the artists speaks...

calling all bay area folks... tomorrow, thursday october 9, at 5:00 PM, i'll be giving a talk on my work in timkin hall at CCA, california college of the arts, at 1111 eighth st., san francisco, ca. the talk is open to the public.

i've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand...

i've been thinking a lot about how certain images remain in your unconscious mind and kind of work on you over time unknowingly. the one thing blogging has done for me is that there is an automatic record of the date of discovery for every image i post.

i don't go back and look at older postings or images much, in fact revisiting things in cyberspace is almost never. i don't have the empty minded flipping of pages experiences in this space as i do with the bulging books in my studio filled with cut out findings, held in place with tape. with the books it's not so much a process of seeking as wandering through images that are familiar, but which i'm still struggling to understand why they attracted me in the first place. they contain images i've gathered over a longer period of time and on a less consistent basis. with the blog, i simply roll towards certain things in a just awakened state, where inspirational fodder for a morning gets replaced the next morning...

the blog as a set of images is much like my conscious brain, with each image fading a bit as i add a new one (strange that these digital photos now live as though they were actual photographs fading with age...).

last night i was working on finishing up a piece that i've been working on the past 6 months or so (it will be part of my show that opens saturday). during its making, things hover conversationally as i build: watts towers, tramp art, molecule models, bruno taut's alpine architecture, terragni's ideas towards the danteum, the paintings of kupka. these, and other things i've already forgotten, bubble to the surface out of the process of thinking and making; but as always, there are things that go into a work, that i really i hadn't thought about or consciously noticed as an inspirational presence. last night, i went into my studio to take a picture of all the parts lying on the floor. it actually wasn't until i looked at the window on my digital camera to take a picture, that i saw the space of my studio as a flattened image, and i remembered this snapshot of toy trains that i posted on airforms a year or so ago.

i had posted it in relation to the paintings of alfred jensen, and strangely enough suggested then that the arrangement could be or might be 'a score' (this entire work was birthed from a 12 page classical music score, and could still also be read as one). the interesting thing is not only might that the train photo have unconsciously suggested the structural form which is so clearly present in the piece, as much as i originally connected the train forms in the photo to images in a painting (jensen's). this responding to a sculptural work in a photograph and connecting it to images in a painting, suggests a deeper relationship between the painted and sculpted things i make.

it is rare when a single image or simple object can become a model of the connectedness of all things that one makes, as well suggesting a connectedness among all things one responds to in the world. the train photo and the photo of these objects on the studio floor reveal to me a kind of intuitive focus - being able to work while both knowing and unknowing at the same time - and in some ways the trains show me more because it's difficult to see one's own works in a light of such distance and clarity.

the other interesting thing is that the train photo is taken at an odd angle, where the images of things lying flat on a table, are read as cascading and related to pictorial rather than actual gravity. when i started these piles of wood i imagined they would be on the floor, a series of minor architectures for humble thoughts. eventually, i decided to string them together, suggesting more of their internal musical and narrative structure. to allow them to not only suggest architecture but to also construct architecture with them. the final work will not reflect the train images as they were in life, but as they are in the reading of a photograph.

inspiration is such a strange thing. an image or object tends to work hardest on me when i've seemingly forgotten all about it. conscious replication is of little interest, as it tends to deny a source the ability to reveal deeper truths beyond it. for me, it's about planting seeds and allowing them to grow within you unnoticed, until they bubble to the surface in these relatively surprising ways. i don't try to direct these things so much as i let them continually jab my insides in tiny and seemingly unimportant ways - never really noticing they've had their way with me until i finish a piece and realize it didn't exactly come from where i thought it did.

when benjamin wrote that for book collectors "ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects. not that they come alive in him, but it is he who lives in them.” i think he's both right and wrong, for there are many things we do enter and live inside of, but there are also certain things that enter us - and while they are sometimes slumbering inside us unnoticed, there are times that they do come alive. in many cases we might not remember they are in us, but they are continually working their quiet magic in wonderfully mysterious ways. once in awhile, a moment decides to let you in on this little secret, and you see what you have done, and you realize that you are not so much the guide, as much as the guided.

this is london...

after posting the richard scarry book last week, i figured i should dig out two other books from childhood that were influences.

when i was a kid, my dad moved to london for a year and the first thing he sent me was this book... m. sasek's 'this is london'. sasek's style is a bit like saul steinberg, but his color sense is more intense and the graphic qualities also bring to mind paul rand's kid's books. sasek's work also shares an aesthetic with early 60's eastern european animation. between 1959 and 1966, sasek wrote and illustrated a series of these books including this is paris, hong kong, munich, venice, ireland, greece, new york, san francisco, and many others.

this is london was first published in 1959. my childhood copy is dated 1966, which means it arrived when i was two or three years old.

