A Painting Journal

Aurorae, acrylic on paper, 2012

A painting journal

Trying something semi-new. Keeping a journal as I paint. Writing down thoughts in the pauses between painting during a session. Just as a record of the creative process.

Listening to music, while I paint, on random shuffle on iTunes on my laptop. Keep in mind that on my studio computer, my iTunes library can now play for over 190 days continuously, with no repeats. All kinds of music, truly random.

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Thursday, November 8
4:16 PM

Feel like painting today. There is sunlight streaming in for the first time in weeks. There’s one painting that I want to finish, now.

Don't be afraid to paint over something you liked before, but which didn't work for this painting. I am finding myself wanting to finish one of the “Lights” (Aurora Borealis) series of paintings today, after having it set aside for weeks. I have the iTunes music library on shuffle, listening to random pieces while painting. All over the avant-classical pop rock map. Copland to Patsy Cline to books on CD to Kate Bush.

Several layers of dry rush blue night sky, over existing backgrounds. Then the luminosity of the aurorae themselves. Lots of edge softenings, nuances, translucencies.

Even though I started this painting with bold geometric shapes, I've moved away towards something more fractal, more natural. Follow the brush. Bold and solid under layers yield to thinner, translucent, feathered upper layers. It looks better that way.

Because of the way I'm painting right now, or because of the abstract-realist subject matter, I find myself using large flat brushes. Angled strokes, really rather calligraphic. Sometimes the brushtrokes form lines and surfaces like geographic texture underneath the more visible layers.

Peter Gabriel to science fiction soundtrack creepiness. “He's got a ray gun!” Melodic punk Bob Mould. Zen shakuhachi.

The painting darkens but the lights still shine through.

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Thursday, November 8
4:46 PM

The next layers will lighten the painting up again. Let the dark over-layers dry for awhile. Then continue. Often I don't let the acrylics totally dry, because I do like the slight mixing that happens when you dry brush paint over a still slightly wet layer. The same kind of mixing that happens in nature, layers of sedimentary rock feathering and mixing together as they form, bleeding color from minerals leaching into the matrix.

Continuing to photograph each painting in progress, with the idea of using these closeups and sectional photos of color and brushstroke as painted stock backgrounds. Might even create and sell CDs of original stock on my own, of these my own materials. Why not? No one else has them, because no one else has these paintings in progress.

Photographing the painting in progress is also a way of looking at it, contemplating it, looking more closely.

Quick sunset of oncoming winter. There goes the last of the natural light. Even in the failing light, though, continuing to paint, kitchen lights turned on now.

Sometimes the texture of the paper still comes through, as do the lines of brushstrokes on lower layers.

Of course lighting affects mood. Color does as well. Despite what the neuroscientists claim, I don't think that's hardwired, I think it still has some culturally-bound factors. A lot of neuroscientists are not even aware that their own fundamental assumptions about what they observe are culturally-bound; unaware that their cultural bias is Western-scientific; as opposed to, for example, Inuit-mythic or Hindu-Buddhist-cosmological. Is a fish aware that it’s breathing water?

Color palette and language are not the same from culture to culture. What is held in common are the perceived colors of natural world objects. Red berries on forest plants around the world are poisonous often enough to humans to be of note. But there is no equivalent color in the northern Midwest to the color of young rice in the paddies, that unique yellow-green. So what we associate with those colors has at minimum some cultural input and conditioning with regards to how we interpret colors as emotions.

Yet I’m a North American, born on Turtle Island, and my roots for this kind of painting that I find myself doing are in Kandinsky and other branches of early Modernism, from the period before Modernism went ultra-rational, began to worship logical-positivism, and threw away all of its early vestiges of both irrationality and mysticism.

People forget that some of the key branches of early Modernism were deep explorations of the newly-theorized unconscious self, the realm of dreams and myths and archetypes; that got discarded in favor of rational utilitarianism. Not always an equal tradeoff. What the expressive color, the color of expression, in my painting means might mean what it means only to me, but as Kandinsky notes, if the experience of viewing the painting evokes an emotional, or mythopoetic, response in the viewer, all is good.

Laurie Anderson runs into Coldplay. Then 40s pop hits. A favorite slow movement from a Vivaldi cello concerto. Truly random music choices. The BBC Radio drama of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Rest awhile. Make some more photos of the painting. Think about starting dinner.

