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Archive for the ‘Painting’ Category

Almost Blue

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, Music, Painting, Recent Paintings, Video, tagged , , , on May 18, 2012| 1 Comment »

A new painting  that is headed for my upcoming show , A Place to Stand, at the Principle Gallery , opening June 8.  This is a 12″ by 36″ canvas that carries the title Almost Blue, a title taken from the great Elvis Costello song.

I often talk about  the color blue as being addictive, about how difficult it is at times to pull myself away the color when I am working with it.  It is the yin to the yang of the reds and yellows I often work with in my paintings.  The reds and yellows are often bold in statement, claiming a small piece of the world as their own and making the case that they have meaning in this world.  The blues, however, don’t make such brash statements.  They create a different atmosphere, one that is quietly questioning why they are here in this world. Blue is a calm sense of wonder and reflection, almost melancholy at times. 

The Red Tree is here but its normally bold statement of self is enveloped in the blueness of the sky and landscape surrounding it, making it feel less like a statement than a question.  There is an uncertainty as to the whys and whats of its existence and the red of the tree seem almost ready to turn to blue.  It is almost blue.

I was going to have a video of either Elvis Costello or his wife, Diana Krall, doing the song here.  Both are fabulous.  But I came across this video of the late jazz great  Chet Baker doing the song in a performance taken from the film Let’s Get Lost, a documentary about his life made in 1988 not long before his death.  If you don’t know much about Chet Baker, you should really check out his bio.  It is the stuff of classic tragedies and will surely someday be the subject of a great film.  This version of the song  is a great expression of his existence and in the photos shown throughout the video you can see the toll that life, violence and drug abuse took on Baker over the years.

Almost Blue…

 

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Sovereign Solitude

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , on May 16, 2012| 6 Comments »

I’ve been getting work ready for my upcoming show, A Place to Stand, which opens June 8th at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA.  This will be the thirteenth consecutive year that I have had a solo exhibit there yet it still induces a certain fear and anxiety, feelings that my own common sense tell me should have faded long ago.  But they still persist.  However, part of me appreciates this fear in that it makes me focus on the body of work, knowing that creating work that speaks and stands on its own is the only way to overcome these anxieties.  If I am satisfied with the overall feeling of the work then it will ultimately prove to be successful.

That being said, I am at a point in this process where the body of work has began to take a shape, a theme that runs through it.  It is called A Place to Stand and that definitely speaks very much to what I see in many of the paintings.  The word sovereignty  also comes to mind often when I scan through this group of work.  The idea of the individual standing apart, self-reliant and strong, is an appealing notion to me, as it is to many others.  This sovereign individual is still part of this world yet self-contained, it alone being responsible for its actions and reactions. It has made its choice and it has chosen solitude.

This is a scary concept for some, a life where we must take responsibility for our actions and decisions, where we relish our time alone in solitude.  It is a freedom which we profess to desire but are often hesitant in pursuing. It may not be a freedom which suits everybody but for those who seek this sovereignty of self, there is no greater reward than living by your own decisions and beliefs.  We may not seem significant in the greater world but we have the power to rule our own lives.

And that should always be remembered.

The painting at the top is very new and really ignited this thought process this morning.  It is called Sovereign Solitude, of course, and is  6″ by 22″ on paper.  I finished this piece late yesterday and found myself thinking about it all evening, wanting to get back in the studio early this morning to look at it to see if it still jibed with how I was seeing and feeling it in my mind.  It did. 

It has a warmth and calmness in it that I myself find appealing.  It is like taking a deep breath then slowly releasing it, allowing the effects of this action to be felt fully.  The pulse slows and breathing levels off. 

Solitude found.

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In and Out of Rhythm

Posted in Painting, Technique/History, tagged , , , on May 11, 2012| 4 Comments »

Failure is inevitable. Success is elusive.

–Steven Spielberg

***************

I’ve written in recent posts about that rhythm that sometimes comes when I am readying work for shows, a deep groove filled with a self-regenerating energy that feeds on itself.  Just a wonderful feeling when I can stop for a moment and relish it.

But sometimes during these grand bouts of this rhythm  there are days when the wheels seem to come off the wagon and everything crashes.  Nothing works and every effort results in frustration and failure.  The rhythm that seemed onmipresent just moments before seems to have suddenly vanished completely and every action feels like I’m trying to move a huge boulder.  That was yesterday.

