Just a quick note that I scanned 24 pages from the sketchbook I’ve been keeping from May 2011 to present:
If you would like that turning-pages feeling, you can view as a slideshow.
As always, I welcome thoughts, comments, suggestions etc.
Visiting my parents over the holidays, I’ve become keenly aware of how physical and vulnerable my art is, and it’s made me think about what role physical presence plays in one’s creative energy.
The first condition is storage, and my parents’ attic is currently starting to swell with all the oil paintings I did in grad school. Many canvases are nowhere near finished, or to put it in more pragmatic terms, a sellable state, so I can’t honestly consider them “product” or “inventory,” so much as… these things taking up a lot of space. Knowing that they are there, lurking above my childhood bedroom and gaining several grams of dust a year, fills me with a sense of queasiness and dread. They make me reluctant to buy new canvases or start new work, and they serve as a heavy physical to-do list. Before I move forward in painting, I feel like I have to somehow deal with those.
The second condition is fragility, which is ironically one of the themes of my paintings. Among the fallout from Hurricane Irene was a moving box in the basement full of sketchbooks, all my negatives, and almost all the black and white photographs I’ve ever printed. The flood water ruined all but a handful of prints made on RC paper (and I can’t forget the professors who harped on about how much more archival and long-lasting the fiber-based photographic papers were). Leaving aside how this particularly delicate box got into the basement in the first place, I was kind of wrecked to think of all the hours – no, days – I spent shooting, processing film, pulling prints, burning and dodging, organizing… it’s all gone.
Losing all my black and white photography felt a bit like a metaphor for the shift from print to digital photography. I no longer have access to a darkroom, so it’s not like I was going to make more prints from those lovely negatives any time soon, but it stings to have them gone forever. I’ve heard similar stories of people losing hard drives full of digital images, or dropping a camera and erasing a memory card after a day’s shooting at a wedding, so I realize this loss of images is not confined to the more archaic photo processing techniques.
As I stood in the cold basement pulling apart moldy, disintegrated prints and tossing them in garbage bags, it kind of hit me that everything physical will eventually end up this way. No matter how carefully prepared, what quality of materials are used, how arduously and well-intentioned their preservation and conservation, everything we make and touch and use will fall to pieces and return to the earth. And somehow, that idea became much more beautiful and important than any of the student-quality photographs I was bitterly discarding.
Another thought crept into my mind, which has been something of a refrain since the time I learned to draw, “I can always make more art.”
What’s remarkable about artists, musicians, writers, and creators of all types is the ability to constantly produce more, new, better art. Our hands and minds pull from the elements, recycling the masterpieces of years gone by, and dredge up novel inventions, shiny and alluring new materials, new ways to answer the questions posed by a constantly new and old world.
The physicality of art contains both its eternal hope and its perpetual undoing. In the sometimes sisyphean task of being human, we watch things fall apart, then we pick them back up and try again. It doesn’t matter what’s come before, or what’s coming next: all we have is what’s in our hands right now.
I draw in public a lot, especially while riding the ferry or taking the subway. I don’t think much of it, since I draw all the time, but I realize it may seem unusual to watch someone attempt a detailed ink drawing while a subway car is jerking around. Then again, these are New Yorkers, who surely have seen everything.
I figured my drawing was largely unremarkable since people rarely remarked on it. Part of that might have been that I often have headphones on while I’m drawing, but I think it’s also the actual images, when people catch glimpses of them (I’m not the sort of person to hide my drawings with my coat sleeve, but I’m also not exactly putting them on display while I work on them). When I drew mostly abstract images, undulating folds and that kind of thing, few people commented, although once a teenage boy was delighted and asked to take a photo of this drawing.
Around Valentine’s Day, I did two drawings that were actually attached to real subjects, one a clumsy thing that turned into a rose, the other stemming from the idea that two people who were too much alike would end up attacking and consuming one another:
I happened to be sitting next to a guy who was telling his friend about his bitter divorce. Maybe he was more attuned to the subject matter on some subconscious level, and I think he figured I couldn’t hear him with my headphones on. He gestured toward me and said, “Jesus, that’s a hell of a drawing,” then asked his friend if he saw it. He may have gotten the same sense from an abstract field folding in on itself, but I believe it was the recognizable aspects of teeth, biting, and creatures with form that allowed him to have a visceral and immediate response to it.
