The Process

Two feet ahead of me exists a still life built from dead flowers which remind me of little humans. Some of them interact with each other, some aimlessly exist without the expectations of communication. There are broken shards of glass that project towards me on a spice rack like shelving unit, allowing the bulbs of some flowers to appear as if they float in space. Others physically do float, hanging by mono filament from the ceiling. There are chunks of mirrors which add complex spatial extensions to a still life only eight inches deep. There are a few rocks and some other things, but mostly it consists of the flowers.

The more I investigate this set up the more visually interesting it becomes. With time the flowers appear to have a greater luminosity and their humanistic qualities become more evident. I rebuild these set ups after each group of works. The last one being a series of three vertical paintings; whose names recently became Transparent Stairs, Subterranean Truths, and Birth of the Snow Flakes. They became a narrative of the past half year of my life, telling a story of demise and rebirth through the energy of abstraction.

This new still life is geared towards horizontally formatted paintings. It is about four feet wide, maybe eighteen inches from top to bottom and eight to ten inches deep. It takes many eye movements to be able to comprehend the entirety of it. The visual rhythm entices the eye to constantly explore beyond its field of view.

The curiosity of what exists beyond the periphery of vision is the birth of imagination.

It is the movement of the eye and the desire of the mind to record unique bits of information which allow me to drift into abstraction. Each shape I record is carefully cut out of real space. The physical resistance of the drawn line becomes necessary for the authenticity of that moment in time. I draw small pockets of space, and then work on the color, and back to redrawing new spatial relationships. The color in these acrylic paintings develop through the rebuilding of edges and the editing out of unwanted information, it is building color through drawing.  

Ideally I would like to change the idea of representation to one of re-creation. I find the process of working from real space to attain an “abstraction” to be one of transforming a spiritual experience into a physical organization of energy. Imagine looking out of a window at dawn or dusk. The exterior is lit by a glowing blue violet, allowing enough light for one to identify the exterior space. The same pane of glass contains orangey reflections of the interior of a home, which is lit by incandescent or some other kind of light. On that pane of glass is the lucid existence of two different realities at a specific moment in time.  I want my paintings to be about the metaphysical existence, but to have that I need to unite both worlds.

Painting can transcend the ordinary experience to the extraordinary, and vice versa. There is no way I could preconceive what a painting may look like in before I start it, or even what kind of color it will have, or rhythm. During the course of my normal day I may find myself getting mad or feeling a strong lust for something, these energies will affect what I choose to focus on when I get into drawing the shapes of my still life. What we experience affects how we see the world, maybe the opposite is true as well, I don’t know.  

I let the natural sate of mental imperfection guide the course of my paintings.

I work off of a complex yet shallowly spaced still life consisting of dead flowers, broken mirrors, bottles, chunks of glass, and a few rocks. The elements are organized on a see through shelving unit in such a way  that there is a pleasurable array of shapes amongst and in between the objects. I’m concerned with the identification of shapes, not objective identification. With any movement of my head or body the shapes that I see loose their identity.  Bouncing around the surface of the painting, I record shapes I see in relation to each other, each one influencing the next. It is inevitable that they fall out of proportion, there in lies the process of transformation.

My greatest inspirations as a visual artist are my experiences in nature. It is here, along everyday walks, where I find human characteristics in small plant life such as twigs, dead leaves, or dried flowers. I find reflections of my temperament and state of being in a world that is often overlooked.  My life’s choices, and the nature of our social structure,  are the causes which have lead me to look close within the inner workings of natural world to find connection.

This beingness that I find in nature I now seek to create  through my art by changing the edges of observed space. It is a process of intuitively moving through concrete information and drifting into abstraction.  There is little which can compare to the sensation of allowing yourself to transform directly what is in front of you into an amazing and unknown world. I hope that the finished compositions may be able to deliver a similar experience to interested viewers.

I was nineteen years old when I started painting. I was not in college for art, but my boredom and curiosity led me on journeys where I discovered how fascinatingly beautiful and mysterious the world is. I realized that my current studies would never satisfy my curiosity, so I choose painting as my avenue for exploring the mysteries of perception. 

 Ideally, I want to create paintings that resemble the process of seeing. Drawing everyday for the past twelve years has allowed me to realize I know less and less about how I perceive the visual world.  For me, drawing is not a means to record objects, but a process I can use to articulate an experience of a certain space and time. Drawing perceptually means recording with a lot of mental fluctuations, changing perspectives, and disproportionate understandings.  We may know what we are looking at, but broken down visually, in regards to shape, the structure of our visual world is in a constant state of flux. Move your head one inch and every shape you see changes its identity. So while I gather information from direct perceptual observation, I end up with paintings which look abstract.

