The Process

The aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. Wittgenstein

For a long time, a few years or so, when I first started to move into abstraction, I thought and wanted to believe that what was naturally occurring was because I studying how I saw. I thought I was painting the way I was perceiving information. But I was just learning, growing, developing into the first mature phase of painting. I could not understand why I felt the need to draw from life every day, just draw anything, for the sake of doing it, yet when it came time for color work all that structure that I was training myself to see did not really matter. I could no longer paint from observation. I had no desire to render or create a semi resemblance. If painting were to be real it needed to go deeper.

Painting is about color. That is its intrinsic quality. It is the essential nature of painting. Color is an endless exploration. It vast and magnificent permutations will take a lifetime of study and still never be controlled. I cannot plan the color systems I use. They have to be discovered and  they change naturally and slowly with each group of woks. They change with different materials I use. Recently I have been exploring working collages together with watercolor paper, that kind of soft light from the paper I could never attain with acrylics. With oils I add cold wax into, creating dense satiny color clusters. I switch materials to discover new possibilities. I switch materials to experience more.

Color has visual energy that is very similar to magnets. This is very fascinating. It is something that is felt and can not be proven with science or charted with theory. Harmonious organizations can be  mathematically understood, but feeling color is a mystery and hopefully will always remain that. In the real world, the physical world, we are surrounded by color that is always proportionately harmonious. It works because it is nature. In painting we try to utilize this thing of nature, learn from it, but we cannot make it perfect; we have to invent our own story.

If I have eighty integrated shapes on a three by four foot panel, and I switch one of those colors, that will drastically change everything. It can solidify or destroy that present state of the composition. We cannot change, with out imaginations, a color we see in the physical world, at least I cannot. But with painting it is possible, and through adjusting color the composition becomes altered. How to construct the proper system of colors which will create the most interesting visual dynamics is the underlining force of abstraction. Painting is a puzzle, a complex problem about how to make something beautiful out of the sensations I have experienced in life.

Encountering a painting should be an experience in itself. Paintings should be powerful, engaging. For me this is not through the use of imagery, it is through the use of color and line, through the exploration of pictorial space, through the use of layering information. I want my paintings to be solid, to be an expressive architecture, one that is capable of grabbing the mind and guiding it through its network of shifting edges and magnetic color. A successful painting will draw you in and work your imagination.

Color is the essence of painting but color needs structure. It needs a form, a shape. Everything we see is shapes. They are everywhere. The world is solid bits of colored shapes. If you take time to explore what you are seeing it really is fascinating. The exploration of   realities I experience, internal and external, are what guided me towards working with color. It has been, and will continue to be,  a mysterious and beautiful experience.

I am so curious about this perception of this world that I took to drawing everyday once I started. I wanted to study and connect, to decipher the psychological tensions that ran through my soul. Drawing was it. It was my connection to the world I felt so distant from. A properly drawn line is a very true moment. When my eyes are locked on what I am observing there is no other space between it and me. A line is like a bolt of lightning instantly connecting, uniting two disparate worlds with a furry of energy.

The drawn line in these paintings finds a different use. Here it becomes a structuring element. The line becomes like the skeleton of a building, allowing rooms and levels to be built. In painting these rooms and levels are moments of thought,  creating a pictorial space composed of contemplative layers. The lines and shapes intertwine, weaving together in such a way that the composition takes on a sensation of fluctuating edges. Forms can be discovered and dismissed by the curious mind. The  paintings are taking on a language of an interactive space, a space where the mind can reflect and imagine.

From studying the physical world I have learned about abstraction. Through studying abstraction I become more aware of what is going on around me.  A the heart of it all the process takes from the physical world and to attain a metaphysical space. It becomes a symbiotic relationship of analytic study and creative invention. It  is the most authentic way to tell my story.

What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.  -Martin Heidegger

How little is there that we know.