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Thursday, November 8
5:16 PM

I'm not remotely tired of photographing these paintings as I make them. It's not really about recording the process, more about watching change. Each working period yields a new painting. The painting you start with is not always like the painting you end with, and it might change several times during the process. Eventually it tells you when it's done, and you stop.

That's something a lot of my non-artist friends never seem to understand: listening to what the work tells you it wants. Non-artists all too often think art-making is all a conscious act of will, as though it were all planned out, pre-designed, engineered to the artist’s willful blueprint. Well, sometimes you do start out that way, but it almost never ends up exactly as you pre-visualized. It moves. It always has a will of its own. The artist doesn't control things as much as people think. There's a lot of intuition involved.

One of the things that makes a lot of current postmodern art so dry and emotionally flat, and often frankly boring, is precisely a lack of intuition, with too much conscious intent and control. Trust me, I've worked in advertising art and commercial design and illustration, where you are in fact working to a goal, an outline, a conscious intent. Art with a purpose, art intended to pass on a specific message. It's often still creative and fun, and sometimes even nuances, but it's not art that’s meant to endure. It’s meant to be seen once, clearly convey its message, then the reader moves on. Most art you see in magazines is like that. You don't desire to keep coming back to it, to look at it again and absorb it.

When I look at a Jeff Koons piece, for example, it's often very clever and flashy and interesting, really eye-catching and fun. But once I've seen it, I’m done with it. There’s no lingering. Looking at it a second time, I shrug. There is no desire to come back. It's commercial illustration writ large, and what it lacks is precisely that emotional intuition (Kandinsky again) that I find myself seeking from my own paintings. I don't tire of looking at them, or making photos of them.

Probably most artists feel this way about their own work, so it's hardly a revelation, I imagine. If it didn’t interest you as an artist, you wouldn’t return to it, or to doing it.

October Project. A movie soundtrack. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Cowpunk ditties. "I hate to wake up sober in Nebraska." Music rolling on.

Pause to make dinner. Ravel solo piano music.

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Friday, November 9
11:45 AM

Now we lighten up the colors again, so they emerge from the dark, glowing. Red glows over green.

Thinking ahead, planning ahead, envisioning in advance with the mind’s eye, what photographer Edward Weston called “pre-visualization,” is something I learned to do years ago as a graphic designer. You keep the goal in mind. You can hit the mental undo button to go back a step if necessary. You visualize what the end result will look like, and you approach that visualization even if you never quite match it in the real world. Imagination remains more malleable, in the end.

Working in layers on a painting, adding layers over layers, is for me analogous to working in layers in Photoshop. You know what's above and below, what masks and what shows through, how they interact. There is a similar sense of happy accident, the indeterminacy I often like to see in all the art I do. Being surprised as the artist is one of the things I love about the process. Discovery. The mystery of an unplanned but even better outcome.

Thinking about this further, layers are natural to me because they are prominent in my music, and the music I play and listen to. All those years spent playing Javanese gamelan, which is layered cycles of melody and heterophony. The influence of the Indonesian music I've studied and played on how I play in a jazz or rock combo setting, in which I also tend to think in layers. Avant-garde classical music and jazz, often structured similarly. I'm thinking of Steve Reich's cyclic gradual process music, and also more recently of Nik Bartsch and his ensemble Ronin, in which the tension between layers of melody and rhythmic cycles is integral to the music.

The underlayers of the painting show through in parts, in textures underneath, even when the pigments are covered over or mostly so. Remnants. Memories. Little bits of the past. Every painting is a history as well as a fact.

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Saturday, November 10
12:34 PM

Recently acquired the special edition DVD of Ed Harris' movie "Pollock," which is an excellent biopic about the artist Jackson Pollock, unsentimental and deeply moving. It’s not a psychoanalysis of Pollock, it’s a presentation of his life. The most interesting and intense parts of the movie are the scenes in which we see the artist at work, creating. To do this role, Harris learned how to paint. He built a studio behind his house, and began to learn. The paintings seen in the film are re-creations of Pollocks, made by the film studio art department, but also worked on by Harris on camera. This is one of the most realistic depictions of a painter in the films: there’s no faking it.

Watching Harris paint as Pollock painted, in character but also DOING the paintings is enthralling. You can see that the actor has absorbed how the painter moved, physically, which gives a strong clue to how he painted. This is a simply terrific film. It inspires me to take up the brushes again today and work some more.

