The Process

“..Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is limitless.”

Carl Jung

“I’m not sure what that means, but who cares”

Astara Mills

It would be ideal if we could on occasion, invert our minds so that everything is thrown out there, even the information we do not know we posses, so that it is made accessible. Then we may be able to understand. From time to time I think it is possible, with some imagination, to encounter spaces which do exactly that; spaces which are the land of the subconscious. In this land stories are told in a different way.

There was no point to prolong the spiritual dismantling. The rocks and heat were cleansing, the space of the canyons grounding and humbling. I found neither desire nor time to force any creativity. My time there was to be like a sponge, absorbing and releasing whatever was needed.

I spent five nights in Canyonlands National Park, exploring a new and strangely sculpted landscape. The overall feel of the land brought to my attention that I was walking on a giant brain of rock, exploring its memories and sharing its ghosts

The evenings were still. The hour transition when the moon was rising and sun was falling created the most brilliantly colored landscape I have ever encountered. Climbing on top of a ridge to view this timeless display one could find mind blowing vistas. You were truly encompassed by a full spectrum of color, each minute offering quiet transitions.

The stillness went right into the mind, as if you were floating through it. It was the summer solstice, an evening I now know why people celebrate.

The Joint Trail was far to get to by foot, an eleven mile round trip hike in over one hundred degree heat. The trail begins by walking into a giant rock split in half. For a quarter mile there is nothing but twenty foot vertical black walls on each side of you and a path of sun creating a transcendental path. At the end there was a cave filled with hundreds of cairns. The sun came through each side, igniting the edges of the rock forms in the dusty air. I had entered the eerie lair of the trickster.

Abstraction is a beautiful mystery, one born from the temperament of an artist, and shaped by their experience.

Painting has become drawing, and drawing for me is a way to directly connect with the lived world. It is a research as much as it is an art. Composing color and line explores a language of feeling and experiencing. The need for accurate resemblance of a space and objective definition has been taken over by desire to transform the observed space into something of a mental landscape.

The process of painting intrinsically demands the development of an abstract language; it is impossible to expressively articulate the action seeing three dimensional spaces onto a flat surface without the dismantling and or modification of observed edges.

My paintings are built of elements carefully drawn and organized through a naturally responsive rhythm; this rhythm is a very critical to the construction of abstract communication. The rhythm is always disparate.

Structure and feeling engage in an important symbiotic relationship to visually create what an experience may look like. Exciting elements of the painting often need to be destroyed, becoming fertile ground for more important energies to grow upon. The conclusion is always decisive.

The moments of loose clarity are when the best decisions happen. You reach a point in the process where all thought has ceased, there is only action based on a sub conscious awareness of the compositional dynamics.

Stories are seen but not told.

There is beauty in imagination. This makes mundane everyday experience a lot more interesting and fruitful when we can find a unique way to look at things. Take the ordinary dried up lifeless sponge everyone has sitting by their sink. It’s completely useless, but when dropped in a sink full of bubbly water, thousands of chambers fill up to make it an effective soft everyday scrubbing tool. Like the sponge, our mind absorbs vast amounts of information so that our awareness can be effectively understood. It is not necessary, for biological survival, to understand how we see, just what we are seeing.  Exploring this process of gathering information has allowed me to open up the doors of abstraction in a process strictly based on perceptual observation.

Fiona, the fleshy green plant I am looking at, hangs from three wires in a wicker container, at eye level, a foot or so in front of my head in relation to where I am sitting right now.  She pivots gently back and forth in front of an open window, the soft breeze swaying her through the southern light.  Her leaves slowly move in and out of shadows, creating a lively rhythm between the internally glowing acidy green and deep rich brown violets of the shadows.

I could not record her like a photograph would, but my drawing would be reminiscent of this moment, it would tell the story of these fifteen minutes of contemplation. Drawing her today would yield vastly different results than if I were to draw her tomorrow.  Each work session carries with it a unique state of being; it is inevitable that my aesthetic concerns regarding the relationship between shapes, colors, textures, and rhythms would be different from one day to the next.

 I approach my process by working in series, each group of work focusing on the same visual source until I desire new information. It is the consistency of studying real space through perceptual drawing which has allowed me to tap into the language of abstraction. Drawing is disciplined.  Any line I ever put on paper or wood is literally felt as if I am slicing the shape out of real space. No mark is arbitrary. Drawing the world one shape at a time is a means of slowing down my visual perception, allowing room for the often subconscious mind to intervene and play with my sensibility of proportion.  Being able to achieve rhythm in this mode of working is the beginning of an expressive architecture.

