In Memory of Roger Stein

This painting I've been working on is in memory of Professor Roger Stein, who shared with me a love for Copley's "Watson and the Shark."

The Painting is Finished, (I do believe.)

The Painting Progresses from 10-13-09 Entry

I should probably give myself a deadline if I'm ever going to finish. August 1, 2010.

The Four Elements of Creativity. (4)

The following was written as a lecture for my students and all young artists. I will be publishing one element each day in my blog for the next four days. To read this lecture in proper sequence, please scroll to the first entry below titled "Fire" and read upwards from there. Thank you.

EARTH



Philip Guston, "Pit" 1976

I threw an I-Ching once in my reckless, younger years that read something like this;
"If you are planning your work, analyzing your work, sitting back and admiring your work....then you are planning, analyzing and admiring, but you are not working. If you have a gift from God, then get down and do it."
I never threw another I-Ching again. This one stuck.

I've sustained my painting career over the last twenty-five or more years hovering just ever so slightly above the gravity of the earth. Ironically, I get more creative altitude if I reach for smaller goals than higher. Lofty thoughts of artistic recognition early on in life were soon replaced with, "OK, what's the next art project?" Eventually, I learned it was more important to try to make great work than it was to try to be great.

Non-artists always make the mistake of thinking we artists are driven by inspiration. That late at night, great balls of firey revelations reveal themselves to us and we jump from our beds, and out of our skin, to lay down mused findings at two in the morning with our God-given talents. No, more likely we take little baby steps in concrete shoes. One step, than the next. It unfolds slowly with much effort. We pick up the steps from where past artists have left off; trying to continue the work they've already started but mortality ended. There's a reason why artists call the practice of their craft a "discipline."

If a young artist were to ask me how they could aspire to great things, I would tell them; "Learn to accommodate mediocrity." Not in your art, but in everything else that nurtures or otherwise "subordinates" it. As long as gravity exist, we will be pulled down to this base level. Here's where we pay rent. Here's where we do the laundry. Learn to balance your checkbook. Fortunately, it takes so little creative energy to tend this dirt garden. But ignore or neglect it and it will bury you and your aspirations alive. Stardom, if it happens to you and the very few, may only happen for a very short time. If you're in it for a lifetime, then you must learn to fly a very long distance, hovering just ever so slightly above the earth, weighed down in concrete shoes.

The Four Elements of Creativity. (3)

The following was written as a lecture for my students and all young artists. I will be publishing one element each day in my blog for the next four days. To read this lecture in proper sequence, please scroll to the first entry below titled "Fire" and read upwards from there. Thank you.

AIR



Ross Bleckner, Untitled (Sphere and moulding) 1987

This was the hardest element to write about. The words kept evading me.

In Italo Calvino's book, "6 Memos for the Next Millennium" his essay "Lightness" lays out the argument that artists are always trying to throw off weight. This weight could refer to the heaviness of words as a writer, or in my case as a painter, the too thick thingness of my plastic materials. I am reminded of a ziggurat, a pyramid of steps for us mortals to climb closer to the heavens, constructed from a mountain of materials. Its as if the very means from which we strive to ascend is the thing that also weighs us down.

An artist once told me she didn't care where she lived geographically, "because when I work, I'm 'up there'." This statement is more the potent when one realizes the many lives behind this particular artist. Suffering her family to the horrors of the holocaust, fleeing the Iron Curtain, living in Paris, Israel, New York and now, finding herself in a small rural American town. Her ability to escape the pain and geography of her past by simply working her way to "up there" spoke volumes to where all artists arise and descend from.

