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I'm going to discuss three things
about the work: why I'm painting out of the rectangle instead
of within it (which will really be a brief summary of the formal
development), my non-formal relationship to the work, which are
some thoughts and feelings jotted down over the years from my
journals, and what I think the work has to do with Malevich's
Suprematism (subject of my 1982 MFA dissertation which greatly
influenced my painting).
I.
To answer the first question I have
to go back in time...1980 was the year I finally decided what
I really wanted to do was paint. I was doing prints and large
paper/canvas constructions prior to that, but I saw the Picasso
Retrospective that year and it had a tremendous impact on me.
Not just that the paintings were amazing, but it was like seeing
every interior aspect of another human being. What struck me
was that all the thoughts and feelings were there in the paint.
One could even feel the change from youth to old age. This impressed
me so much that I decided I was going to do "straight"
paintings likewise.
When I first started painting I
said I could paint anything I wanted as long as it was within
the rectangle. However after four years of this "straight"
painting I woke up one morning and realized I had no excitement
for going to the studio. It was a drudgery, a chore. I had four
large canvases I had been working on for ten months and they
were going no where. I hated them. All during the four years
I had wanted to put something else on the canvas, build as I
painted, to become more physically involved, but I had imposed
this limitation of the "straight" painting and only
out of absolute necessity was I going to change that. Finally
it reached a point where "straight" painting didn't
matter to me anymore --- the goal had become to do a "straight"
painting which put a real limitation on what the work was about.
And it also reached a point where if I added something to the
canvas, I knew now exactly why I was doing it.
I had been fooling around with some
other little color field paintings next to the big ones. And
I noticed when I put the small paintings say on top of a large
one, the elements, lines and shapes in the large one suddenly
became as real as the small paintings and the small painting
sort of hovered in a zone of being a real thing and just an illusory
element of the large canvas. I also noticed that the field of
the large canvas seemed to start to dissolve, float, become an
atmosphere for whatever was painted within it. So there was a
reversal going on of what was actually the real thing (stretched
canvas and attachment) appearing to be more illusory than those
elements that were illusory. I had been trying to do this all
along, but now it seemed to have real impact with these added
attachments. This was just what I needed because suddenly the
paintings seemed to come to life and were activated. I think
this feeling of life energy is very important in abstract work
because without it the paintings become a "so what".
It is possible to get that without building out of the rectangle,
but for me it wasn't, not with my temperament. And besides there
seems to be a kind of inevitability to the history of things
and how was one to ignore what Stella had done with the space
of abstract painting? Formally, it seemed a route to continue
down (shaped, three-dimensional painting), but perhaps with a
different edge.
Anyway, after I decided I could
do anything I wanted, it was much better. I don't regret those
four years though. In fact, I think it was necessary. I think
restraining one's self like that is good, because then when it
comes out, its because of necessity and is honest. I remember
when I finally made my decision to abandon straight painting,
thinking "what does it matter now. I'll never be a painter.
No one will ever want to buy or see my work, so I'll do it just
for me, so that I'll be happy and excited to go to the studio
each morning."
So to answer the first question
of why I work out of the rectangle: it is to make the forms and
shapes within the rectangle become more real. And it seems to
be a way of working for me that is direct, a way I can think
about and feel things with the material instead of my head. Some
people might find it very distracting to be in the middle of
painting and then have to go cut some shape or wrap some wire,
but that is how I like to work. I like the variety. I work abstractly
because feel closest to my feelings that way. I think it is exactly
like composing a piece of music except with color and form.
II.
Now, concerning what I think about
when I'm working on a body of work ... I wanted to read a couple
of journal entries. It gives a little bit more immediacy as to
what my artistic process is like and a more accurate presentation
of the personality which I think embodies a dimension of the
work.
Journal entry: November 1984 (a
couple of months after I had made the decision to work out of
the rectangle):
"I think I am almost to or
may have reached the point where I can just paint -- although
I won't know for sure until I have done a half dozen more paintings.
