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Uh oh

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Fuck

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In my studio (Brian Don’t be worried)

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Two paintings I started, and preparatory star drawings for the curtain

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studio

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Statement

What kind of work do I make?

Paintings and drawings (there is some overlap there).

My drawing is notational, a stream of consciousness of strong ideas, feelings, and sensations that couldn't be otherwise expressed. It’s as much of a documentation of passing thought– what I see, hear, feel, remember on a daily basis– as it is a response to that passage. My paintings revisit and expand upon this notation. Through color, mark making, rendering, they are kind of tangential- they interrupt the linearity of the sketchbook and this way it affects the thought process, and allow for revisitation and improvisation/reimagination of an otherwise "completed" thought.

This marks my struggle to understand the interior vs. exterior (what is real and what’s not, self vs. outside world, how we move between spheres), a desire to connect with others (and witness different life experiences), and an obsessive need to collect and carry every significant moment, longing daydream, exciting-but-fleeting dream I experience. It’s as much fueled by nostalgia (a ‘cultural malady’?) as it is by restlessness- I want to collect all the things that I perceive as being left behind (which maybe never even existed in the first place, outside of a book or a song or warped and inaccurate childhood memory) and create a space for them to live in. I think about how we move through the world, and the unfailing looming presence of time and its passage. I’m always aware of time: a constant threatening presence which pervades every aspect of our lives, but also the fuel and the mother of everything that appears in my work, formally or content-wise. The way I have been using drawing and painting recently allow me to escape the imposed sequentiality of both, allowing me to move back and forth between thoughts.

What is in the work?

People, animals, nature, stars, inside spaces (domestic and otherwise), sparkles, magic. Anything I want, anything that catches as being something significant.

The figures and spaces themselves become somewhat symbolic. They are come from a combination of movies, music, memories, the places I inhabit/visit, books, and things I see. They represent things I want, things I’m afraid will escape, things that have been lost, and endless restructuring and reconstruction of these things. They are manifestations of my experiences, my fears, my perpetual restlessness and dissatisfaction, and my constantly evolving understanding of myself, my work, and the world (three concepts which remain hopelessly and confusingly entangled to me).

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Readings

1. Ways of Seeing by John Berger

John Berger’s seminal text on how to look at art.  Berger created a masterpiece in 1972 by digesting complex ideas about image reproduction and popular culture, bringing theory to the masses with “Ways of Seeing.” He covers subjects including imagery in advertising, the notion of originality, and subjectivity in perception. While others have gone into greater depth with many of the topics he covers, Berger’s opus is a must-have for its succinct mastery and impressive compilation of complex theory.

2. Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This is an original, psychology-oriented perspective on what some call “getting in the zone” but what unpronounceable Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi terms “flow.” What sets it apart, and makes it an apt text for art-making, is Csikszentmihalyi’s focus on satisfaction and happiness.

3.  History of Beauty by Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco’s groundbreaking and much-acclaimed first illustrated book has been a critical success since its first publication in 2004. What is beauty? Umberto Eco, among Italy’s finest and most important contemporary thinkers, explores the nature, the meaning, and the very history of the idea of beauty in Western culture. The profound and subtle text is lavishly illustrated with abundant examples of sublime painting and sculpture and lengthy quotations from writers and philosophers. This is the first paperback edition of History of Beauty, making this intellectual and philosophical journey with one of the world’s most acclaimed thinkers available in a more compact and affordable format.

4.  On Ugliness by Umberto Eco

In “History of Beauty,” Umberto Eco explored the ways in which notions of attractiveness shift from culture to culture and era to era.

5.  The Fifties: The Way We Really Were by Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak

“What does all this nostalgia means? Periods of intense longing for an earlier era indicate that people are discontented with the present. Excessive, sentimental nostalgia generally occurs during times of perceived crisis.” 

“There is an important distinction I feel that we should make between personal nostalgia and societal nostalgia. Personal nostalgia is that smell of your first teddy bear or the feeling of your first kiss. Personal nostalgia is a wonderful part of the human experience. But I feel that personal nostalgia is anecdotal and thus dangerous when used as ammunition to describe this desire to return to a "better time." I find that more often than not, the time and place that society is nostalgic for never existed. Romanticizing the past, while perfectly fine when applied individually, can stifle progress.”

6.  The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art by Lucy Lippard

In the 1970s, Lucy R. Lippard, author of the highly original and popular Mixed Blessings, merged her art-world concerns with those of the then-fledgling women’s movement. In a career that spans sixteen books and scores of articles, catalogs, and essays on art, political activism, feminism, and multiculturalism, her engaging and provocative writings have heralded a new way of thinking about art and its role in the feminist movement.

