Joined, 2009, 36"x52", Acrylic on Canvas
I had a studio visit with David Humphrey this morning. He gave a talk a couple nights ago here at the Vermont Studio Center, I find his work super interesting. He’s very articulate in his ability to talk about painting, which made him a great person to have a studio visit with. As he was looking at my work he pulled out many things I was referencing without me having to tell him. This is rewarding because it starts to make me feel like the work is doing things I want it to do.
We started talking about endings, this question of “when is a painting finished?” He brought up de Kooning, who would just stop painting at a moment, and that would be the end. This got us to mentioning how arbitrary endings are, which reminded me of the essay my friend Heather White wrote in regards to my animation, Apparitions, when I showed it in Toronto last year.
“Apparitions documents, at intervals, changes to the single rectangle of work that eventually became the painting (Apparition) on display. The project emphasizes the arbitrariness of endings; the video’s conclusion is the hanging composition, but any given moment of the animation might stand on its own as a work.”
This led me to show David, Apparitions. He liked the boldness of the animation, the idea that every frame could be a painting on it’s own, and mentioned that some of the work that I’m working on in the studio now has a certain amount indecision attached to it. Which I think is true. When making the animation the act of taking a picture every moment caused me to make bolder definitive marks, but that also made me feel like the work became more contrived. Currently this “indecisiveness” is coming through as I’m trying to paint the invisible in a realm of the material, and don’t know when to stop. This is one of the reasons I’ve been doing quicker, smaller paintings recently- it’s a way to exercise an end point.
I’ve been doing these funny little sketches at night on these small square panels that my friend Arista Alanis gave me. I rarely do quick paintings, but I’m enjoying the spontaneity, and exploratory quality of them. I’ve been drawing these out with charcoal on the panel first, like I draw in my sketchbook, and then filling them in with formal kinds of things in mind, like color. The forms and their constriction feel similar to my other paintings, but I’ve been experimenting with a different kind of painting language than I’m used to.
After finishing these two last night I was staring at them for a long time and thinking about the flatness of this ribbon that wraps the form. There’s no rendering to indicate a change in the direction, the ribbon only shows form through the changing of it’s direction around the edges. In looking at the center, where they weave in and out of each other, they really flatten out and it reminded me of a rickety old roller coaster, like the Comet out on Coney Island. In looking again I started to think that maybe instead of the ribbon only wrapping the form, it could also act as an internal scaffolding- like we’re seeing an internal view of a persons brain, or subjective self. A visual representation of wonky structures, which we create through experience, to uphold our version of the world. This isn’t the first time that the idea of scaffolding has made it’s way into my work, so conceptually it was nice to see it unintentionally reappear. It was a good moment where my memory and visual perception changed how I looked at the painting and morphed into an idea outside of my original intention.
(I like this idea more than this actual sketch; I’m starting to imagine them with patterns or stripes.)
I had this idea a couple weeks ago, that I would write Damien Hirst a letter asking if he would send me one of his spot paintings so I could then use it as a ground for one of my own paintings. This reminded me of Rauschenberg’s erasing of a de Kooning drawing and how that always felt like this changing of the guard to me. That both Rauschenberg and de Kooning knew that abstract expressionism had peaked and was heading towards it’s decline. The thought came to me after reading a couple of reviews of his most recent endeavor to fill all the Gagosian Galleries across the world with his spot paintings.
One night, while I was pondering this idea, my friend texted me that Damien Hirst had died due to digestive complications. I immediately thought, “well that screws up my whole plan!” It turns out that Damien did not die, as the source of that information came from an unreputable blog, but it made me think about how unrealistic my plan had been from the start. So, I decided that I’d make my own Hirst spot paintings. The New York Times review had explained the simple formula on how the paintings were made. “…smooth discs of color applied to white canvases in orderly grids at intervals equal to the diameter of the discs. The discs can be any color, except the colors can’t repeat on any given canvas (though they come extremely close), and the people making the paintings choose the colors.” The only rules I really payed any attention to was that I couldn’t repeat the same color twice, and I chose the colors. So, I painted a “Hirst” spot painting over one of my paintings. I kind of thought of it as a veil or shroud. To me, Hirst’s paintings are symbolic of this untouchable, seemingly meaningless, rich art world that sometimes makes me feel jaded about contemporary art, and makes me question where I want to stand as a contemporary painter.
The funny thing that happened though, was that I actually enjoyed making the spot painting. The pure formal task of filling in dots with my own colors was fun, and it served as an interruption to my usual painting practice which has allowed me to branch out some. Here it is in its current state. Strange new things are brewing.
I remember asking my Mom once why it was so hard, when making a peanut butter sandwich, to get the peanut butter as smooth as they do in the commercials. Unbeknownst to me, my mother only bought organic peanut butter, which I do think tastes better, but falls short of fulfilling the aesthetics of that smooth, homogenized facade. The fact that I like crunchy peanut butter better probably didn’t help either. I bring this tid-bit up because I’ve recently been preparing oil grounds for some new paintings, and laying down the ground reminded me of the impossibility of ever perfectly smoothing out my sandwich. Even if I can’t get my oil grounds perfectly smooth there’s something so enticing and satisfying about trowelling down this silky, satin white. It’s a seductive surface. Begs to be touched. So much of painting for me relates to skin or flesh and touch. It’s interesting to think about making something which is meant to be looked at but can trigger a physical feeling, or make me want to rub my fingers together. When I’ve taught observation drawing in the past I used to say “we’re trying to learn to translate the eye to the hand”- I meant this in a kind of literal way, as in translating what we physically see. But now, as I think of it again, I like the idea that a painting can translate to the hand in another way, through touch. That through seeing the material itself we can feel. Perhaps that’s a good way for me to start thinking about these new canvases, which I now have to let dry for nine days before I can paint on them…
