This Is Painting!!!

de Kooning said

"I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space."

I took this quote from an interesting post here.

Some Notes on My Methods

I am finding myself doing more and more of my painting away from the studio. I do more thinking (is thinking the word?) then actually painting each piece. I lay in bed, sometimes for hours, going over the current painting in my "mind's eye". Now this would sound like it would make my work very well plotted but it has had the opposite effect and I am becoming looser and more abstract. I know that the work can only really happen in front of the canvas but somehow my "twilight painting" opens me up with a notion that finds itself in a less conscious part of my brain. When I approach the easel I do and don't know what will happen and I can paint a lot in a few hours and then I must stop.


I am also spending a lot of time dreaming; more then I ever have. I really pay attention not because I think they are prophetic but because they cause certain creative impulses in me. There are recurring themes -like I can never make a phone call; I keep looking for a phone and if I find one I over and over mess up the number I am trying to call. I have many other dreams of things I can not complete or communicate. I have lately had dreams that I know are dreams but I decide not to wake up and realizing I am dreaming gives me more power in the dream. I have also had dreams where I am dreaming within the dream; I wake up and realize I am still dreaming. I dream in color because I have seen several plane crashes and house fires. But my most important dream is when I see a painting and I try to get as close as possible and try to remember it for when I am awake. I have included fragments that I have retained in some of my work. My dream life has become very valuable to me for reasons I don't completely understand.

Top Twenty

Albert Pinkham Ryder by Marsden Hartley

I had thought about putting together what I consider the top ten greatest artist of all time. But then I couldn't decide what "great" really meant. It is not merely most important, meaning most influential, but also having a timeless quality. An example would be my friend Andy Warhol. I must grudgingly admit he is the most important, influential artist of the second half of the twentieth century extending into the present. But I feel that influence has been so damaging to the humanist tradition of painting that I can not consider him great. All I could come up with was three and one of those was a tie. They are (in order) Michelangelo, van Gogh/ Gauguin and Picasso with perhaps (don't know) maybe Giotto or Courbet or Manet? And I guess maybe the whole ancient Greek sculpture/ architecture team. So I put together a list of my top ten favorite artists:


1. Michelangelo

2. van Gogh

3. Gauguin

4. Picasso

5. Beckmann

6. Guston

7. Hartley

8. Bacon

9. Titian

10. Cornell

And now for the next ten:

11. Ryder

12. William Blake

13. Kitaj

14. Manet

15. de Kooning

16. Winslow Homer

17. The Mystical Beuys

18. Matisse

19. Gorky

20. Morris Graves

Of course this list can and will change without notice on the wings of whimsey. Notice that I am mostly attracted to dead artists. What can I say? Next I will try to put together a list of living artist I can tolerate. Pardon me for being a misanthrope!

L'Hippocampe (The Sea Horse)

Pure Life-of what we are made

Completion?

As the first idea hits the canvas there is such promise. Somewhere along the way it reaches it's zenith with a vast multitude of possibilities and begins its slow descent as more and more decisions are made, filling in more and more blank space until it crashes in defeat with all hope extinguished. It is the specific that kills the transcendental. Does anyone else still believe in the sublime? Then begin again, fooling yourself that this time it will be different. This is my way of saying I will be posting new work soon.

A Rationalization?

"He who thinks for himself can never remain of the same mind" -Melville on Milton

Found In Old Notebook

First 11 Verses Psalms 103

 ¹ Hear my prayer, O LORD,
         And let my cry come to You.
 ² Do not hide Your face from me in the day of my trouble;
         Incline Your ear to me;
         In the day that I call, answer me speedily.
        
 ³ For my days are consumed like smoke,
         And my bones are burned like a hearth.
 ⁴ My heart is stricken and withered like grass,
         So that I forget to eat my bread.
 ⁵ Because of the sound of my groaning
         My bones cling to my skin.
 ⁶ I am like a pelican of the wilderness;
         I am like an owl of the desert.
 ⁷ I lie awake,
         And am like a sparrow alone on the housetop.
        
 ⁸ My enemies reproach me all day long;
         Those who deride me swear an oath against me.
 ⁹ For I have eaten ashes like bread,
         And mingled my drink with weeping,
 ¹⁰ Because of Your indignation and Your wrath;
         For You have lifted me up and cast me away.
 ¹¹ My days are like a shadow that lengthens,
         And I wither away like grass.

Traveling

I travel the road but I never arrive. I constantly lose my way, search out side streets and look for shortcuts but I never arrive. I know this can be made to sound like a good thing but it is not.

Moons and Suns

Tonight I was looking at the cloud shrouded moon, floating behind several dark pines, enjoying how much it echoed a Ryder or Blakelock painting. Is this the only way I can truly enjoy nature? Must I always perceive her through the lenses of art and culture, not to mention science? I sometimes wish I was born 30,000 years ago when I could view the moon with awe and fear. Everyday I would wonder what happened to the sun? And here is the rub: this fascination, this wonderment, would eventually lead to the scientific world we live in today where everything spiritual or awesome has been reduced to synapses and DNA. We have moved so far from nature that we must look at her through some construct. I can't imagine just pure "living".

Ralph Albert Blakelock "Moonlight"

4 Colors I Can't Live Without

Blockx Ultramarine Violet

Gamblin Alizarin Crimson

Williamsburg Lemon Ochre

Winsor & Newton Phthalo Turquoise

Why I Am Often Misunderstood!

Everything is funny; nothing is funny.

How I Pine for Existentialism

The above introduction was written by Peter Selz for this 1959 MOMA exhibition. Unfortunately any portrayal of angst today must be either taken as  irony or kitsch. Can you imagine anyone taking "The Scream" seriously if painted today? Whatever happened to alienation? I have posted below the list of artist in the show. Please note how some artist have completely disappeared from art historical consciousness.

Who Am I?

I am but the diseased carcass of Cotton Mather and the "city upon a hill". More on this at a later date.

Obscurity

Malcolm Cowley first published 1948

It's The Little Things

I am impassioned for independence; I sacrifice all for it... and am tortured more by all the smallest strings than others are by chains. -Nietzsche

Ideals Lost

The best a person can hope for is to sit in the backyard, in the afternoon sun, reading a good book. But then his mind races and all is lost.

Joseph Cornell in his backyard on Utopian Parkway

What Keeps Me Awake #10

Because of Dark Energy the Universe is expanding faster and faster. In perhaps as few as 100,000 years all the celestial objects will be so far spread out from each other that the Earth's night sky will be totally empty and completely black! Whatever intelligent life there is then will have no empirical basis for knowing the universe is expanding or anything about the rest of the objects in the universe. This calls into question whether what we observe now has any relevance to the true nature of the universe or is just a relatively, equally distorted view of the cosmos. Maybe more importantly, as scary and humbling as the vastness of the night sky is, would not a perpetually empty dark sky be existentially devastating?

Working Towards an Artist Statement #3

Excerpt  from "Hell" by Henri Barbusse translated by Robert Baldick first published in 1908