My days have grown structured. I don't believe I like writing in this manner. It's unnerving. I've thought to update this for awhile, through days in wind and passivity the thoughts stream, I try to grab at little bits and preserve them..but I'm just here with a fistful of dirt. The references to nature could very well be because I am presently working on a farm. I'm trying to understand and communicate how things connect, disconnect and move about, how the alteration in environment or temperment changes the work- but it just seems trivial. Earlier I thought about how it is a common thought to regaurd ourselves as seperate from our environment but in the most literal of lights have we known anything but this earth? Plants continue prodding their way into my work. The most prominent element that has affected my work as of late I've noticed actually is not material or imagined. It's time. I'm working routine days. The time for workin
g (on painting) is scarce. I often don't even want to begin because I know I'll only be torn away, interrupted by sleep or the end of break. How often do we decide not to engage something because we know how quickly it will end? Rather a new approach has appeared. I'm working a bit more with layers. It's interesting how bluntly the manners of painting provide analogy for life in general. When I say layering, I mean that due to time restraints I have to leave a painting unfinished, sometimes for days, and return to it. The old paint dries and won't budge. The newer areas are open for any possibility, but they must be somehow resigned with what it already present and less open to change. This is like people. We get older, things, characteristics, habits, beliefs, they begin to harden and stick, and as much as new information can be welcomed, it must somehow be manipulated to fit with all that has come before it. I think about time a lot. About life progression. Like why hasn't anyone told me what age I'll be when I'll begin to loose my teeth. Didn't things like this used to get passed down? I used some berries from the farm for a warm reddish tone and painted with it. I like the idea of using elements from the surrounding. But how seperate are we from it?
Painting is my only connection to the world. This is an exaggerated form of phrasing, but carries the genuine sense of desperateness I feel in it. Within nearly everything else I sense parts of myself constantly needing to be hidden or restrained; otherwise they interfere with functioning. Maybe because art has no clearly defined function these parts are allowed to be utterly exposed since there is no function to disrupt- being what they are is their function. Form and function being one thing, that's an interesting thought.
While my desperation is waning it is only because I have seen that understanding is not instintaneous and cannot be forced. The urgency I have had in wanting others to see what I have seen has become introverted where I am wanting to know what I have seen, how I have seen anything at all, how life in one turn is so remarkably provokative and interesting, and in the next, desolate and tiresome.
When I say painting is my only connection it is because much of my identity us tied up in abstractions- in matters so small and specific, like a leaf falling in autumn, they are of no consequence and in matters so large and general, like mortality or time, that I cannot locate myself within them.
I noticed recently in my paintings that the people have been floating less, existing less in undefined segments of color. They've been on the ground, in fields, floating in small boats through the water. I take this to mean that I am associating more with environment. That's a nice thought.
NY is tiring me. I do not know when I'll go or where to, but I'll keep painting.
In my tendency to divide everything up and then re-tie it all together, the desire to witness every variant of ourselves contrasted or combined, I'm going back and forth with oil paints and water soluble oils (closer to acrylics) and am still amazed at how the materials and working with them is so symbolic of different ways of going about life. I've been wanting to exercise my 'left brain' (the logical, technical, how to part). Oil paints seem to make logic and order of more necessity- they can be toxic, mixed w/ various chemicals, have the potential for many different manners of application, allow for layering, and take a hell of a long time to dry. They require time, patience and study. With oil painting I'm suddenly allowed an overwhelming amount of possibilities, stemming from a surprising cause; limitation. Painting in my usual method of intuition doesn't quite seem to work, I get going and then realize I have to let this thing dry and this is quite frustrating and unnatural to me. Yet it also offers a new option; deliberation. Because of all the time needed, and some kind of order, I can now consider WHAT I am going to paint prior to painting. Right past the limitation is a dizzying array of options, which require a left brain function- decision making or deduction. I can work from photos, from life, sketch out ideas, or anything. Usually we associate risk taking with emotion, whether it's the harm of recklessness or the glee of spontinaity, but I'm finding the opposite. With my usual work produced in the more chaotic fashion I actually take far less risk; each stroke is an immediate reaction to the last and there is a sense of urgency that only what is happening NOW matters. I believe this requires less risk because I'm rarely aware of what could be lost. With the oil painting I can go over layer after layer and though there's a consolation in knowing I can re-paint areas, sometimes I do that and lose what I was going after. It also allows for more risk and experimentation because while painting I understand that I will approach a piece days or weeks later and that what I am doing in a present moment will become the past and will affect the future.