This restructuring of space creates a foundation to explore the dynamics of color, which is used to control the visual movement of the work. Each painting has a certain breath to it, its space expanding and compressing at various rates. Color will sometimes swallow up smaller shapes to form a larger one, greatly altering the speed of the work and forcing new internal structures to be explored.  The process of inventing color begs freedom, in doing so only returns mystery. Like water connecting sky and earth, color is the connective element between opposite realms, in regards to the process, these being concrete investigation and abstract communication.

Sunrise could be the most visually intriguing time of the day. The world emerges out of darkness, beginning a magnificent color show, bringing to light forms which were covered up by the Prussian blue night.

The first group of works from 2010 is complete. I have moved my studio back to the old rickety room attached to the end of the apartment. It has windows on three sides, some are broken, cold air leaks prevalently during the winter months. The main large windows face west. The room was originally designed to sit in and watch the sunsets, the windows are all hand assembled, the wood original and flaking apart.  This entire house was built with great love and a positive energy which is strongly connected to the uniqueness of the surrounding land. In the warmer months I could not ask for a better studio.

I cleaned it, vacuumed it, rearranged it. The new still life is built in front of the west facing windows. The exterior space contains tree tops, a few buildings, a fire house in the distance, and a good view of the horizon. The one unique quality about the land scape is that it offers so many possibilities of diversifying texture to create space. While one can look out of a window here and see similar trees and shrubs, these elements can be interpreted abstractly through diverse textures and rhythms. Maybe those trees can become  a system of circles integrating and  dissipating into space, they can be anything.

I can’t tell what has happened in this last group or works,  if they are advancing or static or what is going on with them. I can understand when they finish, even when it is time for  a group of works to be done, but i just don’t know if what they posses has lasting integrity. This dreaded feeling of waste keeps a challenge alive. Always try to move the paintings forward, somehow. But how much could be done?

 Tonight I opened up a book and came across, at random, a painting by Correggio called “The Holy Night”. What fantastic movements between large areas of light and dark. This is something I am missing, the transition of large pockets of information. The abstraction has become more patterned oriented, spread out like a shot gun blast, I want to reel that back, consolidate it a bit so that it is easier to drift into and out of the pictorial space.

The desire to constantly explore can be bit of a burden. Not necessarily a bad one, but a mental weight, something that occupies the mind throughout the day, the curiosity unfolding during day dreams. One thing that I have been thinking about lately is that the process of building color is vastly different than it is with oils. Acrylic paint is more like colored drawing compared to what I use to consider painting. My idea of painting was building color systems on a glass palette, twenty or thirty colors, then using them to build a composition. It was all about making the color. I cannot attain this with acrylics. The color is too chalky, it changes its identity once dried, mixes poorly, it just does not have that gem like luminosity that is intrinsic with oils.

Luminosity, the glowing sensation of internal structure, now comes by the means of shifting edges. It is reminiscent of the sensation of seeing afterglows, ones that are similar to staring at a light and turning your head away. Imagine if the edges of what we see linger in our minds and overlap what we see next; the awareness of our existence shifting from an observer of space to actually existing within and being part of that space. We are part of what we see. I can imagine the eyes vacuuming up visual bits of information, and all these shapes and colors floating around the tunnel of memory somewhere. When I am agitated I align myself with agitated shapes and uncertain rhythms, and when at peace the composition will exude and expansive and soft energy rather than an imploding self destructive feel. It is always nice to inhibit the weightlessness of the world that painting takes me into. Sometimes I can attain it during the process of working, find a place where there are no thoughts, only actions controlled by nothing more than breathing. In order to attain that space I have to work through all the dark and light thoughts which have existed in my mind up to that point. I have to strip my ego clean of identity and association. It is not an easy process, and a space that can rarely be attained without much discipline of practice.  

There was a coyote at my door step two nights ago. I heard its call, intrigued by how close it was I walked onto my deck without turning on the lights. Another howl let me know that he was at the base of the spiral staircase, thirteen steps below me. What an experience to feel its call in the pitch black of night only a few feet away. Although I knew I was not being rational,  I feared it would climb my stairs to see what or who I was, I feared maybe it was there to meet me, not to harm me but to make contact, to introduce itself.  A forty pound wild dog seemed to turn into a giant psychological monster, yet its voice reverberated so peacefully.  It was the mystery of the unknown, the darkness, what I could not see that brought me fear. Imagination is not always a pleasant territory to explore, it taps into the lightest of light and darkest of dark; art allows me to discover the balance necessary to maintain.

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.