Recalibrating

Two new paintings on paper

The pond in spring, oil on paper

To my current greatest fears–insolvency, and flesh-eating bacteria–I have to add another: fading away. Which it seems I have done, almost. It just felt for a while that I had nothing new to add to this tale, but of course that’s not really true. The positive spin on my long hiatus from posting is that I have so fully integrated my renewed identity as an artist that nothing seemed remarkable enough to write about. The truth, though, is that I simply lost the narrative thread for a little while; the trajectory from no painting to painting all the time became muddled in my mind with all the new but mundane things I found I had to do in order to continue to build this new life. Worry about the resolution of images. Ship stuff. Find places to show my work. Meet new people. File quarterly taxes. Test inkjet printers. Try different brands of paint. But by not writing about all this, some deeper connection to the process faded. Did the work suffer? I don’t know. I have been working, though. Thinking has filtered into the process in ways that haven’t been really helpful. For example, I had a meeting with a gallery that wants to show my work. The gallery owner, looking at my canvasses and my paintings on paper, said he wanted to show canvasses only. Different sizes, he suggested. Make sure you have some smaller ones and some larger ones. So, I am scheduled for a solo show at the Colo Colo Gallery in New Bedford, MA in February 2013. I need to have 25-30 paintings ready by then. Canvasses of varying sizes. It was a bit overwhelming to think about producing that body of work by February, but I went back to the studio determined to keep at it, step it up, focus. And I immediately did a couple of new paintings. On paper. Which brought on a new anxiety that I would never be able to paint on canvas again, and my first solo show in many years would never come to pass because I wanted to paint on paper for a while. So I tried to force it, stretching canvasses, getting them ready to be painted, planning some images, trying them out with crayons. I have to trust I will find my way back to them, because for now, I’m enjoying the paper. I’m sure it’s serving some purpose. I just have to work through it.

Anyway, I found I missed writing. It definitely feeds the work by adding a deeper dimension to my own understanding of the process. So I intend to pick it up again, to keep the thread going. It’s been almost a year since I lost my job and started this life. It’s a life now, not an experiment, not a digression, but the main event. I may need to find some kind of job to keep this going, but that’s okay. It’s got a life of its own now.

I’d like to teach, if anyone knows how one goes about finding a part-time teaching job. Advice is welcome.

New studio, old worries

The new studio

The last few weeks have not been as quiet as my blog has been. My inability to post is just an artifact of the explosion of activity that’s gone on, much of it heat without light, though. I have been working. It just hasn’t been as immediately fruitful as a lot of my time has been so far.
Some positive things to report, however: I moved into a new studio. It’s just the space next door to the old studio, but it’s superior in so many ways: more open space, more usable wall space, better light, more privacy, and, thanks to some insulating the previous tenant did and the door that actually closes, the heat from my space heater actually stays in the room. I was euphoric to have the first studio, but after six months of working there its inadequacies became more and more irritating, so I was excited when this one opened up.
I have also started, somewhat tentatively, a new series of drawings and paintings of the tangles of branches in the winter landscape. I’m thinking of them, collectively, as “tangles”, but what interests me is the amount of observation and focus that I have to invest just to “untangle” them visually. It’s as though they form a metaphorical barrier to understanding and experiencing the landscape, but once you can get through the chaos you see the structure and interdependence of the forms in nature. It’s slow going. Here is the first drawing, very rudimentary, but the start of where I’d like to go with this.

Tangle #1

Drawing this was very much like the experience of painting every single rock in my Jamestown Rocky Shore painting, a challenge of persistence and focus. I entered the Jamestown painting in a national juried exhibit at the LaGrange Art Museum in LaGrange, GA, and it was accepted. So now my challenge is to figure out how to ship this thing to Georgia without breaking the bank. I’m learning every day how complex and consuming this business of becoming a full time artist can be. I’m not complaining, but I wish the learning curve wasn’t as steep as it is. I’m working on connecting with other artists now so I can give and receive the hard-won wisdom that we all acquire separately. The isolation of the studio is only half the work. And the other half of the work requires just as much focus and determination as painting every one of those rocks. This is the part that comes much less naturally to me.

Exhibit information: This painting will be part of the LaGrange National Biennial XXVII between Feb 10 -April 26.

My first exhibit in many years. Hopefully just the beginning.

New year, new challenges

I’m sliding into a bit of a slump, and I’m not sure how to get out of it. I think it has something to do with switching gears after (mostly) completing my Kickstarter project, a series of paintings that were all about water, and all the same scale (48″ x 48″). I say “mostly” finished, because I have something like 25 smaller, related paintings to finish for my Kickstarter backers. I’m approaching them as a single image, gridded out to smaller individual canvasses, based on some of the prep work I did for the Little Compton paintings. I went into this week really eager to start working on them, but I’ve had three frustrating, fruitless days. Today I packed it in early, heading home around 3 in the afternoon, thinking I should do some reading, looking at art, cooking…anything but painting.
I started reading a book, recommended by another artist, Pamela Slaton , called The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love. I thought I needed to have a plan. Auspiciously, the book, written by an artist named Jackie Battenfield, opens with a chapter about how important it is for an artist to have a career plan, and instructions on how to develop one. I found that promising…until I fell asleep. I look forward to reading the rest of it, though, because I am really interested in figuring out how to make a living from all this. But in the process of developing a plan, I feared that for the last few days I’ve been unable to move ahead with the first and most important step: create art. And when that happens, as it inevitably does periodically, I need to step back and not allow the temporary difficulty to suck me into a spiral of defeat and despair. It’s just a slump. Get over it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about scale, and how it affects the experience of the viewer. My 48 x 48″ paintings are exactly the right size to fill a viewer’s field of vision and allow a visceral response. I’m having a hard time translating that to a much smaller scale. I feel like I’m making a picture of a painting, rather than a painting. I need to find a way to make the small paintings significant in themselves, to imbue them with their own presence. I don’t feel that the smaller paintings should be less because they’re smaller. In some ways, it feels like I’m starting over again, like I did six months ago. But the stakes are greater now, somehow.
I’ll get back to it tomorrow, I hope. At the end of the week, I’ll be moving my studio to the space next door, currently being vacated by Matt who’s going to Iowa for a teaching job. The space is the same size as mine, but without a wall breaking it into two parts, and most importantly, it has a door. So I can close it, turn on the space heater, and be warm. That should help.

