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.

"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.