Questions of Time

A general dissapointment with my work is stirred only by preoccupations with what I am actually doing. Latly I've been looking at my work less as images with content and subject matter, and more as a process that triggers and twines certain parts of me. For instance, with the piece above, I noticed that I seem to be laying down far brighter colors without the intention of challenging myself, but also without the usual reflex of annoyance that would keep me from using such colors at all. Strangely I am not much interested in color as a painter as much as I am interested in my perceptions and the responses they lead to as a human. I am growing deeply convinced that our ideas and experiences of perceiving time are fundamental to being human and and insinuative of whatever evolutions are possible for us.
I started out painting with communication and the distribution of specific ideas in mind. As a process this mean sketching out an image that I believed could best communicate the idea. The painting differed little from the sketch while I ignored color, sub-conciously fashioned people as impersonal as possible, and enlarged the scale to suit the materials I had. I paid greater attention to the essays pushing the idea from which the painting stemmed, everything was subordinated the the final result. When I realized I couldn't force people to consider specific ideas I valued I also began to paint in an intuitive non-intentional manner where I would curiously watch the brush strokes move waiting to see what they would form.
I used only black and white for a long time, interested in the unknown figures that would arise to reflect a feeling I wasn't really aware of having until I was responding to it. This absence of concious intention is what has been obsessing me to date. Does one think before hand "I will create THIS" or do they just get going and then at some point realize, "huh, so it's THIS." This consideration is most crucial in starting a painting, because once you're in there both processes naturally occur on various levels in various proportions.
Two years ago I wouldn't have been able to put down bright colors, my reaction would have been fully in the present tense. My reaction and assumption that "This is IT." would have prevented me from doing so, much less doing so with hardly noticing. But something must have happened, because now when working I am somehow aware that what I am working on is not "it", my awareness has somehow included a sense of the future.
St. Augustine apparently came to the idea that the past and future only exist in our mind. Where then does the mind exist? Personally, I am under the impression that something existing not in explicit tangible form exists nonetheless, and may or may not have potential for coming to exist in a more material form. I mostly experience my mind as far more vast, interesting, and 'real' as the physical world.
Where then does art exist? It does not exist in nature. Art is a reaction to natures indifference toward humanity. It is an excessive gesture beyond the basic requirements of survival. We perceived time in a particular manner when living in the woods, which affected our optical experiences. (such as identifying a threat in a camaflauged enviroment) what is happening inside me when I am making a painting? What is happening when it is 'done' someone stands there gazing?

Infinite Plastic Knives

I don't need to sit here and write about my general sense of disconnection to faceless strangers I don't have the energy to be interested in. See that picture? There's my face. I must exist; the multitude of vantage points sends me dizzy. I'm commenting leisurely to nobody that it is too cold to paint. I now pay tribute to the folk at mid-city studio for lending me this heater that I position 4 inches from my legs and cannot detach myself from. Do I name this good samaritan carrying out the neighborly ways of ore? Do I post a link to his art so that you can look up his name and scavenge to find potential unpaid parking tickets? I do not know how to go about things now that we are living in the future. Segways and bottomless juke boxes? This is the future? The internet is getting disappointing because I can't believe people could possibly be so interested in each other. Is this really all a reaction of fear & forelornment as we anticipate being forgotten?
I want to be something profound and stable that you can turn to. Maybe I want to hide a few objects in the world that make it seem a little bit easier for you to breathe. A bunch of bastards have naively confused the nature of this exchange; When I read saul Bellow I don't need him to squeeze my shoulder and approve my understanding. The chatter argues shrilly, "Well, how do you ever understand if you really received something how the person who made it intended!?!" and that voice waves a finger and has pointed eyes, to counter and pacify another one soothes, "Ah, well everyone is different and understands things differently." But that does not soothe me! That statements is the basis of a conversation, not the conclusion of one! So, what I'm not gettin over here, is if most of our verbal communications are stunted and generalized- why are we creating multitudes of new tunnels to pass these through?
In a way it is practical for verbal exchanges to be generalizations or banalities; they are safe, and when people are face to face there is always present, though rarely acknowledged, potentiality for violence. I wonder how often bad news is being presented via phone or text message these days. In another scope verbalizing takes place in the moment, often suited for pragmatic events, which is why it's a useful novelty to be able to call someone at the grocery store and remind them to grab some milk. The written word bares a different relationship to time; it can be lasting. Images have and have not suffered the same fate. A very slight minority would assert that seeing an image on a screen or in a book is basically the same as seeing an original in person. Yet 'hand touched' giclee prints are selling for sums that could pay my rent for months.
This all makes me come to wonder if humanity has just never really come to terms with the finite. We are obsessed with replication, with the comfort that comes from knowing if something falls apart if can be almost identically replaced. We assume confidently that no two things can ever really be the same, because at the very least they are composed of different atoms and occupy different spaces in time. This is basically the paradox that everything is unique; because then what value does the 'unique' have if it doesn't differentiate and all is interchangeable? I'm really feeling like we've been building something running off a misperception for awhile now and I don't understand how it keeps going.

and continue.