It started promisingly enough, working on the small detail work that is the grunt work of what I do.  Staining a few frames here.  Varnishing a few paintings there.  Then I worked for a bit on a piece in progress and stiil everything felt good, the synapses still sparking brightly. 

But then later in the morning  I pulled out a decent sized canvas, 2′ by 3′,  to start.  It had been treated with multiple layers of gesso and I felt like stars were aligned for this piece.  By the end of the day I realized I had misread these stars.  They were telling me to run.  Nothing worked at all on this piece.  The color was flat and every effort to bring it to life failed miserably and made the whole thing seem even more drab and lifeless.  Six or seven hours in and I step back to take it in and it is nothing but awful and the lightness that came with the rhythm has been replaced with a frustrating weight that rests heavily on my shoulders as well as in my gut. 

 I am at that moment verging on  screaming in a very primal way, like the character in the Edvard Munch painting.  My scream was replaced by a grab for the  paint and within minutes there is a layer of  black on the canvas, all evidence of my day covered in thick strokes of paint.  Seeing the failure of the day covered in black actually takes the edge off of the frustration I am feeling at the moment.  The flatness is dead and gone and I know that I will no longer be struggling over it, no longer struggling to bring a corpse back to life. 

But the frustration still lingers in the studio and I know that there will be nothing gained by fighting it.  I clean up and end my day, hoping that the new morning will find me refreshed and back in rhythm.

That being said, I have to go.  There’s a rhythm in here someplace and, godammn it, I am going to find it.  Like Darth Vader says above– failure will not be tolerated.

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Beeswing

Posted in Music, Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, Video, tagged , , , , , , on May 9, 2012| 2 Comments »

I wrote the other day about the rhythm I’m looking for when I’m in the studio, that groove where the painting is more instinctual than intellectual.  Everything flowing fast and easy with little thought, each brushload of paint inspiring the next and on and on.  All intuition and reaction with hardly a thought given to subject or meaning.   It’s a great feeling, one that makes me feel as thought I am somehow connected to some sort of better self within, one that can only be reached by letting go of conscious thought.

A rare and delicate thing.

Delicate in the sense that I find myself at points coming out of this groove to examine what I’ve done and I lapse into conventional thought.  At these times I look at the work spread around the studio, in various stages of their journey to completion.  I forget for the moment how the work came about , about  the fact that the work is not about subject or the scene but about capturing emotion and feeling.  All I see is repetition of form, red trees and red roofs set on mounds and plains.

And for that moment, I panic just a bit.  The delicate thing seems almost crushed in that instant.

But then I focus on a painting and the fragility of  how it came about and what it really is doesn’t seem all that delicate after all.  Though there is often repetition of forms, I can see by looking at this individual painting that these elements are only part of the whole, that, while  they often serve as the central focus of the piece, their importance comes from how they play off the other less obvious elements of the painting to create the real feel of it.  People are not moved by the tree but by the sense of feeling that the tree evokes within the painting. 

It’s not subject but the emotion captured that makes each piece unique. 

And with that realization in hand, I feel free once again to go back into the rhythm, that rare and delicate thing.

The painting above is a new one that fits perfectly with this post.  It is a 10″ by 16″ painting on paper that I call Beeswing,  after a line from a Richard Thompson song of the same name that has as its chorus the line, ” she was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing…”  There  is a delicacy in this piece, a fineness of form that makes the moment of it seem forever fragile.  When I look at it all I can think of are those incredibly rare moments of absolute happiness, when the outer world is completely forgotten and there is a clarity of joy in myself.  A fleeting feeling, rare and delicate, fine as a bee’s wing.

Here’s the song from Richard Thompson—-

 

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Blue Sovereignty

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on May 7, 2012| 4 Comments »

I’m in the midst of finishing up work for my upcoming show at the Principle Gallery early next month.   This show, my thirteenth there,  is titled A Place to Stand , after the famed quote from Archimedes, and opens June 8.  I’ve written here over the past few years about the process of working towards a show. For me, there’s a real rhythm that comes from this process, a deep groove where each new painting begins with little thought as to where it will go, each new piece just starting with a line or a slash of color then taking off on its own at a breakneck pace.  This rhythm is something I look forward to with every show.  It’s exciting to see work that sometimes doesn’t come so easily suddenly begin to flow easily before my eyes.   

