A Weird and Glorious Beast

This is a gorgeous review of my work recently posted on the amazing Flavorwire blog.  (Thank you Emily Temple!)

It comes just a day after I received coverage on the Artist A Day blog, which inspired a number of supportive comments:

 

It has been heartening to receive so much coverage lately by the blogosphere.  All I want is for people to see the work and for the work to find its audience.  But building an audience online is a strange process that often feels more like an old-fashioned popularity contest than a meaningful exchange of art and ideas.  It's so easy to become self-conscious about how many "fans" Like your facebook page, how many "friends" will comment on your posts (on blogs, Facebook, Google+, or seemingly endless new networks that I can't keep track of), how many followers you have on Twitter, or how many times your work is re-tweeted.  Some sites even rank which artists are most "popular" on their sites.   It is a never-ending tally of statistics and quantitative data that measures every eyeball that lands on your work, and publicizes every response (or lack thereof), grading your significance or "success".

Lately I have been struck by how much art seems to be merging with entertainment.  Galleries and museums compete with entertainment venues for their audience, and instant audience feedback is courted as a critical element to the "interactive" experience.  But this call for ranking and spontaneous judgement of work seems more suited to entertainment than art.  Is the painting a thumbs up or a thumbs down?  Should the work be given 5 stars or just 3?  Did you like it?  Did you have fun?  Throughout history, it has not always been the most popular artists who are the most significant or important.  Can the artist ranked #954th still find its way into history?  And is the #1 artist really "the best"?  Just because you don't "like" it, is not worth looking at again?

I admit that the thoughtful review of my work on Flavorwire and the longer comments posted on the Artist A Day blog are encouraging.  They indicate a real engagement by the digital crowd with the work, and as long as the comments are thoughtful and interesting, I love the feedback, good or bad.  I just hope art can sustain its place in the world as something to contemplate, to experience and to debate, and not just a momentary distraction to glance at, rank, and forget.

Too Much

I have too much to say. Way too much. So much that I have found myself unable to say anything at all. I've written countless unfinished blog entries, all of them totally inadequate ramblings. I have so many ideas lately, inspired by so many disparate things, I can't find the time to sort through them and articulate what it all means for me and my work. As the ideas pile up, I don't want to post my latest finding without catching up on the older ones first, but I can't seem to find the time to catch up, so the ideas pile up and pile up. I no longer know where to begin. The longer I leave it, the more the ideas shift and move, overlapping and looping around each other. They feed off each other, growing bigger and more complicated, becoming so thoroughly intertwined that I can no longer find a way to disentangle them into neat, compartmentalized postings.

I know the ideas are working their way through my paintings. I can see the influence in my latest compositions. But I continue to experience an unshakable anxiety that if I do not find the time to sort through, synthesize and articulate my responses, the ideas will start to lose their potency and will begin to suffocate within the tangled mess of incomplete arguments, fragmented thoughts and forgotten connections.

I've had strep throat this week, so my mind is fuzzy and my body aches. I'm exhausted with illness but wired from boredom, and the combination is pushing me perilously to the edge. More often than not (and especially at times like this when I'm sick), I find myself frustrated by the gap I experience between the possibilities I see in my mind and my ability to execute them in a sufficient time such that the products of my efforts don't feel like old news when they are finally complete. The speed of my body can't seem to keep up with the speed of my mind. I recently read a book about the California artist Robert Irwin (a goldmine of inspiration that I have been working through in my recent series of unpublished and unresolved blogs) in which he laments our culture's emphasis on performance:

"We are past-minded, in the sense that all of our systems of measure are developed and in a sense dependent upon a kind of physical resolution. We tag our renaissances at the highest level of performance, where it's really clear to me that once the question is raised, the performance is somewhat inevitable, almost just a mopping-up operation, merely a matter of time. " (from Lawrence Weschler's "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees", page 90.)

I so get that! In the last couple of months, I feel myself caught in a deluge of questions that my work just can't keep up with. I know I must accept temporary resolutions, whether in order to complete a painting, post a blog entry, or write an artist statement. But be forewarned: these works are not definitive statements, they are merely a series of still inadequate working hypotheses.

It makes me return to my favorite quote that I posted on August 1, 2010 by Arnold Glimcher about how artworks are but a series of clues to the art that ultimately resides in the mind of the artist. But even that assumes that the art is fully formed in the artist's mind, and I'm not convinced that this is always so. I certainly love the idea that the art is already there, somewhere inside me, and that all I need to do is sort through the mess, excavate through the comfortable and the obvious, and free it from deep within. In fact, in moments of inspiration, like when I was reading Weschler's book on Irwin, the ideas strike me not as foreign entities, entering my consciousness from somewhere unknown and external, but much more like liberated P.O.W.s, at long last released into my thought processes from that dark, secluded place inside my mind that is otherwise inaccessible to my available modes of expression. I love that art can be the source of such liberation.

I could go on and on. There's so much more to say. I feel like I should end with some definitive conclusion to all this. But alas, I have none.

