quiet

A Summer Tickle

2011-07-17T12:40:00.001-07:00

A Summer Tickle Exhibition Postcard

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

To Paint Like Terrence Malick Directs

2011-06-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

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."

2011-05-24T18:52:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-13T17:50:00.000-07:00

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!

2011-04-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

(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

2011-04-26T18:06:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

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:

Constantine P. Cavafy (via Famous Poets)

Ithaca by Contantine P Cavafy

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon - do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy,
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds
as many sensual as you can:
visit many Egyptian cities;
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to ancho at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

UPDATE: Listen to a recent RadioLab episode on fighting yourself to be most creative. With a terrific story about Tom Waits told by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Photos: Through a Fence

2011-04-12T20:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-08T05:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Unfinished (1st State) Detail 2011 Stephan P. Ferreira

This could be called some sort of search for creative-actualization. It's what painters, artists - people do. The unfinished painting here represents another search for ideas. It is always interesting to apply what you do, to something slightly different - the product tends to reveal your habits and strengths in stark contrast.

Unfinished (2nd State) Detail 2011 Stephan P. Ferreira

I'm deviating only slightly here and working from photographs found in books. This is not about finding different subject matter but instead trying to find ways of testing my process. If I work well from photographs, why? If I find that I don't actually shoot the reference material I want to use, can I find it elsewhere? Is it the photograph at all - or is a quality or feeling - perhaps invoked coincidentally by the photographs?

Some of the details here reveal that I enjoy working from a photograph because it "stills" things. It affords me controllable working time. I like beginning with some sort of clear point and then re-working it over and over. The photograph makes it's own decisions though and I wonder if instead of subject matter, I am trying to emulate something else from the photographs entirely - or not.

Unfinished (1st State) Detail 2011 Stephan P. Ferreira

Ideally I might be working from life. Just as I am always drawing from life. And I find I am active and vivid in an entirely different way when I am observing from life. Although drawing does factor a great deal into my paintings (and the way I paint)- why are the two practices different? Am I trying to trick myself into using the photograph in order to make my process work?

Layering quick, gestural articulations of the same thing over and over reoccurs in most of my work. But when drawing from life, that act seems to exist as the image itself - whereas when I'm working from a photograph I loose sight of my intentions and something concrete eventually surfaces.

Photography really has altered the way I construct an image - and I have embraced it's language with bad habits and good. But what I am realizing now is that I have a tendency to cover what appears like mistakes, that are actually my marks - my thoughts. But by documenting and allowing everything to exist or be destroyed without consequence, I am slowly allowing the accumulation of myself in each painting.

(This post was originally published on 4/6/11 and has been changed. The original post discussed Carina Chocano's reflection on self-perfection in the NYT Magazine, pointing out: "Once we've reduced perfection to a kind of sharp-elbowed self-actualization, even impressive artistic and intellectual accomplishments...come to seem not admirable but hollow and desperate.")

Sarah Awad MFA Thesis Exhibit

2011-04-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Extraordinary caption to a work I can't remember

Detail of a Wayne Thiebaud Painting

Early, Abstract Philip Guston!

Detail of a Robert Betchle Painting

A nice lopsided detail of a Morandi Painting

Kelsey with the Sole Rothko on Display

Loosely Functional: The Volta Art Fair

2011-03-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

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

2011-03-07T19:32:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-26T15:21:00.000-08:00

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.

Waste 2009 Daniel O'Connor (via AEQAI)

Of course, the internet is just a larger community - and a painter's community starts first with local peers and other artists. But as far as I can glean, Daniel O'Connor is young. A Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art's alum and perhaps hailing from Cincinnati. For awhile he was teaching at Northern Kentucky University and Manifest. He's had a few very serious, academic sounding shows, including another coming up this year at the Weston Art Gallery.

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

Daniel O'Connor's paintings are steeped in a rich figurative tradition. In Francis Vallejo's original post, he drops O'Connor's work in with other hard-studied greats - reminding me of the Atelier tradition.

But it is O'Connor's similarities to Antonio Lopez Garcia that make him stand out: his subject matter being modestly mundane, very real and yet very painterly. I like O'Connor's decisive and flat color planes. Sharp edges against softer ones.

It's because of O'Connor's paint handling we are able to look through such ordinary subject matter and enjoy the paint.

Having a difficult time investigating Daniel O'Connor's career just made me happier - as it shows great work exists even if others don't see it (and it reminds me that the internet is a community of communities, not an end in itself). Of course O'Connor's work is being seen, but not yet widely. And his work keeps in line with what great figurative images are all about sometimes even more than abstract ones: paint.

SEMI-RELATED: Interview with John Copeland, who talks a bit about paint "filling in the blanks".

Abstract Narratives in Figurative Images

2011-02-09T09:52:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-05T17:56:00.000-08:00

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.

I learned later that Adolphe Braun was trained as a textile designer, taking up photography around 1853. The photograph lent by Levy, along with around 300 others done by Braun, was intended to be used for other students as examples or directly as templates for wallpaper.

Most early photographs reveal a different standard of craft from today, perhaps mostly because of technology and changing cultural influences or standards. But Braun's photograph was striking because his was meant as a stencil or record. Why are the flowers then less than perfect? Still lives are, well, still. So, why is there indication of movement?

Perhaps Braun was thinking beyond wallpaper stencils and was trying to imply time, some sort of experience or bring to mind ideas about life. Maybe Braun was trying to make a stale representation feel real, mortal. Keeping this in mind and early photography's use as a record keeping tool what does it mean to document something and how does it's value change as a result?

By virtue of making an image or articulating something about an experience or object, it becomes important. Braun purposefully chose to photograph flowers a few days or week old. Once noticed, those wilted petals take on a certain significance that also seem to bring honest authority to whatever mark, technical error or blur that exists in the photograph. It is that truth in good images that speaks louder than the subject matter itself.

It Is Absolutely True

2011-02-01T13:18:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-25T00:04:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-03T14:20:00.000-08:00


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".

Go Where? Trying to be Good

2010-12-13T19:58:00.000-08:00

Go Where? 2009 Jeffar Khaldi (via Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde)

One of the best ways a work of art can be good is when your experience with it reflects, in stages, exactly how it must have felt to make. I tend to respond to paintings that reveal the fun in their construction, the intensity, some heartbreak, labor, risk, confusion and ultimately, some sort of satisfying discovery.

I like to see a painting that shows off how effortlessly it was constructed but yet humbles itself in areas that could have been painstaking. Another words: triumphant and full of ego, but deserving of that confidence.

An artist a friend works for claims to have spent a good decade hiding and making bad work. And the kind of painting I am talking about is as a result of that hard work. It appears so unabashedly effortless because that fluidity has probably taken a short lifetime.

Seeing Jeffar Khaldi's paintings made me think of that. They also immediately remind me of Neo Rauch for the same reasons. Khaldi's subject matter is serious but not stodgy (unlike the NYT Book Review's Top Ten of 2010 which was a complete disappointment). I admire paintings like this because they don't take themselves seriously and that's an important point for me to learn with my own work.

Semi-Related: Chuck Klosterman interviews Jonathan Franzen who makes a good point about authenticity, "Inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity".

And Klosterman is on a roll lately, with a great totally unrelated article about zombie onslaughts.

Grant Hottle: So Domestic

2010-12-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

So Majestic 2010 Grant Hottle (via Half/Dozen Gallery)

When seeing the Grant Hottle exhibit, So Domestic at Half/Dozen, my first thought is how well his paintings manage a large scale, especially knowing the artist works in a cramped space.

Cramped Apartment 2010 Grant Hottle (via Half/Dozen)

Even in Cramped Apartment, that Hottle admits, "is the kind of space I find myself in most of the time. My home is full of art, books, tables - stuff. It's lived in...I wanted it to feel closed in and cluttered like my studio", it's painted in a way that uses it's size - a painting of stacked objects in a tight space but painted so that it reads from 10 feet away.

Looking closer you'll find that most of his paintings are deeply layered and reveal strokes perhaps not bigger than an inch. And perhaps this is what attracts me most to Hottle's work: the ability to articulate tangible, modern compositions relying on traditional color, shapes and elements.

Yes there is the strokey, and the electric color palette - but everything holds together as that first believable idea. Hottle's paintings are a lot about realness:

The term 'real' is so subjective. I've been thinking about this specifically in the relation to the home because in moving from place to place, the space I think of as my home bleeds from one structure to the next. So where is my real home? Is it where I am now or where I am from? Isn't it a construction of both?...the greenhouse in So Domestic only exists in the context of this painting. It was never a direct observation or photograph of a place you could walk into. It is a construction, but is no less real for being so.

For complete images and discussions with the artist, visit the Half/Dozen Gallery website.Or visit KBOO's Art Focus for discussion with Half/Dozen's Timothy Mahan and artist, Grant Hottle.

Finding Patience: The Trees Through the Forest

2010-12-07T13:28:00.000-08:00

Untitled (Red Dresses) 2010 Stephan P. Ferreira

Detail from Untitled (Red Dresses) 2010
Stephan P. Ferreira

When I finish a painting I often have a hard time seeing the whole. I'm stuck on details or the overall language of the painting.

I've labored so much over how I've articulated the imagery that trying to decipher any meaning is the same experience as trying to figure out what a word means after it has been repeated over and over: the word looses it's context, it looks foreign and suddenly you can't even remember if those letters are arranged correctly.

Having been so wrapped up in the painting I can only see the trees in the forest, as it were. It takes stepping away to eventually see the bigger picture. But before then, it's usually these small areas in my paintings that teach me and prompt me to do something else.

A recently completed painting based on a Depression era photograph got me thinking about what changes need to be made in my own process and what the successes in my work tell me about my focus and patience.

Red Dresses was painted as a gift in just a couple of days. It became less about the subject matter (like most of my work) and more about figuring out my process.

Since seeing Antonio Lopez Garcia's work a few years back, I have been consciously trying to figure out how to maintain emotional, abstract marks while articulating something very exact. Garcia's work manages to accomplish this, like in New Refrigerator, shapes for color are drawn on the canvas, and the color marks themselves seem to take precedence over the object they define (it should be noted that some of his paintings take a few years).

This investigation sounds obvious - but I habitually work off-the-cuff, which means often I muddy things up. Using a very primary palette, I mix only a few local colors. Then I paint and repaint forms quickly, scraping down and rebuilding. Another words I usually figure out forms or space directly on the painting - my entire understanding or misunderstanding of it exists there.

New Refrigerator 1991-94
Antonio Lopez Garcia
(via Berkshire Fine Arts)

Detail of Daughters of Edward D. Boit
John Singer Sargent (via Daily Blague)

Most artists seem to accomplish the same idea with other studies beforehand or during the painting. The best example I have of this can be seen in a 2005 Jenny Saville monograph.

The book has always been one of my favorite monographs because the layout shows her paintings and then via various super-close ups and studio shots shows all the other material and investigating that goes into a single painting.

What successfully articulated spots there were in Red Dresses were a result of early gridding and laying out decisions. One example is the woman holding the child in a blue dress downwards to the young girl facing the same direction. I gridded the image and then laid out simple dark and lights. The spare marks remaining reveal an underpainting for something else entirely. I'm reminded of the young girls doll painted with just a handful of decisive strokes in John Singer Sargent's Daughters of Edward D. Boit.

Another example is of the space between the girl's arm who wears a pink dress. The scratchy and thick colors were decisive but simple enough to articulate the change in light.

But while there are lots of quick successes in Red Dresses, what those really convinced me of was that I should be working with more studies, more time and more focus.

The highlighted details of the painting show me that I'm sometimes unable to see the forest through the trees and that when I am able to steady myself and be decisive about my choices, my quick habits could articulate even more.

MFA Boston in Two Hours

2010-11-30T11:35:00.000-08:00

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Kelsey and I had only two short hours to spend touring the new American Art wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This wasn't much time for the art - or the camera - but the space is fantastic, and the Museum's highlights look better than ever.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Photo via Boston Globe)

I worked at the MFA about 5 years ago. The museum has always been big, but back then only had about 17% of it's American Art collection on display. A Museum Guard informed us the MFA now displays more like 30-40%. As their site boasts, 5,000 works of art are on display in over 53 new galleries!

The museum was raising money for the expansion as I left. I was doubtful of the sterile glass buildings they planned to add. Norman Foster & Partners were chosen for the project.

