawing Restraint show.

Loosely Functional: The Volta Art Fair

Untitled 2010 Peter Opheim (via VOLTA NY)

Sharon Butler on Two Coats of Paint has posted a great two-part round-up of the VOLTA Art Fair in New York. I almost always nearly avoid the art fairs in the news but I'm glad I didn't miss this one. Butler describes the show as:

...different from the other fairs because the international galleries, selected by a panel of curators, present solo installations by emerging artists. This year more than half of the 90+ artists were painters. Overall, the work tended toward garishly colorful near-representation. Images of impressionistic, seemingly unfinished figures, mid-century modernist architecture and images of vintage bookcovers displayed on shelves were also plentiful.

Dil Hildebrand, Installation  (via VOLTA NY)

The painter, Peter Opheim is a good example of what Butler describes. Indeed, garish representations of PlayDoh like mounds. Representation simply to use paint. But not necessarily to represent something functional. Or as the artist's statement suggests:

These are paintings that function as sculpture. I don't consider them to be pictures. The size of the canvas and the sculpted image the paintings reference are created together and I consider the painting to be the actual size....The way the paint is handled should be enough. I have made paintings with and without imagery....after throwing away everything that wasn't necessary, including methods, expectations and ideas, this is what was left.

Another is Dil Hildebrand, with an "apparent fidelity to photographic representation". Hildebrand's palette suggests the fringes of Saul Leiter's early color photographs.

Brand 2 2010 Martin Gale (via VOLTA NY)

The painter, Martin Gale, who trained with Neo Rauch, paints these busy, photorealistic images that remain ambiguous and strange. Claiming he is less concerned with the subject matter and more with a "certain distance to it's portrayal." Photorealism being another discussion entirely, but a "reality" that suggests another way of looking at things entirely - or another eye. And Gale uses that photorealist palette and sharpness along with painterly shapes, forms and sometimes even abstract, pink splotches.

A full list of participating artists is at VOLTA.

Looking through the participants a common theme seems to be toying with representation. Whether it is done using representation or defying it, the VOLTA fair seems to present an almost meta-like awareness for each medium and history. And it's a theme I find interesting when it comes to paint.

Studio Update

Untitled, Unfinished Painting 2011 Stephan P. Ferreira

Untitled, Unfinished Painting 2011 Stephan P. Ferreira

What I am working on in the studio. This evolved from material a few years old. This isn't exactly what I am thinking about right now. But I realized sometimes I need to just get into the act of making to get anywhere else.

I haven't been holding myself to completing much - although painting all the same - so it's become important to document something.

SEMI-RELATED: Why do writers abandon novels?

The Internet Does Not Know Everybody: Daniel O'Connor

Daniel O'Connor (via Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)

Sometimes I feel overwhelmingly shut out from information on the internet. In those moments, it seems that  all information exists there just waiting to be found but by not yet having found it, I am lost.

Daniel O'Connor (via Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)

Today, if artists are working hard at their careers one generally assumes to find them with the internet. That was the case when I discovered the painter Daniel O'Conner through Francis Vallejo's blog. And although, yes, O'Connor's work is reproduced in some capacity starting on that blog and subsequently scattered throughout the internet (slated to exist forever in that digital format), he still was really hard to find.

The idea that there could be awesome, hardworking painters toiling quietly and hidden (mostly) from the eyes of the internet and a large part of the art industry, is a romantic one. But one I like.

Abstract Narratives in Figurative Images

Dogs 2009 Nicola Samori (via Art Lab)

My work remains representational. The paintings I look at reflect ideas that I haven't figured out how to articulate. I recently noticed these images are missing a common piece: traditional narrative. By that I mean they aren't about the figures or objects in them at all and instead are about relationships with painting and perhaps even more vague ideas. They are stripped of narrative.

J.V. 2008 Nicola Samori (via Art Lab)

Both Nicola Samori and Alex Kanevsky paint the figure. The way each paints is louder than the figures themselves.

Nicola Samori suggests features of the face or the shape of a head using a rich, Rembrandt-gray palette. But in the same image, that language is twisted and manipulated, until perhaps those colors become other shapes entirely. This creates an unsettling reversal of abstract marks that first articulate something recognizable and secondly become marks themselves.

White Samori's figures are painted in an ambiguous space, Alex Kanevsky's figures interact in clearer rooms and bathtubs. But beyond those interiors, a traditional narrative seems absent. Of course, like Samori's, the figures are doing something. Kanevsky's might be washing their face or bent awkwardly in the tub. But there never is any direction here. Instead what comes alive is Kanevsky's sensational mark making, the bright colors and melted swatches. These are painted mostly on Durlar.