 The true nature of our experience can only be that. Pictures may seek to explain this ambiguous territory but none will ever get it so that it is exactly as it was. Perceptual experience is  complex. With painting this can be explored metaphorically through layers and dimensional edges, constructing within the interpretative  mind rich memories and curiosities. Painting, in its essence, abstract visual energy, seems to me to be the best means of  expressing the experience of life.

Paintings rely on the viewer for their completion. I would like for my paintings to be an object of action; presenting a challenge of  ”what is there”.

What if we could interact with them in such a way as to change the structure of the composition physically. Here begins the idea of the interactive triptych. Three panels will be mounted in a atmospheric color field which will come off the wall at a comfortable angle about chest high. Each panel will be painted on both sides, each side acting as a completed work in itself. These panels could be flipped, rotated, and swapped with each of the others. Effectively allowing each of the double sided panels to serve the role of twelve different functions. One triptych with many permutations.

This creates an interactive object, encouraging the viewer to work for the next solution; in doing so activating their imagination and creating a deeper level of thoughtful interaction with the work of art.

Life an art are reliant upon each other for their growth. We need life to express what we experience and we need the expression to understand what we are experiencing. This keeps us spiritually awake.

This is the space I want art to function in. To go beyond itself, to act as an absorbing mirror for the soul of the viewer.

As I looked around I was taken into thought by the way the trees walked off into the woods. There was a sense of nostalgia.

I remembered how much I enjoyed that kind of space; the night ,close by home, with forests right outside,  lit by house lights. I realized last night that is impossible experience the same thing twice. Memories may be similar but the perfect collection of colors will never be encountered again. Color, when contemplated with the intent to understand it on an experiential realm, is an  infinite world with no boundaries. What we see on the out side and what happens internally can be united through the exploration of color. It strips the boundaries which define levels of reality. It is color that is the constant connector among these disparate worlds.

Last night the trees brought me peace, a sensation of Utopia. But within that scene there was  a being to remind me of the necessity of balance. It was the desert spoon plant, known as “sotol”. The sotol is an sphere of green glowing spike leaves shooting out of the ground. The way it was light in contrast with dark green blue of the car behind it created a amazing moment in the visual interplay of what I was experiencing.  Its texture was so different that anything else in view that it stuttered my thoughts.  Despite its beauty, the plant brought me deeper into an uncomfortable plane of thinking. The plants coarse and abrasive  visual texture was like knives thrusting into a belly; its sharp leaves penetrating deeply into the body of all surrounding colors. The visual essence of that plant brought me to a state of mind comparable to what I was seeing. What we see affects how we feel, and how we are feeling will determine what we are willing to see. It is a constant interaction between interpretation and action.

The sotol has been used for thousands of years to produce a spirit similar to tequila. Although I was unable to find a picture the following description from wikipedia  aptly describes the spiritual beingness of the plant- “humanoid figure with a spray of spiky leaves for a head and a black stripe down the middle of its body may represent the magical spirit of sotol. Sometimes it appears in connection with hunting scenes. Sometimes it appears surrounded by orange ochre flames and black smoke.”

Sometimes there is no boundaries; the thoughts and the physical emerge, interacting with each other, as was the case last night with the sotol.  A year ago there was a moment of a ten lined June beetle that can further support the beauty of undivided worlds. One night, up on the deck where I was living, there was an invasion of hundreds of beetles. The numbers were odd enough to draw me outside and investigate the happening. Almost all of them were the traditional June beetles, there were a handful of  the much larger cactus longhorn beetles and two of a new species I have yet to see. They were the ten-lined june beetle. Large and lightly colored, they have striped running the length of their back and the most unique tentacles which appear to be little fuzzy hands if you look close enough.  I layed on the ground to begin taking picture of  the new visitor.  About ten shots into the photo shoot a month decided to land on its back, and hung out with the beetle like they were buddies.