But I was wrong. The addition was perfect to heighten the original architecture. I had also been doubtful of filling in one of their outdoor courtyards. Instead now that space is active and alive. And like the entire addition, it unifies the museum's disparate additions, making the space both exciting, not too overpowering and re-introducing the building back into it's surroundings.

It was great also to see the entire wing built and curated with it's own collection in mind. Something I'm sure happens quite a bit with all the recent Museum expansions, but sorely needed at the MFA. Paintings that once felt crowded or underwhelming in their surroundings now felt grand. The Sargent painting (above), The Daughters of Edward D. Boit is a good example. It seems entire galleries were created around the experience of certain pieces of art - for example the Pre-Columbian Period room, or the salon-style Colonial room.

And despite the fact that there really is an incredible amount of work on display, it's never really too much too look at. It is all hung at a tempo both exciting and digestible. Even the decorative arts, once set off to the sides of main galleries and usually avoided, were now broken up and placed more closely matched with the paintings or sculptures from their era.

And back to the outdoor courtyard - the Norman Foster addition now includes those outdoor elements and sculpture as transitions between regular galleries.

In my experience with the museum, I've noticed them to cover their weak spots (a lacking contemporary art collection) with stellar small, spotlight exhibitions (Cecily Brown, Antonio Lopez Garcia, etc) in the Foster Gallery and yet (just one of) their prize collections was hung cramped nearby. With the expanded wing, I really had a glimpse into the Museum's strengths and it was exciting.

Finding Gerard Byrne

2010-11-19T16:01:00.000-08:00

Case Study: Loch Ness (Some Possibilities and Problems)
2001-2010 (ongoing) Gerard Byrne (via Auckland Triennial)

Since 2008, I have been searching for documentation of Gerard Byrne's Boston ICA installation of Case Study: Loch Ness (Some Possibilities and Problems). I have really just been stuck trying to find his name, remember when I was there - and almost in bizarre irony to what the exhibit was about - what I had seen - which was originally what haunted me.

Installation View: Case Study: Loch Ness (Some Possibilities and Problems)

2001-2010 (ongoing) Gerard Byrne (via Auckland Triennial)

Case Study has been one of the only installations I've seen that completely swallowed me up then piece by piece revealed it's intentions. It didn't have a clever aftertaste. And unlike how I feel about a lot of installation art, it used all of it's components (photography, found sculpture, multimedia elements) convincingly - that is to say, it couldn't have been executed any other way. The piece has been building since 2001. Greg Cook, of the Boston Phoenix described it as:

...a playful conceptual-art riff on the Loch Ness Monster mystery. The installation comprises a slide-show, a grainy silent film, audio of a guy reading what seem to be accounts of sightings of Nessie, text summaries of "sightings" pasted to a wall, and a tree stump. But mostly it's black-and-white photos depicting a strange ripple on the lake, driftwood, a swimmer's arm breaking through the water - all things that might be mistaken for a monster if you were so inclined.

The Loch Ness legend is well known. There has never been any true evidence of the monster's existence. But Byrne is not so much interested in presenting the legend to us, so much as he's trying to provoke us with questions that Cook suggests: "How do we see? How do we trick ourselves into seeing things that might not be there?". Or as Nicholas Baume, Chief Curator at the ICA, describes, "he plays with our sense of period and context, fashioning his work so that we can never be exactly sure of what we are seeing."

Case Study: Loch Ness (Some Possibilities and Problems)
2001-20010 (ongoing) Gerard Byrne (via ICA)

Byrne's Case Study and his installations expose the inconsistencies with the devices we use to communicate what we know - or think we know - to each other. His art exposes the "treachery of language".

Installation View: Case Study: Loch Ness
(Some Possibilities and Problems) 2001-2010
(ongoing) Gerard Byrne (via Auckland Triennial)

I think what made Case Study so disarming for me was the use of common mediums telling a familiar story. With very little color appearing in a few photographs, the overall presentation is black-and-white, clinical or secretive. There were some framed typed stories. In the center, was a 16-millimeter camera aimed at the side of a pedestal. The film zeros in on scenes around the lake and unintelligible conversations. There are headphones where you can hear some of these stories being mixed and retold. Off to the side was a dry large stump with much of its roots. I can't recall if the stump had geographic significance, but it adds a tactile, scientific reality to the display. Overall you begin to feel how real or tangible this story is - and how real the idea of it is. But all the while you still haven't seen the monster.

My favorite part of the installation, or perhaps what was the kicker for me, were the lumped 15 black-and-white framed photographs arranged in a sideways pyramid. Images of blurry close-ups and unintelligible long shots of the lake juxtaposed with clear depictions of the shore, a stump or objects in the water. The arrangement caused me to question what I was looking at even though it was directly in front of me.

Byrne's Loch Ness playfully builds up a legend and then leaves you standing in the middle of an assortment of hand-me-down evidence but unable to trust any of it. And this questioning has haunted me ever since.

UPDATE: An interview with Byrne here about this work, posted on occasion of his Milton Keynes installation.

Keeping Friends Outside the Art World

2010-11-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

Dan Cameron (Photo via Art Fag City)

I have been following Paddy Johnson's interview series, Survival in New York, on Art Fag City. The series includes interviews of young and established artists and curators including to-date: Marcin Ramocki, Lauren Cornell, Dan Cameron, Triple Candie and William Powhida. They will be compiled and reflected upon later this month in an issue of MAP Magazine.

New York is a far cry from Portland (or maybe not) but the artist survival woes are the same. How does an artist develop a career of making things while making a living?

The interviewee's are genuinely down-to-earth about their practice. Maybe confidence like that is exuded after establishing yourself or eliminating doubt. Confidence is a common trait among young artists, but being down-to-earth is certainly not.

I identify myself as having worked through, and used up, my post-undergraduate doubts and ideals and now am thinking pragmatically. How do I make this possible, even if what I am making is not making it possible? And, beyond the act of creating for myself, what purpose does it serve more broadly?

There's no surprise that all artists "think about the economics and how people get paid". Maybe there are some artists that don't worry about this! But being realistic should have a more humbling purpose too: measuring yourself. There's nothing worse than a bad artist taking themselves too seriously. The Art World, like any other industry can be insular and warped. Artists should exist as much in the Art World as they do in the real world. Lauren Cornell mentions:

A lot of my friends are not in the art world, they are in other fields and I think that's a really great part of living in New York [or Portland], that you do have access to so many kinds of people...I am definitely hanging out with a broad cross of people. And many of them look at me cross-eyed when they don't understand how I make ends meet in the arts. I think that art is a hard thing to do. It takes a lot of risks to be an artist and so it's nice to be surrounded by other people who are making art. But I also think that the art world can be insular and it can be important to be outside of it, too.

And where are the young artists, totally absorbed in the Art World coming from? Art Schools. Robert Storr, the Dean of the Yale School of Art, recently interviewed on PORT, alludes also to the idea of measuring yourself against others, not taking yourself too seriously and using those "reality checks" to understand how great (or bad) you are and to grow:

My concern is with what goes on in schools and so long as students understand that they are there to learn and to question and to make things for which there is not a priori necessity, and that their choosing to be an artist does not mean that the world owes them a career or that they are entitled to special status with respect to others whose lives are devoted to different activities, then art schools are as good a place as any, and better than most for a person to come into their own and form an unalienated working relation to their own faculties and capacities. All my life I have worked too hard at various jobs to pay for the freedom to paint and draw. Painting and drawing have never paid for themselves. I have no complaints and do not feel badly done to.

What Am I Looking At?: Figurative Paintings That Aren't

2010-11-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

Two Paintings by Roger White (via Rachel Uffner Gallery)

When you see something you like, you know it immediately. But knowing what it is you're enjoying is always harder to define. Many of the paintings I've been thinking about lately reflect that feeling pretty literally. These are images about image making and they are influencing my own decisions about paint.

The paintings I'm thinking about might articulate some sort of tangible space but with non-objective shapes. They do not quite fall within Abstraction.I thought the paintings of Roger White work this way. White's paintings are comprised of non-objective and organic forms making up patterns. But in some of the paintings the patterns deviate and sometimes the abstract forms feel reminiscent of actual objects, like a hat, lampshade or folded something. But the forms never materialize beyond that and ultimately we're left looking at only the relationships of a painting process.

Thomas Nozkowski (via Portalen Portalen)

Effulgence Jennifer Shimatsu 2008 (via 1430)

I've started to understand my own paintings to be over complicated - or rather overwrought. I was always taught what the painter Thomas Nozkowski, featured in this past Sunday NY Times, believes, "Too much information is a trap for the viewer". But have only recently understood that. It simply requires work, which gives you perspective and experience until you can identify when enough is enough like Nozkowski, "For me a painting is finished when I finally understand why I wanted to do it in the first place".

Some of the paintings I have also been thinking about use or recall stylistic elements from other mediums. Jennifer Shimatsu's giant abstract paintings use a distinctly photographic or film oriented palette (an affect much better experienced in person). Paintings that could be about many things and although they have no obvious representational elements, their color decisions recall something definite.

Much of the work I have been looking is decidedly more abstract than figurative. But like Angelina Gualdoni's paintings, there is a blurring of figure and ground. There is a suggestion that although the image itself is non-committed it still exists and relates to a real place.

Mise En Scene Angelina Gualdoni 2009 (via Asya Geisberg Gallery)

After seeing the photograph used for this NY Times Style article, I got thinking if this phenomenon of working directly in between the traditional Abstract and Representational genres has been affected by all other sorts of technology. The photograph for that article is a good example. Besides it probably being shot for use in the physical newspaper on Sunday, in which text was placed inside the image, it's actually pretty strange: more than half of the picture plane is a wall, severely out of focus with bathroom items and wall fixture. Obviously it's this way not only for layout, but to draw attention to the figures in focus - but those blurry objects remain more interesting to me. And how often are we presented with things like that, whether because of technologies limitations (like close up posters passed on a bus) or photography? How is this changing our ideas of what "representing" something means?

These paintings I have been thinking about and others linger exactly where I am about to plunge: in the middle of representation and abstraction. In the middle of just about everything. And my own paintings are just as uncertain as that statement sounds. But also certain, like that statement sounds: my paintings are becoming about nothing at all.

Semi-Related: This is a neat idea, artists (of all kinds) explaining their work to their parents. This could be expanded upon.

UPDATE: "I have never thought of myself as a geometric painter, but I have always thought of myself as an improviser." Two Coats of Paint points to the Brooklyn Rail's great interview of Thomas Nozkowski here. And also, Paddy Johnson gives Nozkowski's show a bad review.

Defined by Limitations

2010-10-20T09:58:00.000-07:00

Luc Tuymans in his studio (via Elle)

An older idea came back yesterday: how much does an artist's limitations define their strengths and direction in their work?

As an immediate example Luc Tuymans came to mind. His paintings aren't limited in their intended capacity. But his work has a distinct style, already influencing a host of young artists, even before Tuyman's own career is finished.

Tuymans admits that his paintings are executed in one day. He claims, "I only have an attention span that's that long". Still they are "captivatingly blurry, washed-out and bleached" conceptual representations. His paintings are derived from banal photographs and television.

I remember a figure from my memory - perhaps in undergrad, maybe a grad student in adjacent studios - explaining to me one afternoon that it was necessary to continually refine your process, throwing out old ideas and experimenting with new ones, until you were able to produce what you wanted effortlessly or at least fluidly. And recently, another friend hearing that I had taken a banal, incremental change in the way I moved paint around remarked: "that's creativity - each time you find a solution to make what you do better."

Gas Chamber Luc Tuymans 1986 (via Wexner Center for A

I find Luc Tuyman's paintings so interesting because of their clear decisions - and because of everything that has been tossed out. There is a decision point (perhaps subconscious, slight or gradual) where an artist drops what they aren't interested in or lost patience with. I think that admitting these limitations becomes a strength. What an artist doesn't know begins to define what they do know.

Francis Bacon (via TATE)

I'm not saying an artist lazily retreats from what they cannot do, but by encountering these walls in art making they begin to learn about themselves and in turn become honest.

As I thought about this more, I remembered reading this interview with Damien Hirst discussing Francis Bacon and realized that was where the idea of limitations germinated. He says:

I think Bacon is one of the greatest painters of all time....He's complicated. It's not essentially about formal skill or technique or dexterity. It's about belief. I believe! And the struggle, the sense that you somehow grunt your way through it by sheer will....If you compare him to Lucien Freud, say, it's obvious that Freud is the more technically accomplished painter. He can read what he sees, and render it. Bacon couldn't do that. If you look at the feet in his paintings, they're bloody awful....But it's so bloody powerful.