Most of why I started carrying my sketchbook again and drawing more is because I want to get better at drawing. (Isn’t that ultimately why most people draw, in some way?) I’d like to more effectively marry what goes on in my head with what comes out of my hands, without relying on words and statements to do the heavy conceptual lifting. To that end, I realized that if I wanted to draw figuratively, I needed to actually draw figuratively, including specific, recognizable elements from the real world, or at the very least presenting the figures of my imagination in a language that others can understand.
I realize that feedback from strangers on the subway is hardly a gauge of whether art is successful or not, yet I do trust spontaneous comments to be a little more genuine than the studied, thinly veiled sarcasm masquerading as intellectualization and application of theory that I used to get during MFA critiques. After all, people don’t have to say anything, yet they do feel compelled to tap my arm and say something, even when I have my headphones on. Refreshingly, they don’t comment on the obviously “beautiful” drawings of plants and flowers or organic forms from nature. It’s almost always the drawings of hippogriffs, sea monsters, and bird creatures in bizarre surreal landscapes that elicit commentary. People struggle to find what they want to say exactly, because you don’t really want to call a monster beautiful, but they express an admiration of technical skill and a striking image, typically, “That’s really, really good.”
Anyone who’s been to art school in the last 10-15 years has probably been told, ad nauseam that figurative art is dead, that “no one paints that way anymore,” that to try to present something real in a fundamentally flat, Greenbergian plane is an amateurish fallacy, a dalliance with naivete, an utterly passè and dull pursuit. Yet human beings living in time and space are continuously drawn to things they recognize, to images that evoke memory and association, to triggers that don’t just “seem like” something they recognize, but actually are the thing in question. I think it’s a mistake to be as dismissive of popular opinion as artists and art world folk seem to be; when I really consider the art that’s praised and the art that’s dismissed, the overwhelming experience is one of the emperor’s new clothes, and someone’s got to be the one to say this is all nakedly absurd.
When I think of my all-time favorite paintings, very few are pure abstractions, even though I incessantly defend the liminal and sophisticated emotional power of abstraction. Usually I am drawn to abstracted versions of recognizable images, van Gogh’s wheat fields and skies, Cezanne’s adorable houses in the middle of wooded hills, Georgia O’Keeffe’s moon reflecting in a somber lake, or even Tiepolo and Veronese’s attempts at describing sunlight and euphoria with pink clouds and Prussian blue skies. Maybe my taste is hopelessly pedestrian, or I’m drawn to these images for purely sentimental reasons, but I just plain like them, and I don’t have to wrack my brain to sort out what in hell agonizingly clever game the artist is playing. Is accessibility in art an inherently bad thing? Is obscurity used as a shorthand for depth and insight?
I recently read a fascinating article by Jerry Saltz, discussing the tendency for current contemporary artists to retreat into a sort of post-postmodern insider game of deconstruction, secret coding, and layering with obscurity. His identification and attribution of the sources of these tendencies are spot-on, I think, and the more I’ve talked about his ideas with fellow artists, writers, and historians, the more and more insightful I’ve found them to be. People whose vocation used to be marked by a fearless openness and sensitivity to the world are now becoming the secretive, reluctant hipsters of caged messages and creations so overwrought with concept that one requires a Wikipedia entry to sort out what the hell is on display.
I can’t help thinking about how easily my generation has accepted the dismissiveness in Homer Simpson’s snide appraisal of Marge’s figurative painting (in the Jasper Johns episode), “Oh, honey, I’ve always liked your art. Your paintings look like the things they look like.”
People have been making images for millennia. Up until the past fifty or sixty years, the vast majority of that has been figurative, taking aspects of the real world and reimagining them in a new language or interpretation. As a species, we like the physical, material world, and as entrancing and delightful as abstraction is (and trust me, that’s most of what I do), I really believe there is still a serious, relevant place for figurative works, evidenced simply by the allure of the recognizable that I and my fellow subway riders experience every single day.
I have finally added some new content to my art website, which is sorely outdated and continues to lag at least 3-6 years behind what I’m currently doing.