And it does seem like an artist reaches that point and then it
only becomes greater and greater and greater, that is if they
have an inner vision that is unlike anyone else, which I believe
everyone has, but most are unable to tap it, or be like a free
channel through which it may flow. It is so difficult not to
be uptight or anxious, to be perfectly natural... I don't care
what my paintings are, all that matters is how they are painted.
There are certain things I love and that is what my painting
is about. I'm thinking about my work right now.. what do I like
best, what can I say I love about it or love about its potential
right now. I like it when certain parts float out from each other
and there is a space that exists behind them like thin atmosphere
you swear you could put your hands through. I also like these
rich beautiful colors that sing out with such clarity, that elicit
such a longing, something so beautiful, so perfect that all one
can say is ah. That is what I want to be able to do, to do consistently."
Journal entry: January 1984 (11
months prior to other entry but anticipating things going on
now)
"My thoughts concerning my
art have been so elementary. Simple discoveries carried great
profundity, and now they seem so obvious, so assumed. I have
many doubts about being an artist, about the value of my paintings
and their relationship to our culture and the world we live in.
They don't seem contemporary or radical. I don't know what they
are. Sometimes I think they are irrelevant. I suppose the question
I should ask is: are they relevant to me? They are relevant to
me in that they give me some kind of hope, of awe and peace,
i.e. when they are well done. They are most definitely a retreat
from the world.Yet to me they are images of the world in the
most literal of all senses -- the world evicted of everything
but is mass and weight, its itness, a tiny pebble in a huge field
hurling through space yet never moving. Not all images are that.
Some are trying to understand volume. Volume as most akin to
that huge cavernous sound that opens in space at some moments
when an orchestra is playing. This sound that shows you the infinity
of that space before your eyes. And then this leads to that groping
desire for that which haunts all the riddles of the universe.
Like a low resounding drum beat that hearkens back to the beginning
of time, to a kind of savageness that is present in questions
there are no answers to ..."
Journal entry: August 1985 (One
and a half year later)
"Well, I'm on this tangent
of doing my drawings with no thought in mind, only making crude
marks, scribbles, until the mind begins to see things, pick things
out, impose and order. It seems to operate like a dream And the
mind keeps going, trying to make some sense. And only when it
can put a name to it or go "ah ha, I know what this is"
does it stop. I suppose that's how a certain amount of ridiculousness
enters in -- desperately trying to make something out of scribbles,
to make something, anything at all that is somehow worthy of
attention. But what makes it worthy? The quality of the scribbles
in relationship to each other and their lack of pretension? It
is a very difficult thing because at no time can I try and make
something in particular because as soon as I do, it becomes pretentious.
It has to arise of its own accord. The running thread, idea,
or plan of action is always to create this image, this dissolution
of form and surface, so that the space is always changing and
what is foremost can shift to being in the back or a real attachment
appears to exist in the atmosphere of the painting, not in front
of it. And so this makes the other things seem real and there
is a bridge. Out of painting comes the idea, where as preconceived
idea equals a design. It becomes a doodle when I'm not all there
or am dictating demands."
What I came to realize through this
stream of consciousness way of working and longing desire was
that each of my paintings has a strange story to it. Most of
the stories I can't tell because they're the kind not to be spoken.
I did happen to record two stories of two paintings. One is concerned
more with the tragic, the other more comic. It gives an idea
of how the paintings content level works and how I feel with
them.
Journal entry: April 1986
"I should tell you the story
of these paintings. The one makes me so sad I cry. When I look
at this painting, I feel like someone who is waiting. Waiting
for eternity, with a secret, confined, alone. There are many
associations with this painting... Why is it so sad? Because
there is such a great longing for something. Tragic, because
the beauty exists in the desire that can never be. It is like
pulling up the last vestiges of life, of hope, someone saved
many years and then immortalized it all in a painting -- a feeling
that is trapped, destined to burn brightly for eternity. I thought
also it is a painting of love and suffering. I don't want to
sell it because I will never have a painting like it. I won't
be able to feel anything so pure, so intense again: it has captured
this moment in time perfectly. It is as if when I look at this
painting, the feeling will burn brightly forever and I won't
forget where I once was. It is an image of how I feel at this
moment in a most sublime sense.