It was then, going back to look at Francis Bacon's feet, I realized he was right! Hirst goes on to talk about Bacon's patience. In in a lot of respects that's where I relate. I don't have patience for particular things, but patience for what I haven't clearly defined. But for artists like Francis Bacon or Luc Tuymans, by having admitted to something, they seem to become all the more powerful and in control. And after all, a painting should be nothing but honest and by doing so it has to be about only what it knows.

Untitled (Wedge) 2009 Angelina Gualdoni (via Asya Geisberg Gallery)

UPDATE: I thought of including Angelina Gualdoni's work with this post. Via Two Coats of Paint, Gualdoni writes, “The shift in the work compared to previous bodies, is in favor of improvisation, and against a photographic basis, in favor of degrees of presence." And Sharon Butler follows with: "There's a poignant sense of unknowing in Gualdoni's impressive new work. Whereas in previous paintings she featured lavishly-painted structural elements of defunct worlds, in her new work Gualdoni sheds the nostalgic architectural references and authoritative facture to find meaning in the process itself."

I think it would be interesting to learn of the when and how certain things became dropped or removed in a process like this one. Gualdoni's paintings are very suggestive of representational space while we are still drawn to abstract paint relationships.

Feeling Butterflies Again

2010-10-16T12:24:00.000-07:00

I took a short walk through the Portland Art Museum the other night. Just enough time to make some notes for a longer visit. I was stunned by the Mark Grotjahn installation. I usually have a hard time relating to work dominated by hard-edged, geometric forms. I like what a friend calls, "a way in" or some sort of broken spot (this is actually a point in my own work that I consciously see lacking).

Weibes Kleid Martina Sauter 2010 (via Ambach and Rice)


Stuhl Und Sessel Martina Sauter 2010

But these have it: as you walk closer, those large black shapes become made up of smaller shapes and marks. A natural noise of colored marks are around and outside those giant abstract butterfly wings. They appear almost hurriedly rubbed. As you step back and you begin to read the larger scale again, these images become tied to a representational sort of emotion. Poetic. The video above, courtesy of the Gagosian, shows some of this.

And these kind of noisy marks dwarfed in scale by the abstract, black, wings are like marks I am also trying to play with. Those marks in Grotjahn's pieces are contained within the larger fog of smudges and movement becoming a general tone. It's always exciting to see something your thinking about reflected in a completely different kind of work. Perhaps a piece of art you wouldn't even have ordinarily enjoyed. And even better, is if that work is doing it even better somehow - teaching you something.

From the book of Cy Twombly Photographs 1951-2007 (via Rare Autumn)

Semi-Related: Via Another Bouncing Ball, Regina Hackett links to some beautiful re appropriated photographs of Martina Sauter. Read her press release. These images change the original meanings of the used photographs - but what I like most, is how they also change the meaning of the surface texture of walls, furniture and film texture. They remind me of Cy Twombly's photographs (which I only have seen through this awesome book). I've always enjoyed the way they exist as something documented and yet with a new life of their own - the camera adding it's own emotional texture.

Picasso for Me

2010-10-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

La Celestina 1904 Pablo Picasso (via Seattle Met)

Now at SAM: Picasso:Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris. This is great for Seattle and the Northwest. And especially great for someone like me or for you. I've always respected Picasso, but outside textbooks and short visits to NYC, haven't figured out why I ought to like him. D.K Row of the Oregonian says of the exhibit:

...it strives for broadness, providing an extensive summary of Picasso's career through formidable prints, paintings and sculptures. Every significant period is covered: Picasso's beginnings as an intrepid talent; his Blue Period; the development into Cubism; the many works based on his many wives and lovers (from Olga Khokhlova to Dora Maar to Marie-Thérèse Walter); his absorption of Surrealism and much more.

Jen Graves of The Stranger also has some good first-hand thoughts on the exhibit. It is an extensive exhibit and as Graves points out, full of surprises and pieces not regularly reproduced.

I'm not a fan of a blockbuster. This is an exhibit that could have easily name dropped and been about something else entirely. Or it could have been fluffy (as is probably so tempting for the current climate). But Graves points out how SAM inserts some of it's own curatorial adventurousness: panels are placed throughout the African and other collections linking them to Picasso.

I have yet seen the exhibit - but wish the exhibit could go one step farther and have the guts to place the works throughout the other collections. Besides the security risk, that would be a completely radical and new way to see Picasso's works.

Semi-related: Kelsey pointed out that the PSU Lecture series is happening again. The first was Tina Olsen who talked about museum's role as educating on it's objects. She's also partly responsible for the annual Shine a Light on October 15th.

Art3

2010-10-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

I'll have some new pieces on display for Art3, presented by The Match. The show is an effort to promote NW 23rd's Third Thursday's and to fill storefronts. The spaces include the former Music Millennium store at 801 NW 23rd and Umpqua Bank at 467 NW 23rd. There are 12 participating artists:

Sidonie Caron
Charlie White
Cory Hanson
Jody Katopothis
Annie Meyer
Stephan P. Ferreira
Matthew DiTullo
Judson Moore
Mitchell Freifeld
Jennifer Zika
Antonio Villagran
Frank Schroder

The Opening Reception is Thursday, October 21st, 2010 from 6-9pm. The spaces are open Friday from 6-9p and Saturday, Sunday 1pm-6pm. Please drop by!

Local Comparisons: Turner Prize 2010

2010-10-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

Burroughs in Tangiers Dexter Dalwood 2005 (via Tate Britain)

October 5th marked the opening of the Tate Britain's 2010 Turner Prize Finalist Exhibition.The winner will be chosen from the four participants and announced on December 6th.

Dexter Dalwood has my vote. His paintings are of events or places never seen and usually only previously existing through literary or cultural references. Doesn't sound like he's a likely winner though (see a round-up of press reviews here). Richard Dorment of the Telegraph says of Dalwood:

His pastiches have virtually no aesthetic interest, but that’s OK with the artist because Dalwood’s one big idea is to add a title that evokes the presence of an absent celebrity without actually depicting him or her. For example, you wouldn’t look twice at the image of a tree and full moon against a plain blue ground, but the work’s title Death of David Kelly neatly exploits that good man’s death for the smug consumption of the art world’s least thoughtful fashionistas.

Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse Dexter Dalwood 2000

Mystic Whiting Tennis 2004
(via Harold Hollingsworth)

Hmm...I cannot disagree. But his exact distaste for Dalwood's imagery is exactly what I like about it! Heck, it's what I aim for in my own work. A representational image made up of both objective and non-objective aesthetics that begs you to just look at it! Or not look at it, and miss how quiet it is altogether. Which is an idea I particularly like: how can an image be both boring and exciting?

Dorment is right though: without some of those titles, would these spaces be anything other than mundane little worlds? This is exactly why the paintings are great. Like with Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse, we are led into a serene place with only clues (a guitar, Seattle skyline) and no idea that something is amiss.The title (being used in a way I generally shy from - being that I usually wish they weren't even there) is what gives you the goosebumps.

So Majestic 2010 Grant Hottle (via Half/Dozen Gallery)

Locally, Dalwood's collage-like language reminds me of Whiting Tennis. Also, Grant Hottle is exploring the same idea of "what is real" - and even his recent work, So Majestic, seems to mirror Dalwood's Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse.

What the Goal Is

2010-10-05T22:06:00.000-07:00

Detail of my painting of a Pink Credenza.

Terry Gross interviewed John Stewart for the occasion of his new The Daily Show book, Earth. The interview was recorded in front of a live audience in NY. It wasn't as personal as Terry's typical confessional-like interviews - John Stewart hamming it up for the crowd. But there were some great pieces later, including the excerpt below. It's really great advice about becoming something. And it might even be better advice for artists:

John Stewart: You know, I never in my career have ever thought about what the goal was. The goal was always to be better than I was at the present time at what I was doing. As a stand-up, my break in stand-up was not getting on Letterman. My break in stand-up was - there's a place called the Comedy Cellar in the Village on MacDougal Street, and a great group of guys that were together in those day performing. And they put me on every night at 2 AM. I was the last guy on every night. And not on the weekends, because I wasnt good enough for weekend. So, Sunday night through Thursday night, it was me, and drunk Dutch tourists in a basement in the Village and I would perform for the plate of humus that would be served to me. Because above the Comedy Cellar is a Middle Eastern restaurant because, of course. And I went on every night and I learned the difference between impersonating a comedian and being a comedian. And that was my break, was learning how to be authentic. Not to the audience but to myself. I developed a baseline of confidence and also insecurity. I knew how bad I was and I knew how good I was. And that is what helped me through a lot of the ups and downs as we went along.

A.O. Scott (via The Hollywood Ham)

Authenticity is really important. If I could say there has been only one success of mine with painting, it has been identifying dishonestly. I'm not sure if I've yet solved those inconsistencies. That in itself could take a career.

UPDATED: Semi-Related: I wish A.O. Scott was an art critic. Or, that someone would write art reviews the way he looks at movies: intelligently, critically and yet culturally broad. Maybe injecting a little lightheartedness into criticism like John Stewart with news. What critic can be so positive and blatantly into all spectrum's of class: "My favorite movie of 2009 has to be Crank: High Voltage....I can just tell that it's gonna be good. The trailer is a flawless display of pop art. Plus, Statham is a bad ass."

Gray Area

2010-10-01T10:36:00.000-07:00

Lisa Kowalski Gray Area 2010 (via Half/Dozen)

Ruminating on Abstraction, check out the large wet-on-wet abstract works of Lisa Kowalski at Half/Dozen. It's up until October 23rd. A good throw back to the Abstract Expressionists. And I mean good because these 60" images breathe.

Mary Heilmann (via Un Bloody)

I can't help but feel alot of young abstract work feels stiff, copy-cat or caught up on being non-representational for lack of anything else (this coming from a painter who is fixated on representation!). It might take a career to understand how paint relationships work. I can't understand how artists at the student-level ever begin with Abstraction. Where are they working from?

Even though Abstract Expressionism was explored and absorbed into a sort of mainstream art language, I think it might be one of the more difficult things to explore.

Semi-Related: A friend of mine keeps pointing out that a painting I bought from a local painter bears a resemblance to some Mary Heilmann. It's true, but both their bodies of work (and concepts) only intersect at the stripes.

UPDATED: See Lisa Kowalski s installation shots via OpenWide PDX.

When a Ditch is just a Shape

2010-09-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

Nele Tas About Christmas 2005 (via BAM)

Grier Edmundson The Work Ahead of Us
2009 (via 1430)

I switched majors in college because Illustration wasn't teaching me enough about painting. I thought the act of painting alone was enough. But that put me in the position to approach subject matter very literally. Illustrative. Today I am still trying to teach myself how to paint - or - how to paint, paint, not things. How to break things apart. How to paint abstractly.

I always seem to think from figurative means to abstraction. I actually remind myself constantly to step back, squint or find a means of obstructing my observation - ways of breaking my vision. Another words, I am always turning towards representational means to articulate something, but find more and more that my subject matter means less and less. There is something else I am looking for at an abstract level.

Maureen Gallace Cape Cod, Early September 2008

Seeing the work of Nele Tas reminded me of that today. Alot of his paintings of crowds are very abstract, but snag us using recognizable body-like shapes. It's as if the artist is using objective shapes as non-objective shapes. Figurative, or literal shapes (in this case bodies) as marks in themselves. It got me thinking: maybe lots of representational painters aren't even lingering on figurative means. Maybe, even, they're approaching representational subject matter with abstraction.

In my process, it wasn't until seeing Grier Edmundson's work at Fourteen Thirty Contemporary last year that I truly began to understand a painting with figurative subject matter could convince me not of the narrative but of the painted relationships. Or even that those abstract relationships could create a stronger representational narrative. Grier Edmundson is also alot like Luc Tuymans.

Richard Diebenkorn Cityscape I 1963

Grier Edmundson Untitled
2009 (via 1430)

So maybe it is just my own growth with the medium, but since I've realized all the painters I am gravitating towards are not figurative painters as I would have traditionally labeled them, but maybe more aptly: abstract painters using subject matter just to explore paint. The in between intersect is what I find interesting.

