Touché

Recently, a friend loaned me a book called "Inside The Painter's Studio", which is a series of interviews by Joe Fig, who asks a number of established artists a set of questions about their daily studio practice. For the final interview question, each artist is asked, "what advice would you give to a young artist who is just starting out?" So far, Malcolm Morley's response is my favorite:
Well there's a great story about Mozart who was approached by a young composer. The young composer asked Mozart for advice on what he thought he should write: whether he should write a saraband, a suite, a romance, a symphony, etc. So Mozart looked at him and said, "Well, in your case, I'd write a waltz." So the young composer was very sort of angry. And he said, "But Mozart! At the age of ten you wrote a symphony!" And Mozart replied, "Yes, but I didn't have to ask anybody's advice." So any artist or student that asks advice is already a failure in my view.
It seems particularly apropos for me after my latest blog. The other artists in the book respond to the question with a similar sentiment, but use the kind of earnest, encouraging words that we most often hear from our mother ("just be yourself", "follow your heart", etc). I think Morley's response is a much more brutal but effective slap in the face.

Tyranny of the Hypothetical


I've been struggling lately. It goes without saying that painting is always a struggle, and that's to be expected. But it's much more than that. I think in the last few months, it's really hit me how hard this whole artist thing really is. As a student, you're so protected - assignments, mentors, mandatory feedback, all wrapped in a whole lot of big dreams and naive optimism. But it's different once you're on your own. I finally finished my degree last April, and then shared a studio with a few friends until September. Since then, I have worked obsessively, alone. For the first few months, I reveled in my new-found privacy and space. I made big strides in my work and produced painting after painting after painting. But since Christmas, the months have been ticking by, and while the obsessive working has not diminished, I have become increasingly conscious of my largely secluded existence.

In so many ways, working day after day without interruption or distraction is a gift, a privilege, a luxury. But it is also trying. The deluge of critiques that I so often longed to be free of while in school has abruptly dried up, and too often I find myself thinking back to the soggy old comments made about my old work to see if they can continue to guide me with the new. It goes without saying that they are woefully inadequate.

Of course I work hard at challenging myself - and I do. But you see, there's the rub. When you depend on your art to pay the bills, the art-making process can quickly become stiflingly goal-oriented. There are deadlines, collectors, galleries - and along with all that, is the increasingly anxiety-ridden awareness that the work is not being made for my eyes alone, that it is intended to go out into the world and be seen, scrutinized, and ultimately judged.

Most artists that you talk to or read about say that they don't care what other people think. Maybe that's true. But there's caring what other people think in a grovelling, pandering kind of way, and then there's caring what other people think in a hoping-to-connect, trying-to-communicate kind of way. And while I certainly don't advocate the former, I think the latter is much more complicated. When I was at school, the critique process at school gave each of us a test-run for our work from a bunch of interested and educated viewers. The whole process was an implicit affirmation that it does matter what other people think - as artists, we're literally trained to care. But now that that constructive process is gone, I have had to replace that audience of actual viewers with an audience of my own imagined hypothetical viewers.

And there has been the root of my struggles. My imagination seems to breed these viewers who are not only highly critical but fickle. They befriend my doubts, play hide and seek with my intentions, and dress up my instincts with costumes that don't fit.

But then today, just when the growing, chaotic crowd of bullying hypothetical viewers were beginning to stampede, I experienced an unexpected gunshot to the sky that has scattered the masses. And suddenly I feel emboldened, even liberated. And at least for today, the hypothetical viewer is just me.

A Sign of Intimacy

In my Collins English Dictionary, the word "intimate" is defined, in part, as:
deeply personal, private, secret
having a deep or unusual knowledge
of or relating to the essential part or nature of something; intrinsic
For me, there is no question that painting has a distinct capacity to express intimacy. I would argue that at its best, painting always does. Which is not to say that all paintings are intimate expressions. Many (too many?) are not. Which means it cannot just be the medium itself that evokes a sense of intimacy. There must be more to it than just paint. But what exactly?

What role does the iconography of the painting play - can a still life, a sprawling urban landscape, a figurative portrait, a graphic abstraction, each convey an "equal" (not necessarily similar) sense of intimacy? My initial instinct would be to argue no, that the human body/face has an unfair advantage. It must be easier to feel intimate toward a person than a pear, a building or a shape. But there are simply too many examples (innumerable, really) of painted objects, views and blobs, that, through the eyes of many viewers, evoke as much (if not more) intimacy as peering into the face of a stranger. And if that is true, then perhaps it is not what is painted, but how it is painted.

