Working

I search the web for places to plant my blog address like a seed, like messages in so many bottles. Fishing for a readership that will somehow raise my art out of the concealing shadows of the undistinguished and into celebrated light. Prints will start selling like joints in 1978. Collectors will line up at my door. Historians sift through the garbage. My slightest penciled motion will receive accolades and jeers. The intuitive yet random color placement of background paint smears will send academia scrambling to articulate hidden meaning. The rich and famous will squabble and fuss to have images of loved ones tattooed on my canvas.

Sometimes when laying out a painting on canvas the paint strokes used to sketch the figure are themselves of interest. Including them into the composition they begin to suggest other components and if you let it happen a different painting will result. A sculptor friend and gallery owner I knew made wire sculpture that were then wrapped in copper. He told me if he dropped a piece he was working on to the floor he would pick it up and study it before fixing the damage. Sometimes the drop had altered his work for the better. Similar instances of chance can change a painting.

I begin with a plan which is often vague but occasionally specific. When the pigment is applied now a third thing exists. I have the original reference material, I have a vision, and now I have an image developing on the canvas.

With water color things happen very quickly and the windows to take advantage of what is happening on paper open and close like hands clapping. One is often seduced to continue applying pigment (by the moisture content of the paper) to keep the magic going,  just like a gambler at a casino. And I mean exactly like that. Sometimes you're on a roll and everything you do is the next perfect thing to have been done. Other times everything is lost because one too many applications of pigment were gambled.

The pace of oil painting is much more laid back. Nothing is ever lost from pausing to consider the consequences of your actions and yet you can apply pigment at a frantic pace if you want to.

I look forward to working with oils again.

Oil painting is like a fine wine or maybe the sipping whiskey of visual arts. Watercolor is a cold beer growing warm too quickly. Or perhaps shots.

One begins the idea of writing about oneself in any shape or form with the reasoning that others would find it interesting if you did.

My thoughts seem so enormous, my perspectives so all inclusive at five a.m. Crawling out of my cranium and shooting from my eyes all over the dark cityscape like tendrils of empathy and genius tapping the soul of dawn. Before dawn. Quick like that. And sensitive. But firm and illuminating in a mysterious way. Mysterious to me because I don't really know what the hell but I'm thinking hard and inseminating the world around me with my consciousness.
My credit card debt began with the habit of living beyond my means on a regular basis, something that was encouraged by my decades in the fine dining industry. When you work around exciting ingredients and get creative with them daily, tasting wine to compliment your endeavors, you tend to want to eat and drink well when you're away from the job. Completely forgotten is the fact that the people that patronize your establishment make ten times more money than you do. Add to that your insistence on this pastime of making paintings and then hanging them somewhere for others to see.
Watercolors in particular require backing, matting, glass and something that holds it all together. My choice: a nice wood frame. Framing my paintings to exhibit was a form of gambling on myself and the next show. One credit card topped off I was soon searching the mail for one of those offers of a low low interest rate so I could transfer my already significant balance over to a new lender. Smart. Now I have two credit cards.
I cooked full time, painted full time and lived life in between like I had a right to. I would fantasize that success was right around the corner and that someone could purchase all of my paintings at my next show. I would pay off my credit in one sweeping motion and sit back savoring the good life.
Sixteen years later I'm budgeting hard for the first time in my life, trying to erase a mountain of debt.  Right now, after a long day at work, I'm relaxing with a refreshing cup of hot tea. Yeah. One hundred bags for six bucks. I can lift and drink and pour it down my throat. I can sit and hold it in my hand. Hell, I can get a refill.
Cheers.

Week End, Weakened

I spend what time I have available at the drawing board or standing at the easel but it's not enough. Too much relearning and getting back into the zone. The zone is not an easy place to find if you don't put in the requisite time. So I talk dirt on other painters, dead ones and local ones, rereading my words and feeling taller in my chair until I visit their website: good paintings there. Even small JPEGS which are often easy to dismiss. The evidence was evident: the painter had done their homework. Put in their time. Black feathers chew terribly, leave a foul and bitter taste. 