Hurvin Anderson Peter's 3 2007 (via Thomas Dane Gallery)

I began to first understand what abstract marks, even in representational images, are when seeing (one of my now favorite) Diebenkorn paintings from the Ocean Park series, Cityscape I. Diebenkorn is of course known for toying with abstraction and then figurative means.But the Ocean Park Series is incredible in it's serial change into abstraction of a subject matter entirely banal (Cezanne explored this much earlier - perhaps leading into Abstraction - with Trees). I see the same reference to this in the young, Sarah Awad's paintings. Her Ditch Painting #5 is such a great exercise in finding a shape and composition.

Sarah Awad Ditch Painting #5 2010 (via Sarah Awad)

What I mean is: Abstraction changed the language of painting. It seems following Abstraction, painters began opening up and letting that language in. Of course painters have always taught themselves to deconstruct the world and rebuild it using, essentially, abstract mark making (a head does not exist with a pencil mark). But now very overtly, painters are dashing back and forth between pure Representation and Abstraction, and maybe using the medium in it's most exciting way yet.

Finds

2010-09-21T21:40:00.000-07:00

Walked by this colored-steel yard today. It's one of those places I've walked by countless times. But something about the season, time of day, the light affects whether I see it. These sorts of things can feel incredibly random. Or, is it about whatever I am fixated on? How many things did I walk by for the umpteenth time today and not see?

I disciplined myself and went to the studio today. But didn't feel focused until I was in the bookstore. It's almost like I spend any given day finding the best activity I am suited for. Sometimes the bookstore is a place I have to visit many times to be focused (I will even stray towards certain aisles depending on the light and start there - where I feel right. If it's Downtown Powell's this usually means near the windows. If it's Hawthorne, it usually is directly down the center).

Haven't been following the Oregonian's Art section recently. But browsed today and liked this on Stephanie Snyder. Her curating philosophy:

Yes, but I don't believe in being didactic or dogmatic. I appreciate what Roberta (Smith) observed about the "overeducation movement" happening at a lot of museums. She was talking about the Brooklyn Museum where the walls are colored, and there are video monitors and wall text everywhere. I don't believe in doing that to viewers. You educate by curating good shows and allowing viewers to have a quiet experience with art.

And also, a new Amsterdamn-centric (refreshing!) list-blog about painters, A Thousand Living Painters, has lots of interesting work including these great paintings by Albert Zwann. His paintings feel a bit like backgrounds to Neo Rauch. He's using the same sorts of old-print colors, but really playing with architecturally crisp shapes and otherwise messy figurative spots.

Ellen Lesperance

2010-09-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

Ellen Lesperance was chosen as this years Betty Bowen Award recipient. Really beautiful work and in-line with well deserved past winners.

But I found out about this via PORT. And I couldn't disagree more with Jeff Jahn's analysis of the pick:

Analysis: an unexpected and very good choice but I sense a backlash is about to manifest itself begging the question, "must every regional art award in the Pacific Northwest genuflect in some way towards overtly craft oriented or hand made work?"

Not to be provocative, just articulating an observable trend that hasn't really kept up with new media. Obviously, craft is a valid and important part of contemporary art but it's not the whole picture, frankly its representation at the awards level is misleading. So I ask, when will video, photography and installation art that isn't fetishing craft outright be given its due at the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, Betty Bowen (which did award photographer Isaac Layman a few years ago), Bonnie Bronson, Ford Fellowships? ie can any of these awards move beyond a predominantly laborious hand made (looking) world? This is the silicon forest after all, Portland and Seattle's economies are very tech-driven. In short, it's a question of accuracy in recognition since many of our non craft artists are internationally established.

"A question of accuracy..."? Did he really misunderstand the Pacific Northwest to that extent? First of all, Portland isn't tech driven. In fact, Portland's economy laments the fact it missed the Tech Boom. Sure, Seattle is. But the Seattle Art Museum's mission has been extremely aware of its surroundings, not just trends or economics. Just take a look at their permanent collection: a completely non-western centric focus, pieces from all over the world mixed together.

And what about craft? Craft is the Northwest! Installation and modern media isn't everything either. I believe the choices in artists, like Marie Watt and Elle Lesperance are actually more reflective of the Pacific Northwest. Shouldn't an art award named after a supporter of Northwest Native Art seek out and exemplify art that somewhat embodies those traditions in a modern world?

I'm no Northwest scholar, but I'm afraid Double J doesn't understand the deep rooted traditions of the Pacific Northwest. I find his analysis ultimately just self-serving and inaccurate. Just keeping in line with the trends.

UPDATE: Found this old Regina Hackett half-interview with Double J from 2008 (when she was still with the Pi). I'm happy to see her calling him out on his blurry ethics. But it's disappointing that she seems resigned to his clubby curatorial morals.

"Man, I am Relaxed"

2010-09-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

Herzog must scare his grandchildren. All 19 of them hidden away somewhere dark. And hey, that Waa-keen Fee-nicks is kind of a badass too.

And wait, you mean the Allen Ginsberg / Bob Dylan disguise was an act? Well, we all knew that. But what we didn't know, was whether or not we were going to see I'm Not There. Casey Affleck tries to finally help our decision after a tepid opening week:

Virtually none of it was real. Not even the opening shots, supposedly of Mr. Phoenix and his siblings swimming in a water hole in Panama. That, Mr. Affleck said, was actually shot in Hawaii with actors, then run back and forth on top of an old videocassette recording of Paris, Texas to degrade the images.

This is Casey Affleck's first. Short of an art exhibit, he's kind of like a darker James Franco. I thought his supporting role in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Gerry were great.
Seeing this high-profile celebrity stunt come to fruition would be worth it enough to see. Although strangely, it does feel like there is a piece missing - a one last "HAH".

I guess this peaked my interest, after spending the last few weeks of summer trying to educate myself on the original movie badass: Dirty Harry. The movies get more cringeworthy with each sequel.

But kinda related: Podcast with Slate's, Dana Steven's, explaining rather well why The American was actually worth savoring. It is quiet.

TBA: To Be Attended

2010-09-12T13:30:00.000-07:00

This is my fourth year living in Portland. I haven't yet experienced any of the annual TBA festival. I came close two years ago, with a PICA membership. But found, still, events were expensive.

Looks like the best way to be involved is, well, to be involved. Volunteers get discounts or even in free. That's not exactly my style. Nevermind that I've been somewhat disenchanted with art as a world right now.

And although I love PICA as an organization, (throwing all it's weight into TBA is awesome and smart) it's still clubby. Eventually I'll get myself to some of these events. Each year the event seems to get better well rounded and accessible.

Here are some things I'll try to see (or regretfully miss):

Storm Tharp: High House. Mr. Tharp has a studio nearly below mine. Not that this proximity begets any sort of relationship. I can still hear his music choices though. And well, I do love his work. He'll be creating work throughout the summer in this space. And perhaps there's a chance to see his process - a little dirt and disorder around all those tidy compositions.

Rufus Wainwright: In Concert with the Oregon Symphony, Conducted by Carlos Kalmar, with Guest Soprano Janis Kelly. An Opera? By Rufus Wainwright? Sounds fabulous. As much as I've heard, only my wife and I seem to be excited about this appearing in Portland.

Shirin Neshat: Women Without Men. A first feature film by the Iranian-born artist. I was first introduced to her by the Portland Art Museum's inclusion in Disquieted. One of the more interesting pieces in the exhibit.

Nina Katchadourian: Sorted Books. "Taken as a whole, the clusters [of books] examine each particular collection’s focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies—a portrait of that library’s holdings". Seems interesting.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins: Children of the Sunshine. Another artist in close proximity to me. I've heard alot about her work - but hardly seen it. This print show will be both something new and less typical of an exhibit of hers to see. UPDATE: A rounded out review of the show from the Oregonian.

Danielle Kelly and Noelle Stiles: Blanket. Looks like this will be occupying that empty storefront off NW Glisan, in which Tharp had some work in last month. Just walk by, it looks intense, cuddly and terrifying.

Hard Edge, Hard Work: Curated by Stephanie Snyder. In conjunction with Snyder's show at Reed, ABSTRACT.

Clarity & Televised Golf

2010-09-09T20:19:00.000-07:00

I've nearly completed my bookcase painting. This is a big deal only because over the last year and a half I just over-painted things or refused to finish them. So when I came in with a cup of coffee the other morning and realized I had nothing else, it was an unfamiliar feeling again.

Towards the end I read Laura Newman's words: "I want my paintings to exist at the point where form takes on meaning..."(via Two Coats of Paint). And I thought this was a perfect way to describe the intermediary distance between figurative and abstract representations. And it's even a better way to describe what I've been thinking about: articulating things without showing them.

I also thought Jonah Lehrer's (of Proust Was a Neuroscientist) article (here) on how modern mediums influence our difficulty in perceiving the message - specifically with books and reading - was apt for painting as well. Good paintings never quite articulate everything, leaving that small space of doubt or ambiguity. Lehrer talks about the inconsistencies of ink on paper vs e-readers. But I think it compares to simply looking in general. I believe a painting might have more to tell us if it doesn't tell us everything.

And lastly, maybe in the spirit of drawing conclusions, while drawing the other day I determined drawing from life works for me because it moves. Simple enough right? But while I used alot of information from photographs - it's the actual activity, like a cafe setting, where figures and variables come in to play that I react to. It makes me re-evaluate everything over and over, as a photograph, or a still model never does. It moves. And that's what I want my paintings to do.

After School

2010-08-26T22:47:00.000-07:00

Tonight the sun was setting hard as it does in August. I made a point to head back to a Southeast area school I stand by each morning. The schoolyard wasn't deserted, but it was closed up for the day. The building appeared like most public buildings tend to look like when not in use: dilapidated or worn - really used up. It was eerie to be facing these stark, but warm walls with kids laughter and shadows darting around.

More on the Flickr. Now it's off to far Southern Oregon. See also: Holiday Road.

AAN the Rooftop

2010-08-25T17:26:00.000-07:00

Above is a video of the band, AAN performing Somewhere's Sunshine, filmed on the rooftop of our studio building. Reese Lawhon in the polo is an artist who helped build and occupies a studio on our floor. Special Guest: our landlord. Via Into The Woods TV (and Kelsey).

See also their ongoing mentions in the Willamette Week. Or in the Oregonian. Etc.

Over-rated and then Re-rated

2010-08-12T18:28:00.000-07:00

Kelsey was trying to leave out some History from her Art History course the other day. "There is just too much! How can I possibly leave anything out?!" I stood over her shoulder, watching her try to shorten hundreds of years of Art into one, three hour presentation. I agreed, how do you fit the rich and complex ideas you learn beyond school back into school? You don't. The solution was to teach only the most valuable and accessible lessons (especially in a summer course). The rest would be acquired, layer by layer, with subsequent courses, experience and self-discovery.

The presentation included Impressionism. She flipped through slides of Edouard Manet and later Mary Cassatt. She ended up trimming her more involved and interesting compare and contrasts like of Manet's Olympia or A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. But the images that struck me were Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and Cassatt's Mother and Child (both pictured).

With Luncheon I was stunned to have forgotten how modern it really was. Kelsey explained it's significant nods to many other paintings in history. But I was interested in the strange space depicted and how similar it felt to what I was thinking about. Everything seems to fit together, and then yet also exists alone. The figure in the water almost separate. All the figures themselves nearly detached from paint articulating a forest clearing, but in some areas becoming just about paint. It really was a joy to discover how the painting was very much an predecessor of things explored in Cecily Brown's paintings or Neo Rauch.

I had forgotten about Manet's ability to transition from Realism to the Impressionistic. And with Cassatt's work, I had forgotten about some of the deep tones and changes of edges that give you an emotional sense of touch. Like the child's hand on her mother, compared to the other hand at her chin. The uses of grays and fuzzy mark making, against deep colors and sharper contrasts.

Both of these paintings, despite their subject matter or categorization in Art History still have more to teach me.

I don't think I'll ever come back around to Impressionism as anything but over-rated and heavily commodified. But it's still important. And when I get right back into the subject matter painted by Manet or Cassett I grow bored. But what a joy to have learned of them and dismissed them, then later revisit the same works and realize they have more. With some of those new layers of understanding I see them in a completely new way.

Xavier Veilhan: Using an Inorganic Language

2010-07-31T13:02:00.000-07:00

The work of French Artist, Xavier Veilhan, is growing on me. I was first introduced to his work via Art Observed, when he had the Chateau de Versailles Courtyard and Garden exhibit.

