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Posts Tagged ‘Painting’

There Is Still a Sun

Posted in Favorite Things, Painting, tagged , on May 8, 2014| 1 Comment »

GC Myers- There Is Still a Sun...I am still kind of reeling from the flu but seem to be gaining ground on it.  Yesterday, I was looking at some older work and came across an image of a small piece, something like 2″ by 8″ on paper,  that I hadn’t considered for several years called There Is Still a Sun.  It was from 8 or 9 years back and was part of a series of  small paintings with industrial skylines as the backdrop.  It was a short-lived series of work that had moderate success but was one that I really enjoyed painting.  It was all about the challenge of design and color and many of the things I observed while painting these pieces found their way into later works.

This particular piece was one of my favorites from the group, more vertical than the others with finer linework in the silhouetted forms of the skyline.  The colors and forms meshed well here, giving the piece a less representational feel.  It was more graphic and almost abstract.  For me, it just worked on many levels.

Looking back at pieces such as this is important for me as my style and process is changing almost constantly, never really settling into one distinct process.  These pieces remind me of how different colors were used, how certain pieces start differently and how design within the picture evolves.  It reminds me to trust my ability to create from reaction.  It fires me up, making me want to alter in small ways some of  the ways in which I am currently working, to get away from the groove in which my process has settled.

Funny how so much can come from glimpsing a little piece from years ago.  Perhaps if I hadn’t been ill, I wouldn’t have stopped to look at this piece, wouldn’t have taken the time to consider these things.

Now, I just have to get back to the paints…

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Frankenstein’s Monster

Posted in Painting, Technique/History, tagged , , on April 15, 2014| 3 Comments »

GC Myers Failed Painting detailThe image shown here is a tiny part, a background detail,  of a painting that I worked on for several days a month or so back.  I would show you the whole painting as it is at the moment, which is a canvas covered with black paint.  This little detail is the only part of this piece  that I feel comfortable showing and the only bit of it that you will ever see because this painting  just did not work.  At all.  It started wrong and over the days I worked on it continued to get even more wrong.  Even sitting here, looking at this detail, I am tempted to take a brush loaded with black paint to my computer screen to paint away the memory of its wrongness.

Just plain wrong.

It started as a much too concrete idea,  one that was too clever and too thought out.  I have always maintained that I am not smart enough to rely on my conscious brain to create ideas that can come alive and that my work is at its best when it flows from  intuition and reaction and feel.  This painting was surely proof of that.   I tried to force my brain into this painting in every way and it never took on any sort of organic feel, never had a rhythm, never came remotely to life.  I made dozens, maybe hundreds, of conscious decisions in this painting and it seemed as every one was wrong and made the whole thing a greater mess.

I knew within a day or so that it was futile, that this patient was dead on arrival.  But instead of rolling it into the morgue, I decided to try to bring it to life as though I were Dr. Frankenstein working over his poor monster.  This painting certainly resembled the Frankenstein monster– a good part here and there but stitched together crudely and an overall abomination.  It was as abject a failure as I had created in some time.

It was my monster.

I kept the beast around for several weeks and it became too painful to bear, seeing this tortured monster in the corner, more dead than alive.  I could have put it away to remind me of the folly of my own cleverness but I just wanted it gone,  all evidence of it erased.  So I broke out the brush and within moments it was but a memory.  Of course, I took a photo just in case I needed a reminder of  my own fallibility and failings.

I have quite a pile of such reminders, some more monstrous than others.

This monster was gone but it had taught me a lesson which was to keep the mind clear, to try to not force life where it has not taken hold on its own.  Trust the inner parts, my intuition and subconscious.  The life of a painting can’t be forced.   There is a natural rhythm needed that you can’t create.  You must find it and embellish it so that it becomes visible to others.  In this way, painting becomes less like the surgery of Dr. Frankenstein.

We know how that story ends.

 

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Proclamation

Posted in Painting, Quote, tagged , , , on April 2, 2014| 4 Comments »

GC Myers- Proclamation By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. A want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it’s no good — there’s only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun.