Painting is becoming something that, once I've started doing it, becomes self-sustaining. I still have trouble with all the labels around art: painter, artist, etc. I'd rather than just do it than have a label I have to wear like a name badge. So I still don't think of myself as A Painter, I just paint. I’m happy to say I paint, and leave it at that.

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Monday, November 12
2:07 PM

This painting is now finished. No title yet, though I do know it’s part of the aurora borealis series. Call it simply “Aurorae” for now. I’ll put it up on the bedroom wall with the other painting, and continue to grow the cluster of paintings there, adding color to my room’s most empty wallspace.

Finished. Rather, I don't know what else to do with it. The end result is a bit darker than I had envisioned, nonetheless it's saturated with rich color. There are a lot of details here I like. Brushstrokes like waves of light and air.

Poet Paul Valery once opined, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." I feel some of that now. This painting is abandoned. I feel the need to go on, to work on other paintings. To do something new and unknown. To improvise.

In painting as in poetry, there comes a point after which more revision won't fix anything, and often makes things worse. I once was boggled to hear that a poet was teaching her writing workshop students that she sometimes revised a poem sixty times. I frankly find that either unbelievable or pathetic. If it takes that long to "fix" a piece of art, chances are you never will. Either it has defeated you already, or you've gotten stuck.

I don't feel that way about this painting, it just feels done. Abandoned, maybe, or perhaps it’s just telling me that it’s done. I don't know what else to do with it. I'm satisfied. I'm ready to move on to the next piece.

The Re-Enchantment of Art 3: the Decadent Present

In a recent article in Prospect magazine, The dustbin of art history, Ben Lewis defines clearly, and in historical context, what has baffled so many: Why is so much contemporary art so very bad?

Lewis makes some very convincing comparisons between the decadent art of the Rococo period in European art history, among other end-phase periods of former grand art styles, and what is being presented nowadays as post-modern and conceptual art. His central point of comparison, which I find convincing, is that we're now living through the final-stage death-throes of the Modernist project—a point I have made many times: post-Modernism is really Late High Modernism, not a new trend but the end of Modernism. What was once great and vibrant and life-changing and original has collapsed into self-reflexive decadence.

Lewis writes:

There is a pattern typical of these end-phase periods, when an artistic movement ossifies. At such times there is exaggeration and multiplication instead of development. A once new armoury of artistic concepts, processes, techniques and themes becomes an archive of formulae, quotations or paraphrasings, ultimately assuming the mode of self-parody.

Over the last decade, not only conceptualism—perhaps the dominant movement of the past three decades—but the entire modernist project has been going through a similar process. Of course, some important and inspired artists have made important and inspired work in recent years—from famous photographers like Andreas Gursky and painters like Luc Tuymans to lesser-known video artists like Lindsay Seers and Anri Sala. But there is something more fundamentally wrong with much of this century’s famous art than its absurd market value.

I believe that this decline shares four aesthetic and ideological characteristics with the end-phases of previous grand styles: formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult that elevates art and the artist over actual subjects and ideas; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism.

Self-parody (art that refers only to other art), narcissism (the personal self is the only real subject), formulaic rule-sets for art-making (in the absence of truly open-minded exploration, we reproduce and copy), the cult of the artist-personality (especially post-Warhol), the cynical use of cliché and sentimental iconography to simultaneously manipulate and mock the viewer and/or buyer: all these are aspects of the art that is now considered the gallery/museum mainstream. In a nutshell, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and their ilk. (I've never yet been able to decide if Koons was actually making fine art, or if he is rather a one-man icon factory.)

The archetype of the Hero-Artist that Modernism was founded on (itself the ultimate flowering of the Romantic notion of the heroically feeling-motivated artist)—the lone rebel breaking out against the backdrop of stale salon and academic art—was the leading narrative of Modernist art's technical and thematic innovations: from Picasso through Pollock, from Mondrian to Frank Lloyd Wright, from Georgia O'Keeffe to Edward Weston, from Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot through to Jerome Rothenberg and Octavio Paz, and the many innovators in between, in all their various styles. A full century of the Modernist enterprise has left us with many high marks to reflect upon.

What archetypes do we have now?

We have the Sellout-Artist rather than the Hero-Artist; the conceptual artist who feels entitled to a museum career merely because they have the ability to shock and provoke. The artist as Brand, in which artistic variation means only diversification of media. The artist who consciously embraces commercialism, who attempts to portray their own commercialism as a mocking commentary on the commercialism of the overall art-market system. The successful insider who mocks being a successful insider.

