Time Machine

I spent the summer in Europe, at a place called Pont-Aven.  I made many paintings there, which came out more or less like this.

It took me awhile to figure out what to do next.  Jason Karolak mentioned that the shift from representational work to abstract was indicative of the space I entered, itself an abstraction in which my only concern was painting.  Upon returning home, I have been developing new ways of continuing and departing from this vocabulary.

In October, I spent two weeks  up to and including election day as a full time volunteer for the Obama campaign in Miami, Florida.  Both Miami and Pont-Aven were spaces severed from my life, but both involved complete commitment to the moment, to concrete goals connected to abstract notions.  In other ways, they were very different.  Miami was a place with a history and a culture that I faced every day, going from door to door, talking up Cambio.  In Pont-Aven, the studio became our world.  Apart from certain necessities, we had no presence in the community.

In Chicago, I have struggled to modify and change the languages I used in the specialized space of Pont-Aven.  Some things remain consistent.  For example, I brought back with me to Chicago a sense of the importance of having a well organized studio.  I no longer paint in my room, but pay a modest sum for a space at a great arts center called The Galaxie.  I have continued to think about ideas of touch, as well, though now more explicitly about flow.  The utopian ideal of touch, of a plane where all things maintain contact with all other things, is dramatized in movement, in flow.  separation is not simply the capacity to prevent contact, but also to channel and direct motion.  In many ways, the language remains recognizable from the summer to the present.

However, I have brought my photo-based practices back into the equation.  This has changed the target I have been addressing, shifted it in important ways.  In my first attempts, I forced representational aspects into the abstract scene — this led to a mostly confused picture space.  The pictures rejected my imagery as a body rejects a foreign object, slowly pushing it to the surface until it is expelled.  Simultaneously, however, I was working on some photo collages similar to the work David Hockney briefly explored during the early 1980s.

Ultimately, I feel it has been collage that is leading towards a language that can accept the imagery I was hoping to combine into my paintings.  I think this has been working because collage is a machine — it is a machine for making strange and discontinuous the smooth and uniform and uniting the separated and disparate.  It is always maintaining and bridging the space between objects.  Most importantly, however, is that it is simply a machine, because it is only by machines that we connect abstract flows (of fluids, goods, money, gasses, populations) through the concrete bodily and social spaces I try to depict through photographs.

I hope this is a useful introduction to a transitional series of works that is sometimes surprising, disappointing, absurd, and obvious.

Just for fun

A still life I painted for my class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The class was a brief introduction to traditional painting techniques (glazing, scumbling, egg tempera, etc). Excuse the photograph, the painting is already behind glass:

Oil on masonite.

The masonite panel is primed with Gamblin’s traditional gesso. Other than that, the execution is pretty straightforward. I forget what the ground is, but I think it’s pretty warm. The forms were modeled in dead coloring, using caput mortuum for shadows, yellow ocher, Venetian red, and gray for light areas. Then the secondary coloring was applied, using a much wider range of colors. Finally certain colors were glazed and highlights were added. The color in the bowl is entirely glazed, using Indian yellow, some of the shadows on the babushka salt shaker and the rose in her cheeks are glazed. Some of the texture in the pliers and the reflection of the light source on the left side of the base of the bottle were scumbled.

As for the objects, the bottle is a wine called Evenus, which is a Zinfandel Port I chose for its art nouveau label. The bowl is actually a trophy my roommate Jeremy won at a speech and debate tournament at Harvard.

La Poseur: After Seurat, For Sofia

Pencil on paper and mixed media.

A gift for my friend Sofia. I drew the picture at a figure drawing session at a studio on Ravenswood in Chicago. Regarding Seurat, see “Les Poseurs” at the Barnes Foundation.

Paintings on Metal: Kate

I consider this piece, and hopefully more to come, as an extension of the photohagiography series.  Basically, I’m trying to concretize certain aspects of “photographic vision” into material media, in this case painting.  I’m pretty happy with this piece.  The metal support is aluminum, which I bought from a small metal shop in the Irving Park neighborhood.  The shop specialized in welding and cutting aluminum for ventilation for restaurants.  Their focus isn’t exactly aesthetic, more like light industrial.  Anyhow, this is Kate:

She’s holding an Etch-a-Sketch.  Below is an incomplete study in guache, gridded from the photograph:

History of the 20th Century

These works are based on a photograph of a friend I took a few years ago. I used a medium format Mamiya press camera. It gives an extra-long picture compared to most medium format cameras. I suppose I was trying to create a Kafkaesque space, where things are surprisingly present or absent. The last is the most successful in this regard, but the others are nice. The pieces are painted with guache.

The imagery, besides the photo, is from various textiles I collected from both sides of my family tree – the most readily identifiable images, however, come from my father’s side of the family, such as the Petremont “P.” The family monogram is here represented on top of a mattress — I’m not sure why I chose to do that, but I think I was looking at some Jim Dine photographs that had a naked mattress in them, and I thought it was such a great image.

Just to show I wasn’t making anything up, the textile reference for the last piece is below. The only alteration I made was instead of having the figure gardening to have him harvesting. My model’s last name is Harvester . . .