I’ve got lots of good excuses, but the fact is, I like making art more than websites. I hand-coded that site in 2003 using tables and HTML, so it is slow and laborious to update. I usually put off updating it because I claim I’m going to redesign the whole site any day now, but that day still has not come in half a decade, so it’s probably time to quit pretending.
So what did I add?
And because I am apparently in a race to occupy the most bandwidth possible, I updated the Contact section with links to my other websites and places I can be found on social media. I haven’t decided if this is a good idea or not, since I do tend to say a lot of silly and unprofessional things, but I am who I am, so I might as well own it.
I’d love any comments, questions, suggestions, or other feedback you may have about the updates or the work itself, and I hope to have more updates coming soon.
As I mentioned in my last post, I finished the sketchbook I’d been keeping, from the spring of 2010 through May 2011. I scanned every page of it (save for one that was a list to myself), and you can view them all here, or as a slideshow, if you would like the experience of flipping through the pages.
I’m pleased with what I’ve learned about drawing and composition through this book, and I’m really happy with some of the ideas I explored in more depth than I usually do. I can see that in the second half, I moved from essentially doodling to actually thinking about form and how to represent it and communicate about it.
How this applies to painting remains to be seen, since I am most frequently consumed with schoolwork lately, or obsessing about nature.
But what matters to me right now is that I am thinking, that I’m in a really open and enthusiastic place in how I’m looking at the world and experiencing it. It’s lamentable that I lost my focus during grad school and got so overwhelmed with my personal life that my painting became half-hearted diagrams of scattered emotions, but that time has thankfully passed.
This afternoon the light was coming through Venetian blinds in my window, and a gentle breeze was moving the trees and leaves outside, as well as the blinds themselves. This cast an array of shadows that I found utterly enthralling, across the corner of the painting currently on my easel.
In response to this subtle but powerful observation of a moment so small and ephemeral, something started tugging fiercely at my heart. I know, in my soul, I need to paint more.
The more I draw, the more I learn about painting. That statement is both blindingly obvious and paradoxically elusive for me. I am about to finish my current sketchbook (so expect to see more drawings soon), and through it, I’ve learned incredible amounts about structuring a painting and attaching ideas to forms.
One aspect of oil painting that I’ve been reluctant to embrace is its infinite mutability. I used to resist making any changes to paintings, preferring to map out a composition at the inception and more or less stick with it to the end. More often, I would discover a compositional fault that I couldn’t get past and abandon the painting entirely, intending eventually to get back to it, but almost never doing so.
Grad school was very useful for loosening up my resistance to make changes, as in-progress critiques helped me identify the parts of compositions that were resolving problematically for viewers or in some other way failing to provide the appropriate structure for the ideas I was trying to layer onto images. Unfortunately, however, it also let me find a way to avoid having to make changes, as I moved into water media and embraced the unpredictable, fluid shapes formed by water in my ink paintings.
Now I’m trying to use what I’ve learned about structure from drawing to enact greater control over my oil paintings. I have a tendency to sketch out a vague form using washy lines, then plunge right into modeling curves and shapes without stepping back to consider the overall composition, scale, or bigger movements of the canvas until it’s too late. More importantly, I need to ask myself if what I’m painting actually matches what I’m thinking about, or if instead I’m getting lost in some lovely swoops that will ultimately feel shallow or frustrating to me.
I have this big blue painting that has been sitting next to my easel for months. I was hesitant to move forward on it because something felt imbalanced about the composition. I had intended for this painting to be a meditation on rippling, folding matter, a sort of undulating consideration of this idea from physics that everything is made of something, and there’s no such thing as nothingness, as even space has certain properties and forces to it. Less abstractly, when you look at a flower and see shadows, you’re not seeing darkness or absence, but rather a part of the flower that is occluded, yet present. Each petal has both a top side and an underside, just as curves in nature have insides and outsides that are part of the same surface.
I wasn’t getting that feeling from this painting as it was, and I was frustrated that it felt like a bunch of impulsive decisions, without the organizing principles I’d intended.
It’s always with some trepidation that one revises a composition, but I knew I wouldn’t be happy with my first stab at this painting, in light of how easy it should be to change.