Our reasoning allows us contemplation and retrospection. Romanticism is whatever it is we care enough about to contemplate and remember.
Good night.
I just used this turpentine varnish stuff for the first time and I think I may be gradually asphyxiating myself; in addition I'm smoking, which opens my possibilities for cancer and spontaneous combustion. Now may be the moment to rush and buy up all my work, the investment value would spike.
* * * *
I have been wanting to speak with you. I'll try to work out the matter, right here, without preparation. That is just it...preparation, forethought and the desire to have oneself in some kind of order before presentation. The more I've been studying this in myself the more I think our attempts at perfection may be our biggest mistake of all. We want to see ourselves, our world, our lives as meaningful, and in this earnest desire, we construct ideas for ourselves to live up to, and then later disown these same ideas, having it appear that it was something outside ourselves which set the course.
To present a clear depiction of what it means to live would be a limited and exclusive contrivance, because I don't know what it means to live, nor how to live. But I do believe there is something outside & inside ourselves which 'sets the course' (or IS the course) and that our desire for control is what inspires our projections of how life 'ought' to be.
...This is not what I wanted to say. (and I hang my head in frustration.)
I decided to use this area to work out my thoughts about painting, art & life in general. Why am I so tentative right now? When I speak & paint I am almost completely without discretion (often to my disadvantage) but I'm writing this and I'm already imagining you reading it and I have no idea who you are or how you are...well, how are you? Who are you?Wait- perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. I made an alarming discovery a few nights ago. Coffee in my system does not assist me in painting, and this is a terrible thing for me to learn because I am very happy with my addiction. I pour coffee into me until my brain feels light (and um, stimulated) and then my eyes are roaming all around and I know I am ready to begin something. But it's hard to keep a steady hand. It's hard to keep a steady train of thought regardless of what's in my system or where I am going with this.My paintings have begun to pile up like bodies. This is really what they look like to me. I feel like they have an existence independent of me, and keeping them here in my hole of a dwelling is almost like keeping them tied up in my basement. I don't think they belong to me, when I bring them out to sell it seems like I'm just waiting for whoever they belong to to show up and claim them.
The paintings are not what are important to me. The process of painting is my involvement. Internal monologues streams through me, in words and in shapes and diagrams. I carry on somewhat fictional conversations with flat two dimensional peoples of whose existence I am in much of question of as my own. I think these people were alive, are alive, and that death is a part of their life that they know much more of than I do.
g (on painting) is scarce. I often don't even want to begin because I know I'll only be torn away, interrupted by sleep or the end of break. How often do we decide not to engage something because we know how quickly it will end? Rather a new approach has appeared. I'm working a bit more with layers. It's interesting how bluntly the manners of painting provide analogy for life in general. When I say layering, I mean that due to time restraints I have to leave a painting unfinished, sometimes for days, and return to it. The old paint dries and won't budge. The newer areas are open for any possibility, but they must be somehow resigned with what it already present and less open to change. This is like people. We get older, things, characteristics, habits, beliefs, they begin to harden and stick, and as much as new information can be welcomed, it must somehow be manipulated to fit with all that has come before it. I think about time a lot. About life progression. Like why hasn't anyone told me what age I'll be when I'll begin to loose my teeth. Didn't things like this used to get passed down? I used some berries from the farm for a warm reddish tone and painted with it. I like the idea of using elements from the surrounding. But how seperate are we from it?
