Pre-Appocolyptic Painting?

Wondering lately what the difference is between practice and a finished piece. The ideas my mind is quick to fetch are obvious and don't explain what I'm thinking about. Mostly, I'm thinking that for now my focus needs to lie in just making my work, and selling and showing need to ask less attention. Back before Katrina I felt like I knew exactly what I was doing; I was pulling up these dark little pieces of life and bringing them out where people would pass by or stop and squint to remark, "Oh- that's a part of me." Then they would buy it, the money seeming so incidental, just a trademark or formality for this process to carry out its purpose. But now- I'm no longer clear on what I want to communicate- and if what I want is what actually needs to be said. I can see that just for myself, this inclincation towards order and pre-conception has meaning for me. Outwardly, as goes the world at large- it seems like we're heading for the appocolypse.

"Are you Suffering?"

It's raining. It's going well. A nervous energy courses through me. I sat last night with some five or six recently finished paintings hanging from my aged wall and just looked for awhile. I feel that I finally have a hand hold, that I'm just begining on something that will be expanded upon. Endlessly I peer and ask, what choices are being made to bring a painting into being? What's worth noticing? Do I start from a sketch, a photograph, a memory? It's so often heard, the prompting- go experiment! And it always sounds so fanciful to me, I picture some empty-nested housewife, someone with a life more secure than my own, and after staring at their 90th attempt at some flowers in a vase they rip the bun out and throw some loose canvas on the floor and attack it. They 'experiment' the way adolescents do with sex or drugs, they run wild, they foget to wash their hair for weeks in this mad dionysian frenzy of creativity. Their usual reserve is rejuvinated by spontanity. But I rarely brush my hair, not for behomienism but out of laziness. I used to scatter the paper all over the floor and hunch down with it and get into it and this was the natural way. But since I noticed something, a dissatisfaction rose in me, maybe I just grew some. And so my experimentation is quite the opposite, methodical and pre-thought. I'm still going through a laundrey list of new experiences- and I still get quite excited over some of them- but mostly they would bore the laymen. I found a thrill in experiencing what viscisouty & adhesion meant after staring uncomprehending at all those art store catalogues. I'm seeing light in gradations, but it is more an experience of unveiling, de-mystifying, finding explanation in the place of revelation. I'm doing so much work I'm pissed I've had to get a regular job, that my camera broke so I can't share the latest paintings here. I've fallen into rich hours of resentment, where I spite any artist who shows a light hearted concern for their craft. It's not fair to them, but it's not fair for any of us. Lately when i meet someone who tells me their an artist or introduces me to one, I want to ask with all this accumulated accusation, "Are you suffering?" or just say, "Oh, I'm so sorry." While my moments of discovery are jubulent and this new found determination is strange and new to me, it gives me a quiet internal pride, a soft sense voice whispering, "You might get there, you'll keep going.." Equally far down I know there is no where to get, and so I can enjoy just being in this place of knowing what I want. The frustration is more outwardly directed and though unfelt in this moment (an untraceable anxiety seems to have replaced all else) it's been showing up enough lately to be fit for mention. This is all to be said for this moment.

