"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.

Life in General

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 working (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?

Waning desperation

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.

A good reason for reason

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.