Absolom, Absolom

I started "Absolom, Absolom" last year, just after Austin was born.  I remember reading it to him in studio.  I love the way that Faulkner wrote.  I unfortunately don't have the endurance to finish his books.  I have started three and gotten to about page 150 on each one and then I lose gas.  Today, while I was watching Austin, I happened into Longfellow Books in Portland and found a copy of "Absolom, Absolom" for my own library.  There is something about reading a book from your own library that can never be compared to borrowing the book.  You own that book.  It is yours to enjoy, feel, and love.  There is something important in starting this Faulkner over again for me; a thread that I left unravelled but not unravelled all the way to the end and not wound up again either.

It seems that my artwork is in the same headspace right now.  I am excited about the work but it seems foreign to me, like someone took all of my saved files on my computer and converted them to French.  I can still catch the gist of the work, but it is difficult to decipher and some of the motives are lost in the translation.  My time in studio has been reduced to such a great extent that I find myself feeling a bit lost, but I've begun piecing in hours.  If I can piece in hours then I will be better off.  I just need to retain my train of thought.  I suspect that I will need to write more; dictate to myself what steps I wish to take while I am creating.

I worked on two pieces today, neither of which is finished, both of which seem like steps in the right direction.  So as I sit here typing, listening to my last album of the day, Wilco "A Ghost is Born," I wonder what the next step is with this work.  I want to put up a show of new thoughts at every turn, but as I related in my last post, I think this does a disservice to the work.  Is the work really about my subject matter or about me painting my subject matter?  Would I be saying the same thing if I did 100 portraits of my son or if I were to 100 paintings of the Grapevine Epimenis?  Grad school suggests to a certain extent, yes.

There is a holiness in the pattern making.  It feels electrifying to fit myself into the spaces, but on the other hand I don't really fit into the spaces.  I haven't concerned myself with coloring in the lines totally since I was in grade school.  At the same time, I come fairly close on a regular basis.

Here is the piece from last night.  I've started to solidify the color, work in a ground which the tessellation will eventually seem to be growing out of and started to paint the succulent.  I realized two things today while I was working on the piece.  One, that I need to have the succulent in front of me if I am going to attempt a more expressive brush stroke.  The photo that I took to studio of the plant at home flattened everything, and the plant that I love felt lifeless.  I need to feel the weight in person, just like I would with a figure drawing.  Two, I realized that I needed to finish the tessellation layer as a whole the next time before I started worrying about where the additional elements might reside.  It is frustrating painting in the negative space around a subject when the ground is a pattern.  Really, it feels like two figures fighting each other; a mathematical and logical figure versus a natural progressing and aesthetically perfect logic.

I wizened up and created the tessellation before I determined where elements were going over top in this piece.  Right now the piece exists as a pleasant play between a cobalt turquoise and a yellow green.  I can already feel the weight in the tessellation, so now when I add in the succulent I feel like it will seem more like a counterweight than a figure being created in correlation to the tessellation. 

Absolom, Absolom.

Peace

-Mike

All Small

The fall generally means invites to Holiday sales and group shows.  This year I was asked to participate in the Sohns Gallery Show, "All Small" this November.  Each artist has been given three 6" X 6" panels to work with.  We were instructed to "paint, draw, collage, print, assemble on our panels.  Anything goes as long as the panel is still able to hang on the wall.  Normally when given these types of group shows I have tried to make cute works involving characters that I think will sell.  I've been trying to steer clear of some of the character work recently.  I don't think that I am getting out of it what I once was. 

Instead I decided to make a small series out of an image that I had been obsessing over for some weeks.  A while back I found myself sitting at a coffee shop called Crema, here in Portland.  There are several chairs and a couch which face a massive window in the front which overlooks the harbor.  I felt drawn to the power lines across the street.  The light was dim that day as the sky was overcast.  It hearkened back to the days sitting in coffee shops in Seattle.  As I was sitting looking out the window I noticed a plane landing.  Suddenly I felt very much in tune with the aircraft which were taking off and landing far more frequently than I had ever noticed.  I thought back to living in my old house where I could feel the planes as they started to come into the runway.  The silhouette of the plane seemed so powerful to me and yet so small against the vastness that was the sky.  It's a simple image really, but one that I've been obsessed with since.

I started drawing the scene over and over again on small pieces of wood.  Several of the resulting pieces I then glued down to the surfaces of my three All Small pieces.

 The first piece I really wanted to add an element from a Jasper Johns piece.  For some reason the target pieces seemed to work with the airplane imagery.  I'm not sure exactly how the viewer will read this piece, but that's a good thing right?

