experimental surfaces

I recently was reminded of my love for creation, by several outside sources. One of which came from the great beyond. I have realized that I need to create, it is a part of me. I have for many years now neglected this part of me, as you can see with the diminished amount of posts. I will now create.

I have been experimenting with different surfaces to mark on. I took some old panels that I had earmarked for another project all together, and started to melt crayons onto them. Not only did this give me a really vibrant, rich, surface to work on, but because I had primed the board, it was bright white under it all. The surface, when still soft was perfect for me to just take a pencil and start drawing. I will show more of the drawings when I get the right one completed. I know, I know, crayons will crack and break, but for the sake of experimenting with a new medium I just used what I had. If the medium continues to excite me I might start to explore a more permanent medium.

Glazes and stuff

Been experimenting lately, with colors and techniques. Started a new painting, I will discuss the subject matter in a later post, and I have found that several techniques are just lighting my fire these days. Not one over the other but rather a combination of two.

I started to paint, rather sketch, with my normally loaded brush. When I started to paint the background, I was not all that happy with the density of the color, so I started to glaze layer on top of layer in the background. This started to provide a really rich, textured background that was really exciting. Then as a finishing touch I dry brushed color over it. I feel as though I am actually painting with light. The combination of dark under painting with bright, bold colors over it, well, just makes the colors uber vibrant.

The glazes that I have been using are made from transparent oil paint, and a mixture of 50% terpenoid, and 50% linseed oil. The combination of colors in glazes brings a new level of color exploration for me. For example, a bright cadmium yellow under painting, and then I glazed Indian Yellow over that, and then over that I glazed another layer of Burnt Umber. After the final layer of Burnt Umber I then wiped it off with a rag. The color looks aged and experienced.

I will upload a good image of the painting once I can get a good shot of it. Right now it would just look like shit if I tried. I need daylight bulbs to get a good shot.

Brian Taylor’s Low Brow

I have for several years been going to an artist’s site by the name of Brian Taylor. An amazing illustrator, but more importantly an amazingly creative individual. I think that is what sticks with me more, is his visions. So simple, so graphic, so wonderfully engaging. His technique of using textures, and vector art that play apon the reproductive limitations of print are just fasinating to me. As a print designer myself, I have been bound by print limitations but have not ever seen them as a source of such creativity before I started to see Brians work. When you get a chance go check out his site at www.candykiller.com.

When did you know?

I was recently asked by an artist’s rep., “When did you know you were an artist?” It made me pause for a moment. This was a question I never really considered. I never considered the thought partially because no one ever asked, and mostly because I have always had art on the brain. But, if you think back, I am certain there is a time in your life when you consciously knew, or just relinquished yourself to being an artist. I would like to pose this question to you all, when did you know you were an artist?
My response:
This is a very good question. I never have known a time when drawing was not part of my consciousness. As my Dad always put it, the first thing I ever picked up was a pencil. Not sure how true that is, but my earliest memories have me sitting at the family kitchen table drawing all the cartoon characters I saw on TV. It didn’t hurt either that I got a tremendous amount of support from my family. Giving me marking devices and paper was a way to keep me entertained for hours, and also kept me from, as I used to put it, proclaiming “I am boring.” But, that really does not answer the question, “When did I know I was an artist?” I think the first time I realized that I was an artist was when I was in the 5th grade. I entered a school contest to create the school mascot. Long story short, I did not win the contest. I came in second place. But, the response that I got from my classmates, even kids I did not know, was overwhelming. From that moment on, I was “the artist” kid in my grade. Not much has changed; I am still the artist kid, just not in the fifth grade, more like the 35th grade.

The harder they come…

I am finally finishing a painting that has taken at least five months to figure out. At first it was about a groundswell building up into a victorious ascent. (Not surprisingly, this was started in early November 2008.) The painting became increasingly problematic, with the layers weighing down the bottom and the theme of jubilant victory never quite becoming realized.

 

After much deliberation, I turned the canvas upside down and pretty much started over, while retaining a few pieces of the earlier painting. The result is a top-heavy composition that somehow, at least in my opinion, works in a precarious way. Since the eye travels in a downward motion when viewing the painting, I felt it would be apt to focus on the recent fall of large financial institutions. 

 

In a departure from my other abstracts, I have assigned symbolism to some of the colors used in the painting. The bronze in the upper third connotes currency, while the cerulean evokes the luxurious idylls of the wealthy or the color of that fictional utopia, Shangri-la. And as if symbolism weren’t enough, for the vindictive literal-minded, you may choose to read into the picture a company jet, packed with a bunch of AIG execs, plummeting from the sky.

 

This painting marks the debut of my newest tube of paint, quinacridone crimson. A shrill pink, it is the most flagrantly flirtatious hue I’ve ever seen. The paint’s transparency also makes some wonderful things happen during the application; it is a wonderfully tactile and responsive medium.

 

Here is a photo of the entire painting as it stands now. I feel the inadvertent curve in the crossbars needs to be corrected, but for the most part it is done.  

 

 

Here is a close-up.

 

 

And here is an even tighter close-up.  

 

The language of fracture

As most artists know, inspiration is a grievously fickle thing. When present, it can imbue a painting with vitality and relevance; once it departs, the piece becomes as mundane and irritating a reminder as, for example, the bathroom sink that needs to be bleached out.

 

When this happens, the artist faces a crisis like that of a doctor: the patient is languishing on the operating table; is there any way of reviving it? It’s too easy to abandon the project, now that the connection with the painting has been broken. And too often, rekindling an interest feels like starting a fire with nothing but two fingers.

 

My painting “died” the other day, so I picked up an old issue of Art in America to find an artist whose work attracts me. Without having to look further than the inside front cover, I discovered Jean-Pierre Riopelle, a Canadian painter who used a gestural “all-over” approach, while maintaining an elegant formal organization to his paintings. 