There is an interesting photo spread of the major piece, Le Carrosse on his website. This is a piece that has a strange power in that courtyard - articulating very quickly what it is you need to know. Somehow it's slightly digital language is both contemporary yet fits exactly into a memory of Versailles. It's communicating everything you need to know and using a language that we're all becoming strangely familiar with.

His work is more expansive than at first glance. I have the initial reaction of thinking I've seen his language before. But that's exactly it: he's using a borrowed language - an inorganic one, from computers, polygons and pixels. Reminds me most like the early Virtua Fighter games, which represented the way we see forms using a limited technology. Breaking down curves of calves and torsos into a few different flat planes.

I suppose his work could reflect alot about technology and avatars - digital selves and identity. But that broken up form itself is nothing new. Think Cezanne or Euan Eglow. Cezanne had once set out to paint a single tree over and over, each time focusing on a sole element. Painters, sculptors and artists have always simplified forms in order to represent them. Or also Ann Gale, breaking form into, quite literally, pixels.

I find myself using alot of masking tape in my paintings lately. And I do it to get a manufactured line or shape. I'll paint in a flat, totally mechanical shape over an otherwise brushy, scraped and ragged texture. Maybe again working form into a flat shape. This is may be part of my painting language now - but in a similar way to Veilhan's work, it is mimicking an inorganic language - something picked up on from what the camera saw.

It's developing a language. As I might use photographs and memory as reference - artists before may have other varied references: sketches, live models. This changes the way we see and choose to articulate that. But ultimately artists are articulating something by abstracting it.

Big & Bold

2010-07-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

I'll have a few older pieces up in a show called Big & Bold.

This 1st Thursday, August 5th from 1-8p. Running until August 8th.

at The Match
908 NW 23rd
Portland

Other participating artists:

Justyn Livingston

Annie Meyer

Judson Moore
Cory Hanson

Antonio Villagran

The Match is sort of an art dealer / venue started by some friends. Drop by and support everyone!

Philip Guston: Gaps in (My) Art History

2010-07-16T11:05:00.000-07:00

Oh the shame. While browsing C-Monster's SFMOMA photo essay today, I realized I had never yet seen Philip Guston's abstract work. Or maybe I have and instead only remember his once famous art world reversal to stylized figurative paintings in the late 60's. In either case, I've seen lots of Guston's later work and always just understood this to be a complete change for someone originally associated with abstraction. Maybe I wasn't paying attention in class, or it's just more common now to see Guston represented with his figurative work.

But how awesome that his abstract paintings appear to be composed of the same marks, colors and smudges that characterized his figurative work. Suddenly it doesn't seem too weird that his later paintings came about. It's almost as if he untangled these figurative subjects from his messes.

However, knowing Guston as I did for so long, I think it makes seeing his abstract more exciting - rather than had I been paying attention and properly digested him as an abstract painter than a figurative one. Or maybe, painting today, it's still more common for an artist to follow that linear path: figurative loosening into abstraction.

It's really exciting to see Guston's taming of something like abstraction. And then look back and see the same Guston, just distilled.

Something Else

2010-07-15T19:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I documented and sleeved some other things I've been puttering around with at the studio. These are collaged or cut snapshots. Some of the cities or buildings are random vintage postcards. But the other ones are from Kelsey's family albums. Some of the interiors have led me to think about the positive cut image as one abstract painted shape. Many more after the jump. Click to make larger.

Cinematic

2010-07-08T13:03:00.000-07:00

Got out and about with the Tibbles Family a few days ago. Super hot day. We didn't actually want to accomplish anything, and spent more time stopping for tacos in St. Johns than actually hiking.

More photos from our Sauvie Island, Oak Island walk on my Flickr. It was so darn bright. The digital camera likes to make things too clear and clean colored. I intentionally underexposed my shots and desaturated them. I later muddied them back up with more reds.

I thought afterward that these appeared very cinematic. It's not often I have people in my photos! I have been thinking alot about this particular photo lately. And have been trying to duplicate the focus and color. Something still and quick about it that I like.

"Hurting the Cause of Reality"

2010-07-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

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Years ago I was first introduced to Goddard's Band of Outsiders. Although today I feel oppositely, then it was a new language to me and it made me sleepy. But still my friend tried to explain how Goddard intentionally used editing to interrupt the fictional narrative on screen. In the dancing scene above, music is cut out (probably very simply by using the player's mute switch - Goddard was very resourceful in his production. Like even using a wheelchair) and narration dubbed in, while you can still hear the shuffles and snaps of the actors themselves.

Or, like later, mirrored in Terantino's Pulp Fiction diner dance scene, the narrative already being laid out is interrupted by this very theatric, but almost separate moment. Goddard's ruthless editing also makes his films look intentionally mismatched, with movements jerky or missing. A good example of such editing and (at first take, obnoxious) use of on and off music is the driving scene in Breathless. There's a fictional story being constructed here like any movie, but Goddard is also trying to make that more real by reminding us of how strange it is that these two people are probably driving the same route over and over; pretending.

Goddard would famously edit together documentary like footage (long before this sort of Docu-reality became popular) of his actors on breaks or having a cigarette. And these would be written in, usually on the spot, into the movies story (this is not a post of Goddard's filmmaking prowess, but I will make one more aside: he was also infamous for changing his script daily, even making it up each morning to keep his actors and producers confused).

We're being reminded that these are movies. Artiface. And yet somehow these interruptions make other things feel more real.

When Art Observed posted this story of a found Velazquez painting (above), the chipped and old surface of the painting got me thinking again of interruptions and our sensation of reality. What sorts of imperfections were a part of image making (whether intentional or uncontrollable) that changed the image's narrative and impression on us?

Nowadays we have access to limitless information (Google) and cheap external memory (digital camera's, computers, all sorts of devices). Can too much information, or easy accessibility to it, or ability to endlessly stockpile information outside ourselves but not in our own memories, change what reality is for us? What happened to forgetting? The book, Delete, brings up the interesting conundrum of having too much memory at our disposal - essentially making us unable to forget. Making things strangely permanent.

I guess I'm least concerned with technology for technology's sake - and more about what's happening in the likes of Goddard or that Velazquez painting: going back to some sort of imperfection, an imperfection of construction that sort of mimics how spotty our senses are. The things that make reality, well, real. Imperfect impressions.

Last year, I was working on this (failed) painting of a figure taking off a dress. A friend pointed out some of the best things working were the drips on the surface - sharper colors or strongly decisive, but completely unfigurative marks around otherwise detailed things "allowed us in" to the painting. It occurred to me from there on out that even figurative things require this abstract entry point - or breathing room.

I am reminded of Matthias Weisher's paintings of spaces - and all the imperfections built in: grids and drips. He is the first that comes to mind. But almost any good painter does this very thing: "suggesting, rather than explaining".

As I work from photographs for alot of my painting, I sometimes wonder how it affects my memory of those things. Each time you remember something, you are recreating it. And by doing so you're changing it. The same can be said about photographing it in the first place, or sketching it or painting it - each time your make a note - or changing one. By working from a photo, even though I discipline myself to know - well this yellow is more like a white, etc etc, how does the photograph eventually augment my memory. Or how does it change my sensation of that thing?

The important thing to remember here is that photographs, movies, paintings, books - they're all just those place holders to activate our imagination or trigger a reaction. They aren't necessarily intended ever to replace reality. So it's very interesting to me that technology increasingly makes the "trigger image" more lifelike. Watching the Apple videos for devices is always fascinating for this reason. It's strangely Utopian and terrifying.

A great NY Times Magazine on beauty and HD last week also touches on this. How does all that detail change our impression of beauty? Of ideals? Am I being nostalgic when I long for grainy, low resolution television screens and all their grouping and smooshing of detail? Isn't that what a painter's mark does on canvas: make a human and decisive abstract mark made up of pigment which doesn't exist on the object itself? Suggesting rather than explaining. I am not sure I like more information in imagery.

When working from photographs I am also confronted with the quality of that photograph. Eventually I will have been staring at the image for so long I will come to recognize the camera's own language - of forgetting. And sometimes that study of a photograph kills it for me too. Unlike live observation, the photograph is actually just a place holder to recall my own memories of that very thing. I often go back to the original object in some form (and even better, but not always accessible, is painting from life anyway) and try to re-remember something about it.

As an aside about photography: I have always responded best to photography that boldy groups shadows or objects in them. Even a photograph has an abstract language, albeit increasingly higher-res.

Another NY Times article, celebrating the anniversary of Roswell, mentions "that on the one hand, digital media 'may be hurting the cause of reality: such nonsense gets spread much faster than it used to.' But 'it’s easier for the correct explanation to spread as well.'" Part of what made the documented UFO evidence so exciting was all the detail that was left out.

I am not sure the correct, exact explanation always makes things more vivid for me. And maybe it's years of overwrought painting, but I think reality has alot to do with forgetting.

And only related to the ideas of ambiguous painting, via Undercover Painter: Douglas Witmer's brilliant statement.

Some Sketches

2010-06-30T20:04:00.000-07:00

I think that my ideas reveal themselves best when sketching. Sketching is immediate and done quickly. I also tend to think the best when I'm drawing. I always feel that I am bolder when drawing - and let things disappear, group things together more decisively and take liberties I otherwise shy from. Here are a few (lousy) scans from some recent sketches. All are under 8". Click to make bigger.

Ambiguity as Relationship

2010-06-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

I learned how to paint very traditionally. I hesitate using the word classical, since even though I was taught to look at the masters and art history - and had certain ideals hammered into me, like a full 8 semesters of drawing) - my education as an undergraduate painter was more about structure and practice. I began as a student and am now becoming a painter.

So I learned how to make things right. Even though this meant disregarding grandiose art world statements. As an undergrad I even remember a few of us taking a short trip to see RISD's undergrad thesis exhibits. We were intimidated that they might be producing work that was more important than ourselves (and by the way - who was producing important work at that stage?). But when we saw their exhibit, were relieved to find work full of over-reaching themes, grand world statements and conceptual artifice but a lack of any technical skill.

So we had comforted ourselves: we knew how to paint and draw so we would be better off. I'm not sure if that is true now, but certainly it was true for me. I needed to build structure in my practice before tearing it all apart. I used to envy artists at that age who seemed to have it together. But did they? Were they just endowed with a better creative sense of cool and not cool? Or were they just doing what they did best, and avoiding what they couldn't do: paint?
On the phone with a friend a few years ago, her in graduate school, we laughed, "Isn't it funny how long it takes just to learn how to fuck things up?" Not that we wished for chaos, but with all that structure and figurative thinking embedded, we were just now learning how to let go.

Matt Stangel in the Mercury, reviews Storm Tharp's Hercules at PDX Contemporary.

While Hercules functions to identify and reveal the harmonious relationships between objects, those objects are often very different, representing many approaches to art and at varying degrees of refinement. Perfection, then, isn't so much one specific type of relationship communicated any single way, but the expository nature of relationships in general. "Perfection is a relationship," says Tharp.

But as I am finding lately, ambiguity is also a relationship. And when I'm painting now, I'm after that uncertainty. I have identified my tendency to overwork and make things overwrought. And have understood sometimes overworking is exactly what needs to occur to then make something I trust and can live with. Anotherwords: I overwork it and then destroy it. I put it there to satisfy myself then remove it.

The relationships among things in an image sometimes are about what is not there, or about things vividly seen and completely not understood. Shortly after school, taking a job at the MFA, Boston, I remember always being stunned by the way the figure Julia and her doll were painted in John Singer Sargent's Daughts of Edward D. Boit. As exact and sensual those figures are, up-close there are traces of things having been moved around. Up-close, there are only a few swooping marks and things make less sense.

I used to believe I was in awe of a painting like that for it's mastery, for it's sensual realism. But now, I realize that I was actually intrigued by the areas that didn't make sense and how they existed with the ones that did. I was interested in those areas of abstract ambiguity against real hard articulation. And that intersection, that relationship is where I think perfection might be for me.

2010-06-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

Lots of changes for the better lately. Have been real busy but not social busy. Here's a mini-digest of sorts:

     Via C-Monster, Gary Turner's Mini-MoMa Gallery Wallpaper-like photographs. Neat!