—Katherine Mansfield

October, 1922, Her final journal entry

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I came across this final journal entry from the writer Katherine Mansfield, who died much too early from tuberculosis at age 35, and thought how much her words fit what I was thinking about this newer painting shown above.  I call this 30″ by 40″ painting Proclamation and the thought and feeling it may be proclaiming might very well be the same as those expressed by Mansfield.

It is a painting that speaks of coming to an understanding of one’s self and stepping forward in the light to show that true identity.  It is at once flawed and beautiful.  Flawed by the scars of attained wisdom and change.  Beautiful because it is honest and real, open to the elements and all who look upon it.  It has become, to use Mansfield’s term, a child of the sun.

I think it would be too easy to say too much here.

Let it be at that.  A child of the sun.

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Early Reductive Work

Posted in Biographical, Early Paintings, Influences, Technique/History, tagged , , , , , , , on March 15, 2014| 1 Comment »

GC Myers 1994 Early ReductiveWork6I have been spending a lot of time here in the studio in the last few weeks painting in a more traditional manner, what I call an additive style meaning that layers of paint are continually added , normally building from dark to light.  I’ve painted this way for many years but much of my work is painted in a much different manner where a lot of very wet paint is applied to a flat surface.  I then take off much of this paint, revealing the lightness of he underlying surface.  That’s a very simplified version of the process, one that has evolved and refined over the years,  that I, of course, refer to as being reductive.

When you’re self-taught, you can call things whatever you please.  I’m thinking of calling my brushes hairsticks from now on.

This reductive process is what continually prodded me ahead early on when I was just learning to express myself visually.  I went back recently and came across a very early group of these pieces, among the very first where I employed this process.  I am still attracted to these pieces, partly because of the nostalgia of seeing those things once again  that opened other doors for me.  But there was also a unity and continuity in the work that I found very appealing.  Each piece, while not very refined or tremendously strong alone, strengthened the group  as a whole.  I would have been hesitant to show most of these alone but together they feel so much more complete and unified.

This has made me look at these pieces in a different light, one where I found new respect for them. I think they are really symbolic of some of  what I consider strengths in my work, this sense of continuum and relativity from piece to piece.  It also brings me back to that early path and makes me consider if I should backtrack and walk that path again, now armed with twenty years of experience.  Something to consider.

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Quiescence

Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, Influences, tagged , , , on December 4, 2013| 2 Comments »

GC Myers- QuiescenceI had a quote on the last post with a quote from artist Jean Arp about man turning his back on silence.  Instead of savoring the quiet, he runs from it, instead distracting himself with all manner of noise.  Anything to keep him from facing the fears that the quiet represents to him.

It’s a theme that has been large in the background of my work.  Early on, when I felt that I wanted to be a writer, I would find myself writing about large open spaces and the caverns of silence that rested in these places.  I called it the Big Quiet.  Of course, it’s a pretty limited subject and there is a certain redundancy in writing about silence and stillness.  I mean, how can you use the noise of words to aptly describe the absence of noise?

So I gave up writing about it and went on with my life, always with an eye out for this Big Quiet.  I don’t know that I was craving it or fearing it at most points.  My life was pretty much filled with the noise of the world, all the snaps and pops of sound and distraction that creep into every living space.  The sounds that I hoped would lessen my anxiety but instead fed it.  I was like so many others who needed the security blanket of sound to protect them from what they might discover if they were forced to face the silence.

But painting gave me a path to finding this Big Quiet.  It was wordless and calm, creating an inner space absent of the sounds of the world  that I was and am still occupying.  It became a destination, an oasis to turn to when the din of world became too loud, too overbearing.  It eased my fears of looking inward and allowed me to savor the quiescence of the brief moments I actually myself there in those scenes of stillness and calm.  It became real and necessary to me.

I don’t know where this going, this wordy noise I’m creating about the stillness I find now.  I just felt that I should add a bit of context to my work, to give a an understanding of what I hope to take from it for myself.  This moment came about from running across the image above, a piece from several years ago that is called, fittingly, Quiescence.  It’s a piece that brings me quiet immediately and seeing it again made me again think of why I paint.

