Titles

Thinking about how difficult it is to title my paintings. Usually I call most of them "Untitled" followed by the date of completion. Before a recent show I was faced with the absurdity of hanging six works differing greatly from each other but all with the same title. Giving them numbers didn't help. They weren't part of a series, or even a sequence of making.

Odilon Redon writes in "To Myself" that the title of a work "is not justified unless it is vague, indeterminate, and aspiring, even confusedly equivocal." I struggled to find words that would not define the work or determine its meaning yet would have "imaginative logic".

Poets do this. I asked poet Pam Brown to name the painting she and her husband had just bought. They decided its title was Uova. Here it is:

I feel that the painting became complete when it was named by Ones Who Really See It.
Who, as Redon says, are spectators whose minds are incited by "fictions of great or small significance."

I'm always moving along. My paintings are always works

in process for a long time. I have them and come back intermittently maybe for a year or two. I can't really do "one, two, a painting". I try to work quickly but that doesn't usually work for me. My paintings are an on-going process of sedimentation? then excavation? Or something like urban renewal? Maybe due to shifts of sensibility? Choices of line, color, texture,opacity or transparency, density or sparseness, flatness or depth, warmth or coolness...volume?

 This one, called "Conjugational" evolved over several months of painting in, and painting out, and then reading some of Paul Klee's observations about line and volume, and "seeing" what the painting could be. Finally it became itself. Someone who saw it recently said it was funny, and now I know it is. The viewer completes the work...

I'll be talking about my painting tonight at Cocoa Bar in Brooklyn. I have several works on view there, with fellow artists Amy Weil and Carlos Torres-Machado. Thinking about what to say, I came across this quote from Brice Marden that greatly inspired me awhile back:
"There are possibilities to make paintings that people don't pursue. The whole post-modernist thing is about closing down possibilities--that's just bullshit. What about magic? Okay, magic. You look at all the religious paintings very formally, you look at them historically, but what about Zubaran painting something and just going out of himself. To me it's possible. It was a big thing with the abstract expressionists. How you could go and paint and work but there was only a small amount of time when you really painted. And that was when you were in another state. You're coasting right along, you're not even thinking. It's just all coming out. You're the medium, and to me that exists. This could be an aim." -interview in BOMB.

 

Francisco Zurbaran, St. Francis in Meditation

Thanks to Myra for reminding me
that I've neglected this blog for too long.  Time to resume.

A new painting is in progress: bigger surface than my recent 12inch squares. This feels very different to paint- I'm standing, stretching, reaching, stepping way, way back to see it. Yet I know its surface as intimately as the small paintings I sit before at my easel.

detail

My painting is a search for form through color and light. The final image is not the goal. The paintings record my intention to engage the paint, canvas, and the tools at hand- my fingers, brushes, knives and scrapers.
As I paint, my attention is drawn to complements of complexity/simplicity, edges/mass, energy, the movement of light across the surface of the canvas-- reflected, glowing, undersided, rising-- that has spiritual resonance for me.
The medium I use is oil, but have recently experimented with acrylic mixed with oil pastel, and collages made of cut-up paintings.

Recent paintings

Just wrote a new statement and submitted works to the Brooklyn Museum's GO project.

Untitled, scraped

AGAST 2010

Please come view my work during the Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour on Saturday, October 2nd. My studio is at Brooklyn Artists Gym, 168 7th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Ave in the Gowanus district of Brooklyn.

Language of Landscape

Heidegger uses the metaphors of the forest, the forest path (Holzweg) and the clearing (Lichtung) for "Being", through which one must make a hazardous journey off the beaten track and beyond the boundaries of the familiar (Holzweg) to gain insight. The actual existing "being" is not the fundamental Being (the forest) but the way it appears to us (as a clearing).

Holzweg implies not only a natural path through the woods but also the darkness of the forest and one's ability to lose one's way in it. Being lost on a Holzweg is like being on a "wild goose chase."

Holzweg can refer to the space cleared by foresters to allow a tree to fall unrestrictedly to the ground. It may also be the path created as the cutting of trees progresses ever more deeply into the woods. In both cases, a Holzweg is a "path to nowhere".

In the beginning, the experience of following a Holzweg does not entail thinking one is lost at all. Eventually, one finds oneself in unexpected places...having several paths to choose from but not knowing which if any will lead one back to familiar ground.

Holzweg is distinct from Feldwege (a path to the field).

Holzweg. 2008. 32"x 54". oil on canvas.

True Companions. 2008. oil on canvas.

Seed. 2007. 48"x 36". oil on canvas.

Mutable Ting, 2007. 36"x36".oil on canvas.

Rings of Jade and Gold. 2007.Oil on canvas.40x54"

Artist Statement

My Work focuses on the connection between creative process and spiritual inquiry.

I paint with my hands. I like the direct, intimate contact of my fingers in the paint, on the canvas. My painting practice is about transformation: turning an organic substance into atmosphere and light, the visible growing beyond itself, extending into the realm of the invisible, paradoxically becoming clear.

For me, painting is both a somatic and an intuitive process. I'm moving without a map, yet my impulse is toward stillness. An image develops, lingers, recedes in a meditative space as I work with it. I am concentrating on the activity of doing rather than on what is done.

Some works focus on differing qualities of painted light: the light 'just now'; the light that reflects, tricks, draws one towards it; absent light, the pull of the dark. I use light to find my way through architectural space that is both invented and found.

Other works explore Taoist, Buddhist and Hindu spiritual traditions of being open to receiving the unexpected, acceptance of the way things are, and the inter-relatedness of destruction and creation. I am inspired by Buddhist Thangka painting, which serves as a record of and guide for contemplative experience; Taras, which are gateways to states of mind; and Taoist Tings- cauldrons used to obtain nourishment for spiritual use.

Like painting, the Ting itself is affected by the mutability of conditions as transient contents move through it.



"The function of objects is to restore silence." Samuel Beckett

Current Show: New Paintings

November 3rd-8th
Opening Reception: Saturday, Nov 3rd, 6-9pm
BAG Gallery
168 7th Street
Brooklyn, NY
Brooklynartistsgym.com

Recent Show: BAG + One, September 2007

BAG Artists in Residence curated a work by a fellow artist to show beside their own work. I chose North Carolina artist Bonnie Melton who works in oil, tempera and clay. The work below was shown with my painting Upturn.



Bonnie Melton, Ghost of Sex With Canoe, 2007

Upturn. 2007. oil on panel. 18.5 x 22.75"

Family Tree.2007.oil on canvas.54x40"