Using cadmium yellow and darker blue, I started essentially correcting the areas that stuck out to me. I thought more about the central idea, that everything comes from something, in terms of existence, spirituality, matter, physics, math, psychology, and on and on, thinking through what movements of this form could evoke these sensations. I knew I wanted the form to be more centralized and inwardly-focused, rather than jutting off the edges haphazardly as it had done.
It’s not accidental that the painting started looking more and more like a greenish-colored rose, as I’ve always used roses as a sort of shorthand for postmodern introspection and layers of meaning folding out from themselves. My undergraduate thesis project used details of roses and other organic forms to get at some of these same ideas, so I shouldn’t be surprised to come full circle and use them again, with different inflection. I think of dimensions as petals, so a treatment of some unfolding facets of existence logically follows blossoming flowers and wave forms.
I don’t know if I’m done revising this painting’s composition yet, though I’ve lived with it for a while and find I am mostly satisfied that I can work with this iteration, with small adjustments that will be sorted out while painting. It’s fun to consider an object in flux, wobbling toward what it will become.
I’m planning for the color to shift toward teal, with creamy highlights that pick up the yellow, and deep blues and browns that push the depths into sharper, clearer contrast.
I’m excited about what this painting could become, and I’m both relieved and encouraged by the revisions I’ve made. I haven’t typically kept track of revisions in the past, as I think there exists the risk that previous versions looked better and I’ll be able to see the ways I’ve ruined something good. I think the value of discovery from change is worth the potential ego pitfalls, and I must learn not to regret the changes that insist on being made.
Drawing, by its very nature, is an act of faith. A drawing is a unique creature that must continually ask of its creator the indulgence to persevere and persist in believing that its fulfillment is worthwhile. The finished drawing is rarely the finished product; rather, it serves as the documentation of a journey taken in the mind and sensibility of the artist, a crude adventurer’s map charted in the moments of discovery.
At their most accessible, drawings give the viewer access to the course of exploration between the chasm of the blank page and the landscape of lines or scumbled charcoal smudges that comprise an image. Other drawings are more akin to Coleridge’s vision of Kubla Kahn: fleeting, spectacular glimpses into a fantastic surreality that only exists instantaneously in the imagination. Both types have equal potential to become utterly captivating and decadently entrancing.
Academically-trained artists begin with drawing as the first – and primary – discipline because it allows for the most direct connection between materials and self. Drawing is the physical manifestation of the Cartesian self, declaring with each contour and gradient of tone, “I am, I am.”
More than words, drawing represents man’s fundamental split between being of the world and inhabiting a sentient mind. From the earliest marks scratched in sand or painted on cave walls, man has used drawing to mark the separation of inner subjectivity and physical experience, an interface that allows us passage between the two. The calligraphic emergence of writing cannot be coincidental to man’s ability, through drawing, to reflect upon and express what it is, and eventually what it means, to be alive.
Michelangelo Buonarotti. Study for the Libyan Sibyl, 1511CE, chalk on paper, 290x210mm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In its economy of language, drawing retains an immediacy and, if deployed effectively, urgency of communication. Through drawing it is possible to see the essence of an idea, the core components that convey meaning. At times this meaning may not even be fully understood by the artist, who acts by a creative compulsion, yet demonstrates through drawing’s liminal qualities what the Romantic writers called the interior of the heart. One cannot view Michelangelo’s careful, sprezzatura cross-hatching without understanding his singular, industrious focus, nor the meditative, repetitive iterations of figures drawn obsessively in later life without recognizing they are an ephemeral treatise on mortality. In Michelangelo’s marks, a fervor most similar to spiritual devotion becomes apparent, with drawing serving as a visible prayer or incantation. It is also clear that Michelangelo’s faith was not misplaced in drawing.
Michelangelo Buonarotti. Christ Crucified between the Virgin and Nicodemus, c. 1552-54, black chalk, brown wash and white lead on paper, 433x290cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
It can be an enormous challenge to face the vast expanse and sucking void of the unmarked page, and by extension, the sprawling complexities of existence. Art students like to use the shorthand of horror vacui, but it is a more nuanced and demanding task to place one’s trust in drawing. One satisfactory transaction in drawing does not in any way guarantee future success in using its delicate, tenuous devices to hammer down meaning. An artist must continually face the uncertainty of drawing as a sufficient language, spurned forward only by tenacious faith that the marks will coalesce into some visual signifier or ambient carrier of sensation.