So then is it the artist's touch that humanizes the surface into a sensual being? If so, is any touch sufficient or do we all have to be de Kooning? Chuck Close used an airbrush in his early work to remove the baggage that comes with a strong gestural imprint, but when face to face with the real paintings, the surface cannot be said to read as mechanical. In contrast, Richter's blurred photo paintings are clearly of the hand and brush, but I can't say I would describe my encounter with these works as one of intimacy.

Does the size of the painting matter? Can an enormous painting be as intimate an experience as a miniature? The immersive experience offered by a large canvas can swallow the viewer into its vision, but is that really what we would describe as intimate? But if the canvas is too small, does the viewer dominate it like a giant to a child, keeping the viewer at a remote distance like a photographer looking through a viewfinder. De Kooning spoke of sizing his works to relate to the scale of the human body. I like this approach, and have been adopting it as of late, but I know this cannot be the only viable option to creating an intimate relationship between painting and viewer.

Color must play a role in it somehow too. In my own work, I have found using too much of the synthetic pigments that have no real existence beyond the chemical usually severs the intimate possibilities in a work. But is that to say that must always be the case?

Of course I am sure there is no definitive rule to be discovered. In the video of Chuck Close that I posted yesterday, Close wisely states, "Problem solving is way too over-rated. Problem creation is much more interesting." So the problem I have created for myself is to grapple with the question of intimacy, to strive to create paintings that engage the viewer in an intimate confrontation. As Jonathon Lasker wrote in his essay "Paint's Body" (and one of my favorite quotes about oil painting):
"We are all at present, more divided, less empowered, and certainly far less connected to the effects of our world than we should be. It is for this reason that I am deeply involved with the textures of a medium capable of universalizing so much lost intimacy."

A Gamble

Painting (or perhaps more broadly, making art) is nothing more than a series of decisions, big and small, grandiose and minute. So many decisions must be made, and then once made bravely and boldly, they must be re-thought, re-considered, re-done. It's easy to become overwhelmed. (Have I mentioned I'm overwhelmed?) It's certainly exhausting. To learn, past decisions that worked must be remembered and re-used to facilitate the next series of decisions toward something even more difficult or complex. But to move work forward, they must also be questioned, challenged. But which ones do you hold on to in the name of a lesson learned, a skill achieved, an idea expressed clearly, and which ones do you discard as inadequate, unsuccessful, or no longer interesting? How can you be sure you know which one is which?

Lately I feel as if I'm sitting at a slot machine, with a million possible choices whirling around inside. With a random but decisive move, I produce one result that reflects some combination of all those choices, and with each successive attempt, I produce new, slightly varied results. But it amazes me that it can be the change of just one choice that makes the difference between hitting the jackpot and losing your quarter. I know I can't hit the jackpot every time, but I'm tirelessly trying to achieve enough winning combinations that at the very least, I get to keep playing the game.

Beauty in Disguise

If you could see me, you wouldn't describe me as beautiful. I'm pretty enough, and I can feel pretty good about myself on a good hair day with a flattering outfit. But I'm not beautiful. Enough men have hit on me that I assume some would say I can be sexy, or hot, or however men describe it outside the company of women. But it's not beauty. I think it would be fair to say that I have a fascination with the fantasy of being beautiful. For me, the fantasy is not about gaining the approval or love or admiration of others. It's something I assume I would feel inside myself - not just a confidence, but perhaps a freedom, the kind of freedom that comes with donning a perfect disguise.

I generally don't talk about the role of beauty in my work. I'm comfortable discussing the theoretical debates surrounding the idea of beauty in contemporary culture, but to declare my work to be a meditation on beauty, I don't think I'm ready for that yet. It closes off the possibilities. It sounds trite.

Someone recently said to me that they were tired of the idea that people thought art had to be deciphered, that art was somehow a means to hide something obvious that the viewer just had to find. I agree with that, but I don't think it applies just to viewers. I think artists too, now faced with the pressures of insightful and theoretically rigorous artist statements, can find themselves trying to define and clarify and explore ideas without even making the work. But the more work I make, the more I continue to be surprised by the themes and ideas that reveal themselves to me in the process of making and in the completed pieces.

My private relationship to beauty is slowly revealing itself. People have been telling me so. But that doesn't mean that is what the work is about, or what I intend it to be about, or what I hope it to be about. But it is there nonetheless.

Perfect Enough

Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me if there was a difference between searching for something that cannot be found, and searching for something that doesn't exist. A weird question, I know. But as I began to play with the philosophical angles, I quickly (as I always do) veered toward painting.

