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

Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich (via NYC Observer)

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

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

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

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

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

Photos: Through a Fence

Untitled (Through a Fence) Stephan P. Ferreira

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

Untitled (Through a Fence) Stephan P. Ferreira

Many more at the Flickr page.

Self-Actualization in the Studio

Untitled (Finished State) 2011 Stephan P. Ferreira

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

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

Sarah Awad MFA Thesis Exhibit

Habitation 3 2010 Sarah Awad (via Sarah Awad)

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

April 14 - 22, 2011

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

New Wight Gallery, UCLA

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

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

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

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