C.L. 2004-5 Alex Kanvesky (via Alex Kanvesky)

When I showed Kanevsky's work to a friend about two years ago, he didn't like them. He thought they were sterile. And in fact, he's right. The backgrounds or the furniture these figures interact with don't tell us any more about how we should be interpreting this image. They tell us how beautiful these pastel colors or a shadow under a nose are in their own right.

To further the point, I'll take a leap here and mention the popular show Mad Men. I am currently enjoying the second season. But I'm always left feeling something is missing - the same something that I oppositely found in a show like The Wire: better writing - or, another words, narration.

David Mendelsohn of the New York Review of Books gives the show a thrashing. His critique, which first ruined the show for me, later helped me understand why I also enjoy it so much: it's painterly. It shares the same ideas I am exploring and looking at with respect to the mentioned artists: figurative paintings without narrative.

Mendelsohn says, "Most of the show's flaws can, in fact, be attributed to the way it waves certain flags in your face and leaves things at that, without serious thought about dramatic appropriateness or textured characterization". The same argument can be applied to the paintings mentioned. Cues are used, faces warped or figures with their back turned - but ultimately there isn't much to be solved there. Like Mad Men does, these paintings want us to recognize the whole image as a shape, as an object - as a point of narrative against other objects.

Like the critique of Mad Men, these paintings dance around the surface of traditional narration, presenting textures, colors and emotional playfulness that coalesce into something recognizable but result only in becoming a graphic of itself and how it's made, resulting in a narrative that is more abstract and ambiguous.

Riches of the City: Adolphe Braun

Untitled c. 1853-55 Adolphe Braun (via Tout Cici Est Magnifique)

Riches of the City: Portland Collects is up now at the Portland Art Museum through May 22nd. The exhibit, taking it's title from the museum's founder and long time patron, C.E.S. Wood, is a terrific celebration of collecting in Portland. The show includes valuable works from Asian Art to Contemporary and demonstrates that there is a lot of great art tucked away in Portland.

Untitled c.1853-55 Adolphe Braun (via Tout Cici Est Magnifique)

While there are great examples of why exhibits of this scope can be lousy, this exhibit is not one of them (Things I love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch at the MFA, Boston in 2005 was a good example of a collector's show turned "museum-owed-me-one" spectacle. It featured among a smattering of art: trophies, a large collection of Magnums and even larger wine vessels (already opened) and even two sailboats installed into the front lawn).

It is the stronger, lesser seen work hanging in Riches that made it enjoyable.Among those pieces was a great Adolphe Braun photograph lent by Stu Levy.

The untitled photograph(not featured here, but very similar)has an aged sepia glow that, along with it's mundane subject matter of a tabletop bouquet and date of around 1855, would be easily dismissed simply as an early photographic study.

Looking closer and minding the eerie, narrow focus and clumsiness of the image (never mind the unusual, truncated composition) it's apparent that the flowers are wilted, dying.

It Is Absolutely True

Andrew Vicari (photo via BWW Society)

The following is true, even it comes from someone making close to Six Million per painting:

"The thing about being a painter," Andrew Vicari, who claims to being the most lavishly rewarded painter in the world, was saying, "is that every night you go to bed thinking the work you have done that day is fabulous. And then you wake up the next morning and look at your canvas and think it is worthless, a piece of junk, and you start again."

That feeling repeats itself everyday. I am so practical though, that I always believe each evening I can will myself to believe in my work in the same fashion the next day. And although there are stints of time where I require no pacing, or extra trips to the cafe - another words, no screwing around, to get to work, I still come back and have the feeling Vicari admits. I'm sure any painter or other artist I've ever met would relate.

It is about how painting requires you to articulate honestly - which really means exactly what you're about, what ever is secretly repressed, what might be worrying you or even delighting you. That translates to being emotional, at least with paint. Emotions or states of mind change daily - hourly.

I was taught to be disciplined.You go to your studio to work even if you cannot. You paint until you can. That's not exactly emotional. But eventually emotion comes out of me. It's like I previously mentioned with Ginsberg's words.That semi "meditative" process creates a place you can be focused and closer to your thoughts.

I think the best when I am drawing. I've come to identify my drawing as simply a tool in my process - but usually not to any greater clarity of what I will paint, but great understanding as to how. I draw people. They are ordering coffee or hunched over bundling up children to leave. But my sketchbook reveals variances in line weight, shading, masses of tangled line - a mass of thought - and maybe some bit of clarity with a nose or ear. But inside, I feel sorted and able.