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Satisfied

Posted in Biographical, Influences, Painting, tagged , , , on September 12, 2013| 6 Comments »

GC Myers- SatisfiedIt was twenty years ago this month that I had the accident that started my painting career.  When I began painting at that time, it was not with some long-range goal of becoming a professional artist or even with the thought that anything would come from it.  I was simply looking for a creative  outlet for emotion that was roiling within.  I never had real expectations and didn’t even begin to form any until a year or so after I started.  I had no idea where this would take me nor did I have a notion that my work would take any sort of form that might reach out to people.  It was simply an urge that begged to be fulfilled at the time.

As the years went by, expectations and hopes did begin to take form.  I began to expect to sell my work and to have people take somewhat of an interest in it. I hoped that people would take my work as seriously as I did and that people would look deeper into it.

But the thing that has surprised me over the years is something  that I never expected or had even thought of beforehand.  That is the trust that many people place in me when they confide to me their feelings about the work, often sharing deeply personal stories about their lives.  I have heard many personal stories, some sad and some triumphant,  in the past two decades and seen many teary eyes as they relate their stories.  Each time I am surprised and touched at how open and honest these folks are in sharing the details of their lives with me.  Surprised may not be the right word here.  It was surprising at first  but then  turned to humbling in that I often didn’t feel worthy to be so privileged.  Now, it is still a bit surprising, a lot humbling and totally an honor to be let in on such private emotions.  It is the most gratifying and satisfying aspect of my experience as an artist over the past two decades, far exceeding financial rewards and public acclaim.  It is perhaps the most inspirational element that I carry with me into the studio each morning.

I had no idea that such a thing might happen when I started and still struggle to figure out how it has happened within the framework of my paintings.  It remains a mystery but a most satisfying one.  Thanks for such an unexpected gift.

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The painting shown here is fittingly titled Satisfied and is a 24″ by 14″ piece on paper and is currently at the Principle Gallery.

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Orphans/ Ode to Whitman

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, tagged , , , , , , on September 3, 2013| 2 Comments »

GC Myers-Ode to Whitman Orphans is the word I use to describe the paintings that don’t find a home.  I’ve been fortunate in my career that there haven’t really been that many so that the ones that do keep coming back to me take on a special significance, especially the ones that I felt were somehow special beforehand.  It may be the extra time I get to spend with them, examining them again and again to see if there is some inherent flaw or lack of fire that keeps someone from making it their own, that gives it this significance.  I spend much more time with these orphans than those paintings that quickly find a home.

Ode to Whitman is such an orphan, it being a piece has toured the country and has yet to find a home.  It saddens me a bit when I look at this painting because I do see the spirit of Walt Whitman in this piece, at least as he translates into my own psyche.  Though quiet in nature, the Red Tree here is celebrating its very being and could be embodying Whitman’s verse:

I too am not a bit tamed,

I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

These were words that were very influential in the formation of my artistic voice.  They dared me to stand apart.  They challenged me to reveal my inner self to the world, to let my light shine.  To let my yawp go free.

And that is what I see in this  piece.  It as though once the yawp has been released, even as the surrounding trees seem to be recoiling from its sound and fury, a placid pall has come into the center of its being.  It is calm now that it knows who it is, what it is.

As you can tell, I see and feel a lot in this simple painting.  I guess that is why it pulls at me to think of it as orphan.  That’s why I am going to give this piece a home and this is going to be the painting that will be given away at the Gallery Talk this coming Saturday at the Principle Gallery, which starts at 1 PM.  I know that it will find a good home in this way because someone who didn’t like my work would not spend an hour of their time listening to me talk about it.

So I hope you can make it  to the talk and that, if you’re the one who takes Ode to Whitman home , you realize the feeling that it carries with it.

Here’s another bit of Whitman that like, from the preface to his landmark Leaves of Grass:

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

 

 

 

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Dark Crossing

Posted in Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on April 14, 2013| 1 Comment »

GC Myers 2013“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”   

-Leonardo Da Vinci

 

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I’ve been working on a number of pieces lately that start on a black base of paint, rising from the darkness as each subsequent layer adds more and more light.  I still think of this additive  process as being a form of sculpture, one that starts with a flat surface and builds out in contours that give it definition and texture.  Each layer of paint is like adding clay to the supporting armature of the sculpture.  It’s a process that is hard to pull away from when I immerse myself in it. There’s something about seeing the colors grow more and more vibrant on the surface that becomes mesmerizing.  I guess that’s why I often refer to this work as obsessionism.