7.  On Some Relationships between Music and Painting by Theodor W. Adorno

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-do-you-make-a-painting-out-of-sounds-38014594/

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Some work from this semester

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Art Lineage

1. Peter Doig

2. Lois Dodd

3. Nicole Eisenman

4. Grace Weaver

5. Dana Schutz

6. Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

7. Nikki Maloof

8. Vittorio Brodmann

9. Luc Tuymans

10. Elizabeth Peyton

11. Ginny Casey

12. Susan Lichtman

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In the David Byrne essay, something that resonated with me was the way he described what he made. He says "Just because the form that one's work will take is predetermined and opportunistic (meaning one makes something because the opportunity is there), it doesn't mean that creation must be cold, mechanical and heartless. Dark and emotional materials usually find a way in, and the tailoring process–form being tailored to fit a given context–is largely unconscious, instinctive. We usually don't even notice it. Opportunity and availability are often the mother of invention. The emotional story–"something to get off my chest"–still gets told, but its form is guided by prior contextual restrictions. I'm proposing that this is not entirely the bad thing one might expect it to be. Thank goodness, for example, that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time we make something."

With thesis looming over me, I keep thinking about how to write about the content of the painting. While I know basically what I want to write about in regards to the more formal/painterly aspects of my work (about drawing, color, etc.) it often feels, when I’m trying to write about or verbalize the content, like it’s very separate or disconnected from the rest of my work. When I’m working, I don’t feel the need to force a connection, or at least find one that is easily explainable or easily understood. It's more like a stream of consciousness, and the making of the image is part of that. 

Context has a lot of different meanings. Is it what you’re thinking about? Is it what the image is being made for (for you, your studio, a gallery?) Is it who will see the work? Is it what is written on the tag next to your work? Is it an essay you publish writing about your work? All or none?

I think subconsciously this will shape the work, but for me personally, thinking/writing too specifically is disruptive. I prefer to think in terms of listening to music, looking at images like movie stills or old photography, writing down scraps of phrases and words that carry something. I like to think like a sketchbook, fragmented but a steady documentation and collection of thought processes and significant feelings. This is what works best for the way I work, half-baked blind drawing and recording, chew it up and spit it out. Does spelling out everything clarify you and your work, to the viewer or to yourself? What is requiring the context? I prefer not to think about it.

Ideal context: It’s a lot for me, making things I want or need to see- like lucid dreaming! But I also want to connect with other people. That might sound cheesy (I’m pretty good at writing academic essays but not so much this kind of thing), but since I can’t or won’t verbalize whatever it is I’m trying to express/explore/expunge from myself (which sometimes feels deeply complicated and even otherworldly and other times feels like I’m making horrible teenage fan art) drawings and paintings are the only way I can communicate it to others. It’s not really about *me* (well sometimes it probably is) but also the place we are in and a shared past and memory. So I’d like to make something to be passed around and eaten.

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Laurie Fendrich: How critical thinking sabotages painting

http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2016/03/laurie-fendrich-how-critical-thinking.html

Richard Baker handed out this article in class, and I found it informative. It kind of butts heads with the concept of “critical thinking” and objects to it as a default. Although I think the author paints painting teacher with a very broad brush, they also make a lot of keen observations about the academic artmaking process:  “With today’s identity-conscious students wanting, right off the bat, to express in paint ideas about anything from gender crossing to wealth inequality to global political oppression, competence in painting’s traditional skills has become almost a no-go zone. Painting professors have retreated to merely “supporting” and “nurturing” student painters, asking only that students “articulate” what they’re trying to do — that is, to retroactively apply critical thinking to their works.” I would say that I while I agree that the article’s definition of “critical thinking” is flawed, I don’t necessarily think that the author’s suggested solution is the best or only solution. There is probably some middle ground.

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Questions and Answers (or not)

I think I should first mention that my response to question of “What kind of question are you trying to answer with your art? What kind of question is your art asking?” seems to change radically each time I attempt to answer it. I have no idea how to pin down exactly what I’m doing because it’s constantly changing and developing. Sometimes this worries me (especially as I see some of my peers seem to have a much clearer, more stable process) but I’ve realized that allowing anxiety to dictate my artmaking process only paralyzes me, so I’m somewhat resigned to going with the flow at this point. 

In my art, as far as content/subject matter, (trying to speak honestly and describing it in the broadest terms) I think I’m creating a place to inhabit, a special magical kind of place, and to populate it with characters (and also versions of myself) which I like and think are special. The imagery in my paintings is kind of supplementary to the things I think are missing in in the way we/I live. Places, situations, people, and feelings which don’t have a place in the world anymore, or maybe never even really existed except as exaggerations/amplifications of the human condition in movies and music. Things I will never experience in real life, but which still cause some kind of emotional response, or feeling of nostalgia. Even things from my own past, places and situations which are imprinted on my brain. I feel the impulse to collect these things and then place myself within that context. Why? It's everything about the world that is interesting and sticks in my head as something significant. As I think about it, it must sound like I'm creating a safe space, like a fantasy world. And maybe to some extent that's true, but these spaces and characters also exist as a space for me to push back against the world and against myself. 

 Don’t people develop the way they do, form their uniqueness, by basically collecting memories and experiences, and also choosing things outside their sphere to follow, dislike, admire, participate in? That basically seems to be my practice now, by obsessively collecting imagery and character to play out some kind of non-sequential, non-narrative which somewhat mitigates my restlessness and perpetual dissatisfaction with myself and the way I live my life. My sense of self has always been overly entangled with the work I make.