We have the Reproducer-Artist, he or she who (in genuine postmodernist style) thumbs through art history to borrow images and meanings and icons and reproduce them on a theoretically level playing field, for them to interact—which usually means disjunction and juxtaposition rather than genuine interaction—in other words, steals the art of the past and present and recombines it in theoretically new ways. This is collage-making brought to its ultimate end: the only thing "new" is the recombination; none of the elements are original. In fashionable literary circles, we get flarf and Oulipo and other "post-avant" poetry and flash-fiction stylings; most of which proudly state, in multiple manifestoes, that they mean nothing. Cleverness is all: content is dead and gone.

At what point does an artist quoting another artist's work, referring to other art by reproducing it as a reference, become outright plagiarism? If you quote another artist's entire opus and put your name on it, are you really making a comment about anti-authorship, or are you really just being lazy? Are you attempting to conceal your own lack of ideas in your appropriation and cooptation of the ideas of others?

We have the Theorist-Artist, who must write a manifesto before making any artistic move, whose works are mechanically determined as well as mechanically reproduced. There is always a Movement, an -ism to be named. The artist must be a permanent avant-garde, rebelling against an establishment, even if the artist becomes the establishment, the institution. Permanent avant-garde placed in permanent opposition: to what? Sometimes to nothing but other theories. In literature, neo-formalism and Language Poetry are alike in their conception of political rebellion against a straw-man status quo; although they are opposed stylistically, they are identical psychologically in their need to put theory before art-making, ideology before inspiration.

We have artwork after artwork that plays out in the mind without ever really touching the soma, or the heart. Art which is some cases openly claims this to be a virtue.

Antinomially, I do feel that artists as diverse as Andy Goldsworthy and Donald Judd have been our alternative artists who have been involved with vision and re-enchantment all along, even as the decadent art goes on simultaneously in the urban centers. More than one artist living and working outside Gallery Row in New York City has shown us ways towards re-enchantment, all during this same period: but they are not the darlings of the galleries, the museum retrospectives, or the art-buyers who listen to the dealers who promote artistic fashion over enduring quality.

As many working artists will tell you, the gallery and art-buying big-city "scenes" for the most part perpetuate this state of affairs. There is too much profit invested in the structural edifice of decadent postmodern art for galleries or dealers to let it collapse anytime soon: there remains much money to be made. Does anybody buy a Koons because they love it, or do they buy it as an "investment"? What form of capital is involved in such a transaction: social, financial, spiritual, or aesthetic? Does anybody really like this stuff? Meanwhile, genuinely visionary artists, and artists who have something different to offer, are for the most ignored, or kept in their place as outsiders. Galleries are inherently conservative financially: they rarely show anything that hasn't sold well before. To be "inside the system" means one has to become like what sold well last year: cynical, self-reflective or narcissistic, and ironic.

Irony.

Irony is the new sincerity, and has been throughout postmodernism. Irony replaces civic grace. Irony is the only acceptable way of approaching the world. Anything non-ironic is labeled retrogressive and mocked. If your art isn't heavily ironic, you probably won't get noticed, much less lauded by dealers or galleries.

When Lewis refers to "the alibi of cynicism," I feel he is at root discussing irony. The excesses of art are claimed to be critiques of society's over-valuing of art in a decadent way. But such art is rarely convincing—except as irony. As Lewis writes about cynicism:

Contemporary artists and their curators and theorists concede many of these faults, but invoke in their defence a critical attitude towards their material. Yes, Koons’s shiny balloon dog is kitsch—but it thereby subverts hierarchies of taste in art. Yes, Hirst’s gold-plated cabinets containing grids of industrial diamonds are glossily vacuous, but they are a critique of the society that admires them. Other artists have made works about their own shortcomings. One of Maurizio Cattelan’s brilliant early works, in 1993, was the installation of a live donkey and a chandelier in a New York gallery, to thematise his inability to come up with a good idea. The German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-97) spent much of his (now acclaimed) career making art that described his frustrating quest to make important works of art. A surprisingly honest sense of failure, hopelessness and a bankruptcy of ideas are fundamental components of this end-phase of modernism. . . .

Here is art celebrating its own superficiality. In doing so, it absorbs any criticism made against it, like Warhol’s celebrities—or Hirst’s Golden Calf, which ironises the adulation and criticism his art receives.