Color is one of the most beautiful elements of the visual world. I am fascinated by the idea that through only three colors anything can be created. While colors cannot be mixed to match what we see directly, any proportion system can be made. This is a seductively complex concept. I work with twelve or so tube colors, I’m always mixing when I paint, I want the colors to go on clean so that uniqueness of individual shapes can be recognized. I start a painting by building colors in response to what I am seeing based on the idea of warm, cool, light, or dark.  At the end of each days studio work, I rebuild the colors on my palette, creating new systems for the next day’s work. Color keeps growing and slowly changing within a painting until a specific visual weight is achieved. When that happens the painting is finished, a little burden is released, and the process continues.

I’m thinking about a yellow chair, a metal one that folds up, I keep that one on my deck, kind of a yellow orange I guess. Its not comfortable, it is one of those metal fold up one, probably has some spider eggs in it now and a bit of rust, but it has a presence. Each time I walk up the sixteen steps of the blue spiral staircase and I see the yellow orange metal chair, I feel like I have made it home.  Sometimes people ask me what my favorite color is, one of my least favorite questions as it is an idea that I cannot truly comprehend. Imagine a poet trying to respond to the question of what is their favorite word. Without relations of words to words or colors to colors the individual elements are merely deffinations, not actions. 

Painting is about color, that is as straightforward as it gets, but it should not be superficially used. When one color changes in our vision, all the colors that we see change. It is a network, an integrated system of constant change. At dusk, when the sky has some of its richest and deepest blues, take notice of brown buildings, of dark pine trees, of the ground you are walking on. The magic does not happen in the sky alone, we are immersed in a space of changing light, it is all around us, we are in it.

Color is a mathematical puzzle. Imagine the fact that with only three distinct colors, it is possible to create the sensation of any light, I am not saying match colors directly but to create the sensation of. For many painting is about a figurative context, a narrative, a story telling. The space within the rectangle becomes a way to write a book, to reveal a story they choose to tell. I find this context in the interaction of colored shapes, the energy amongst them resemble humanistic qualities. There is always a figurative context, a story line, whether or not directly revealed, for it is the interactions with society which lead ones thinking.

As a fan of competition and precision, I love games. My favorite of all time being table tennis. Unfortunately, since living in Santa Fe I have yet to find anywhere to spin balls around a table.  You have to be creative to win, be intuitive, you have to imagine what kind of spin is coming at you and counter balance it, there is nothing like running for a shot and making it land on the far corner of your opponent’s side. Its a great fast game, just like the mind works, lightning quick. When you are in the zone you don’t think, just react to sounds and movements. Its fantastic, a game of reactions, its probably the closest you can come to being a cat. 

Fortunately and unfortunately, a lack of playing pong means more time to paint. Now painting does not match the joy of chasing balls around a table, but its pretty close. Paintings  interaction is more of  mind verses space. It is a process of gathering and placing information, it literally is a dance around a rectangle.  It is a game of placement, decisions, and intuitive interactions.  Spin is replaced with color. You don’t win or loose against a painting, you resolve, and in doing so bring some kind of internal energy into physical being. The conclusion is achieved when there is nothing that can be changed with out the internal structure falling apart. Unlike a game, there are false conclusions as there is no outside sources or rules to determine its conclusion. This can only be found through internal knowledge. False conclusions lead to focused decisions. They can be painful but they take you places. Recently I worked on a series of portraits but they took me no where. I thought they were concluded because people told me so. They were not paintings, they were objects to impress. That’s the difficulty of being an artist, every element of your life is transcended through your work, you seek approval through it, that’s where it can get dangerous. Your identity can be challenged by the desire for approval. Its a psychological fucking mess at times, but it is utterly rewarding, to see and experience new forms of beauty, to feel color interact, just to feel, its a good thing. Life would be simpler to just play games, but there would be no false conclusions, and without theses I think that it would get rather boring.