Where is "up there", and how does one get to it?" I always forget how I got there myself. Despite the many steps of the ziggurat, the road to heaven is blocked from easy access. The jealous gods will not allow artists to be their equal, so they hide the ascension into divinity. They lash out at mortals who attempt to ascend "up there" where the gods dwell, just as Prometheus was punished for stealing fire for humanity. Likewise, Aphrodite became jealous of Psyche's beauty and sent Eros "down here" to shoot his arrow at her. No, artists cannot be gods, at best, a demi-god like Michelangelo, but never a god. So, we must sneak our way "up there" by stepping our way through the rituals of our work. Climbing the steps of our ziggurat blindly, hoping we will arrive. The way to divinity is always a new puzzle to refigure with no assurance of success.

I often go to my studio, after the distractions of a real life, and say, "Now, where was I?" I have to pull out old work to reassure myself that I've risen to "up there" once before, and that I might find it again if I work some more, work myself into a cathartic trance that puts me into a state of feeling no pain or geographic boundaries.

The Four Elements of Creativity. (2)

The following was written as a lecture for my students and all young artists. I will be publishing one element each day in my blog for the next four days. To read this lecture in proper sequence, please scroll to the first entry below titled "Fire" and read upwards from there. Thank you.

WATER


J.M.W.Turner "The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up" 1838


Ann Hamilton was quoted in the New York Times as saying something to this effect;
"You can't really force great ideas to happen. The best you can do is float yourself in a situation that is conducive to thinking, and wait for great ideas to surface"

My favorite step in the process of painting is in the middle, when the painting is neither the start of a blank canvas nor my efforts' end result. It’s when the canvas is full of paint and color, but still coming and undefined as yet. I stretch my mind across the picture plane along with the paint that has been spread across the canvas. Suspended there, we move in and rise out of the plane, waiting for the forms to emerge, the hues to take hold, the ideas to surface. This is the medium in which I float myself in.

There are many mediums that I could choose to float in; electronic, dialectic, religious, alcoholic....? Some mediums I swim in more eloquently than others, as in painting when I effortlessly do a backstroke from my many years of practice. At this moment, however, I am suspended in a pool of words. I doggy paddle here.

Perhaps our need to float in any given medium comes from a need to experience what cannot, or should not, be defined? Water has no form of its own; it continuously adopts the shape of whatever contains it. Suspending ourselves in a medium becomes the form in which we think in, and the medium often does the thinking for us. In this way, the thinking, though cogitative, is never objective. Does a fish know if he's in water?

The Four Elements of Creativity.

The following was written as a lecture for my students and all young artists. I will be publishing one element each day in my blog for the next four days. To read this lecture in proper sequence, please scroll to the first entry below titled "Fire" and read upwards from there. Thank you.

FIRE


Jackson Pollock, Number One, 1948

In Rollo May’s "Courage to Create", he makes the argument that before there can be an act of creation, there must be an act of destruction. He was mostly referring to the established structures of ideas that must be overthrown when innovating new concepts in science or art. But what if the process of creating is more intrinsically connected to destruction? Concepts and ideas aside, what if they are primordially connected on a base level inseparable from the onset of the action?

I recall watching a TV documentary of a young boy who had a cleft, not in his palette, but in his entire face. His far too far apart eyes were separated by a caved in nose and his forehead had too wide a span from temple to temple. The doctors incised his skin across his head in an arc from ear to ear. They then pealed his fleshy face down below his mouth and removed a section from the too wide brow bone in its center. With the center forehead space gone, they pushed the temples closer together. Taking the extra brow bone material to the table, they began to whack at it with a chisel, chipping away a shape suitable for the boy's new nose bridge.

What was disturbing to me about this procedure was not the reminder of my mortality, the moroseness of the operation, nor the vulnerability of pliable flesh against cold steel. My unease derived from my empathy with the doctors. I knew that energy. They weren't handling that bone with kit gloves; they were banging and beating it. Any person unfamiliar with creativity would have been so concerned with the preciousness of the material that they would have been paralyzed to transform it. Frozen, they would ask, "Where am I going to get more of this bone that I'm making into a nose if I accidentally destroy it?" But, there's an urgency here. Something has already been destroyed and recreating it successfully is paramount.