It was one of those magical moments in nature that may never happen again. Perhaps it was a random coincidence or maybe the moth knew what was going on and wanted to come say hi. The next spring we were reminiscing about the randomness of that beetle invasion and the uniqueness of the stripped beetle and the moth who decided to catch a ride to nowhere with him. No sooner that we had that conversation did a ten-lined june bettle fly into the window right above the futon we were sitting on.  As if to say hey I am still here…Those moments, like the experience with the sotol, remind me that there are levels of reality we often pass right through without paying much mind. The beauty of painting, of working with color, is that is slows this all down, strips the barriers away; it reminds me every day that there is magic out there.

You reason color more than you reason drawing… Color has a logic as severe as form.  -Pierre Bonnard

Thoughts on the process 11.10.11……

The structure of the composition will change with the introduction of new colors and the colors will change with the introduction of a new shape.

It is a search for the working system.

This system is the only one possible which can solve the problem.  A painting will change form many times until no alteration can be made that will not destroy the structure of the composition. This is harmonic proportion.

As an object, paintings have a definitive end. As a process, they have no distinct beginning.

The paintings need error. This creates change.

Paintings are layers of thoughts woven together to form a nest.

The act of drawing is the act of eliminating all unnecessary information.

I had to understand the idiosyncrasies of the process to be able to get into these works. I am beginning to understand that they are a balance between knowledge and irrationality.

My mind is busy and quick, rapidly firing off memories and discovering questions. My drawings are my written thoughts; they are as closest and most honest I can come to expressing the immediacy of a situation. A drawing may only last a few minuets and contain a dozen lines. But in that short amount of time I am truly focused. My eyes do not leave the subject I look at. This makes it a bit hard to work in public  but it is where I need to be. In the shared world there is natural movement and psychological tension. It is an ideal place to be gathering my information for the new works.

Whether it is a knife edge cutting through dense tacky paint or a pen scratching into paper, it is the physical resistance of making a line which allows me to truly connect with what I am looking at. My eyes look and my hands feel. Drawing abstract moments from real life, paintings abstract moments from the drawings. In each part of the process there is  connective control and intuitive response.

The aim is transformation.

There was a crystal vase that was broken for a second time in a crowded restaurant. I was part of the problem. Although I was there seeking help my presence was not welcome. I was shot twice in the left side, the bullets still in my body.  I continued on to find a hospital but that building only housed the dark territories of my memory. Each room having nightmarish images of past experiences. From there I came to a dwelling where I found three sides of myself. Three different personalities were in a room with the devil, who harassed them with arrows and guns. One of the people accepted the fear and was the target of the punishment, the second was at peace and could not be bothered, the third, the one I identified with at that moment was the aggressor and sought to discover ways around the situation.

The day before I entered a world no less ominous. I was being chased down by a car. Unable to run I decided to fly.  I put my hands together and pointed them towards the sky. The most amazing sensation of weightless transportation overcame my physical being. From my hands down I dissolved into light. I felt as if I were a pile of sand being sucked up by a shop vac. As quick as that happen I began to materialize. This time, in a counter clockwise motion, the particles came back together and I was in a new land. This was a unique dream in a number of ways. Mainly that it was the first where I was truly lucid and used that knowledge to escape danger. Beyond that I was  also conscious in waking life, aware of the sounds going on around me and the smell of coffee being made. I was present in different spaces at one time.

For the most part I am not concerned with the symbolic meaning of dreams but am certainly amazed by their mystery and the sensations experienced when in such a space. The idea of shifting realities has fascinated me for many years. It is what first led me to artistic exploration.  The world is far greater that what we see,  it has been  beautiful to discovery that we are all individuals with infinite experiences and expressions.

I see my art as a process related to the sensations of drifting in and out of realities. When I am drawing people walking around in the every day world I am thinking about nothing except focusing my line on what I see.  On the contrary, when I am painting I am thinking about everything. The very process of building, applying,  and rebuilding colors is like travelling through some loose understanding of memory. Its like having thirty different glimpses of thought, each one abstracted and identified by a color and shape. They are recorded on that surface and by the end of the painting they are all compressed and layered on each other to from something new. Kind of like a really good sandwich.