Tyranny of the Hypothetical

I've been struggling lately. It goes without saying that painting is always a struggle, and that's to be expected. But it's much more than that. I think in the last few months, it's really hit me how hard this whole artist thing really is. As a student, you're so protected - assignments, mentors, mandatory feedback, all wrapped in a whole lot of big dreams and naive optimism. But it's different once you're on your own. I finally finished my degree last April, and then shared a studio with a few friends until September. Since then, I have worked obsessively, alone. For the first few months, I reveled in my new-found privacy and space. I made big strides in my work and produced painting after painting after painting. But since Christmas, the months have been ticking by, and while the obsessive working has not diminished, I have become increasingly conscious of my largely secluded existence.

In so many ways, working day after day without interruption or distraction is a gift, a privilege, a luxury. But it is also trying. The deluge of critiques that I so often longed to be free of while in school has abruptly dried up, and too often I find myself thinking back to the soggy old comments made about my old work to see if they can continue to guide me with the new. It goes without saying that they are woefully inadequate.

Of course I work hard at challenging myself - and I do. But you see, there's the rub. When you depend on your art to pay the bills, the art-making process can quickly become stiflingly goal-oriented. There are deadlines, collectors, galleries - and along with all that, is the increasingly anxiety-ridden awareness that the work is not being made for my eyes alone, that it is intended to go out into the world and be seen, scrutinized, and ultimately judged.

Most artists that you talk to or read about say that they don't care what other people think. Maybe that's true. But there's caring what other people think in a grovelling, pandering kind of way, and then there's caring what other people think in a hoping-to-connect, trying-to-communicate kind of way. And while I certainly don't advocate the former, I think the latter is much more complicated. When I was at school, the critique process at school gave each of us a test-run for our work from a bunch of interested and educated viewers. The whole process was an implicit affirmation that it does matter what other people think - as artists, we're literally trained to care. But now that that constructive process is gone, I have had to replace that audience of actual viewers with an audience of my own imagined hypothetical viewers.

And there has been the root of my struggles. My imagination seems to breed these viewers who are not only highly critical but fickle. They befriend my doubts, play hide and seek with my intentions, and dress up my instincts with costumes that don't fit.

But then today, just when the growing, chaotic crowd of bullying hypothetical viewers were beginning to stampede, I experienced an unexpected gunshot to the sky that has scattered the masses. And suddenly I feel emboldened, even liberated. And at least for today, the hypothetical viewer is just me.

Speak for Yourself

I'm really proud of my new paintings. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. They're certainly not perfect, but for now they're the closest thing I've ever gotten to saying what I really want to say - or, should I say, seeing what I want to see.

But the closer my paintings get to expressing what I want, the more nervous I am of talking about them. It's just that I don't want them to be about me. But I also don't want to intellectualize them and drain them of their emotional content. Artists are always required to talk about their work, to explain their intentions - and I've certainly embraced those expectations so far, particularly in this blog. But over the last couple of months, my paintings have been making me grow more silent. They are more revealing than I expected them to be.

Back to the Blog

After weeks of marathon painting sessions, I am in the home stretch and should have my last painting of 2009 completed within the next couple of days. In a week, the masses (or hopefully at least a small mass) will descend upon my studio to check out my new work. It has taken all the willpower and patience I have to not post photos of the new work these past few weeks, but I am determined to have the first showing of these new works to be in the flesh. As always, I'm anxious about the response, but I'm hoping for some encouragement - some confirmation that I'm on the right track. It's been quite an experience to work for so many months without any feedback. It has forced me to focus more than ever on what I want my work to be, without fear of poor grades or poor reviews. But once the work is done, there is no question that I want people (not all people of course, but at least a passionate few) to respond to my work, to feel something, to reassure me that it speaks to more than just my own cravings.

Conversation for Critique

I have been receiving a lot of feedback about my posting "A Pleasure to Meet You", and since my computer does not seem to be posting my reply comments, I thought a fresh blog posting in response might be appropriate.

I want to assure all who have responded that I was not referring to any particular person or any particular event. Really. That so many people think I was talking about them helps me make my point though. Over the last few months, outside of the studio environment (which I distinguish from studio visits, when critiques are an obviously essential part of a studio practice), I have found people are either silent in their response to work or have only criticism to offer. It makes me think of the experience of going out to a fancy party after buying a new dress or getting a new haircut - people can say they love the new look when they don't (not what I'm asking for), they can say nothing (where it is easy to assume they don't like it because the change is undeniable), or they can kindly say all the things that aren't working - the dress makes me look fat or uncomfortable, the haircut is old-fashioned or boring or makes my ears stick out or whatever. Except maybe it's a new look for me that I love, maybe they just need some time to get used to it - or maybe I already hate it and am embarrassed that I had to go to the party looking like a freak. Or maybe there actually is one or two things that are a surprising change that make me look better - or could make me look better if that one awful thing was not there. All I'm saying is, making value judgments that are truly constructive requires a conversation. Maybe you think Dolly Parton looks a little slutty, but unless you ask her, you don't realize that that's the look she's going for, that that's her idea of beautiful. Telling her she really shouldn't wear that because it makes her look slutty is not particularly helpful.