I need to get a bit better about updating this. One post a month shouldn't be too much. Suddenly it seems..I am comfortable working with oils. All the things I've been talking to myself about relentlessly aren't coming to mind right now. I may as well not be writing anything. But it's something in....writing to yourself, while allowing eaves droppers, not holding things off because of that, perhaps I am incoherent or perhaps that idea is just comforting. I've gotten really into shading, and believe that in the same way if you just draw anatomy from life over and over again it gets stuck in you well enough to produce- not from memory- but from knowledge- it's not recollecting HOW something looked, but WHY it looked that way and being able to use those coordinates for my own means. I know I did want to write; to tell other people, as though anyone would be interested in these constant often repetitive dialogues I carry on with myself- That in painting I am not interested in documentation. I do not care really to show you what I have seen, literally or visually. I want to paint things that I cannot see- but I can see people- but I paint people primarily probably because it is what I understand the least. I do not know what it is to be human, and I am tired and slightly panicy that people constantly throw down such passionate, convicted statements as regaurds it. But then I rise up too there, to be human is to be limited- but I do not always want to be human. I wonder why do my paintings look old, probably for some credential that the past owns and the present and the future must prove...but I do not feel I am doing something particularly new or that I care to- I cannot help but do something new, since I have not existed before, though I am doing this all again, it is also for the first time. I do want people to look at them and feel something that is presently living inside of themselves- this is just a communication- not me turning something on or implanting anything- it is relation and the viewer is the other necessary 1/2 of that process. It is a process we're involved with, and time probably doesn't even function as we experience it, so to freeze something, such as an image is, is actually a false comfort, that perhaps comforts in one area so that things may happen in another. The process of my work and the form (or the end result) must bare direct relationship with one another. I love the spontenaity of finding people in random brush strokes- it is almost like recognizing my self as a bag of flesh- as any other indistinguishable clump of matter sitting around- and this recognition becomes a distinction, but then right after that I again feel unfamiliar, that I again do not know what I am, how I am with others that apparently form a species and assumedly bare commonalities- and so defining these people, sitting with them after they have arrived, and possibly giving it time- maybe that is where layering comes in, or working on a painting with time in between- so that it is not all contained within an immediate reaction....or so that the immediate reaction may be combined with a prolonged and hesitant reconsideration. Hm, I'm not sure what I wrote exactly, but I put something down here and I guess I'll leave it as such. and continue.

Considerations and doubts

Every time I look at my work, I'm not sure if I like looking at it or not. Sometimes it looks so close...and other times, so god damned far off from where I want to go. While I keep telling myself I'm working towards it, I can't beat away the million doubts that rush me. I mean- how do I know? Maybe I'm driving myself in circles again. If I look towards human history to account for my own, I really have to question whether progress is possible at all. My mind scrambles to account for a million different things, between materials and subject matter... some areas are limited and forced into ultimatum; do I start a piece with a 'plan' and allow that to go into disarray or do I start with the usual familiar chaotic strokes? Right now I lead more toward the latter; I want not only my images, but my paintings, to follow the same patterns that life does. While the movement of the stroke is chaos (just like the initial conception of children- all those sperm going for the egg) once that stroke is put down it can't be revoked, and the dna starts to meld- and that's what one has to work with. But then I think of scale, and am I useing a direct or indirect method? There seem to be so many directions, that sometimes its hard to move at all.

Slow building

Slowly it gets less frustrating. Finishing off a recent group of paintings, I felt myself breath, feeling like much like a farmer whose been working the ground and finally seeing what may be something sprouting. Over the past year I'm realizing what I've been doing with myself by upturning this comfortable, habitual painting process I had- and finding a way to progress but integrate this. The 'this' is imagination, working from the suggestions of a random brush stroke. Attempting to combine this with intentional imagery, or even working from life has been overwhelming. I'm finding it wise to set a plan with the understanding from the outset that the plan is vague and there is plenty of room to move and change within it. I suppose I see the same things I go through in painting reflected in various areas of life, and perhaps I even believe this to be one of the essential aspects of painting.
Painters primarily concerned with the final result baffle me. Though their methods do appear too methodical for me, mostly I just don't understand that. I've said and thought- I don't want to paint what I see- I want to paint what I can't see so that I get to see it. Layering the paint has been the biggest change... but jesus, I would much like to rest in an area of change for awhile and have the steady satisfaction I once did. Slow and steady..

Just to keep working

In a rush right now...got about ten minutes before I got to the place where I haul people in and out and then move their dirty dishes. I'm starting to sicken of my perpetual self-righteousness- that I see so much work and my reaction is, "What am I looking at?" and I think, jesus, people are putting out such careless crap that I could put a little of my efforts into something and in comparison it would still be something more. More what? More genuine. More well-constructed. But that is comparison and that is not the point. I remind myself now- I need to work privately, and people don't need to know my woes or deep gouging frustrations- and if I show work that I personally find to be sub-par, I am dropping down to that level myself, to compete and be seen- when what I know I need to work for is to see for myself and translate this in a comprehensive enough fashion that I can stand by my work and firmly know that this is the best I'm doing and it ought to be seen. Just to keep working, when there is no promise of some far off sense of completion.

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.