monday (or how to use and abuse the colon and semi colon)

Fresh paint, painting in progress: that perfect stage of wet and workable.

How my 24 hours were spent instead of taking advantage of the muse, who sat bored and unbelieving, kicking her heals and chewing on my conscience as I ignored the studio (insert: easel, painting, passion, future)?

Woke up at 3:am. Breakfast, news, email. 30 minute workout and stretch, 4:45 am, frost on the ground, ice on windsheilds, moon low in the late night, early AM cold black sky. My breath precedes and trails me: I take the dog for a run (or she takes me. I need the workout, she wants the excercise, it's symbiotic...). Shower, dress, drive to the next town to work @ 6:am (one minute late, must find a supervisor to let me punch in). Hack, slice, dice and grind the farm animals of the world for Northern California kitchens. Off work at 2:30 pm: bank, shop, home by 3:30. Dishes to wash, dinner to prepare, HOLD ON! A vital household chore rears it's mandatory mug. To hell! 5:30pm, crack open Anchor Steam Seasonal Ale (g-r-r-e-A-T-E!). 7:30, finish my business, eat, watch Fedor_The_Last_Emperor_Emelianenko while eating then fail to find another interesting fight video that will load on the 24hundred dollar Mac. Decide to blog, finish wine, go to bed. Wake up and repeat with the hope of Art being allowed to breathe next time.

Good night my empty audience. Cheers.

Black Sunday

Or blue. Maybe soon to be seeing red Sunday.

I saw the work of another local painter having painted the same landmark (landscape) I just abandoned (finished). As I mentioned in my last post "emotion" is a strong and necessary component of a painting, and yes, even in a landscape. Well, my painting seems rather stiff and two dimentional in comparison to the painting by the other artist. Trumped certainly in the emotion category as well as technique for that matter. Ahhh, what better way to start a day at the easel than feeling lame and second rate.

That aside, my thoughts today are on Picasso's 'bull' series and how important it is as a theory in strategy. I never really cared for the piece as a work of art, still don't, but the idea is not only phenomenal but crucial. Pare down the subject matter to what is most important. Paint that. Everything else is too much. You can quote me on that. Make a bumper sticker out of it: Everything else is too much!

Being a painter from the loathed and scorned group of painters who work from photographs I can tell you absolutely that the photo gives you too much information. Unless you took some overexposed photos (that sucks), you must choose the 10 to 25 percent of information that will make the most interesting composition and throw the rest away. Let me tell you first hand that is no easy task. I love every morsel of the female figure and now I have to throw most of it away? As a matter of fact I just scraped two sessions, four days of painting off of a canvas that had become a parody of itself in no small part because I refused to make the cuts necessary. Painting and scraping and standing away scrunching my face at the easel I thought "Picasso's goddamn bull". Took a break, ate a sandwich, checked the news on that Pulp Fiction style shooting of those cops in Tacoma, and wrote this.

Back to the fray.

I should be painting

Finally finished the large landscape; took months of neglect, stagnation and life's other demands along with quite a few days off and week ends to do. Someone, artist or poet once said: art is "never finished only abandoned". I feel that. Especially with that piece. The flip side of that is getting through all the composition and color/contrast issues and really enjoying those final moments where I intensify the highlights and make minor adjustments, feeling a little sad about ending my relationship with the work.

What about those mission statements artists are bound to come up with to get their work shown anywhere? Does anyone find those as useless as I do? I was thinking recently about what I am trying to achieve with my work and i came up with four things:

One: Subject matter. I want the subject to matter. Imagine that?

Two: Design. The composition must be pleasing, allow the eye to move and come back to points of interest. Crazy shit, i know.

Three: Emotion. There should be an emotional impact. Easier said than done. Look at the Mona Lisa to see famous failure.

Four: Technique. The manner in which the paint itself is applied should have it's own interest value. Illustration of point: from a distance the painting works and is pleasing, from up close the texture of the brush stroke is interesting in and of itself.

That's it. Hang my shit on your gallery walls and tell the people I tried. I tried very hard to achieve these four goals. Hope they like it.

To put it another way, I do my very best to not waste a potential viewers time. If they are going to stand before my paintings opening their minds and using their eyes there had damn well better be something there for them to find. All the other crap about color and feeling and meaning and your mother and your father and your lonely ass feelings, where are they listed next to any of the classic paintings? Who knows what Klimt was thinking? Who cares? His subject matter is important. His design is impeccable. Emotion. Technique: how the hell does he make woman's head sit at an unnatural perpendicular angle to the body while preserving the beauty of the figure? Style and technique.

I'm not a worshipper of Klimt's necessarily, he was just the first to come to mind. On the other hand, many of the artists that society holds up as the big winners for me, lose the ability to excite. I can look at them and see how and where they were successful but I am not inclined to be inspired by their work. But that's a whole 'nother discussion. I've got a day off and the howling November winds are reminding me there's painting to be done.