Art Moment #1

Yes, there will be others.

One of the beauties of traveling as I've been is that I do set down long enough that I can knock out a few small pieces. At some point, this will be problematic if I set down long enough to do larger works. I'll leap that crevice when it opens.

I am keeping a journal, of sorts, because I like to keep the hand/eye coordination going. Usually, it's quick, gestural stuff; in a couple of cases, I've gotten caught up in details of buildings. All that's for another time because what I'm working on now is a series of acrylic and gouache illustrations for a friend's book (which I need to hustle on since it goes to press right as I'm leaving).

Santosh's book is titled "The Color of Life". He'd seen some some stuff I've been monkeying with and really liked. He asked if I'd be interested in providing him some images and I said yes. The beauty of that is that we both agree that poetry by its nature is abstract and nonlinear. Words are related in poetry to something more concisely ambiguous than over an arc of narrative prose and, I think it's safe to say, that in many cases the poet is often as surprised at the result as the painter.

For Santosh's book, we chatted mostly about the nature of poetry and nothing about content. I think if it had been a burning need for him to tell me, he would have. And I rather like not knowing.

The works he saw are still part of a visual framework I'm kicking around. A number of years ago - almost three decades ago - I started working with this idea of a kind of expressionistic containment. Get super loose on the one hand and rein it in on the other. I still like that idea. Consequently, a lot of what I'm doing now is more about ambiguous (that word again) space. I like the idea of a kind of vertiginous perspective or multiple perspectives and opening up the space for a lot of visual play.

Part of me wants to do something relatively structured, so that happens underneath. In each of these examples, there's an underlying design that acts as a starting point. In the most recent image, I pretty much just doodled on the page till it looked like it was time to start working with whatever it was trying to tell me.

It's this last that's pretty important. The work will inform you. All I know when I start something is that there's a felt desire to work with materials and see what forms. Along the way, I let the shapes, colors, saturation, etc. guide me. I'm not pushing for some perfect image I have in my head; let the moment be the author as much as possible using my limited skill set.

The series is called "Poetry and Light" as a kind of antiphonal response to Santosh's "Color of Life"; it might be a bit precious, but it's what came to mind. Illustration is collaboration, even if each is doing their own thing. But there's often a synergy at work that isn't predicated on the separate elements of the final product.

The first two in the series came from a couple of sketches in the journal. I wanted these drawings to be as bare-bones as possible. For this kind of work, you can't (don't want to) plan out the painting's image. Surprises are going to happen.

I finished a work in Houston for my sister before I left that I'd been mucking about with for a very long time and that went through a similar protocol, the main exception being that the final image was much closer to what I had seen in the mind's eye on my journey with the materials. Of the three images that follow, the second is the one that most conforms to the idea in mind. Even then, though, I want to come back to it in a later painting and mess about with it.

Click on the images to launch the viewer.

This is the sketch for "Poetry and Light #1". All I wanted was something that felt like a current or a wave formation. It's actually something of a loose gridwork and there's a possibility for a much different outcome. Perhaps an outcome that will show up another time.

The final work is more driven by a kind of action painting approach. For sure, there's an underlying layer of an idea, but frankly, I got tired of that and decided to get more freewheeling. You know when there's more lurking underneath and you know when it needs to be set free. The basic gist remains the same; there are these wavy beings, criss-crossed with other beings and in general doing whatever.

As I look at the image now, one of the happier accidents was the obscuration of the three main crimson lines by this yellow chaos that just happened as I monkeyed with masking various areas.

Number two is almost an ode to Wilfredo Lam. There are no recognizable images in this, but I think of Lam whenever I come across grids and hatching like this.

It was tempting to deviate from the black and white when I started painting, but something told me, no. I've been blabbing since I was in my late teens that there's plenty of color in black and white.

Personally, what takes over in the painting is linear direction more than anything else. While that was certainly importatn from the beginning, this has a kind of ascendant Gothic structure that seems to have gained precedence. The painting is less busy than the drawing for both good and ill. I wanted more movement in this piece; but I rather like the blockiness and almost sculptural aspect of the resultant image.






Number three is a surprise. I didn't plan it out until I started drawing randomly on the page. Note the orientation; the movment starts in the upper left corner, as it does in the second image. There's considerably more movement in this and a much more interesting sense of space (I think).

I'd be lying if I didn't say that I didn't have Roberto Matta in mind as I whittled at this. He's been an inspiration since I was a teenager and I derived a lot of theories about space and values from his work. This may be more obvious from the details below:

Each of these works is born from some stuff from many years ago and earlier this year. There are specific elements that hold weight for me and point in directions I definitely want to go in. I think there is another trio of images for this suite. I look forward to seeing the final book (it will be in Nepali, I believe; perhaps a translation will be in the offing one fine day).