In this way, though they are humble and easily discarded, drawings may represent some of the bravest, most ardent acts of man, embodiments of the purest kind of faith.
On Wednesday, I enjoyed an afternoon painting outside in the sun, in a makeshift garden studio. It was incredibly inspiring to sit out in the grass, shaping it to hold paper for these small ink paintings.
Ink painting in the grass
I preferred the finished look (and process) when the paper was thoroughly saturated, as it allowed for more dramatic movements of the ink and water.
I made nine small paintings, eight on off-white 8″x10″ drawing paper and the first on 9″x12″ smooth Bristol. I preferred the absorbancy of the drawing paper, as well as the warmth of the resulting black and gray tones.
I’ve numbered these in the order I made them, in advance of titles.
1 - 9"x12" on smooth Bristol
detail of 1, left side
I saw the bubble kind of shapes in the first one and started making little circles. I tend to make patterns like this when I am doodling with a pen. In this case, I used a paintbrush to draw the circles with water, then touched a dropper of ink to fill the shapes, which was great fun to watch.
2 - 8"x10" sumi ink on paper
detail of 2, center
I started to work in a butcher’s tray so I could saturate the paper with water. The large circular areas are where I dropped ink with a dropper, and the turbulence between occurs when the ink pushes water into adjacent flows.
3 - 8"x10" sumi ink on paper
The shapes in this one reminded me of soap bubbles.
detail of 3, upper left corner
detail of 3, lower left corner
This fourth painting was wetter, so it made more rewarding flows of water with lighter grays. The wind blew a few times and flipped the paper over, making the drip-like marks that emerge from the center channel. I like the two drips at right, but the one going to the upper left bothers me.
4 - 8"x10" sumi ink on paper
detail of 4, center
(The color on these photographs is inconsistent, but these drawings are all on the same off-white paper – I think my camera meters differently when there are richer blacks, and I didn’t notice it to adjust it.)
This one was also very wet, with the paper thoroughly soaked in inky water before the drops were applied. I like the ink effects when the paper is wetter, but working outside, this one also got blown around, producing a dribbling line toward the right. I don’t hate it though.
5 - 8"x10" sumi ink on paper
detail of 5, lower left
It is uncanny to me how closely the shapes made by the ink resemble the shapes I draw in oil paintings. Maybe it is something archetypal for me, that in every media I come up with these movements, but it’s interesting to see the tonality worked out naturally, by the flow of water, rather than when I am trying to create an illusion with modeling and shading.
I started to make smaller marks on wet paper, watching them spread. In this case I did sequences of 13 dots, with varying amounts of ink in the dropper.
6 - 8"x10" sumi ink on paper
detail of 6, upper center
I used drier marks in this piece, gently touching the edges of the nearly-empty dropper in wet areas, letting the water have more of a say. I like when there are whiter and lighter areas to act in opposition to the heavy expanses of black space.
7 - 8"x10" sumi ink on paper
detail of 7, center
I especially like the branching, fractal-like shapes that the water makes as it soaks into the paper. Tide marks, I guess.
These last two were probably my favorites of the day, as they were really soaking wet. I used the ink more like fields than drops, observing the movements it made in space. I think this made for more delicate shading and softer transitions in the grays.
8 - 8"x10" sumi ink on paper
detail of 8, center right
detail of 8, upper right
I took a lot of flack in graduate painting classes for attempting to make illusionistic images. I still am not ready to accept that this can’t be done in contemporary art, and I think it was a personal hang-up with my professors and classmates.
That said, it does make me rather happy that this kind of process results in the kinds of tonal shifts I would make were I attempting to draw an illusionistic abstract space. I think a lot about the mutability of form, shifting and changing, the surreality of physics and what really goes on in synapses, among molecules, with electrochemical impulses and so on. It strikes me as a fitting place to allow for some imagination, and to my eye, these images work like folding and collapsing dimensions or detail views of extraordinarily large and complex organic systems.