I awoke the other night, actually I never really slept, but I got up to go to the bathroom. I sat down on the toilet with my mid wandering like crazy, contemplating the reason of my insomnia.I was looking at this shelf with stuff on it, clutter, normal bathroom clutter I suppose. There were things of different colors, I don’t know what they were, it is not important. They were shapes, and interesting, very interesting at that moment in time. Normal everyday shit all of the sudden became some intriguing organization of colored shapes. I let my eyes relax, I became aware of the battle for eye dominance, each eye firing off a focused point of view so rapidly that it was as if I was watching an old school style flip book cartoon except this one was made of pages of colored shapes. I was lucid as I could be, I knew what I was looking at but was watching it as I was seeing it, as I was perceiving it. In that process of  looking, I no longer had worries. I was entertained by what I was experiencing. Its kind of priceless, being able to look at anything and find that it can become something extraordinary, and all with out the use of any hallucinogenics. That is the beauty of art, of color. It has allowed me to explore  experience, mainly through vision but also through more complex psychological levels. Painting has a lot of levels to it but its ability to transcend ordinary experience is really what draws me to it. More and more, color is becoming so important in ways that I cannot explain yet. Color is the intrinsic quality of painting, mixing color, watching color interact, imagining what would happen if I swapped a colored shape for another in a composition, that’s painting, and it is all fed by living, by the intense mind that required complex spatial structures to be tamed. I am thankful for color, what ever it is. its like some strange mathematical system that allows me to think clearly, to structure the busyness of my mind.

There are not too many times in sober waking life that I can account for the fact that colors are of a heightened intensity. These moments are few and brought on by a substantial stress. For two nights I slept little, constantly occupied with the thought of living a more fulfilling life and the struggle to attain that. That’s how I found my way to this site, so I started a page, hoping that I can start getting some publicity in this town and move a painting or two so I can get out of my day job and treat my mind to the life so desired.

I like where I live, it is a pleasant little bubble in the middle of the woods, I have an arroyo right outside, I can access it anytime I want by transporting my self down the blue spiral portal, sixteen steps to be exact.  At sunset  last night I went for a walk to get some air and wake up. It is all green out there now, it is alive, ants all over the place, strange beetles were staggering and flipping around on there backs, as if they intoxicated and dancing for another who was not around. Birds were talking and singing everywhere, which in my opinion is the coolest part of this wilderness.  The abundance of rain lately has allowed everything to be green and thick like a forest, different color flowers have bloomed, Cati once dried and shriveled are not displaying beautifully colored buds.

At one point  I looked up at the sky and saw these  these pockets of tree branches that just glowed a color I have never seen before, it was amazing and slightly scary. Some kind of violet color, radiating in front of the blue sky. I felt as if I had just eaten mushrooms, my legs were weak, my lungs full of yawns, my perception disoriented and colors alive with a sensation I have never seen.  A few weeks ago I was considering this reality, wondering if it was actually possible to see new colors. To see new colors is an idea that bothers and fascinates me, I can understand creating new color systems in paint but seeing new colors after thirty one years of visually observing the world?

I think that perception gets heightened the more we explore and embrace it. My neighbor, a practicing Buddhist, said recently that those who meditate on a constant basis can slow there perception of the world down, thus becoming more united with energy. a process that takes one closer to a more universal way of living, universal like literally tapping into pure energy. this concept was fascinating to me.  I am totally interested in visual perception, Ive explored it in many ways, mostly through drawing and painting. For me the idea of visual perception is not merely just about seeing, but how what we see effects the nature of the mind, and how the nature of the mind affects how we see and what we choose to see.

Painting lets me tap into and explore and invent concepts revolving around perception. Color is my foundation to construct some intuitively analytical and analytically intuitive compositions that tell the story of my explorations. Its painting, its a mystery, that’s why I try to write about it. I find it fascinating, the process that is, like I find perception fascinating. The past two days have showed me that there are colors I have never experienced, that our understanding of this lived world is barely explainable.  Art, true quality art, is a necessity, it allows us to form new structures of thought and understanding and appreciation.

It is the process that interests me, the transformation from the source to the compositional object. What goes on in between is a fascinating journey, I cannot explain it yet, I do not truly understand any of it. So I rely on my imagination and intuition. There is always a battle between using the imagination to build a story and using it to build a pictorial space. All preconceived ideas; this includes ideas that emerge during the growth of the piece, must be stripped clean to arrive at a true transformation. It is in this process that the final mark can be made.

The space of the physical world is really interesting to me. I use it, study it, and try to understand my perception of it. I gather information from it, its rhythms, colors, textures, its constant state of change, to explore my internal world. Painting is a visual philosophy. It is a way for me to get closer to what I am experiencing and farther away from the clutch of preconceived ideas.