    And, recommended by Kelsey (and PORT), is a great piece on PAM's Tina Olsen. A true bright spot for the museum. And speaking of museums: Regina Hackett has two great back to back pieces on SAM's hunt for a curator. One here. And the other.

    Two Coats of Paint defends artist's signing their art. I don't usually sign mine. It bothers me but I can't figure out why. A signature on other work never tends to bother me though...that is, unless the work is awful, in which case the artist's signature is almost like this ostentatious stamp. Maybe that's how I feel about my own. I don't want to stamp it until I'm confident it's worth declaring.

   Also, found via The Morning News: art of subtitles!

I thought OpenWidePDX's photo essays of recent Portland exhibits is always a good way to see things you don't want to make the trip out to see. But one exhibit this month I would like to see is Bailey Winter's Ambush: The Story of the TDA.

More Interesting than Words: Rodney Graham Light Boxes

2010-06-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

Via, Art Observed: 303 Gallery in NY has Rodney Graham's light box photo's on display. Photographs in light boxes are akin to viewing them on a computer screen. They are both interesting and viable ways of exhibiting but really make the image appear entirely different. A light box has that illuminated glow. Graham's images would not appear as ghostly as they do if they were printed.

The instantly recognizable cliche of the Old West has made itself very ordinary by now and works the best.Then once the viewer is sucked in, there are strange manipulations happening. However, I always am weary of justification of work through lots of art historical references. Or as the press release says:

Graham recreates a staging of a piece from 14th century avant garde, as performed by musicians of the mid-1970s. The concert Graham is ostensibly recreating is a recreation itself, a historical reconstruction that betrays the stylistic bias of the period it hopes to evoke. Graham implicates himself as part of the arc of history, as he dons the clothes of the present-day man acting as the 70s man acting as the 14th century man. The surfeit of stimuli which contribute to a picture of antiquity are taken to their logical extreme, with Graham subjected to all the implications of their romance and projection, abetted by his own whimsical tinkering.

Or even less articulate, and more revealing of some over-reaching of meaning, Art Observed's wording:

Each work encapsulates a disconnection from the very object it is depicting, thereby questioning the status of the object.The series of disconnections almost seem never-ending: presented are the lightboxes, which present a scene, that presents an archetype as it has been shaped by its medium (theater, dance, etc), that in turn (as is its nature) is a symbol for the events it seeks to unify. This cycle, adapted for the show, has the show’s artist throughout: Graham inserts his own figure in each of the lightboxes. In other words, the displacement of lightbox, scene, and archetype from the singular experience it represents ask a series of questions. Where is the object, Graham asks, and where is the artist?

All of this is well understood, but I hesitate to use this as reasoning for the work. I completely understand the importance for artists to be art historically educated and aware of their context. But when we view the work, do we gravitate towards it because the musicians are from the 1970's? Would we ever even know the artist is in some of these images unless we were in with his camp? In such an example as Graham's press release, I wonder if the words are compensating for what good 'ol composition and technique does on it's own.

Instead, the press release or artist statement is more something I would expect after-the-fact, used to contextualize or criticize. Maybe I'm just operating in my pre-Emering Artist mindset. And maybe, this is the sort of thing that accompanies your work when you've already got a market hankering for it (and I also recognize I am taking this all in as a whole: the reporting of the exhibit and the imagery together). But I recognize alot of today's work being accompanied by complex reasons and clubby-art references.

I agree with the context provided by the press release. But sometimes I wish there was some breathing room or mystery when work is first introduced. I think there are alot of complexities to making even the simplest work. But not all of those complexities have words and they shouldn't require immediate compensatory contextualizing.

Two New Paintings

2010-06-16T19:49:00.000-07:00

Thinking Big and Thinking Failure

2010-06-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

Via Two Coats of Paint, a rundown of Bravo's Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. I didn't catch the first episode, so cannot imagine what it's like. But I have seen plenty of Project Runway (my wife loved the show before it left Bravo - and just like Top Chef, thought it made such entertaining TV by leaving out details and making drama out of producer induced pressure).

But what would that be like, having a camera crew hover over your practice? As I mentioned before, my practice isn't all that glamorous. Even my wall of windows opening directly onto an apartment building makes me self-conscious. Art seems to be, even in collaborative processes, something that needs to be created alone. Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe says, "Work of Art, as well as any other reality TV show, taps into our need to be fascinated without the inconvenience, the risk, of further emotional investment." It's pretty to watch without the trouble. And, "Almost all the female contestants make work in heels and fluffy tops.."

I seem to actually work the best when there is absolutely no possibility of having someone see into my space. And that is usually never. There's always a chance. It's just like the act of painting itself: you paint the best in those short moments when you forget about painting altogether.

I wonder if the Work of Art artists have been chosen because of a vain or loud persistence. Also likely, for our benefit, they're process - or lack of it - looks good on camera.

Semi-Related: A great interview of a great interviewer, Ira Glass in which he mentions working for failure:

I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it's usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it.

UPDATE: Also related: The Downfall of Thomas Kinkade (finally).

Sarah Awad and Making Decisions

2010-05-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

I found Sarah Awad's paintings today through Visual Inventory blog. These are simple paintings dealing strongly with what is sometimes so hard for me to make: decisions.

I mean decisions with paint. There is alot of attention paid to composing shapes and marks with seemingly simple execution. With a surprisingly short career so far, it's impressive how she understands how a scarcity of abstract marks can say alot more.

I am not always interested in subject matter but with a Mathematics's degree along with Illustration and Painting, Sarah Awad's paintings could be ripe with things I have yet to think about. Just the War Games series tends to explore this really eerie idea of military and our own security. Each of the images tend to have these great overworked bits of a pant leg or shape of light and then trail off into an unknown thought. And even her earlier work, in a more realist way, tends to mirror Eric Fischl's Beach Painting's.

What I am more interested in, is the stark, graphic economy of decisions she's making on canvas. It seems a graphic quality has imbedded itself in alot of recent painting. But I'm not sure it's always because the artist can paint and instead it's reveals they can't.

I relate to the tight, form building brushwork across a back or on a figure juxtaposed with a nonsensical abstract mark. I like when, in the Standard Surrender (below), she uses the simple gray shape behind the figures to delineate almost all the space. And one man's chest becomes just the right muddy red, while the pants and limbs become painted louder, almost carrying all the sound of the struggling figures. These are ways I have been thinking about making a space - where the actual meets something remembered or lost. Figurative and abstraction.

It's no news painting is about making decisions. But I think it's one of the hardest things, simply because it requires that you trust yourself.

Studio Visits

2010-05-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

I love studio conversations. I don't have enough of them. A really good studio chat usually involves some heartbreak, some navel gazing and eventually becomes a great critical discussion on current ideas. The best visits have ended up occurring when I least desire it. The visits allow me to really face up to what is being done - or avoided. Sometimes those ideas wouldn't ordinarily express themselves otherwise.

I had a great visit with Nick. I remember the realization that the ideas we were talking about weren't yet being demonstrated in my new painting. I deflected to explaining ideas about cleaning up my palette, my marks, etc, at which point he scolds, "I think you can safely say your a good painter and just put it in your back pocket for awhile." Anotherwords: get over it and get on with painting.

Via, Two Coats of Paint, T.J. Carlin's Studio Visit column is great! The Lisa Yuskavage conversation that Sharon Butler points to is also one of my favorites.

Something that does disturb me is when someone tells me I’m a good painter, and they mean technically. That’s like telling someone who flies an airplane that you’re good at it. If you’re painting—or flying an airplane—you should be good at it! High-quality craft is a part of what we do as painters. If it was merely technique or being provocative with the imagery, I’d be totally disinterested in what I was doing. I’m not trying to make merely a spectacle. There are two kinds of reality—there’s the reality of the painting and the pictorial language of all that is happening there—that part’s not that interesting. How those things interact is what is potentially really interesting.

I have always liked the way Yuskavage paints, but not her subject matter. Except for the pie face paintings. (which is an idea that's explored by Adrian Ghenie too!)

Making Secondary Habits Primary

2010-05-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

Kevin Hartnett writes about how the writer Murakami deliberately rearranged his life to make writing work. He cites that Murakami knew, as I am figuring out too, that there is only so much writing (or painting) one can accomplish when it's a secondary activity:

He wrote his first novel in the predawn hours after he’d finished tallying receipts and washing down the bar. His writing sessions sometimes lasted only half an hour, at which point he’d fall asleep. Even under those conditions Murakami was able to mine the talent that would eventually make him famous.

I've never read Murakami, but he seems very deliberate. He seems very aware of how each day fits within the rest. I've always tried to aim for being so confident that I know the exact place for each day's work. But I'm pretty impatient and tend to let all those "primary" activities overwhelm me. I guess there is still something to be said for working with resistance. Would I even know what to do (yet) if each day was entirely devoted to painting?

Semi-related: Although I can't access the June 2008 New Yorker article, The Running Novelist, that Hartnett mentions... the cover to that same issue pretty nicely sums up my feelings when I see folks at work tapping a book title into Amazon on their iphone.

"Shadowy Existence in the Studio"

2010-05-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Neo Rauch (via Art Info)

The most valuable art books in my studio become the ones with the most words in them. Which is funny because they're usually purchased for the pictures. I get infatuated with someone's work and the monograph becomes a way to possess it or learn it. The artist conversations inside recreate the existence of the work for me long after I first see it.

There is a great studio chat between Wolfgang Buscher and Neo Rauch in the book, Neo Rauch: Schilfland Works on Paper. There is also another interview with Ellen Alpsten. They discuss the hidden prolific drawing practice of a painter who already is known for being "uncommonly productive".

Drawing by Neo Rauch

I recently began to recognize gaps and strengths in my own preparatory process and think Rauch's use of his drawings, from Schilfland, is interesting:

These things here are not preparatory drawings for pictures in the academic sense. They lead a kind of shadowy existence in the studio. There's a kind of darting around and crawling about them that's almost insect-like. They're things that simply come about in passing and then astonish even me when I look at them...

Rauch says he does not necessarily do preparatory studies, but needs to start large canvases with at least "mental images". He claims it has something to do with "worrying about spoiling the adventure by taming the figure before struggling with it."

Drawing by Neo Rauch

And I often feel the same way. Attempting a study of a figure for a larger painting often just deadens the imagery. It's mostly that I will struggle with the imagery on the canvas and it be right, or not. I often draw figures in gestures reminiscent of my paintings, but this is outside the studio.

I like how Rauch's "production process" has evolved to include these drawings that clearly have the same dream-like and surreal imagery, but don't necessarily need to be anything final - or anything period. The book includes dozens of these drawings done with pen, graphite, marker and paint. Some are more characture studies - his usual pudgy and muddy faces blankly looking. Or others are compositions more designed - about a color quality or shape. But it's the act of drawing that helps his entire process.

For an artist like Neo Rauch, who is identified so crisply by these enormous paintings and nothing more - it's really satisfying as an artist to see part of his erroneous process. I can't even say his drawings always amount to much as themselves (although they still are exciting).

I don't even own this book, but have others of his. It's just that this certain conversation, about the idea of making things in your studio that have no consequence, in order to facilitate serious images is one that I can learn from. I guess that is how Neo Rauch has developed his paintings to appear so haphazard but deliberate - so incredibly painted but cavalier.

Building an Artist

2010-05-21T23:12:00.000-07:00

Proposal for Train Jeff Koons

Greg.org examines Jeff Koon's CV (via C-Monster) and finds that things don't add up. Koon's legacy (perhaps like many large historical figures) seems to be blurred just by virtue of not having kept track of details. It seems Koon's mythological start on Wall Street might not be more than any other working artist's early days: a simple day job filling in the blanks. He didn't give up some million dollar career track.

Towards the end he mentions a fairly common artist trajectory:

...the very familiar arc of an emerging artist's career: art school; crap job at a museum; make crappy work; get a day job; friends with artists; failed starts with some dealers; sell a piece or two; go broke; get another day job; get in some group shows; which leads to a solo show. And the rest, we know.

Just out of school I think I was afraid to be called a painter if I hadn't been painting that morning. I was afraid I'd loose it. The reality, as a professor made clear years before, "You're lucky if you'll get 3 hours a week of painting in at first".

Black City Julie Mehretu (via Representing Place)

I think things are a little bit different now for me: there isn't an identity crisis about it, for one thing. But when for artists does their day job stop getting in the way of artistic practice? When does your ordinary lifestyle inform your practice? Or when do we become honest with our selves about what we're making?