 

Crowded with complicated, overlapping forms, the paintings reflect strife and aggression at first glance. Riopelle’s technique varies: sometimes he drags long paths through the paint, and other times he chips and pushes away at it with short, feverish strokes of the palette knife. The latter technique yields an effect like that of a closeup of crystals in a microfiched sheet of rock. The myriad facets of seemingly solid narratives are brought forth in stunning, rainbow-hued array. In this sense, Riopelle’s canvases aptly express the kaleidoscopic chaos of a rapidly modernizing world.

In spite of their sense of entanglement and conflict, these paintings have an undeniable celebration of richness—of the medium as well as the entire, splintered prism of modernity itself.

 

The ambivalence in Riopelle’s paintings points to a question that every individual faces: will you forsake the world or will you embrace it in all its wounded glory? Likewise, the question of abandoning a painting or returning to it is a crucial decision that an artist faces every day.

 

 

Esquire Magazine’s Worlds Best Dressed Men

In a recent article, Esquire Magazine outlined who they think are the worlds best dressed men. I found the list interesting for one reason. The number 7 ranked, best dressed man, was David Hockney. What an amazing thing to come across. A visual artist, getting such pop culture recognition, in a time when rap stars and american idols are all that one hears about around the water cooler. It makes me smile to see such recognition of an artist, in a time when art may not be the most popular, or the most lucrative. I’m gonna have to take a look in my closet and see if I can take my self image up a notch or two.

Exercising the random

In an interview with the New York Times, the German painter Gerhard Richter once admitted, “Weeks go by, and I don’t paint until finally I can’t stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don’t want to talk about it, because I don’t want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself. It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.”

This is a surprising fact, coming from somebody so prolific. And he is right: waiting for an idea or inspiration to hit is as futile as simply waiting for the rain. I think that artists that hold themselves to a disciplined way of working are much more productive and, in a way, happier. There is little that annoys an artist more than stasis. Even if you’re embroiled in formal problems on your canvas, you are at least making progress.

Richter seems to have hit upon an exercise that, while simple enough, emphasizes the gloppy sensuousness of paint itself. He smears paint on photographs. The process reflects his philosophy of painting, in which “chance, arbitrariness, whim and destruction brings about a particular kind of painting, [and] it is never a predetermined painting.”

The results of his painted photographs are strikingly lyrical, surreal, and in some cases, a little disquieting. Swells of paint metastasize and threaten to consume entire landscapes. Happy families are buried under deluges of layered color. Fields and flocks of painted forms assert their primacy, creating an alternative universe and forcing the viewer to question the illusion printed underneath as well. 

In experimenting with random forms, Richter liberates himself from the expectations and weight of having to produce a strategically encumbered piece of work. Rather than cramming inspiration into a heavily worked painting, he allows it to lightly enter the painted photograph, as detached as some of the blips and blobs that appear to float on the surfaces of the snapshots.

Matters of representation

One of the gratifying things about painting is it provides an opportunity to pin exactly the moment or feeling you’ve been housing inside you. Unfortunately, there are also an infinite number of ways to fail at it. While success in a painting is a cumulative venture, failure can be splintered into a series of wrong turns. In this sense, painting can be like driving into an imagined city without any roadmaps. There is frustration, and while there can be beautiful things to see along the way, sometimes you never do arrive at the place you were seeking.

Part of the reason that abstraction can be so difficult is because there is no explicit guidance or even a membrane of a form to contain it beyond what is created minute by minute. There are no requirements to represent anything physical—only formal art principles. Abstraction is freed from the restraints of representational painting; it is a wilderness of your own making. There is no table of fruit as a touchstone.

Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to paint representationally for a group art project. My task was to paint two panels that would form part of a larger painting. After receiving two images to reproduce, I had to painstakingly grid out the images, as well as the panels, in order to render them accurately. The ironic thing was, the process of gridding consumed much more time than the painting itself. When finally applying the paint, I let a delirium take hold, and the paint swelled rapturously beyond the penciled lines, augmenting curves and exaggerating angles. In the paintings, the architecture assumes the shaky stability of a wedding cake. Even the windows of a skyscraper I had meticulously plotted out with a ruler were diminished to haphazard streaks of color.  

In looking at the panels now, I tend to fixate on the application of paint more than the image itself. Heaped in certain areas, it thins out in others, as if conforming to its own law of conservation, where no matter is lost. But the subject matter is somewhat lost, in honing in, and the woman in the prim hat and coat is diminished to fields of hungrily applied color.

Something that surprised me was how the subject matter did not, in fact, eclipse the use of paint itself. If anything, it draws more attention to it, even though one would think that an abstract would foreground the use of paint more than a figurative piece would. Maybe because one expects to identify the image as looking a certain way (i.e., I should see a woman in a red coat), the represented image gets subsumed in the actual application of paint, and the technique becomes more apparent. Either way, there is an enigmatic, sometimes uneasy, interplay between image and surface in representational art. It’s like looking at a glass table and seeing your face reflected in it amidst the crumbs and stains and scratches. But in that duality also exists the beauty of representation.

Here are pictures of the panels.

 

Happy New Year

I have spent the last few weeks packing, and moving into a new house. This has been a very draining experience. My first home. The ideas have been a plenty, the well of creativity seems to be over running. Isn’t that always the case, when you are so focused on getting other things done your mind blooms with the most amazing creative visions. Well, I still have a tremendous amount of work ahead of me, unpacking, sorting through my history, and generally getting settled. I am currently working on a side project that is keeping me from getting my hands dirty with paint. But, with all this said I would like to share an artist that I discovered last year. His name is Dave Kinsey.  Enjoy.

Happy New Year! Lets get that paint flyin’!