 

The second piece started out very graphic.  I had several diagonals which opposed the wood block that I had glued down to the surface.  I was working with those geometric pieces for a bit until I realized that I absolutely loathed them.  I then started to lay a lot of paint over top.  The piece became one solid color.  I then started splattering and painting very gesturally over top.  I was quite pleased with the result even if I keep looking at the piece and wondering if there shouldn't be more to it.

 The last piece included the first image that I drew from my coffee shop experience.  I decided to work with the same type of imagery that I had used in my work for 10 X 10 Brunswick.  I determined that the painterly and the more graphic would balance out nicely, and I think that it does.

The pieces don't feel like my usual imagery or like they fall into my usual visual tropes.  It was an extremely liberating process to work on these pieces.  Hopefully I can loosen up even more in the coming months.  I feel like I am finally feeling more interested in the act of painting than I am in trying to push some false agenda on the work.  I wonder how that will effect the viewing experience of my work.

Peace
-Mike

Color, the Kaddish and Jets to Brazil

Today I finished work early and came home to an empty house.  It was lovely.  I packed up some books, stretched out on the couch, read a bit of Allen Ginsberg's The Kaddish, and listened to Jets To Brazil's Perfecting Loneliness.  It was a completely peaceful moment.  Then my wife came home, made a lovely dinner, minus her chipped tooth.  Darn you Whole Foods and your ready to eat Edamame.

After dinner, Courtney shipped me off to studio for a bit with a thermos full of coffee.  It was a great night.  At studio I worked on her Christmas present, which I can't share and a pipe in the clouds piece that has been coming slowly along.  After about an hour of working on the piece, I decided that it needed more color, a little pop in one direction or another.  I retrieved my cobalt turquoise which I hadn't used in ages (way back in the days of the cloud constructors and my show at Lunar Boy Gallery in Astoria, OR.)  After a bit of experimentation I was reminded of exactly how awesome the color was.  While this isn't a terribly good photo I think you will get the idea.

The piece has definitely taken a turn for the better.  I can't wait to go work on it again tomorrow.  Courtney is actually packing me lunch for studio tomorrow as we speak.  Life is awesome.

Peace
-Mike

Index Card Art, The Metamorphosis and A Night Off

Yesterday my wife volunteered her time to help paint a new wellness center that our good friend is spearheading.  I was granted the opportunity to an entire day in studio, but alas when I was left alone in studio I was not very capable of working.  My energy wasn't there.  I didn't really care what I was making.  Sometimes this happens.  Usually this happens when I have been waiting for days to have a good long studio day and haven't been granted one.  This was the case yesterday, I think.  At about four in the afternoon I gave up and traveled out to my old, pre-wife haunts.  I visited my friend Mattie and my friend Shirah.  I talked about teaching and my frustrations therein.  I talked about art making and its traps and I talked about how my students never show up to class on time.

Shirah is an amazing painter.  It is lovely to take time off to speak with her.  She has a habit of setting my head straight.  It proved to be no different this time.  I woke up today refreshed and ready to get some work done, at ease with the wife being gone all day in place of my former reluctance, and curious as to what I was going to make.  I am now wondering if maybe being curious as to what to make is better than being certain of what you are making.  Today I made some small pieces of jewelry and traveled to the craft store to pick up more supplies for necklace making.  I then set to making a number of small drawings on index cards.  My artist assistant was busy making backers for each of these.  You can read about that at my Tumblr blog which she manages.

It donned on me that the index card paintings would look a lot better as acrylic paintings than as watercolors.  I determined that I would leave the background as index card and the foreground would be painted opaquely.  I was very pleased with the results.

The other day I had made a single watercolor which I was trying to recreate.  The recreation did not go so well.  I think that may have been the root of some of my problem yesterday.  I had to abandon that method as the expectations were too high and it was influencing the quality of my piece.  Here is that original piece, however.

It was good to abandon that drawing for a little while.  Painting opaquely requires a different type of focus; one that alleviates my stresses and makes me more in touch with my anxieties.  I become a better person, essentially when I paint opaquely.  I think that perhaps this is what people mean by having a calling.  It made me think back to the weekend.

This past weekend I read the Metamorphosis.  Since about Monday I have been questioning why Gregor ever needed to turn into a bug in order to create the resolution to the story.  Why wasn't he just sick or completely immersed in his work or why didn't he just disappear on one of his many train rides?  The fact of the matter is that I have spent four days wondering why the construct of the story happened.  It is a success.  It is stuck in my head.  It didn't need to be anything more than it was.  It was simple.  I have been looking for a big punch again, an answer that will solve the world's problems; my problems, but I have forgotten once again that the world's problems start as something very small within the citizens of the world.  The inconsistencies and anxieties that each individual feels feeds the dinosaur that is our society.  The whole turns about and eats the constituents.  To solve the worlds problems we all need to find our own balance and let the other guy be the other guy.  That is, at least, what I keep reminding myself.  It is, I think, just as correct as many of the sociologists hypotheses.