And honestly, I'm not sure I've exactly replicated that experience in the studio yet. Painting for 6 hours in a row usually brings me close. However, like Vicari says, it's coming back into the studio only to feel like the previous day was a waste, is how you ever get back to work to fix it.

Howl: Identifying with a Poet

Allen Ginsberg (Image via Read the Spirit)

A teacher in college pushed Allen Ginsberg's Howl on me. I have got to admit I don't think I ever really understood it. Never took the time to understand it. But I devoured it, in a systematic fashion, and like the rest of the Beat stuff, I noted it's importance.

As it happens with poetry, art, or any sort of great cultural artifact of Howl's caliber, the actual work has become regarded as so important and canonized that it requires no additional judgment or effort on a new reader's behalf in order to remain so (another great example is Dylan who even among non-listeners exists as a "great" perhaps without ever really being investigated).

That sort of shallow relationship is how I identified with Ginsberg until seeing the Rob Epstein movie, Howl. I'm still undecided about the movie itself (James Franco does a well done Ginsberg). But what I enjoyed the most were reconstructed interviews from an apparently lost TIME Magazine interview and other extracts from his lifetime.

Sometimes I feel in command when I'm writing. When I'm in the heat of some truthful tears, yes. Other times, most of the time, not. Just diddling around, woodcarving, finding a pretty shape, like most of my poetry. There have only been a few times I have reached complete control.

It's in these scenes, which are meant to shine some narrative arc and interpretation to Ginsberg's life leading up to Howl that I learned to identify with Ginsberg. These snippets reveal an artist just around 30 struggling to figure out how to say something and why. I immediately understood his feeling not in control of what he was writing - or in my case painting. I often wonder how things add up and sometimes realize weeks worth of work just circles onto itself. Then later on his gripe with literature (which could easily apply to painting):

There are many writers [or painters] who have pre-conceived ideas about what literature is supposed to be. But their ideas seem to preclude everything that makes the most interesting in casual conversation. Their faggishness, their solitude, their neurosis, their goofiness, their campiness or even their masculinity at times. Because they think they're going to write something that sounds like something else that they've read before...instead of sounds like them or comes from their own life. So the question is what happens when you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your muse. The trick is to break down that distinction. To approach your muse, frankly, as you would talk to yourself or your friends. It's the ability to commit to writing [painting, photography]...to write the same way you are.

If the movie does one thing right, it illuminates Ginsberg's trials as a completely normal, then repressed somebody who figured out how to be himself. He figured out how to make things the same way he was. Naturally. That's something that any young artist is trying to find. Sometimes the pieces are all there but they don't connect. And finally, later in the movie he reveals why an awful day in the studio (or out on the street shooting photographs of walls), feeling unaccomplished with nothing but false starts can be an important day:

The act of writing becomes like a meditation exercise. If you walk down the street, in New York, for a few blocks you get this gargantuan feeling of buildings and if you walk all day you'll be on the verge of tears. But you have to walk all day to get that sensation. What I mean is, if you write all day you'll get into it, into your body, into your feelings, into your consciousness.....

...And, completely humanizing himself and where I identify with him the most, he then admits:

....I don't write enough that way.

Victim of My Own Discipline

Nu couché et homme jouant de la guitare 1970 Picasso (via National Picasso Museum)

With the Holidays comes plenty of spare time. Everything seems to slow down yet become harried. There are too many lists.

I never make anything of that luxurious free time and end up dispirited. The studio feels far away. I built a few canvases and swept the floor. I criticize myself for not using the time wisely and then forget to enjoy myself all the while. I am a victim of my own discipline.

But each year I vow to embrace the Holidays. To be unaccomplished in style. Ultimately I find I've saved something up and when I return to the studio, it's better. Until then, here are some links that become strangely revealing of my current mood:

- Finally saw the Picasso Exhibit at SAM. There are a vast amount of prints and lesser known work that seem only to tell a chronological story. Despite realizing that there are many other more interesting lesser known works out there, I did fall in love with the last painting (above) and ultimately Picasso.

- MoMa leading (or standing alone) in the change of museums.And maybe more related than you think: Writing a pop hit.

 - Before the New Year, NY Times featured their 10th Annual Year in Ideas issue. And also from the same issue: In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm.

- What C-Monster is currently reading.

- And a great piece about Northwest artist, Jay Cunningham. "A victim of his own perfectionism".