Balance is a bitch. Compromise is compromising.

Maybe next time it will be more successful. Something to show worth showing.

On the other hand, my garbage is decorated with spent minutes and thoughtfully applied graphite. Quite impressive from a glance. Here I am prolific.

How do you describe your paintings?

Having recently done a search of the inter-web  for "decorative art" I found a group of painters and the work they perform and websites with members and pictures of motel rooms with wall art... It was a world of fruit and flowers, vases and striped table cloths and birds on a limb. It was all of these things and more done very badly as if painted with dust and the vast and surprisingly fresh palette of pigment scraped from the color plates of a 1960's Italian cookbook, mixed with dishwater. Paintings so lacking in luster as if a great skill were applied to keep them so. I should not be so attached to the description of a genre that flaunts it's mediocrity, like a sculptor longing to make knick knacks.
During the process of drawing and painting there is a mental dialogue going on. Much of this dialogue is designed to make the finished piece look better to the prospective viewer. Firstly it must satisfy some basic criteria but thinking of a larger audience as the painting evolves is a type of editing that is not at all censorship. It is a maturing of the work. Taking a moment and thinking about the potential viewership gives one a different perspective. It's not as if I paint for my mother, this would not be a useful voice. My mother would prefer I joined one of the afore mentioned groups and painted flowers. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with painting flowers: I once got an erection viewing a Georgia O'Keef. It was a black flower but i digress.
It is simply a process where a painter decides is this good enough? Is it worthy of taking the time out of someone's day and asking them to view it? This could be in relation to many aspects of the painting; contrasting colors, shapes, hard and soft lines; has one been bold enough? Defining form; has enough information been given? Too much? Has the negative space been used to it's full potential? Does it help move the viewers attention in and out of the painting's subject matter or is it a distraction? The list goes on (indeed, you say). At some point you have to turn the critical voice off but I think one has to ask themselves: Has the effort been successful or did the painter actually fail at bringing the piece up to a standard worthy of viewing?
 When a painting is scrupulously conducted and worthy of viewing, worthy of hanging on a wall or making a statement in a room or corridor, is it not decorative? My usual antithesis to this idea is the work of Frida Kahlo. An absolutely riveting personal life story, but she couldn't draw her way out of a terrible painting.  Good therapy perhaps and I understand the attraction, but, here with the word: not decorative. On the other hand is say, Jackson Polock, another incredible personal drama. The man's passion is almost unmatched. I'm not a big Polock fan either but, it IS decorative. It has what it takes to command a space and lift the room to another level in lieu of the painting's inclusion.
So I wrestle with this term. I am not a fan of the company it affords me, but I find it's execution to be a purifying process.

Viewing Local Art

There is one local artist in particular whose name is bandied about whenever the subject of 'success' in the arts is mentioned. He has of course a working knowledge of color and a sleeve full of technique. His landscapes are decent enough although nothing that would motivate me to drive a nail into my wall, but a series of portraits that I saw him exhibit were nothing short of embarrassing. Seventeen of the first nineteen comic book illustrators you might hit with a penny could have drafted a much more interesting, and less clumsy figure. Besides poor basic anatomical skills the faces had no character. No light. No energy or gut emotion. Cardboard. Successful.
His wife however is pretty good. Paintings worth standing in front of. Paintings worth a frame and a nail.
He seems to be quite prolific.

Most Days

Perfect burning desire to create. Effervescent notion of how to attack the figure today with a ruthless will to distill the crucial elements and abolish the plethora of unnecessary details like a gardener pruning with abandon. The day is barely born, dark and cold but the warm quiet inside is the perfect environment to germinate this fist of will tickling my cortex. 
Instead, I will shower, dress and drive to work. Hack and wrap some dead beasts. Ponder dinner. Drive home. Cook, eat and sleep; then do it all again hoping that, 48 hours from now I won't be too tired to find the same stomach and vision and magic I'm wasting now.