I am always open to hearing people's responses and thoughts about my work. It's why I make the work. It's why I have this blog. The point I wanted to make was that as artists, we know that putting our work out there is a brave and personal thing, and encouraging words are just as needed as any well-intentioned criticism. And lately, they have been pretty hard to come by.

A Pleasure To Meet You

(It has been too long. The first posting of September only now! I will have to make up for it.)

During this extended period of blog silence, I have expanded my studio space, planned two new major art projects (not paintings - details to be revealed at a later date), thrown out the failed paintings of the summer, and sent two recent paintings out into the world (at the group exhibition "Dreamers & Screamers" at Board of Directors). In the midst of this mania, I have been reading Susan Stewart's "The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics" - which I have been dying to blog about for days.

But before I do that (more tomorrow), I wanted to put a few thoughts out there to my fellow artists about sharing our artwork with each other. The art world is full of weird and wonderful people, and I certainly embrace the subjective and critical responses to my work from anyone willing to share them with me (hence this blog!). But lately I have been struck by how quickly people are to give an artist a "critique" of his/her work while forgetting to provide any positive words of encouragement or appreciation. Some stick to the adage "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all", while some offer extended critical feedback without any prompting or request. But outside the classroom or formal (or even informal) critique environment, what is (or perhaps should be) the protocol among artists for responding to a peer's work? I know the word protocol implies a rigid politeness that would seem to defeat or detract from the dialogue that we want art to inspire. But is there not a distinction between debating the ideas raised by a work of art, and debating the merits of the work itself? I certainly agree that constructive criticism by our respected peers is an essential part of any artist's studio practice. But when considering the merits of an artwork (particularly with the artist), is it not just as important to consider what is working in the piece and not just what may not be? As artists, we all know the struggles in creating new work and the anxiety associated with the first public reveal. I am not advocating a falsified love-fest, but out of respect for the courage, passion and labor of our fellow artists (and frankly out of respect for art itself), is there not something to be said for giving an artist (and seeking in the work) some (truthful) affirmation of the artist's efforts? And if at first we don't see or experience the merits of a work, do we not owe it to the artist (and even to ourselves) to have a little patience, to stick with it a little longer. You don't have to fall in love with it, but maybe to just be open to the possibility, to be open to persuasion.

In Susan Stewart's essay "On the Art of the Future", Stewart draws an analogy between "the face-to-face encounter between persons and the face-to-face encounter with artworks." The following passage is worth quoting at length:

"Our meetings with artworks are embedded in the meanings and conventions we bring to encounters with other persons, and all nonmonumental art is a means of figuration in this sense. Yet, specifically, this meeting with an artwork that is in itself and for itself is analogous to that free ethical stance in which persons are encountered in themselves and for themselves - without prior determination of outcome or goal. When we consider an artwork as something meant, it is the intention and actions of individual persons that we seek to recover and come to understand in a project of implicit mutuality and heightened responsiveness or intensity." (The Open Studio, p. 18)

Stewart relies on the "paradigm for aesthetic experience" offered by Kant that asserts that "an encounter between persons and forms [is] in truth an encounter between persons - the maker and the receiver." (The Open Studio, p.19)

Perhaps this paradigm could soften the hearts of those who seek first to judge rather than understand, who revel in the chance to criticize rather than patiently find an opportunity for connection.

The Heart of the Matter

The last week or so has been all about reassessing the paintings of the summer and understanding my dissatisfaction with them - analyzing, questioning, reasoning - but in the last few days it has been all about the paint again, and I just love it. The simpler compositions I'm working with require me to explore much more subtlety in the surface; I'm taking more risks with the color, and not painting the surface as sheerly as I have been; and now I'm allowing the paint texture and brush strokes to reveal themselves too. My natural touch with the brush is quite gentle, so the paint-handling has a really sensual, feminine look that I'm actually quite happy with.

I've also added a new color to my palette - Manganese Blue - which looks like it has light embedded in the pigment. It's infused the painting with a type of brightness that my other oil paintings don't have. It's made me want to explore some other new pigments that give this sense of light - although I do find the contemporary palette can get too attached to the screen-aesthetic and lose the richness of some of the more traditional colors. Pthalo-based (and other synthetic) colors can easily overwhelm a painting. But in moderation, it could help me to re-invent the historical types of images I use with a slightly sexier edge than my past works.

With all the emphasis on conceptual matters in art now, it's often too easy to lose focus on the magic offered in the materials. I still have a lot to learn about oil paint, and I've only begun to figure out what I can make it do, but I just have to remind myself to not get so wrapped up in the ideas and the image for the work that the importance and relevance of the paint itself gets lost. I see my work almost as a defense of painting - that the translation of these digital/photographed images into paint changes their meaning, changes the viewer's reception of the work - which means I need to make sure that the paint in my work is speaking as loudly as the composition, the ideas and the image. In fact, that probably describes all the paintings I love - when the paint itself is not just a tool of expression, but is an undeniable part of the message.