Strangely  the drawings are a critical part of the process that  have little to do visually  with the end result of the painting. This bothers me but it is really the guts of the process right now. Drawing is one means of abstracting information from life and working with color is a means of abstracting information from the drawings. It is kind of a strange filtering system used to get beyond what is seen. I keep expecting that I will some day make a painting which looks like the drawings but it is just not meant to be, not now.

Drawing is not a mysterious activity- Leon Kossoff

The first of the public works are wrapping up and they look like colored stick figures in ominous spaces. They float on top of a liquidy world. The only thing that separates them is the outline which creates their mass. This is their shell, a barrier to the world. It is this line which possess and expresses their identity, for in between that line and their exterior of the energy remains the same. The same texture and pattern and color which surrounds them runs right through them. They are at once individuals connected with their environment and surrounding neighbors. I though I had no connection with the people I drew in public but I could not have been more wrong. For when I paint I am cooking them down to people I have been. I am recreating them, and when that mark is made which forms their presence I am struck with a ghostly sense as if I had just created a real entity. They are memories of sensations I have experienced; I have stood like that man stood, I have faced the awkwardness of the two strangers sharing a bench. These characters float in the color of memory. I relate to these beings. These paintings are not about pictorial space. They use paint to dig through the depths of the ego to discover the essence of life. They are about what it means to be human. They are a search for identity.

” It is not a question of fancy dress or symbolic objects. Its this reinvention of the physical world, and everything else comes from that. ” Frank Auerbach

The idea of painting a head, or portraiture, seems to me one of the most challenging of subjects. I have been rather happy and comfortable over the past few years painting from still lives which I made in the studio. These paintings became internal contemplation of  structures which never  moved or changed on  their own accord. The observed subject was lifeless. The resulting paintings grew into a means of making a comfortable abstraction rather than an object of substance.  In the past few months I have had a strong desire to paint people again so I’ve gone into public to gather my information from the every day world. Out there it is very complex, a vast space full of physical movement and psychological interplay, its like a really good movie with nothing unusual happening.

Right now I am focusing on one space to gather information for the paintings. It is a balcony perspective, overlooking the center of downtown Santa Fe. A place the locals call the plaza. Where I draw offers a panoramic view of both streets and buildings. There are two cross walks, a green field with trees, walkways, a food stand, and another balcony to my left where people eat outdoors. At any given time if the weather is good there are seventy or co people floating around this space. The number of benches surrounding the field offer strangers a chance to rest and engage with each other, whether they talk to one another or not.  It is a space of constant motion and energy.

This particular location gives me a chance to work with people (not in regards to the portrait) and develop questions I have regarding the traditional ideas of figuration, abstraction, and pictorial space. At farthest distance I draw the observed space from everything is very small. People are reduced to a line or two. Transformed into paint they become nothing more than a buttery colored swatch. If there is a crowd of people waiting inline at the food stand, the become drawn as a series of open lined forms, creating a sense of timeless depth.  My concern right now is not with the identity of these individuals; it is the space they exist in, how they are moving through it, and interactive space between them.

The nature of working from public spaces not only offer new opportunities for spatial exploration in paint but also engages a different psychological realms. Working in public exposes part of the artistic process which for the most part is a private study. This puts me on edge as I am working, I become very sensitive to surrounding environments. It is impossible not be aware of what is going on. As a result that energy feeds into the drawing, affecting subconscious and  intuitive decisions.  It is a beneficial insecurity.