as a kid, this book was my first link to a faraway place that was real, rather than imaginary. although i can't really recall anything specific in the book that i obsessed over, i remember pouring over it, and trying to copy images from it often.

the interesting thing about looking at it now is that the three images above reflect the stages of my painting process, and utilize a number of visual languages i use in my own work. the top image is an entire page awash in brown brush strokes that sasek call's london fog. this wash is essentially how i begin every one of my paintings. the second image is the next page and is the same image of london without the fog. a larger whole made up of tiny units, would reflect the second stage of a painting (and continual third fourth, fifteenth stage, etc.), although the colors and sizes of the tiny shapes would probably be reflective of some kind of self imposed rule or system of translation. the last image, is much later in the book. i feel a strong connection to the oddly curved image with a central core; the way it is put together, the use of color, and the graphic qualities. my process is closer to image two, but the trajectory is to use the language of image two to generate something seemingly disconnected from it, like image three. (while looking for a painting of my own to illustrate this, i was surprised to find this one that is very much like the composition of the sasak's subway).

of course, none of this is specific in terms of influence and memory, as i haven't opened this book in probably 20 years. nonetheless, it is interesting how one can still feel connected to certain things. while i'm certain that the connections discussed above come from looking at the book now, and trying to find connections (some thick and some thin) to my own work looking backwards; i can't deny the thoughts that it probably had some effect on my aesthetic when my aesthetic was just being formed...

sometime this week i'll post images from the last book, that probably influenced my work more than any of the others...

the fields full of wonder...

"...now he made no attempt to distinguish the different species of birds or recognize the bushes by their buds. all he saw was the general activity, the colors bursting forth everywhere; he breathed in the smell of the young leaves, felt how much softer and intoxicating the air was and walked through the fields full of wonder... he constantly saw other objects than those that actually surrounded him. what they were he did not really know himself and he did not give it much thought. they were bright, delicate, unusual dreams which surrounded him like paintings... pure paintings only to be contemplated, but this contemplation was a kind of experience too... it was breathing a strange air... full of lightness and delicate dream-like pungency..."

hermann hesse, beneath the wheel, 1906
(1920 watercolor also by hesse)

the public lives of sketches...

the danish artist j.f. willumsens (1863-1958) was known mainly as a painter, although he also worked with ceramics, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and even designed his own house.

willumsens had a somewhat scientific and obsessive approach to studies, feeling the necessity to know every last detail of a composed painting in his head before he started the final work.

in his own words: "After all the preliminary work for a picture has been done, like compositions, sketches, studies, etc., and I think I know to the very last detail all that is necessary to complete the picture, I paint a draft version of it, usually in full size, from memory.

It is this draft version that I call the "dress rehearsal". From it I can see whether I am capable of painting the actual picture with the knowledge I have acquired from my studies, or whether more are needed. For it is my view that a painter has not mastered his subject unless he knows it by heart. One cannot at the same moment be an enquiring pupil and a knowledgeable master. I believe that I am the only artist who uses this procedure."

that willumsens was the only artist to use this procedure is debatable; but what is not open to discussion are the beauty of his preliminary color sketches. although these were never intended to be discussed as finished artworks in their own right, they would fit comfortably into the world of early abstract painting, even if this insertion was not part of willumsens' (nor anyone else's) plan. though never intended, the visual connections to abstract painting history - from paul serusier to alfred jensen - are certainly there. of course, it's somewhat presumptuous on my part to read the sketches of someone as obsessed with finished work as willumsens as something more - but when i discovered these images, they killed me!

i've recently been thinking a lot about the idea of sketches and how much an artist might or might not be able to control their eventual entry into the world. an upcoming release of some of nick drake's home recordings is a mix of both good and bad. some of it is unbelievably powerful and all of it is undeniably private (i've heard the whole thing... most of this stuff has existed for ages on various bootlegs, and this new release is already circulating on the web). drake was extremely shy, as well as a very very careful composer and songwriter; and i can't help but think he would be painfully uncomfortable with the idea that these "dress rehearsals" or, worse, these preliminary "color sketches" are being released as a record. on the other hand, there is no denying that these recordings do more than simply shed light on process. there is some seriously raw mind numbing beauty here of course.

perhaps an artist has to be resigned to the fact that when such things are brought to light; they will most likely be co-opted by a viewer/listener to fulfill expectations and purposes never intended by the artist (similar to the trajectory of most artworks). for better or worse, drake and willumsens sketches have no choice but to allow us to make them our own... to find transcendence in things, that perhaps, were never supposed to contain quite so much power.

to be unmodern...