Til next time.
Peace
-Mike

A Mug from My Hometown

This evening after bowling, I was sitting having a cup of tea in the kitchen while my wife was looking through her many cookbooks.  She has been meal planning.  It is a creative process that I do not share the joy for.  As she was meal planning she began talking about "real Mainer" type dinners.  My response to this was to draw something from my hometown.  The last mug of the four for Artstream Studios was a fund raiser for the Volunteer Fire Department in Croghan, NY.

It felt good focusing on my hometown.  I remember the Fire Department before its expansion.  When I think about its location I can visualize Vinny's Pizzeria, the library and 7 year old me.  I can see the Monnat brothers running to the station from Monnat and Nortz Garage at the sound of the fire whistle.  I can hear that it is noon everyday when the whistle goes off.  In a little less than two weeks I will be home for a few days.  I can't wait.

I am excited to do some more work like these pieces.  I think that there is something much more personal in drawing your personal belongings than there is in trying to tell the stories that are in your head using metaphors.  It is like drawing a very sensual portrait verses making a caricature of someone.

I'm off to bed with the sounds of The Fruit Bats, Hobo Girl in my head.
Peace
-Mike

The Dangling Man, Coffee Mugs, and Solitude

This afternoon during Experimental Painting class I finished The Dangling Man, Saul Bellow's first novel.  Saul Bellow's characters always bear such a sense of solitude.  In Dangling Man, Joseph is waiting for the draft board to call for nearly a year and in the meantime, slowly loses his sense of control and balance, but also gains a sort of comfort with the solitude.  It is a feeling that I am often curious about.  Much of art is this solitude.  Until my recent marriage, the majority of my studio days were accompanied only by feline companions.  To be sure I played a variety of music in studio and listened to a number of podcasts and different musicians but at the end of the day an art practice is a quiet practice.  It is one that has traditionally been accomplished in solitude.  What of this type of man in wait for his calling?  Joseph was waiting to be called by the draft board.  Is that so different than waiting to hit your big break.  Eventually we see in Joseph that his inability to act, which is exacerbated by his depression which is in direct correlation to his loneliness and lack of purpose, becomes the very source of his lack of happiness.

With this in mind, I started to think about my ability to act.  I have been taking some solid steps in the right direction these past few months, but still have a couple major steps on the way to success.  An inability to act on these steps will only result in loneliness and depression, or as the rock band AC/DC put it back in the 70's, "It ain't no fun waiting 'round to be a millionaire."  I've got to take some action and it is important for me to prioritize these actions.

In contrast to this thought I have also been very much involved with a new series that I am producing for Art Stream Studios' "Off the Grid" show coming up in December.  All work is 6" X 6" and under $250.  I started these four panels by painting a color pattern field in the back.  Actually, to be fair, I indicated the colors, mixed them and laid the panels out like paint by numbers for my studio assistant.  You can read about that a bit over on my Tumblr blog, which she has taken over as a sort of process diary from the studio assistant perspective.  It is certainly different hearing these perspectives from outside of my own head, but I digress.  As I looked at these color field paintings, I had originally planned on doing a few more pipe and drop pieces, but realized that that had nothing to do with the way that I was feeling about this show.

I started to think about the ordered chaos of the color patterns.  None of the shapes were really the same scale.  The colors alternated back and forth and so the pattern was the same but the color and size varied from piece to piece.  They were all very much related but would never be mistaken for being in the same pattern.  They fit together more like a quilt.  Recently I had been visiting my nieces and had broken my favorite coffee mug which they have set aside for me at their house for some five or six years now.  I have since found one which I use at my own house, but that has only been in use for maybe 2 years.  I thought about how objects hold some of that relationship, working as a sort of totem and concluded that I needed to do a series of mugs over the top of these patterns.  It would serve as my source of mental pause over top of the ordered chaos that is the world these days.

This first mug is the mug which I spoke of that my nieces would always hand me.  It carries with it my memories of my past relationship, the roots of a couple fantastic friendships and a family which is not really mine but which I will always feel is mine.