Of course there is work, work and more work. But there's also something Robert Pirsig mentions in that classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally."

Semi-Related: The writings of Jack Tworkov, who seemed to content working like a salmon at his art. At the Art 21 blog by Sharon Butler:

Every art can only say what the medium allows it to say. Every change in medium is a change in content. A painter knows that what was originally suggested by charcoal can never be said in paint. If you paint you say one thing. If you stain you say another. If you paste, you say still another. By the time you use a computer you will say an utterly different thing—that’s why painting will go on…

And also Julie Mehretu’s paintings that I have always been strangely attached to. Another one who is so seemingly embedded in another world beyond her own. Maybe that's the secret!

Walking Six Months in the Wrong Direction

2010-05-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

Untitled Unfinished 2010 Stephan P. Ferreira

Today I realized a painting left incomplete a half a year ago was worth revisiting. Like walking a few blocks in the wrong direction, reaching a dead end and retracing your steps.

I found a photograph taken (quickly) a few months into the painting. It changed dramatically after taking the snapshot. Then I quite and threw it out.

I remember how throwing it out made me feel decisive. And I remember the shocked look a friend gave when I mentioned this, even without him seeing the painting. That's when I thought about having done something wrong.

Untitled (Conversation) Unfinished State 2009 Stephan P. Ferreira

I found that photo recently. Over seven months since I quit it. Of course everything appears much better scaled down to a few inches. And nostalgia blurs what I remember. And being currently in a fix with my painting aids this too. I think about it more and the painting was actually a third painting on top of the others. The surface had no absorbency left. It was like glass. And I would spend lots of time laboring over my brush marks, scraping them off.

But ultimately I am reminded of some of the ideas I was aiming for. And I included another photograph of painting mid way (this one I did complete). Maybe I was in the right direction. The idea at the time was to distill the subject down to something I could react to over and over: our dining room. The trouble was that I made this less than honest. I think as I populated the table with suppers - from a few dozen photographs every week - I was lying to myself. It was getting away from me. We never actually had that much food on the table. I had begun with a way of looking at this imagery and instead began trying to make it something I had never seen. It was being manipulated.

But (like the second photo also shows) at that one certain stage I may have been painting it the way I wanted to. I relish some of the bold, flat and decisive shapes I had made. Somewhere I started lying to myself. You could argue things are more articulated. But I think the space behind the figure becomes unclear and reveals impatience.

Lately I have been searching for some sort of honesty in my painting. And instead of finding in it finished paintings, I am finding it in pieces I have abandoned, or completely different pieces of things I had once found successful for other reasons.

I think today I just realized I'd been wandering in the wrong direction. And so I'll turn around a few blocks and start again.

Here's the Real Thing

2010-05-12T18:28:00.000-07:00

Even if I still take out my scarf every other day...it's getting close to summer. Didn't much feel like being behind my studio windows today. Took a long walk. I guess I just wanted to hear the sounds of everything. More on the Flickr page.

Hurvin Anderson: Figurative Paintings about Paint

2010-05-09T13:46:00.000-07:00

Peter's Sitters 2 2009 Hurvin Anderson (via Thomas Dane Gallery)

I discovered the paintings of Hurvin Anderson today via the new Saatchi exhibit/book, Newspeak: British Art Now. The paintings are loud, energy filled hair-salon spaces occupied by a figure or "sitter". And before I could dismiss them and turn the page (as a large survey containing so much information overwhelms me to do: dismiss, dismiss - what's next, etc) I realized I loved them. These are paintings about paint.

Barbershop 2006 Hurvin Anderson (via Thomas Dane Gallery)

Anderson's paintings reminded me of what attracts me most to certain paintings right now: tricking me into looking at something rather banal or usual in a new way with paint. Hi paintings are of figurative subject matter done in a very abstract way. You can follow a figurative or recognizable form - a room, a chair, counter top, towel - and follow it until it becomes an unrecognizable shape altogether: a mark.

So Romantic 2009 Grant Hottle (via Half/Dozen)

Why is this so interesting? Because no matter how literal or real an image, paintings are made with abstract marks. I think it's really strong when a painter can articulate a completely recognizable form with such loud marks. Not just marks for noise sake (as that's a lazy thing) but marks that become as important to the figurative space as the objects they exist next to in the same plane. When those shapes and swatches become as exciting as the forms rendered, if not more exciting.

I started making comparisons to other paintings I remembered - that maybe at first I could not identify why they were so important to me. I thought of Matthias Weischer, who I first saw at the Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection. That was also the first opportunity I had to see a Neo Rauch, in all his impressiveness, first hand.

Neujahr 2005 Neo Rauch (via David Zwirner)

In fact, I think it was Neo Rauch's work that first set these thoughts in motion. I never much grasped the surreal subject matter. I gravitated towards the ordinary things depicted in those wild canvases - the grubby hands, the motherly touch on a back - the way the painting was constructed. He is always playing with one color against another. One figurative form planted against something completely abstract. A face articulated in a messy mark.

Many years before that, I was impressed with Dana Schutz's neon palette (which never compares in reproductions). In one of her paintings of the fictional character, Frank, his chest becomes just the only gray-ochre flat shape in the painting - an abstract shape taking the same tone and shape as that slump of the chest. Wispy no-no paint marks become grass. In other paintings of hers, like Lovers, these wild strokes of forest green become leaves, camouflage even, for two lovers who share a foot - and a kiss.

I am reminded also of the painter Les Rogers, whose newer works tend to depict figurative spaces but then lead you to the splatter of a mark all in one shape.
Working in an entirely different direction, but with a similar language is the Northwest artist Whiting Tennis. He uses collaged pattern as marks in his paintings. Bitter Lake Compound in the Portland Art Museum is a good example of this.

Study for Blue Hamburger 2007 Whiting Tennis (via Greg Kucera)

Frank in the Dessert 2002 Dana Shutz (via Saatchi)

And even more local is the Portland-based, Grant Hottle. I first saw his work a couple months ago at Half/Dozen gallery at the Lofts. I didn't much like them at first. But then saw the photo-only studio visit by OpenWidePDX. I sometimes thought the unfinished works lining the studio were more interesting, with flat colors swallowing otherwise fully formed spaces.

Almost any painting seems like it could be identified this way. But I find it especially exciting when a figurative subject can be articulated in this abstract way. What seeing Anderson's paintings made me realize is that I'm only figuring this out myself. After undergrad and years afterward hammering the same ideas home, I've only begun to figuring out that I never was looking at the figurative pieces of a subject...but the shapes, forms and colors.

There is Some Painting Out There

2010-05-06T15:01:00.000-07:00

Some things to see the first half of this month:

- Jessica Hirsch's Folk Feng Shui

- House Arrest at Worksound.

- The work of MFA students from the University of Oregon, Brightly Colored Party.

- Natascha Snellman at Fourteen Thirty.

- Cut Ups by Gus Van Sant at PDX Contemporary

- Oil paintings of Barbara Sternberger at Leach.

- The 2D works of Leiv Fagereng, Sarah Horowitz & Alfred Harris at Froelick.

Books: All the Inspirational Self-Help Won't Save Me

2010-05-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

The Studio Reader

Today I started The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists. An interesting anthology of interviews, essays and older writings that all think forward. Put together from the Art Institute of Chicago, it has a little bit of old and a little bit of new. A book like this is always neat to pick up because it helps quell my anxiety of my own practice. But it got me thinking of all the odd inspirational books I've read and if they make any difference.

A good example from the book: artist Michael Smith's simple but true list for a perfect studio day:

Wash dishes.
Fresh Coffee.
Window with view.
Quiet.
Plenty of ideas.
Room to pace.

Robert Henri's classic, The Art Spirit

For all of us, the list may be different - but as I've grown more confident (or at least more set) in my ways - it always has included a place to think, pace, do absolutely nothing or everything - another words: space. And whether or not artists admit it, I think in our dark moments we always look elsewhere for a slight confirmation of our fears. That's why making art is so hard. You'll never find yourself in someone else's practice. You'll only recognize bits. You have to find your own solutions.

Art & Fear

My practice lately might involve inventing trips to the sink. Sweeping out the corner. Rearranging the small amount of items on my bookshelf. Or gaining a huge interest in whatever is on the radio (have you not heard Terri Gross?). Sometimes absolutely nothing happens in the studio. Sometimes everything does. And it's easy to be terrified either way.

I've just spent the last year building and settling into a studio space adjacent to a few handfuls of artists all over the spectrum. It's created as much anxiety as it has work. Both are good. But sometimes other artists appear to have themselves so figured out - or at least it appears that way. Something quoted from Frances Stark in The Studio Reader that pretty well sums up my current feelings:

There is nothing photogenic or charming about the way I do what I do, and there's no special atmosphere created by doing it. I am starting to think that, for me, being an artist in the studio is a complete fantasy. Don't get me wrong, I believe in what I do, and I even love what eventually goes out my door, but my methods have yet to form a place that feels like home. Sometimes I think my studio says as little about my work as a basketful of my dirty clothes conveys of what I look like.

I'm reminded of Art & Fear, first given as as required reading in Junior-level painting. It was terrific then, as it dealt with, well, FEAR. But now in retrospect it had a motherly and justifying tone.

During college, suggested by my Illustration professors, we read Robert Henri's The Art Spirit. Also really good. But written in 1923. Apparently written for his students. I think it helped alot with the discipline of art making. There was also The Artist's Way. But this is a bit more spiritual.

Press Play

A few years ago though I found Phaidon's pressPlay. A great candid collection of artist interviews. Until this point I hadn't realized other art making practices, completely opposite to my own, could be so affirming. It's been a bible. It was as this point in my own studio practice that I realized the studio was any solution that worked for me. And the only confidence I needed at that point was knowing that. Just recently there is a cheeky packaged followup.

A Painter's Life

There have also recently been a host of books trying to talk about the studio. But they all go in extreme directions. Inside the Painters Studio interviews a set group of artists. But it sets them up in the usual idolized and mythological fashion. They give cavalier answers to ridiculous questions. Art is not magic, it's hard work. And there are these strange art dioramas of the artists studios with the artists in them.There is also Art Making & Studio Spaces but this ends up more as artist studio as interior designed space than about studio practice.

There is A Painter's Life, a fictional diary of a working artist today. This I suspect is more of artist as a lifestyle or rockstar. Not interested.

Or also The Fall of the Studio. It takes an entirely opposite, ArtForum-like approach (or in-approachable). Sometimes it's hard to even recognize what kind of practice it's discussing. Although there is an excellent essay by Bruce Nauman on how his studio practice became about him as an artist:

If you see yourself as an artist and you function in a studio and you're not a painter...if you don't start out with some canvas, you do all kinds of things-you sit in a chair or pace around. And then the question goes back to what is art? And art is what an artist does, just sitting around the studio.

I look forward to The Studio Reader, as it borrows backward and forward to examine what the studio means. It so far doesn't pretend the studio is this hip, secluded factory of ideas that aren't accessible to everyone. It also doesn't attach space to spiritual or magical ideas. I think like the purposes of all these books, it helps demystify the practice. It's reassuring to realize some of the greats have wasted years of time. It's really just about artists who've done alot of pacing to know how to work.

Monograph Bookwerks

2010-04-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

Monograph Bookwerks

John Brodie and Blair Saxon-Hill have opened a new art book store: Monograph Bookwerks. John and Blair are both visual artists, so the shop promises to be smart about architecture, design, photography, fashion, biographies and criticism. They will sell both used and rare books, studio objects and artwork! Keep up to date with their Twitter page.

Although I don't know Blair all that well, I do know that John is ceaselessly busy. John recently opened Store For a Month (much to the chatter of PDX). He also had a giant re-appropriated billboard-like art installation at this years Disjecta Biennial. Oh, and he owns Le Happy.

Euan Uglow: A Painter's Painter

2010-04-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

Ali Euan Uglow (via Akty Erotika)

Euan Uglow is a painter's painter. Just like a friend of mine once described Nabakov as a writer's writer. Why? Because their work is playful and experimental. Or maybe they're less about something and more about being difficult and exploratory.

As Nabakov did with words, Uglow tends to do with paint. That is, dealing more with relationships about the material and less about reactions to the world. Maybe these kinds of works are infuriating for a non-painter (or non-writer) to look at. Maybe infuriating is too strong a word. Maybe just without statement. Beautiful works about working. And sometimes nothing more.