Recalculating

Salt Pond, Goosewing, Work in Progress

I love my new life. I want to keep it going. One night last week I walked through Copley Place in Boston on my way to meet some friends, and realized how completely I’ve been enclosed in my work bubble and how out of touch I am now. People were Christmas shopping! They had Louis Vuitton shopping bags full of stuff! My first thought was, “Well, these people have jobs, I guess.” My second thought was that I really wanted no part of this getting and spending. The fact is, I can’t afford to shop. I was never much of a shopper anyway, but now, the less money I spend the better I feel. It feels like a real accomplishment to find a way to squeeze more out of less. Every time I pass up some shiny trinket (especially things I would have bought previously without a second thought, like these boots , for example), I’ve bought myself a little more time to spend in the studio. Probably sometime soon I’ll have to give some serious thought to bringing in some income, and hopefully there’s a way to make this art practice pay, but for now I’m just happy to be doing it. My family, fortunately, is on board with reduced consumption, a smaller Christmas, no dinners out (although we’ll have our Christmas Eve dinner at the Indian restaurant; it wouldn’t be right not to), and although I have had more than a couple of early morning anxiety attacks about the heating bill, the anxiety is manageable, balanced by the immense satisfaction I get from finally building a body of work that’s mine.

This is something I’ve wanted to paint a long time: a wall of golden reeds that edges the salt pond behind Goosewing Beach in Little Compton, RI. This is the third painting I’ve done in Little Compton, and as the season advances to winter and the colors deepen, the structure of the space is reduced to a skeleton, and it becomes more visually interesting to me. I hope to finish this (there are actually two separate panels here, each 48″ x 40″, so the entire painting is 96″ x 40″) by the end of the week, take a short Christmas break, and begin planning for the coming year. I’ve been at this for six months now. I’ve completely recalculated the direction of my life in that time. I look forward to what’s ahead. And yes, I really look forward to finding a way to buy these boots someday.

How art has changed me

My speckled shoes

I got dressed today to come to the studio: Levis, thrift-store sweater, and my usual shoes, paint-spattered clogs. I wear these same things nearly every day. My hair’s getting longer, not by design but because I just don’t think about it. I suppose I’ll get a hair cut someday, but it’s not on my list of things to care about anymore. I was never that concerned about fashion, to be sure, but while I was working in an office I had enough vanity to get regular haircuts, and I really loved having a variety of shoes to wear. Now I wear these clogs every day, everywhere. My outward appearance is beginning to reflect the interior turn my whole life has taken since losing my job in June and returning to the studio.

When I get here, the first thing I do is connect my laptop to the speakers and find some music on Spotify to play all day. Right now it’s Charles Mingus. It seems to fit the mood while I’m slinging paint. When I first recognized that I needed to fill the silence of the studio, I was caught up short to realize that I had no idea what kind of music I liked anymore. I had spent so many years with the background noise and hum of the commuter train, the office, the family, that when I had the chance to tune out the cacaphony of an overextended life, I wanted silence. Now there’s room for music, and I love exploring different genres to see what works best for different moments. This is a revelation. Today I’ve listened to Foster The People, Adele, Weather Report and now Mingus.

I had no idea how far I’d drifted from the deep interior life one needs to make art…I didn’t even know what music I wanted to hear! There was so much noise in my life that I couldn’t think anymore.

So now, there’s plenty of thinking. It’s comical, how much thinking goes on here. A lot of it is mundane: What’s the difference between #12 cotton duck and #10 cotton duck? is Windsor Newton paint better than Lukas? And some of it’s much more consequential: Why am I doing this? Why does anybody do this? How will my work evolve in one year? Five years? Ten years? Will I have ten years? And of course, the profound thought follows the mundane thought in rapid succession, the day unfolding in one long train of thought that chugs across the entire range of my mental terrain. It can get dizzying. Finally, the day is measured not in terms of how much actual canvas I covered, but how many issues I resolved in my mind. The art objectifies the resolutions I make. It’s all interior work, projected onto the canvas. And the feedback loop ends here, until I put my work out into the world.

This way of being is far removed from my old life. In my job, I spent a lot of time in meetings, talking, listening, collaborating. I had friends and colleagues with whom I could discuss politics, family, food, shoe buying, haircuts. Honestly, I miss all that. This daily confrontation with the contents of my own mind is really hard to sustain. But the payoff is enormous. I love the work, the smell of the paint, my own sunny studio, the fact that nothing happens if I don’t make it happen. But I am beginning to understand why I wasn’t able to do this when I was younger. It takes a lot of confidence to keep going to the studio day after day and sifting through the junk in your own mind to find the one shining thing that’s worth examining. Somedays, there’s nothing. But I don’t feel defeated by that anymore. I’ll just comeback tomorrow and set the stage again, hopeful that something will percolate upward. Mingus helps.

The studio