 This second mug is a mug which I purchased on a trip back to Seattle after I had moved away the second time.  I was staying with my friend Jill in her First Hill studio apartment, where she had shown me images from her recent trip to India and her adoption of Buddhism.  It was a defining moment in my life.  Her apartment was so simple and cozy.  We had tea.  We lived quietly those two nights and she worked very hard.  The morning after I finished staying there we had coffee at Victrola on Pike Street.  I left with this mug and it now carries that story with it for all time.

My father was a forest ranger in New York State, as followers of this blog well know.  There were two mug designs that I remember from growing up.  There was this one and one with a simple green tree on a very tiny mug.  This commemorative mug is the mug that holds my paint brushes.  While drawing this mug I couldn't help but think of Jasper Johns castings of his mug and brush set up, but also was taken with thoughts of my dad, and drinking coffee at home.

It is a little odd to be drawing from life and perhaps a bit odder to find so much meaning in these inanimate objects, but it seems natural and I really like the way the pieces are coming out.  I'm doing at least two more; one more for Art Stream and an additional one of the mug that I won at a muzzle loading match with my father in the 90's for my folks.  Coffee mugs have always been my family's jam.

Peace
-Mike

Clouds and Paint

Last week I went to visit several very good friends.  Each stop revealed multiple works that I had painted.  My style has been very different than most of that work in the last two years.  While there is something really great about my newer drawing based work, I have been missing the layers evident in my more painterly style.  I really had started drawing more as a way to work on my skills where I felt they were wavering.  It was not that long ago that I wouldn't worry about the state of drawing so much because I knew that once I started painting I could make the work look like whatever I needed it to look like.  I had kind of lost sight of the fact that the strictly drawing based work was an exercise.  It is time to paint again.  I want some more serious shows again.

With these last two thoughts in mind, I started at one of my sketchbooks during the middle of a class that I was monitoring on Saturday.  I visited some cloud motifs that I had worked with a couple years ago.  They were really a modification of the clouds in the old Cloud Constructor works, but with more of the express intent of making the clouds characters in their own right.  I started crossing this imagery with the rain marks.  Rain has always signified a sort of cleansing and rebirth to me.  Perhaps it is like a continued sort of baptism?  The rebirth brought me back to me child who is on the way.  I started mixing the baby badger into the piece as well.

Finally I was able to get some real painting in the other night.  My wife was asleep on the couch and I was listening to Ben Kweller ( I love pop music when I am working through new ideas. )  I took a panel that I had nailed together in attempts to entertain her little brother at one point.  Side note: that plan did not work.  I liked the shape of the pieced together wood and I thought that cloud forms would add a nice contrast to the rectilinear shapes making up the larger shape of the surface.

Slowly everything started to form in my head.  The clouds and the rain are a way of thinking of media and ideologies which saturate our vision and thoughts.  It is all one confusing cloud or blob.  I began to think about my child.  What are all of these extraneous bits of information going to feel like to a small child learning the ways of the world?

The larger piece felt pretty good and I felt like the colors were working really well.  It felt like the right thing to be painting again.  I started to wonder if there might be something in working the painterly and the drawing back and forth a little bit more.

This is what I ended up with when I started to think about the two as one.  I think that there is probably some success in here that I had not been aware of before.  We will have to see.

Peace
-Mike

Sitting Pretty - A Tanager on a Derby

Today I started to paint my Bee Here Now piece, but realized about half an hour into it that I needed to work out some of the kinks in my acrylic paint application. It has been about a month since I've really sat down and had time to work with paint. Moving and the new job have kept me somewhat in check, but now I am getting some time to work on things. Either way, I realized that I needed to work on my application and get my stroke back in its rhythm.

To do this I started to rework an older sketch that I had on board but which hadn't even received the full benefit of an under painting. The idea too, is a little bit older. I first put this sketch together in 2006 and painted the original in the same year, but was still in my phase of work where I finished everything with a hard pencil line, leaving all of my pieces a bit too shiny.

While I was working on the piece, I was thinking about that hard pencil line though, because when I used that line I didn't have to worry so much about contrast. Now that I have stopped using that line it is much harder to work a piece with contrast because my palette is so limited. So with this piece I was really trying to push my color a bit more to make up for some of the loss of contrast, and considering that I hadn't even pushed paint in about a month, I'm very pleased with the outcome.

Suddenly I have the desire to work with people again. Ever since I visited MICA with my fiance I have wanted to start working with people again. The birds are fun, and I love doing them, and in fact it almost feels like I am painting old friends, but with my people I can really work out how I feel about the character a bit better. Exaggeration is so much easier to use to prove a point. But anyhow, I digress. I hope you enjoy the painting, and I have a couple more in the works, so hopefully there will be something else up for you to look at soon.

Peace
-Mike