Now, the other painting excites me. It is a rather funny painting
and has a really dumb story: Like a dog named Spot goes on a
little sail boat ride through flaming bushes in a fake tropical
setting, and then there's this whirlpool that goes down and around
and suspends everything in space around a key hole that is something,
a solid object, not a hole. So one feels a madness like looking
through a hole that is dense and solid, that is like the key,
not the hole. And so what am I saying? X is given the impossible
task of finding the promised land, the fountain of youth, the
city of gold, but will be forever searching, going around and
round, because there is no hole into the secret chest. (And then
it all turned blue, a deep, beautiful blue, in every variation
imaginable.)"
A month later in May, 1986, I came
across these notes in the newspaper on beauty and sadness and
jotted them down as I thought they were interesting. It follows:
"Consciousness itself is a
form of sadness. The waiting, the patience of the self, the silent
spaces between impulses is where sadness lives. Joy is activity.
Beauty has something of the primal scene in it -- a sense of
forces beyond our capacity or control. Beauty is perhaps a bittersweet
regret that our lives cannot be better than they are."
There is a definite kind of sense
on a content level as well as a formal level that evolves in
the process of painting. The forms and marks exist as themselves,
but also allude to maybe two or three other things, layering
the meaning of the painting. Always in this process I find some
insight into my life that creates a unity between the piece and
myself. I often think of it as a kind of meditation in which
one delves into the depths of the mind, which one can think of
as either a dive into the unconscious or supra-consciousness.
III.
Now, Malevich, along with a number
of early 20c abstract/non-objective painters, was concerned with
developing supra-consciousness as a way of ushering in a new
age, a new way to feel existence on the basis of a kind of existential
sublimation. Suprematism was a theory of pure painting, forms
existing as themselves. The general line of thought of his that
I found interesting was in regards to his book The World a Non-objectivity,
a play of words on Schopenhouer's treatise The World as Will
and Representation. Its rather heady and convoluted but essentially
goes like this: If there is representation, then there is no
world. And if the will exists in order to direct and conduct
representation, then it is clear that there is no world but combat.
When the will becomes free from directing or conducting representation,
i.e. objects, it traces out a pure form of floating and a new
freedom of consciousness arises. In this state the painting can
become for the spirit a pure expression of its own self-evident
creative powers. The painting makes pure sensation real and creates
a situation where one, (I think both artist/viewer), exists in
a state of active passive receptivity. As I see it, this state
of active passive receptivity is the key and is from which one
becomes involved in a process of expansion and unification. I
think once the will is free form the world of objectivity, it
becomes possible to really tap ultimate truths and develop a
sort of supra-consciousness. So in terms of a philosophical goal
my work is similar to Malevich's and also in the fact that I
try to keep a non-objective relationship to the forms I use.
There is a statement from the philosopher
Martin Buber's I and Thou that I think gets at the core
of the transcendental in art and how art may function as a bridge
of sorts. He writes:
"This is the eternal origin
of art, that a human being confronts a form that wants to become
a work through him. Not a figment of of the world, but something
that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power.
The form that confronts me I cannot experience or describe. I
can only actualize it... And it is an actual relation. It acts
on me as I act on it. Such a work is creation, inventing is finding,
forming is discovery. As I actualize, I uncover. I lead the form
across --- into the world of It. The created work is a thing
among things and can be described as an aggregate of qualities.
But the receptive beholder may be bodily confronted now and again.
[The art object] enters into the world of things in order to
remain incessantly effection, incessantly It -- but also infinitely
able to become again a You, enchanting and inspiring."
The thing I remember so clearly
on doing the work on Malevich was his desire for painting to
be something in and of itself, actual and active, where one is
confronted with the immediacy of another mind. Buber in his discussion
goes on: "What then does one experience of the You? -- Nothing
at all. For one does not experience it. -- What then does one
know of the You? -- only everything. For one no longer knows
particulars." Then further on he comments on the notion
of presence which is something associated with human terms as
opposed to the world of things. He writes: "Presence is
not what is evanescent and passes but what confronts us, waiting
and enduring." I look at my paintings in terms of presences.
And so that is what my work is about,
or some of the things I think about when I step back from painting.
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