"to be unmodern, that is to say to have the unreasonable courage to do what all the others are investigating and placing question marks by: to just paint a picture, a picture with the greatest demands and belief. otherwise in this century it is a question of investigating the picture as picture or the picture as consumer object, painting with metaconsciousness of various kinds. to be so naive as to believe that it is possible in spite of this to paint a picture with stirred pigments on a piece of cloth and to believe that it will contain references to the greater things, perhaps in life itself it is the greatest thing. it is to be unmodern and that both takes time and costs prestige."

per kirkeby from a book on the painter edvard weie

frequent flyer...

well, my insane travel schedule is taking over once again... i'm going to berlin for a show of my work at susanne vielmetter berlin projects. the above is one of the recent paintings, part of a series i've been working on for the past few years using a classical music score to generate translation systems towards image building. if you are interested you can see most of the work for the show here. if you are in or near berlin, you can get info on the show here, the opening is may 31st.

it is unlikely i will have much of an internet connection or time to load things to the blog, but you never know what might show up randomly... by june 10th i should be back on daily airforms duty again. with any luck i'll bring home some old pieces of paper... i'm making a secret pilgrimage to see some very special things that i'll post on when i return.

three landscapes...

a nice hotel in bergen norway with good internet connection and unable to sleep tonight... so a post of images from the national gallery of art in oslo ... the top by edvard munch, the middle by august strindberg, and the bottom by peder balke. all three were mind bending, mystical, and sublime....

the munch has this wonderful test tube shape of the moon reflected in the sea that he used in a lot of works. i also visited the munch museum, and it really seems that if you want to get a sense of how lonely it is at times to be an artist munch's work really reveals so much of this. the paintings are tinged with psychedelic colors, and seem so much about an interior life. in many of the works, the outside of things is almost dead cold and dark, while the inside is living breathing luminous mystical activity...

the stringberg painting was an unbelievable surprise. i've obsessed over his paintings for years and never was able to see one in person until i turned the corner in the museum and there was the sea marn, which has always been one of my absolute favorites. a perfect compliment to munch's interior work; strindberg painted a bit like a mainiac and the interior frenetic activity of munch is all over the surface of strindberg's seascapes - the large cliff/rock is a ton of built up slapped on paint. it's completely haunting to see these dense grays and blacks created with a kind of manic energy. having recently visited a small island at the westernmost tip of norway, it seems to be related to the incredible force of the wind, which was, in reality, completely insane.

peder balke was an artist i'd never heard of and two of his works were up in the museum, including the bottom image, which was absolutely stunning. the entire mountain area in the sky was simply loose paint applied with a pallet knife and then rubbed over with a patina. you can feel the shift of his wrist in it, and much of the imagery at the bottom is also done with what appear to be quick scrapes of paint. amongst his contemporaries, the technique and results are completely amazing and forward thinking. and, again, these landscapes feel somewhat more about the inside of things (interior movement, history, being alive....)

it was a really wonderful experience to start my trip experiencing the landscape through these paintings, and then going out into the reality of it, seeing traces of all of these in many of the places i visited...

unit structures...

looking through a pile of old photos at the flea market sunday morning, i was instantly smitten with this image. its visual appeal is probably clear to most airforms visitors and my plan was to leave it at that... but by the time i got home and scanned it, it got me thinking.

almost all of my work is somehow composed of building blocks - small units that can move from one language to another - and the forms of these small trains in crooked lines on a table feel uncomfortably familiar (somewhere i've already made this painting).

i actually counted the trains in each line, hoping the lines would reveal a secret, perhaps each one signifying a letter based on the number of units, and the whole becoming a visual translation of a word or phrase (unfortunately the long rows spelled: ggkhgghjj, and the short cluster at the top: dababb).

so i stepped away from myself, from the limitations of my own inability to 'translate' the forms into something else, and to simply fall back into the arrangement of units and the beauty of misunderstandings (i was slightly disappointed when i discovered these were trains, as i had hoped originally that they were blocks of wood or some such secret aesthetic activity - which they still, of course, could be... for who hasn't absentmidedly arranged books by color or counted steps out loud while climbing...).

it led me to one of my favorite painters, and one of the masters of large structures built from single boxlike units; and also towards objects that revel in their stubbornness not to let their secrets be known. you have to take them on their own terms, and allow their beauty to simply envelop you.

i was talking to someone on the phone a few days ago about how alfred jensen's paintings come down to this kind of powerful vibrational moment, where logic and understanding is consumed by emotion and experience. in the end, there is no need to seek answers from the mass of specifically arranged units, as much as to accept their potential for some seriously revelatory wandering (perhaps that's what he meant by painting 'remote sensing' across the top of this painting - as their 'force' can seep deeply inside of a sensitive viewer from across the room).

i think most visual objects have the potential to affect us in this way; deeper and quieter than the logic of words and understanding; and i hold a kind of secret hope that jensen wouldn't mind me loving his work for all the wrong reasons.