I’ve done this long enough to appreciate how rare and fleeting is this feeling.  When I first experienced this euphoric rush, I didn’t recognize this, actually thinking it was just how things were, that I’d just progressed to a level where this was the norm.  Years later and many peaks and valleys in between, I know better.  As a result, I find myself really relishing the last few days when this rhythm seems to be fully in effect.  Relishing and hoping that it will hang around for a while.

This is a painting that came from this rhythmic surge, a 12″ by 16″ canvas that I call Blue Sovereignty.  There are a lot of things I could say about this painting.  The coolness and smoothness of tone in it that gives it a placid pall, for example.  Or how I see it as a sort of abstracted portrait when I look quickly at it, the moon serving as an eye in profile.  Or about the title’s reference to sovereignty,  about how we each have authority over our own life, our own empire of self.

 Or any number of different things.

But I will leave those alone for now. 

I think I just want to take it in without thought, much as it was created.  Free and easy…

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Humble Home

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , on May 3, 2012| 4 Comments »

This is a new painting, a 16″ by 20″ canvas, that  I am calling Humble Home.  There’s a real crispness in the color of this piece, both in the clarity of the hues and in the way they react to one another.  It has, for lack of a better term, a real snap to it.

The form of this painting, the lone house  under a huge dome of  sky,  is one that I have revisited several times over the years.  The idea of a lone home standing against a vast sky always stirs emotion in me.  Their is a sense of grandeur and power in such a sky that gives one perspective on their own place and influence in this world.  However highly we esteem ourselves, we are indeed tiny before the sky and all its forces, both seen and unseen.  Thus the title, Humble Home.

But while the house here is humbled small beneath the forceful sky, it is no less confident of what it is at heart.  Humble does not mean a lack of confidence or a form of  servility.  It simply signifies a knowledge of things greater than one’s self.  The house here speaks of a solidness of belief  in one’s self and their place , however humble, in the great scheme of the universe.  It has purpose. 

It brings to mind the words from Ecclesiastes, or the Byrds if you prefer: To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.

Turn, turn, turn…

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String Theory

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on April 30, 2012| 1 Comment »

I call this new painting String Theory.  It’s a 20″ by 40″ canvas that is simple in design but has great depth of color and a strong underlying texture that gives it added dimensions.  It’s a striking piece in the studio, especially given its larger size, with its saturated tones and the thick spiral bands that run through it catching glints of light at different angles. 

The Red Tree’s crown is painted as a monolithic form and seems to glow with life  amid the contrasting darkness of the sky.  I chose a deep red for the color of the fields in the foreground because I wanted it to represent  the earth as a physical dimension, the red symbolizing the blood of the living.  The swirling  blues and greens of the sky, to me, represent a different dimension, one less tangible and more ethereal. 

As for the title and the thought behind it, I described this in a blogpost from July of 2009.  I think I will let the words from that post describe what I see here as well:

The title of this painting comes from the way the sky is formed from many patches of color and the way the light is formed therein. It reminded me of one of the supposed byproducts of the string theory which is a very speculative area of quantum physics. Without going into the scientific basis for the theory ( which I really couldn’t do very well anyway), string theory basically creates a platform where extra dimensions could and may exist alongside the dimensions that we know and dwell within, without our knowledge of their existence. A simplified example of how this might work is the way we are surrounded by radio signals all the time without our knowledge but with the proper receptor, a radio, they become apparent. With string theory, perhaps there are also parallel dimensions around us without our knowledge, dimensions that contain others forms of energy, other forms of existence. 

People have used this as theoretical basis for many things such as time travel, the existence of UFOs, and things supernatural such as ghosts and other spectral occurrences. The string theory has been a very fertile field for science fiction writers to work. 

Perhaps it also provides a place where the soul, the source of energy that animates the body, ultimately dwells. Perhaps there is the energy of souls all around us in these alternative dimensions. Maybe the photons we see are also the part, a facet, of something unseen. That’s how I see the sky in this painting, as masses of disparate energies that we only see partially in the dimensions we can detect. 

Okay, remember that it is early in the morning when I’m writing this. I’m not smart enough to really discuss quantum physics. I am not familiar with all the New Age-y spiritualism. I’m just saying there is some form of energy out there in the light we see. What it is, I surely don’t know. In this painting I like to see it as light and energy of souls. 