Subverting hierarchies of taste in art: even if I could take Koons seriously on this point, I would never be able to forget that Warhol did it first, and did it better. What is Koons but a third-generation Warhol, only with bigger and brighter and shinier toys? (I admit I do prefer Warhol's art.) Another difference between Warhol and Koons is that Koons' art is deliberately decontextualized, ahistorical, non-referential—more characteristics of postmodernism—in ways that Warhol's art is not. Warhol remains bound to the context of his times; because, in his time, he was innovating something new. Warhol may have claimed to celebrate the popular and the superficial, but his art nonetheless resonated with history. Postmodernism, in removing historicity, indeed celebrates its own superficiality (which becomes another form of narcissism).

One of the contemporary trends in art that I personally find alternately mystifying and infuriating is its smallness: its smallness of scale, smallness of interest, of ambit, its unwillingness to even acknowledge grand themes, much less embody and express them. As Lewis writes: Art has become small, superficial and self-indulgent in its emotional range: sentimental rather than truly intellectual or moving.

Now, I like the gods of small things, too. I like close-up photographs of tree-bark and pond-water textures that reflect the fractal nature of the world's geometry. But I also like broad landscapes. One needs to look at the whole mountain forest, not merely the moss on the north side of one small grove of trees. Postmodern art's narcissism is actually part and parcel of this smallness: a refusal to look outside the self-recursive self, to see the larger, cosmic Self.

The parallels in literature are the dominance, in poetry, of the post-confessional lyric (the dominant style emerging from MFA workshops) wherein the subject is always the writer's own life and emotion; and in fiction, the short story about small personal lives in relationship, the parlor-story, as opposed to, for example, the historical sweep of Dr. Zhivago. The latter is a novel equally personal, equally a love story, to any being published now—but on a large scale, using a large palette. Who writes such epics now (that don't refer to the epics of the past, with irony)?

Smallness of ambit also manifests as repetition of themes. In genre fiction, for example, fantasy publishing is glutted with High Fantasy trilogies featuring elves, magic, heroes, trolls, and all the usual characters—none of which would have been conceived had not J.R.R. Tolkien written The Lord of the Righs. Several of my SF/fantasy-reading friends keep trying to engage me in various of these High Fantasy series being published now; but few strike me as more than warmed-over Tolkien; or worse, self-recursive winking ironic acknowledgments and parodies of Tolkien.

Another aspect of the superficiality of postmodern art is its smallness of feeling, its narrow emotional base. This is perhaps one of the most pernicious smallnesses in play: Because evoking strong emotional responses—other than shock and disgust, that is—is considered passé by so much postmodern art, we are left with the numbing-out of psychological disassociativeness and depression. Acedia is actually considered a positive value in postmodern art; although few would give it so clearly a spiritual label. Spirituality is suspect, spiritual content, even meaning itself, are suspect, and to be avoided at all costs. This isn't really about blandness: it's about numbness. Once again, irony stands in for genuine feeling. One is expected to be numbed-out in front of the paintings; one is supposed to have no strong feelings either way. Responses to art other than intellectual are devalued. The shrug is taken to be a supportive response; in a bizarre use of doublethink, indifference is redefined as love.

I want to be clear, in my criticisms here of contemporary art, which echo Mr. Lewis', I am being neither despairing nor apocalyptic. In fact, there is a great deal of art being made nowadays, as well, that is inspired and endowed with meaning. But you might not have heard about it, if only because it's not making millions of dollars in sales for the artists, the galleries, and the dealers. The wrong turns that contemporary decadent art has made has been perpetuated, even exaggerated by the gallery/dealer/financial systems. But it is not the only kind of art being made. I will be getting around to that soon in this essay series. I am working my way towards describing possible re-enchantments in art; but we must first honestly survey what is happening, right now.

Lewis concludes his article with, in part:

There have been inspired and important artists at work during the last ten years, just as there were in the late 19th century. But in order clearly to see what is in front of our eyes, we must acknowledge that much of the last decade’s most famous work has been unimaginative, repetitious, formulaic, cynical, mercenary. Why wait for future generations to dismiss this art of celebrity, grandiosity and big money?

We must first assess the current state of affairs, honestly and with a cold eye. Then we are able to see what visionary, enchanted alternatives have also been going on—if not so publicly, then at least chthonically.