This is the last piece in the series so far, and I think it’s the most complex and interesting. Again, think presence and absence, appearance and disappearance:

Descents

These pieces are based on the same photograph of Maya as the photohagiography piece. I think it’s instructive in this case to present the photo itself, because it is really a process that starts with the image and never quite moves beyond it:

The floating shapes in the following drawings are kind of like Malevich, or Russian Suprematism. The mark making is reminiscent of Klee. I’m not a big fan of Klee or Malevich, but actually I rather like these drawings. Here’s some remarks Lyotard makes on Klee’s process:

“Klee says, for example, that three things must be done: first, draw from nature, second, turn the page around and stress the important plastic elements, third, put the page back into the first position and attempt to reconcile the results of the first two operations. What is altogether remarkable is that Klee is thus perfectly describing the real relation of the artist with his phantasies, i.e. the double reversal. What he is attempting to do when things are upside down, is to free himself from the object, to keep desire’s mise-en-scene from seducing him, to see the form itself, the stroke, the value, etc. . . By turning his drawing around, he reverses the relation between the represented and the formal system, he is working, and if he reverses representation, it is in order not to see the figurative, not to be the victim of phantasy any longer, in order to be able to work upon the plastic screen itself, upon the page, by producing strokes that have a certain formal relation between themselves. The two operations must subsequently be reconciled by reversing the sheet of paper once again. There is a reconciling function much like what Freud calls secondary elaboration. When this is resorted to, you have a work that is no longer jammed by phantasy, that is no longer blocked in a repetitive configuration, but on the contrary one that opens upon other possibilities, that plays, that sets itself up in the “inner-world”: this is not the world of personal phantasy (and neither, obviously, is it that of reality); this is an oscillating work, in which there is room for the play of forms, a field liberated by the reversal of phantasy, but which still rests upon it.” (italics are all Lyotard’s; from “Notes on the Critical Function of the Work of Art” in Driftworks, pp. 74-75).

If I were to seriously consider the process described above, I would say that I had not really completed the double reversal, and that the final process of reconciliation was never reached.  Anyway, they’re just for fun. I only cut a mat for them because I was bored at work.

Again-Oedipus

I’ve been learning how to use egg tempera recently, and have thought for awhile about using that medium to rework a couple of my Oedipus drawings from last year. So I’ve started, as you can see below, with a green undercoating for the skin parts. Piero della Francesca used such a green undertone in his figures.

Conceptually, my goals have not changed much since I finished the cartoon for this piece last year.  Below is what I wrote about Oedipus in my artist statement from last year:

“What are the consequences for violating the simple correspondence of a single desire to a single object?

“Go and ask Oedipus this question; ask him what havoc a multiplicity of meanings may have, what terrible consequence the confusion of objects of desire may have. … The tragedy is personal, but it is not one that can be simply left at the doorstep of the oikos; he must be removed like a cancer from society, because the king is the criminal, a blurring of distinctions that society imagines it cannot endure, but that it always does. Oedipus fell from power due to a plague of multiplicities. Like a malignant cell that drowns its host by multiplying itself, too many meanings can paralyze the whole.

“How will Oedipus stop the plague? The cure must match the disease, and if Oedipus is afflicted with the ‘tragic hero,’ then certainly a regime of ‘heroic medicine’ is called for, but what combination of emetics and blood letting can set his humors straight? Benjamin Rush would perhaps have prescribed a thorough purging of the stomach, but I think in the logic of myth the apostle had it right: ‘if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee’!

Overcome with the burden of too much significance, Oedipus must remove the organ that moves him to conflicting love and desire, his eyes. He must discard his sight if he is to retain his sanity, and with the resolve appropriate to a hero he acts. But hold your own hand! When your own symbolic world grows too thick, remember that we are not heroes, and our world is no Thebes. You may quickly regret your hasty action; then, searching blindly with your hands for those discarded eyes, you will not be able to tell them apart from a pair of ping pong balls.”

Green underpainting

The bottom-left hand is painted over. Egg tempera has a mat quality, and it dries almost instantly, so the whole is really built out of a plethora of strokes.

A little exercise I finished first. Oil with egg tempera under painting.

Drawings of photographs that make my friends look like saints III (fin)

All pretty with a gray mat, as they were displayed at the WOR loft.  The name I’ve settled on for these is “photohagiography.”

“Untitled,” pencil on acrylic ground on Arches hot press.

“Untitled,” pencil on acrylic ground on Arches hot press.

“Untitled,” pencil on acrylic ground on Arches hot press. This is a second version of the first drawing I did in this series. I decided to do it over again because the first was done with a different pencil than the others. Although both pencils were 3H, these latter pieces are done using a Derwent pencil, which has a much colder lead than the brand I was using first.

I also got notably faster at drawing these portraits. The first version of this took me probably five or six hours, over the course of two days. The last three drawings were all done in one sitting, usually taking under three hours.

Drawings of photographs that make my friends look like saints II

Round two.

“Untitled,” pencil on acrylic ground on Arches hot press.

“Untitled,” pencil on acrylic ground on Arches hot press.

Around the studio

Miscellaneous drawings and such.

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Asleep on the El.  See David Hockney.

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See Barnett Newman.

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“He caught me in the doorway” (for Rachel).