This small experiment, a 10″ by 12″ piece on paper,  is in this vein.   It’s one of those pieces that I’m just not sure about because I like it but I’m not sure if I like it for what it is or for the experience, the obsession of the moment in painting it.  Like a parent looking at something their child has done and wondering if they like it because it is truly good or simply because it was done by their child, their flesh and blood.  

Sometimes I can finish a piece and it instantly stands apart and on its own, complete and independent.  Ready to move on like a young person proclaiming their emancipation from their parents.   Other times, there are pieces that cling closer to me, perhaps too attached to yet  stand on their own, at least in my eyes.  Because I am unsure, I become more protective of these pieces because they do feel more personal, more of me.  

It’s a hard thing to describe, this uncertainty in a piece, especially when it feels objectively right.  Can a parent ever fully take out their own subjective view of their offspring and see them objectively as they really are?

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Not Quite an Island

Posted in Influences, Painting, Quote, tagged , , on March 25, 2013| 4 Comments »

GC Myers- Not Quite an Island When I awoke in the middle of the night, as I wrote in the last post, I had a piece in my mind that I really wanted to start on.  It was simply a causeway running out to a piece of land, an almost-island.  That was all I had in mind.  I held no details on the island itself or even how the causeway would look, just an idea of a strip running outward.

This is the piece that emerged, a 16″ by 20″ canvas that I call Not Quite an Island.  The title is based, of course,  on the famed piece of writing from John Donne that begins with  No man is an island and ends with Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.  It’s often portrayed as a poem but it’s part of a sermon, Meditation XVII, from a book of his sermons  titled Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Donne was writing on the interconnected nature of the world, how one man’s suffering was the suffering of all men, that the death of any man somehow diminishes the whole of mankind.

I saw this piece as being about the impossibility of ever truly detaching oneself from the outer world.  As hard as we might desire to seek  isolation from the world, we always remain connected by virtue of our own humanity.  And the causeway here represents that connection to me, a lifeline to the larger outer world with the path that runs along it up to the Red Tree almost serving as a root nerve connected to the larger spinal cord of the world.  To cut off that nerve, that connection, is to lose all feeling.

It’s a simple painting but the simplicity of it actually reinforces the message, in that the image makes a striking and easy first impression.  There’s a meditative quality here, an easy flow and harmony to this piece that brings my eye back to it again and again.  It’s actually just as I hoped it would be when I got out of bed at 3 AM a few days ago, filled with anxiety.  In its way, it has alleviated that angst.  For the moment.

As it should…


					
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Click

					

					Posted in Influences, Painting, Technique/History, tagged , ,  on March 23, 2013|
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GC Myers Studio 4 AMSometimes you can almost hear it click.


It happened this morning about 3 AM as I was laying in bed trying to convince myself that I really needed to get to sleep,  to try to grab some rest.  But my mind would have none of that.  It was spinning and snapping– things that had to be done,  ideas for upcoming shows, new compositions that I wanted to get down.  My head was racing and it felt like a big ball of anxiety was building inside of me.  In the past I might have written it off as such.


But for me it was a huge relief to have that knot in my stomach once again.  It was like the big click of a switch going off inside that was triggering some creative surge.  I had felt this before and had missing it as of late.  I know that it sounds funny to bemoan the fact that anxiety and fear have been absent in one’s mind.  But I knew from experience that this anxiety was something just trying to push itself out of me.  Something to which I had to respond, had to harness and use.  React to and express.


When I did the interview for the TV crew  last week, they asked what painting meant to me and I struggled in coming up with an answer.  I can’t remember exactly what I told them.  I guess the answer should have been that painting gave me a way to make this anxiety that has been my lifelong companion take a positive form.  I have learned to embrace it and when it comes around with that big click that is telling me there’s something on the way, I react.   So here I am at 4 AM, happily in the studio,   already having prepped new panels, jotted down the images that were dancing in my head and am getting ready to break out the paint.


Click.


 

					
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