-------Order-------

The second guess gets tiresome. I'm pleased with myself to have cultivated some discipline, I am painting just about every day. In earlier conversation with a friend I told my dissatisfaction with what I view as polar inclinations of our culture- the drive to progress forward and the yearning to go back. I want to cash in my ticket with the latter ideal, seeing it in ways as the less harmful of two impossibilities, but I don't really believe in it. It's impossible to erase what we've already experienced, but I feel it in my bones that were just going too quickly, we were anxious to forget where we've been, resourceful and fast paced in the construction of industry & technology. I learned about the painters who worked in classical style to an uncommon result. I'm going in a different way- slowly considering traditional methods and results, but without the old structure, without apprenticeship I'm picking up tools randomly and learning at the cost of my comfort & habits. Right now I want to end up with traditional feeling paintings that are arrived at through basically untraditional means. Tradition chained us so long, even in me, I feel the resentment that leads to a break away. But we've had that, right? Numerous time, and we'll have plenty more. I want to present images that are unchanging, that are spiritual and human, industrious & uncertain, but not 'out there' or seperate from the world we live in.
These matters can be questioned intricately forever, because I wonder now and often times if the world I'm experiencing is common to the one your experiencing. Most fine art I encounter I feel repulsed by in it's haughtiness of individual expression and what appears to me as absence of meaning, and then worse a ring around the rosy song and dance that praises itself for this. But Who decides what is true? Why, we all do, with our lives in every act, thought, feeling & moment. I don't believe we 'create' truth, to me life is the experience of getting reduced to what we are. We guess and throw ourselves at various ideals but what is lasting has always been lasting, except perhaps after it has done its part. The artist is the middle man who works in private, steps out into the public glare, stares with fright at the mass, and then out of that, one person steps out, they receive the sign they are ready for, and they take it with them back to the private. So art should not just be someone expressing themselves & it should not just be a reflection of communal life, but an individual expressing themselves in such a way that someone else may look over and recognize themselves within it.

The Usual; The Intense

I am amazed that I've done such a poor job in updating this. Once a month doesn't seem too lofty of a time frame, so from today I'll attempt for that. The struggles going on in me over why and how to work have come to a lull, where work feels more approachable though less climatic. It's funny because as I explore order and have really kept my eyes open for it, most of the people I mention this to dissuade me and seem to hint that as a general rule there is freedom 'outside of the box' and little more than oppression in tradition and rules. Of course my own perceptions color this, and though fascinated and transfixed, order does not yet feel natural or even necessary.
Wait, I contradict. Recently with getting into oils I saw the reasons behind different rules, and I suppose the more we can view rules as suggestions the more options we are left with. And what is more frightening than options? For all our cries of freedom, in most cases, when you leave a man to his own devices he does nothing trecherous and nothing glorious. Most of our lives are spent taking care of things that continue our lives. The climatic moments of bravery or vengence are gaped at in awe until life simply resumes, continues rolling on and we have to wonder what will be for breakfast.

In the Thick of It

Lately I've been writing a lot of notes to myself about painting. I'm at some indefinet place with the work that has me uneasy. I can't rest in the chaos and mystery that I lived in until now. I still feel these elements are necessary to present in order to counter balance what feels like an impending insanity to convince ourselves that 'everything is under controle' and the universe will be catergorized and explained soon enough. I can't explain it. But it's looking more necessary to study and grasp these inclinations of controle, linear processing and goal oriented function. It's always looked so futile to me, because if there is no static goal in living why would there be one in painting? I can only guess that it's a way of learning to live better within time. The whole human method of setting about on a path with the idea that you're going to get where you think you're going has seemed absurd to me. It now appears approachable. Is it even possible to anticipate where or what something is REALLY going to be? (How could we even develop expectations when we haven't experienced it yet?) In this consideration it seems outlandish that we do this, but I assume tomorrow that when I go to brush my teeth, when I turn the faucet that water will come out. I'm even assuming that I'll wake up in the morning. Life makes no false promise of assuring us anything. This general assurance that we concoct for ourselves is a necessary illusion. While I'm in this experimental floundering I'm going to attempt exploring this. A related conundrum I've been asking myself is- does a painting show itself more through the process or the final piece? (Say the subject is 'grief' does one paint an image of someone grieving, or do they paint a work that will invoke the experience of grief from the viewer?) (And how can anyone presume what will affect another person, a stranger for that matter?) Somehow I believe the ends and the means can be synthesized. Art, like science and philosophy, are not about accepting or condemning but extending the question. Rather than saying, "Ah, it is a necessary illusion, I'll just keep living on!" or "Ah! It is an illusion, it's false, let's do away with it!" I can study both what makes it necessary and it's illusory properties.