For this last painting, I soaked the paper, dipped one corner in inky water in a butcher tray, then dropped a large quantity of ink at the opposite corner. (You can see the set-up here.) This one most closely approximates the sense of tides advancing and receding.
9 - 8"x10" sumi ink on paper
detail of 9, center
detail of 9, lower center
I really like the ghost-like white area in between the two darker forms. It flips back and forth between a sort of negative space or a positive, modeled form, depending on how I look at its edges. It reminds me that there is never really such a thing as empty space, in an image or in reality, and I enjoy imagining what fills the spaces that appear empty from afar.
For an afternoon’s work, I’m pretty happy. It’s wonderful to enjoy the painting process, and I actually came up with a lot of things worth thinking about. Any time I use ink, I learn more about its properties and tendencies, and I am positively mesmerized by all the strange and lovely things the water does.
I like these little paintings as images themselves – to me, the black and white really fits the feeling in them and makes for a very satisfying experience. Because these are the types of movements and tonal shifts I’ve been searching for in oil painting, I may do some studies using these as reference, trying to capture some of the lush movements and elegant shapes.
I can’t wait to get out in the garden some more!
I meant to use this blog as a studio journal, but I have still kept my notes on scraps of paper or jotted the occasional thoughts on painting in my regular blog. I don’t realize right away that I’m thinking about painting, especially because so much of the way I work is rooted in the way I live, but I would like to get more of that put down, made into images, and worked through.
Since February, I’ve been incredibly busy with school and work, I spent three weeks in Italy, and I’ve had a whirlwind of activity in my life. I have not, unfortunately, done much painting.
I think if I want to cultivate a more regular studio habit, I need to pay more attention to thoughts and observations as they come, without worrying about the way they reflect on me. Self-consciousness has had enormous inhibitory effects in my life lately.
I am still slowly plugging away at the red and blue painting. I went over the red areas with an opaque cadmium red, making them solid shapes instead of a modeled background layer. I was attempting to make it a unified plane, against which the blue forms would push and pull, playing with the color relationships. It’s fun to invert the receding movements with value changes and fight against the natural inclinations of colors, though I’m sure this game has been played many times before.
I’ve been finding enormous inspiration in plants, flowers, water, and nature, now that I’m living at the shore again. I wonder if the synthetic feel that my painting took on at Pratt was to do with imagination-fueled inspiration that wasn’t grounded in the observable world. It felt like virtual painting, a computerized pastiche, rather than dreaming in nature’s presence. Neither approach is better or worse than another, but I find I’m much happier when I feel viscerally moved to paint by all the things I see and experience.
I have some literal and figurative housekeeping to do with my paintings and the huge pile of works in progress. It feels silly to keep starting new paintings when I have so many ideas I still want to work through in their incipient phases, but at the same time, I keep stepping in this river a different person, and I want to start with a new feel, new colors, new strategies and so on to reflect that. The solution, I suspect, is to get better at finishing what I started, or to accept that when I’ve let something fizzle out, it was probably for a good reason.
This week I was talking with a friend about colors. He works with computers, and he described the way he color-codes the backgrounds of different terminals so he always knows where he is. The green ones are his “home,” where he feels free and safe, like he’s returned to where he belongs.
I have been thinking about this a lot since then, the meanings that colors carry, and especially this sense of belonging and feeling at home. Not surprisingly, it worked its way into my painting.
24"x24" oil on canvas, in progress
I had started then abandoned this canvas almost two years ago. It’s always carried a nice energy for me, so I enjoy starting it up again.
Something I’m finding interesting about the way the colors are working now is the tendency for blues to recede and reds to come forward. It’s a kind of push/pull which I’m playing against with illusionistic shading in the blue areas.
detail view
There is a murky grayish purple color behind the transparent phthalo turquoise that keeps sneaking into it. I’m not sure it bothers me, but I’m very aware of it.
detail view
The movements are pretty satisfying, though the scale is perhaps a bit tight in places.
detail view
I’m looking forward to working on this piece more. It has a lot of really comfortable feelings and associations in it. I realize that a lot of my process involves the people I am thinking about and the music I am listening to while I paint. This one has some great stuff in both respects.
