Makin' that art...
I have been trying to update LJ as often as possible because I really definitely still feel like this is my favorite site... but I find I end up having these giant conglomerate entries of what is going on once or twice a week. I hope you guys don't mind. My facebook is more of a day by day record. Anyway, currently I have been trying to hole myself in my studio every night for 6-8 hours and just paint because I am REALLY far behind in the paintings I need to make for my show which opens early November at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, MD. I work better in choas, so I wasn't too worried about procrastinating until I got an email from the curator organizing the show that she needed an image for the cover of the brochure by the end of this week to send to the press. Holy hell... well I have been painting like the wind and I am really satisfied with my progress thusfar. I only really become passionate about painting once I get into it... once I'm done blocking in the surfaces and can lose myself in the details. I think it is a time where I can be completely happy alone, much like when I am listening to my vinyls or recording vocals. It's funny because I never step back when I am working... I just make these little globs and move them around in a seemingly painterly way, and then it always tends to resolve to photographic. One of my old teachers used to tell me I had a Courbet-like sense of value, which is quite a compliment, since his values are definitely almost photo resolution... I think it is because I have for so long deprived myself of color in my paintings, so I am not distracted in value by hue. This painting, on the other hand.. is another story. All the color does not exist, it is merely reflected. This one is 48" square to give you some sense of scale, on huge gallery-edged stretchers. I think at the point of this pic, it is about halfway done:
I thought of something last night while I was painting and I posted it in a status, and I think I'm going to incorporate it in my new artistic statement. Certainly given my current rocky emotional state, many would think to express what they feel in visual form, but for me the painting helps me forget all that. I make art not to express emotion but to vanquish it. My work is the absence of sentimentality- light, line, form, cold metal, mechanical reproduction. It speaks to a world in which we find our machines ever livelier, and ourselves strikingly inert.... ripping off Haraway with that one, but it's too perfect for the idea that I am trying to express here. These stellarator paintings are also a perfect subject to demonstrate this new distinct sort of cold-alien aesthetic of the manufactured- the stellarator is a human-made star. It simulates the inside of a star. How far we have come with imitating nature, yet we have created something completely distinct from it... and when you consider the machine/user symbiosis, the more advanced the machine, the more tasks it usurps from its user...rendering the user progressively more useless... without passing judgment or making statement to one effect or another, I simply present this fact. Here is technology- and here is the visual space in which it resides, completely separate from our own.
Also, I went to the beach. It was nice. Nags Head with my friends from wrestling Mahnaz and Brandon. We had a house literally ON the beach...slept with the windows down and let the sound of the ocean in... so incredibly healing.
I thought of something last night while I was painting and I posted it in a status, and I think I'm going to incorporate it in my new artistic statement. Certainly given my current rocky emotional state, many would think to express what they feel in visual form, but for me the painting helps me forget all that. I make art not to express emotion but to vanquish it. My work is the absence of sentimentality- light, line, form, cold metal, mechanical reproduction. It speaks to a world in which we find our machines ever livelier, and ourselves strikingly inert.... ripping off Haraway with that one, but it's too perfect for the idea that I am trying to express here. These stellarator paintings are also a perfect subject to demonstrate this new distinct sort of cold-alien aesthetic of the manufactured- the stellarator is a human-made star. It simulates the inside of a star. How far we have come with imitating nature, yet we have created something completely distinct from it... and when you consider the machine/user symbiosis, the more advanced the machine, the more tasks it usurps from its user...rendering the user progressively more useless... without passing judgment or making statement to one effect or another, I simply present this fact. Here is technology- and here is the visual space in which it resides, completely separate from our own.
Also, I went to the beach. It was nice. Nags Head with my friends from wrestling Mahnaz and Brandon. We had a house literally ON the beach...slept with the windows down and let the sound of the ocean in... so incredibly healing.