And that makes me feel good…

It made me feel good then and does now as well.

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Abstracted

Posted in Biographical, Painting, tagged on April 27, 2012| 7 Comments »

Yesterday was one of those odd days in the studio.  I have been extremely busy at work recently and, as a result, have found a nice deep groove, one of those creative rhythms where each new effort inspires the next and new ideas are shooting out all over the place.  Everything comes easily and is done without questioning, all with the confidence that the instinct driving this surge will carry me in the right direction.   It’s a great feeling and I find it hard to pull myself away when this happens, fearful that a break of any sort will disrupt this vibrant but sometimes fragile rhythm.

But sometimes the rhythm just goes a bit haywire for awhile.  Like a seemingly healthy heart that suddenly goes into fibrillation without warning.  That was how it felt yesterday .

I can’t explain why or when or  even what caused this episode.  It was as though everything suddenly became  abstract and I could find no semblance of direction or purpose in what I was doing.  The whole concept of pushing paint around sheets of heavy paper and canvas seemed absolutely ridiculous.  The work in front of me made no sense and when I turned away from it, hoping that I could simply pick up in something new, there was nothing.  I suddenly felt totally empty and the confidence that had been so ample in recent days was gone in a flash, replaced by old fears. 

It’s quite disconcerting  and even a little panic creeps in at first.  But this isn’t my first rodeo.  I’ve been here before and know that it’s a matter of just pushing through this temporary fog and that it will soon subside. Sometimes it goes quickly and sometimes it lingers for days and weeks but eventually the fears will fade into the background and purpose returns. 

Luckily for me, yesterday was just a short episode and within a few hours I had regained equilibrium.  My world seemed less abstract and I once again believed in what I was doing and felt a vitality in my efforts.  The rhythm was regained. 

It made me realize how fortunate I was to only have to face what amount to relatively  minor demons when several friends are going through much more true hardships in their lives.  I hope they can endure through these periods of darkness and abstraction and soon find their own rhythm again.   It’s out there waiting for them if they can just struggle through.

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Moment Divine

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , on April 25, 2012| 2 Comments »

Sometimes you paint something that you really like, something that very much hits every potential goal you set for your work, yet you find yourself at a loss for words to describe it.  That’s very much how I feel about this newer painting, Moment Divine,  a 10″ by 16″ piece on paper.

Perhaps this lack of words is a good thing, a sign that the work needs no more said about it.  It is expression enough in itself and to talk too much would only take away from the atmosphere it creates.

I don’t really know.  Sometimes there are pieces like this that seem to have a quiet completeness to them.  They are usually simply designed with a harmony of color and form  that makes them feel effortless and without pretense.  They have a simple and natural beauty that doesn’t need embellishment. 

That’s kind of how I see this painting.  Simple and easy.  Naturally effortless. 

Maybe I’ve said too much already.  Maybe I should just let the image speak for itself now…

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A Place to Stand

Posted in Painting, Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , on April 19, 2012| 3 Comments »

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.

– Archimedes

^^^^^^^^^^^^

This is actually a condensed and long accepted version of  Archimedes‘  words.  It was really about the power of lever in physics.  He actually said: Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand  and I will move the Earth.  But the lever has been dropped over the 2200 or so  years since he lived and has come to signify something more than a statement about physical mechanics.  It is an almost existential statement about the power of the individual in changing the world.  The small somehow defeating  the overwhelming forces set against them.

David versus Goliath. 

 David’s lever was the sling and stone he used to take down the giant.  Every underdog has somehow identified a strategic advantage that has enabled them to triumph against all odds.  Something that plays to their own strengths and magnifies their greater opponent’s weaknesses. 

What is the lever you will use to move the Earth?

I call the painting above A Place to Stand after these words of Archimedes.  It is a new piece that is a 24″ by 30″ canvas that is a very simple composition that relies on the juxtaposition of the single Red Tree set against a powerfully set sky that seems ready to overwhelm the diminuative tree.  Yet, against all the elemental force  of wind and weather that  the sky can muster, the tree perseveres.  It uses the flexibility of its trunk and limbs to absorb the wind and its bark protects it against the heat and cold. 

It stands alone, without protection.  Yet it stands.   Just standing  strong where you are is a lever powerful enough to change the world. 

Perseverance is often its own victory.

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