The Quarry Pignano 1979-80 Euan Uglow (via Art Interview)

I think making this kind of work is a hard thing to accomplish. Mostly because it's studied and hermetic. It's hard to imagine a painter like this being a product of today. Of course it's possible, but I feel the pressures are there to accomplish other things.

Morandi, Ann Gale and Antonio Garcia Lopez are other painters that remind me of this kind of work. Painters with a slower, deeper and more authentic career (which reminds me about the Lopez painting, La Cena shown at the MFA Boston a few years ago that haunted me until this summer).

Semi-Related: Today I had another good chat with Gabriel Liston. He's finishing up his NAAU residency. It's really nice to have a discussion with a painter. I feel like I've recently had many conceptual discussions about my work. But it's refreshing to hear Liston talk about simply mixing paint. Or has he jokingly described it, "making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches". Apparently I caught him shortly after his KBOO interview.

Also: "...I still think the bar is so high regarding paint that it’s almost easier to disregard it than to deal." Eva Lake of KBOO's Art Focus takes another stab at where all the paintings are in Portland. It's a looming question, that she asked Cris Moss on her show. He pointed to the hundreds of gallons of paint surface on a sculpture.

New York Review of Books: The Book as Object

2010-04-26T15:17:00.000-07:00

Alberto Moravia's Boredom in the NYRB edition

"The series boasts exquisitely presented books—affordable trade paperbacks with a beautiful cover image and wrapped in a dual-tone spine and back cover that form a literary rainbow when shelved together." I owe my interest in Alberto Moravia to NYRB.

Although my interest has waned recently, the series has always been like a beacon. Last year (or longer) I also got hooked on Peter Handke. The NYRB version of Sorrow Beyond Dreams got me scouring shelves for old copies of others like Short Letter, Long Farewell. A few months later, NYRB release a whole bunch. And sometimes that's how it happens for me: seeing the series handpick an author like that highlights them. I may not have given the book a chance otherwise.

Who doesn't love a good garish, vintage paperback? But there is just something so tidy and delicious about NYRB books. I can't stand how perfectly chosen the spine and inside flap colors are. And they are pleasant to read - not too small or big and spaced far from the center. And there is something so nice as seeing the cover of a book, the first impression, being revised and freshened. Another related good example of that is the double-issue Rabbit series.

One wonders what e-books could mean for book design as an object. Sure cover design will persist, as selling MP3s has shown for album covers. But the object itself - the size and girth that determine part of your reading experience may change. It's such a long story that hasn't been finished yet.

Jenny Saville the Rizzoli Monograph

I am really interested to see how this fairs for art books mostly. I've only recently had any experience witnessing change in monograph design. It seems art books have progressed from the wow factor of reproduced color plates pasted onto pages, into entire experiences, where studio shots are juxtaposed with other images and text to create an experience of art (kind of what I touched on before).

One of the best examples is the Jenny Saville Rizzoli book published like 5 or 6 years ago. I mention her alot, but wonder if this book alone has to do with that. I often pick it up when I'm at a loss in my studio. It's exciting to see full spreads of her large work followed by a detail of strokes and layers of decisions. Then a continuing page of interviews, with a studio shot of ideas left on the walls (a photograph included here of Nick Raffel's studio, that I always liked for the same reason). The book really informs me of how her practice might work - short of ever seeing it or talking to her.

Studio 2009 Nick Raffel (Photograph Stephan P. Ferreira)

I might owe even more to that monograph. When I bought a copy those 5 or 6 years ago, I realized what the book could be. Maybe I respond to Saville the way I do because maybe that monograph has given me a more robust identity of her than of many others. I've since sought out books that exist as an experience rather than a cheap spread of reproductions.

Surface: Seeing it in Person

2010-04-25T11:46:00.000-07:00

Reflection, Self Portrait 1985 Lucien Freud (via WebMuseum)

There is a Lucien Freud exhibit up at the Centre Pompidou in France. It's unlikely that I'll get to that. There isn't a good chance I will see Freud's work in person for a long while either.

Lucien Freud uses so much paint - his images are so tactile - that I wonder how seeing them in person would change my experience of them. My wife said seeing the paintings in London is the reason for her undergrad thesis. Oppositely, another friend recently said he saw some in person and it changed his view of the work for the worse.

Study for Head of George Dyer 1967 Francis Bacon (via ARTINFO)

There are so many artists that I've only known through reproductions. A good example is Francis Bacon. Sometimes books and the internet are my primary source of images.But do I really know what it's like to experience standing in front of a Bacon painting (although great documents like this tend to explore an entirely different side)?

Morning Sun 1952 Edward Hopper (via NY Times)

During undergrad I was all about Edward Hopper. And I only knew him through books. Those reproductions always led me to believe he was a terrible, good painter. Meaning he could use color and make space, but had this ugly surface. It turned me off slightly. But during college I saw a good majority of his work at the Whitney, and later at the MFA Boston, and realized the texture and mark making was all lost in the reproductions. His colors were still messy, but beautiful.


Reproduction Drawing 1 (after Leonardo Cartoon) 2009-10 Jenny Saville (via Gagosian)

I'm always thinking about the aesthetics of a surface. So much so, I tend to scrape off my marks and repaint them until I've got the movement memorized. I tend to gravitate to a nicely orchestrated form, or shape. I get distracted at poorly made marks - or rather, insecure mark making. I like sureness or decisiveness- even if I haven't been able to demonstrate it myself (or if it's prevented me from allowing anything of mine to come to fruition lately!). It's led me lately to care more about what that paint looks like, in any form, than what the image is.

There are dozens of artists I have only known through seeing in person, sometimes even only once (and maybe in that case they live more in my head than anything). Whereas others, like Jenny Saville, I am in awe of their mark making and paint, but haven't seen one. Am I looking at different elements to a work of art when I see it reproduced instead of in-person? Would my view of certain artists diminish if I were to see a haphazard surface? Or, would it give me more confidence to be a bit more carefree myself?

Studio Update

2010-04-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

Studio 2010 Stephan P. Ferreira

I have been playing around with oil on paper in the studio. There is a certain speed of mark and mix of soft and hard features I have been fascinated with. But really only coming up with only little pieces. Today, with some final control over some smearing and gesture, I feel like there is a sort of direction. I'm hoping to get started on a larger piece with figures at a table, in the sun.

Studio 2010 Stephan P. Ferreira

When a Chair is Not a Chair

2010-04-19T18:11:00.000-07:00

Salesmen Sample Cabinet 2006 Roy McMakin (via James Harris Gallery)

I never thought much of artist Roy McMakin. But that was my own fault. A lack of investigating what he was about. Allowing this one poor monograph my store had for eons determine his whole artistic identity for me.

Roy McMakin (via James Harris Gallery)

But the other day, I ordered and had a good look at When a Chair is Not a Chair. I was caught by furniture and designs which were fragmented. Where he actually introduced fragments of other colors and shapes into these beautifully made pieces.

And then I found his Eight Photographs of an Angel Wing Begonia series (of which I cannot find reproduced anywhere except the book). Here is another version, done much simpler. They are around 30"+ in size and comprised of neatly layered photographs of the Begonias. The single clay pot they're planted in are in one piece, while the plant itself becomes fragmented and twisted.

The closest thing I could find in his (apparently) extensive photography work was the images here. Sometimes they're photographs of his furniture. And sometimes they are photographs of other objects, drawings, etc. It's become so interesting to me to figure out how this artist takes apart his own work. And how maybe by playing with these objects in a cubist sort of fashion, the photographs have since informed his work. Just like the craftsmanship of his furniture making has informed his photography.

A Green Dresser 2006 Roy McMakin (via James Harris Gallery)

Watch Awaken 2008 Les Rogers (via Les Rogers)

As I write this, I do not have anything rather important to say about McMakin that hasn't already been said. And I really haven't even done more than drool, at dozens of separate special moments, with those images in the book. At first I wanted to make all these comparisons to Cubism (check), David Hockney's photo collages and my own work.

But after a vain search for those images, I realized it was simpler: I was responding to those photographs of the begonias, with a distorted literal and figurative language because it drew attention to how something is made. Like good paintings and how they are about painting. The comparisons then are more like Maureen Gallace or Les Rogers (two new favorites that come to mind). Where-in a figurative subject is only the vehicle for getting you to look at how it is made.

Cape Cod, Early September 2008 Maureen Gallace (via Whitney)

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere

2010-04-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

Hanna 2010 Ryan McGinley (via Art Observed)

There is a great Ryan McGinley exhibit up at Team Gallery in NY called Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Also some great images and linsks at Art Observed.

Larson F 2010 Ryan McGinley (via Art Observed)

I'm not sure I really like nude photography. Even those classic nude landscape-like photos by Weston made me feel weird. But I do love the expressions, the candid faces and the blurry features mixed with other crisp limbs.

McGinley says,"... I sort of approach using the studio camera like a candid camera. And it would be insane to shoot as much as I did on film because for each portrait: I shot between 1,500 and 2,000 photos." Unbelievable. But it doesn't seem all that strange to me, considering the way I've learned to take photos - or sketch a line - is to make many of them. Sketching that way is a very traditional way of doing it. The photography habits though - maybe more a product of digital technology. Would Weston be doing his any differently? I think, with exceptions,

photographers have always bracketed shots. But today I think digital has changed that.

And it's changed what you apparently can capture. And what becomes candid. That's something that's just occurred to me - things can be captured faster. Things you may only think you have seen you now see. Like a weird way your Uncle might roll his eyes - and now you can see that forever, alien-like. It's almost another level of realism - this split second gesture, caught in all it's detail.


Polaroid by Andy Warhol c. 1970's

I have been using those kinds of things in my paintings alot. I really liked that first image above, with the dark shape of hair - and the slightest blurring of shapes and different sharpnesses in the face.

I've also been stuck on this memory of an airport somewhere - where the sun was setting into the terminal. And I sat facing the crowd of people squinting. I am stuck on all the expressions with this creamy lit skin and deep red shadows under noses and in folds. But I haven't been able to be fast enough to capture it with a camera.

Also semi-related in Portland: Scarecrow at Reed.

Artist behind Glass

2010-04-10T15:53:00.000-07:00


Installation View of I Don't Know Anyone in Paris 2010 (via NAAU)

I love stopping by NAAU each week to put my hands to the glass and watch the artist in residence. Currently it is Gabriel Liston. The program invites gallery artists to work in the space for over a month. The gallery seems designed exactly for this purpose, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street. This is consistent with NAAU's process-oriented nurturing too.

I am still undecided if I'd ever really want to stop by when the artist is working - or if I like being able to see the process without the artist.

I really particularly enjoyed Timothy Scott Dalbow's residency last period. Cris Moss, who curated this years Disjecta Biennial singled him out as being one of his favorite painters working in Portland.

Looking for an Hour

2010-04-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

The Mill 1947 Max Beckmann

Thursday night James Lavadour gave a talk about Max Beckmann's The Mill at PAM. These artists talks have been happening every Second Thursday of the month and I'm just getting around to seeing one. I just found Podcast highlights from past talks too (the Hayes one I had meant to see).

The best part of the talk for me was the unusual chance to stand in front of a painting for an hour. Sometimes I give something a few minutes. It's those minutes that give you a fresh feeling when you exit the museum. In my studio I often look at things for hours - days - but its more grueling, self-depreciating kind of looking. Or sometimes I wander a museum trying to greedily have those experiences over and over. But usually there's only one in each visit.

James Lavadour (via LLOSO)

I wish I could say I walked away with some sort of appreciation for Beckmann that I didn't already have. I didn't. It really was more like a talk in front of Beckmann's painting. And the experience in this case was simply being treated to a discussion, while trying to figure out Beckmann's agonizingly dark and labored line work. Lavadour did have some interesting anecdote about why he chose the painting: he apparently never liked Beckmann but began appreciating him after a friend of his and Gordon Gilkey showed him the artist.

Lavadour tends to lean too much on the spiritual side for my taste. But considering his background, I don't think his talk about "the cosmos" is all that uncalled for.

At the end of the night though, prompted by a question about painting or doing things while walking, he said something to the effect of (paraphrasing here): "I sometimes might, but you don't really need to. When you walk your absorbing everything around you anyway. The bumps in the ground, the air - you're remembering everything even if you don't realize it."

UPDATE: Here is an edited video of Lavadour's talk. But it doesn't cover his question and answer period. That's where I think he really got talking.