Rembrandt and Guston

Just as a child’s relation to a beloved toy blurs reality and pretend, so also moves the creative activity and play of an artist in her studio. The painter Philip Guston once wrote; “In Rembrandt the plane of art is removed. It is not a painting, but a real person – a substitute, a golem.” With my portraits of Pinocchio, Ms. Oyl and Ms. Mouse, this quote was foremost in my mind. As these puppets “sat” for me in my studio, I wanted to lovingly create an image that represented them somewhere in between reality and unreality, static and animation, flatness and volume. Like the story of Pinocchio itself, the still life object, the artist and the painted picture plane endeavored to be real.

TRAINS

Well yes, its called the "Railroad Avenue Studio" for a reason. It fronts the railroad tracks instead of the usual Main Street. So, if you happen to be traveling on the Crescent, the Cardinal, the Northeast Regional, or the Circus train, please wave to me as you fly by. (Circus train, please throw peanuts.) If traveling North, I'm on the left side of the train as you enter the town of Orange. If traveling South, I'm on the right.

The Painting Progresses from the 9-17-09 Entry

Marking Time in a Kung Fu Lunchbox

This is my Kung Fu Lunchbox. Its an art piece that will be finished, posthumous. I began putting the scrapings from my paint palette in the lunchbox in 1987, the year before I moved to Virginia. It reminds me that I need to waste paint in order to paint. It also reminds me of my mortality.

Matter Matters

I hold a deep respect for the matter I manipulate and the ensuing enmeshment of material and ideas that occurs in my creative process. This enmeshment in figurative painting often occurs when the material and the motif become one. When representation is evoked through the plasticity of the paint medium itself and the canvas becomes more than a mere illusionist picture. This is the heavy weight of Morandi’s paint turning into wet clay when he paints his still life objects as if he were painting gravity itself. Or the oily sea of Turner’s pictures when they submerge, churn and float in unison with his palette. Or Van Gogh’s “Potato Eaters” that he expressed to his brother, Theo, is an attempt to make the paint as the dirt that the “eaters” ate on their potatoes.
DeKooning once said that oil painting was invented to depict flesh. So, I ask, why was acrylic paint invented? I had always snubbed the medium as inferior to the great tradition of oil painting. That was, until I started to paint plastic toys and then my sixteenth century painting material failed miserably to depict a mid-twentieth century substance. For all its modeling and illusionism, somewhere in my pictures of plastic toys it had to flatten out like melted plastic stuck to canvas. Only with acrylic paint, (plastic virtually painting plastic), could I produce that magically place where the material and the motif fused into one.
Beyond the material, the motifs in my paintings struggle. The events of 9/11 profoundly shook my illusions of a safe and secure world. So the armies of cartoon characters and secondhand store superheroes that make up my piles of plastic toys have become a personal metaphor for the varying factions of external forces rallying to destroy or save us. In addition, abstractionism and realism struggle to co-exist on the picture plane and the antithetical applications of loose expressionism and focused control scuffle to find resolution. The paintings fall into a polar opposition from being critical of our consumer society to being complicit with it. Painting the toys from observation, I fight to find visual clarity when falling into vertigo over the extreme colors and mass consumer objects. Still, it’s the depiction of plastic that I feel makes my work truly contemporary and where it can best make a contribution to the development of painting. What is this matter that we have surrounded ourselves with increasing amounts since the 1960’s and how do I make humans aware of its omnipresence in their lives?

Derivative: a substance that can be made from another substance.

