Palette Madness

The palette of 165 colors I mixed in my studio yesterday.

As you can see, I have a new background image on my blog (and on my Twitter page too).  I've been hating how boring all this white white white is, so I spent yesterday mixing a zillion colors and filling my palette with dollops of paint.  I started out with a less ambitious plan in mind, just wanting to mix a few interesting colors that I could photograph, but as I started to see all those perfect drops of pureed color accumulate on the palette, I just had to keep going until it was at over-capacity.  In the end, I mixed 165 colors (yes, that's right 165 -- 11 x 15 rows!!!), and I was adamant with myself that no two colors could be the same.  They were all mixed from a basic palette of about five blues, three reds, three yellows, two whites and one green, mixed and mixed and mixed for hours on end.  Needless to say, the last 60 colors or so were a little challenging to make identifiably unique, but trust me, I didn't cheat!!  A little OCD, I admit.  A weird obsessive tangent in my studio practice.  But it became like a fun, sadistic, creative game that I had to finish.  And lucky for me, I now have a palette stuffed with paint -- and several blank canvases await...

NOTE:  For all the painters out there, my basic palette consisted of the following:

Blues:  Cobalt, Ultramarine, Manganese, Cerulean, and Old Holland (and yes, that's a color by the brand of the same name).

Reds:  Quinacridone Rose, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red Light

Yellows:  Hansa Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Light, Brilliant Yellow (another weird Old Holland brand color that I've recently started using)

Green:  Permanent Green Light (Graham brand)

White:  Zinc and Titanium

An Epic Problem

I started this week expressing my frustration with my work - and now, after a good week of progress and new ideas, I'm ending the week somewhat down, on another note of frustration. I have to produce a small work (or two) for a group show at the end of the month, but my new ideas all seem to be so epic - they either involve large fragmented pieces, or multi-paneled works that could fill a gallery on their own.

I am excited about exploring the idea of painting as performance with a serial approach to an image, painting each of the various transformations of an image that result from my ink print process. My photographs then become a documentation a "happening" of sorts - as if the image itself is in the midst of a performance. I'm sure there are video ideas to explore in there somewhere as well - but I still have a couple little paintings to make. And SOON.

Painting as Performance (a remix)

More and more I think the context of a work is critical to its reception. I don't think painters in particular consider context enough. They deny the installation aspect of all artwork. It's something I've been thinking about since a class I took at OCAD (Improvisational Music and Visual Arts), reading about performance and improvisation. If we consider all artwork to fundamentally be a performance for the viewer, something that occurs in time and changes with each viewing experience, maybe it would change the way we approach our work - and the viewer. It's hard to think of any final art object (whether a static work like painting or a dynamic work like video) as an ever-evolving work, but more and more I am coming to believe that. It's why I aspire to create ever more complex works - the one-liners just don't seem to have the same shelf life - like the difference between performing a three-act play every night vs. repeating one well-crafted line.

If the context of viewing becomes an unavoidable part of a work's performance, do we then have to consider how to get more control over the viewer's reception of a work, or do we embrace the ever-changing nature of each viewer's experience? Now that an artwork can be seen in so many different contexts, in so many different incarnations, it seems inevitable that the artist has to relinquish control of any kind of "pure" reception of his vision. But just because this is inevitable, is this necessarily a good thing?