Drawing is memory, a record of interactive thought. For the first time the paintings are utilizing my creative memory, I feel as if I am drifting off to that moment, attempting to assemble information as it was experienced. I work off of the many drawings done from that particular spot. They become guides which help  to spark the sensations of being in that space. So far the paintings are very small in scale, two by seven inches and five by fifteen. At that scale everything becomes reductive and condensed. The colors in these works are boiling down to more lucid systems, they are not as fleeting and decorative as they were with the water based acrylic. I’ve been working wet into wet, using a cold wax medium to get a more butter feel to the paint. The paint becomes a thick liquid form of light, its visceral quality possessing the means to transport me to the space where emotive and physical realities meet.  Color becomes the substance of space, transforming that every day experince remembered by the drawn line.

….maybe it is the beauty of balance.

Over the past year I lost track of the one thing that always proved to be true; to develop the paintings I need to follow the drawings. The drawn line is so direct and pure that it immediately unites the hidden mind with the physical world without the hesitation of thought.  Drawing is equivalent to breathing while painting is equivalent to cooking. Working with color is infinite and complex, the territories to explore are so vast that sustained focus is needed to maintain sanity.

I recently exlpored a short path of trying to let the paitnings lead the drawings. This did not work, there was no sustaining power. It led me to rebuild my process, get back to basics. Cezanne said it best- A carrot when freshly observed has the power to start a revolution. What I get out of that is learn to see the world with your own eyes, fresh eyes. Disregard what you think you know and begin to learn how you experience. When the painter can construct his or her experience through color, then they can truly begin to grow.

The paintings over the past year have been uncomfortably removed from their subject. The goal became to create an internal world but appropriating structural elements I found in the physical world. It was a means to constructing abstract compositions. What the drawings never loose is the direct interaction with the observed subject. They too will become abstract in some way, because i am responding to peoples movements and psychological hiccups, proportions will change and shapes will shift. These studies are more about interaction, engagement, a constant exchange of energy with what is observed. This is the realm I want the paintings to get to.

I always thought of abstraction as a process, a language which forms when something is being deciphered and altered into a clearer state. Last week when I was drawing some strangers eating lunch at a bar I began to think of “abstraction”  as a metaphor of the situation. In terms of pictorial space, when work is made from direct observation, the organization of energies of the composition stand in for the experience of being in a specific place and interacting with the subject through drawing. Those two at the bar had just met, he walked in the door and sat by the lady who was sitting alone a rather large empty bar. It was really interesting to see the entire story unfold, it was beautifully awkward. A situation I could relate too.  Their body language said so much about their interest in each other. I was drawing this constant display of shrinking and expanding shapes, shapes which breathed with their energy.  Shape(space in the physical world, shape in pictorial world) is a metaphor because it is always ellusive, constantly changing unless recorded by some artistis means. Once a shape is recorded it speaks of that moment in time; through the course of a five minuets the space between the strangers is in a constant state of change, I may draw that space ten different times, creating an overlapping system of shapes; creating a representation of energy rather than a representation of smiles.

The public works really have had an effect on my thinking process and where I want the content of the work to explore. It is really interesting to me to think that I can use human interaction as a source for exploring abstraction, or rather using abstraction to explore human interaction…

So i am making a move to focus on one thing that I truly enjoy, color. I will be producing a large series of small scale oil painting over the next month. Oil paint has vastly different light properties than acrylic. The color is much more luminous and unmatched in its jewel like quality when a bit of cold wax is added into it. I am thinking of opaque colors here, which really I find to be one of the most appealing uses of color in painting as it revelas the clarity of thought. Working with oil paint involves mixing systems of colors on a palette prior to and during working on the paintings. Having a system of colors to work from means being able to work with color in a rhythmic that could not be attained with acrylic based paint. That is a major step in uniting the painting process closer to the speed of the drawings and being able to work without too much self critical thought.

Painting is thinking through color and it works best when it is not over thought. That is where I felt I have been in the past few months, really analyzing the works, forcing some abstraction and then forcing myself to destroy it and find fresh results. It lost its fun. Time to get back to mixing paint, rediscover the innocent seduction of color.

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.