Sometimes I’m not sure what I’m doing in the studio. No, let me rephrase that: often I’m not sure what I’m doing. Its what keeps me coming back to work in this visual laboratory, the unawareness that eventually makes its self known only through the unfolding of one painting experiment after another. And because this blog is a journal of those studio experiments, I won’t always be able to offer the reader, (or myself), conclusive explanations as to the images I am posting. That being said, my latest studio exploration is “A Bunch of Dumb Bunnies” shown here, (front and back.) When recently asked by another artist why they were cut-outs, I had no answer. Other than the fact that I just happen to like cut-outs, perhaps it has something to do with the genre of still life painting? More than all other genres, artists through the ages who painted still lifes were focused on material, mass and matter. Somehow the stuff that bogs us down, the gravity of life, seems paramount in still life paintings, as opposed to the likeness of a portrait, the story of a historical painting or the space of landscape. Maybe I just wanted to do away with space and atmosphere all together and cut out the matter with its ensuing gravity? To that end, these bunnies have become what I call “derivatives” of their original material identity. They are varnished, acrylic paint on heavy, cut out paper with cardboard easels, resembling plastic toys that are attempting to resemble chocolate Easter bunnies.

Since mid-July, 2009, I have been working on these two large canvases, (one painting), of toy animals. My models are in two separate shallow boxes on the floor, one for each canvas. Though I often photograph my models for my own enjoyment, (or for this blog), I never paint from the photographs I've taken. I always paint from observation. Working from observation has been challenging on canvases this size. Though the composition meets in the middle of the two canvases, the boxes of models do not. Instead, they are centered in the middle of each canvas where I can hover over them and paint from the center, radiating outward. It is only with luck and fate that they hope to connect visually at the edges.

LeRoi's Toys

I began the painting "LeRoi's Toys" in the Spring of 2008, after my friend, Lisa, asked me to paint a special painting of army men for her fiance's birthday in October. Her fiance', LeRoi Moore, was the saxophone player for the Dave Matthews Band. He died that Summer 2008 and I finished the painting in his honor.

Charles Baudelaire

“I have moreover retained a lasting and a reasoned admiration for that strange statuary art which, with its lustrous neatness, its blinding flashes of colour, its violence in gesture and decision of contour, represents so well childhood’s ideas about beauty. There is an extraordinary gaiety in a great toyshop which makes it preferable to a fine bourgeois apartment. Is not the whole of life to be found there in miniature - and far more highly coloured, sparkling and polished than real life?”
- Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys”

Morandi for Robert

This writing was in response to my amazing painter friend and mentor, Robert Royhl, who lives in Montana and couldn't see the Morandi retrospective on the East Coast last year. He asked me to observe Morandi's whites and tell me what they were like, having heard that they were remarkable.

I'm not sure about the whites my friend Robert asked me to see for him? (As if he could borrow my eyes.) When Morandi painted, lead white was still in use and not illegal or known to be harmful. It is possible he used that as an undercoat or even in the paint itself? It did look like he used something other than Titanium. I would guess Zinc. Its a softer white than Titanium, and there was A LOT of white, like marble dust, mixed into all his colors.

I thought the show was curiously intellectually, but not as awe inspiring as the Turner show that we had seen together last year at the National Gallery. (I left that show exhausted, feeling like I just had had esthetic sex all day long.) I did find Morandi's show extremely optimistic though. Here is a man that painted quietly and persistently until his death in the 1960's, his life ending about the same time the art world was telling us that painting is dead. And yet, I was looking at objects that quietly asserted that the fundamentals still mattered, composition and form was still alive, painting was still powerful.

Being in Italy over the past several years made me understand better what might be considered as Morandi's Italian sensibilities. Italy is a nation of stone builders and masons. It doesn't use the same structural materials we do in North America. Its a world built of mortar pressed between stone, not clapboard, vinyl, steel or concrete. Walking the Italian streets of stone, on the cobbled sidewalks next to masonry buildings with ceramic tiled roofs, in the hill top villages across from the mountains that are being quarried for marble, one can taste the dust in the air. In the same manner in which Morandi spreads his paint like plaster, thick between his heavy objects like mortar, he paints like a mason with a trowel.

The Making of "P.Guston's Toys"

This is "P. Guston's Toys"

I started this painting in the Summer of 2008, by piling all my toys up against a large, plate glass window in my Railroad Avenue Studio. I then went outside to paint it in the "plein aire"