In the context of painting, I like to think there is a difference. I think in some ways I am always striving for a perfect painting - not THE perfect painting, but the perfect realization of the current painting or idea that I imagine. Can it be found? Does it even exist? I'd like to think that it does exist, even though I'm sure it can never be found. But that does not deter my efforts in the search. Everyday, at the end of my work day when I look at the part that I've completed, I wonder how differently it would have turned out if I had painted that part yesterday, or tomorrow, or the next day. What decisions would I have made differently, how would my hand have moved, which brushes would I have chosen, would the colors have been brighter, duller, warmer, cooler. As a painter, the vision I have in my head for a painting is clear but still nebulous. Even working from photographic sources, the vision I have for a piece doesn't fully exist until I paint it. Then maybe it satisfies that vision, and maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's better than I could have imagined. Maybe it's better because I couldn't have imagined it. But I'm always fascinated with the idea that I could paint a certain image a hundred times, and each time it would be different. And which one would be perfect? But once that first painting is done, then it's found. It exists. Imperfect, but fully realized. But the possibilities still haunt me. I want to paint every painting again - fix it, make it better, live through the search all over again, see if/how/how much it would be different with just one more endless try. But there are a million other paintings to search for, so I move on.

I like to think painting is special in this respect, but I'm probably wrong about that. Photographers must struggle with the same choices - one split-second to the next captures a different, irretrievable moment. You have to pick one, averaging out their strengths and weaknesses. Is there such a thing as a perfect moment?

When I paint, I consider it complete when I believe I've achieved the best result possible in that moment and believe that doing more is more likely to ruin it than improve upon it. Some might call that intuition, but I don't. For me, "intuition" sounds like I can tap into some inner voice that has the "right" answer. I hate that idea. I have a million voices in my head all the time, the angels, the devils, the sloths, the philosophers, the wounded, the dreamers. It's hard to know who to listen to sometimes. Sometimes I listen to one over the other. But what I am working toward is that moment when they all seem to agree - when I get that rush of adrenalin, or happiness, or excitement, or ecstasy, or whatever you want to call it - a rush that tells me to stop. It is complete. A few stragglers in my brain may want me to go back in and see if I can make it even better, but armed with the comfort of majority rule, I resist. It's good. It's good enough.

That sounds like I'm only striving for "good enough". But the fun part for me is that with each painting, "good enough" slowly becomes closer to that ever-elusive perfect - I want more and I expect it to be better. My skills develop, my vision expands, I have to rise to the new occasion. And then what was good enough for painting 2, just isn't good enough for painting 10. I'm capable of more, I want more, and a thrill occurs each time I see the glimmer that I can have more. It makes me endlessly curious, if not impatient, for the next painting, and painting 112, 256, and 759. The challenge is to not be defeated by what constitutes "perfect" in the given moment, to have a little faith, and to just keep painting.

A Beautiful Thing

I'm in a show next weekend, the "Untapped Emerging Artist Exhibition" at the Artist Project. It's a three day art fair, and there will be various lectures on contemporary art held as well. I received an email today from one of the lecturers who will be doing a talk on beauty in contemporary art. She asked me about the role of beauty in my work. This was my response.

Beauty is undoubtedly central to my approach to art. I have not been an artist all my life, but I have always been a viewer of art. Now as an artist, I relate strongly to the role of the viewer and I believe the use of beauty and an engagement with the ideas of beauty is a seductive way to capture the viewer's attention. Jonathon Lasker writes, "Contemporary culture is oriented toward sensation far more than it is toward beauty. This is very much in keeping with the image of our world: the texture of life is seldom beautiful, although it is usually sensational. It is fast, loud and enervating. [...] If contemporary art cannot provide beauty, than it must come to terms with sensation." But I disagree that we have become numb to beauty in some way, or that beauty lies outside the realm of sensation. On the one hand, I think beauty has an aspect of spectacle to it, a call to be looked at, which is very much symptomatic of our society today. On the other hand, it is also true that beauty is generally a quieter presence, a more contemplative space. But in the midst of a culture seething with the type of sensations evoked by images of violence, disfigurement or disgust, perhaps beauty is a much needed antidote, an escape or refuge from the "fast, loud and enervating" aspects of our life. It seems to me that the experience of beauty is one of the fundamental qualities that make us human, that frankly, despite everything, makes living worthwhile. If art is to capture, reflect on and remind us of all aspects of the human condition, beauty must be an essential part of that endeavor.

The other important aspect of beauty in my work comes from my belief there is an inherent sadness to the experience of beauty. Alexander Nehemas describes beauty as "a promise of happiness", but I think it is more the promise of unhappiness. Beauty is momentary, fleeting, sparking a desire that cannot be fulfilled, creating a longing that can never quite be satisfied in the same way again. My work deals directly with this by virtue of my process. My recent paintings are derived from images taken from fashion magazines. I print fragments of these images with an inkjet printer on a surface to which the ink does not adhere. I photograph the prints as the ink moves and bleeds, as the image dissolves into something new (and "less beautiful"). My paintings are composed from fragments of these photographs, with each painting comprised of one image at different stages of metamorphosis, from one vision of beauty to another.