The Rosemary commission is finished as of this weekend. As I elaborated on in my paint diary over at www.maxlowtide.com the painting process went fairly smoothly all things considered. Once that painting is hanging in the gallery with a frame I will take a picture of it and use it as a thumbnail here. I hadn't written a paint diary in some weeks until I did last night over at my other website, that paint dairy can be read here where I expanded on all the recent projects I have been happily and busily immersed in.
One project I failed to mention because of limitations on time was the final mural I am painting on the east side of Houston that will complete the accidental tryptic I made on this massive corrugated wall on Harrisburg street over the last year. It had been my intention for some months to paint the final spot on the end (the far left, I painted this right to left), but I hadn't developed a design I was sufficiently excited about painting until about 10 days ago.
I have learned throughout the years that you need to be extremely excited about the design you are painting because very little else will sufficiently sustain you through all the schlep that is painting a massive mural (for free). Anyway my design came very organically in that I constructed a collage with just two pieces in a way that I felt was both symbolic and aesthetic. I was watching an art history video of Gorky and I saw a painting of him as a young boy standing next to his mother (I had seen this painting before) and found it extremely moving. I printed out a few copies of this and then ripped the paper in half dividing the young man from his mother. I filled the void caused by the rip with a picture I had of a fighter jet from below in such a way that it looks like the shape of the jet and the very tip of the plane is ripping through this paper, thus ripping through the family.
I need not elaborate more on the symbolism here but I was quite pleased with its immediacy, its referential nature to art history (of which this has been the general theme of the triptych) and ultimately its very straightforward symbolism. Even for me the straightforward reading of the painting is a bit too direct but ultimately I think it’s more successful than not and after all the confronting nature of it is appropriate. Especially given how this wall was originally conceived way back when - when I very first painted it in the exact size and spirit of Picasso’s Guernica.
I am leaving for Virginia in two weeks for a personal reason and my intention is that this mural will be complete by then. The first mural I painted on the other end of the wall has a spot of graffiti on it that needs cleaning too, unfortunately. That will be a few hours worth of work surely, but will certainly be worth it in that I’d like to have a picture of the entire side of this building with my three very distinct murals painted on it.
This is and will be my largest public art statement I will perhaps ever leave here in Houston. Unless I am offered some massive downtown skyscraper canvas, as far as raw square footage is concerned, it is unlikely to get much larger than this for me. Keep in mind these were all self-supported murals. At the risk of giving myself an excessive pat on the back here in person, I really do do this for pure love and nothing else. I expect and anticipate absolutely nothing from this massive wall I have painted other than the satisfaction and enjoyment of having been able to spend the time painting these things. The content of the mural and the "problems" I am trying to solve via their composition is and will be entirely lost on most of the population anyway. If I didn't love this mode of expression in the most sincere and authentic way I would not still be doing this.
I always think about something someone said about the Ashcan painters that is an extremely important north star for me to hold on to and it was something to the extent that these painters never expected a single (material) thing from the labor of their efforts. They did ultimately find some material success, but that was never the expressed purpose of their missions. Many of them worked as commercial illustrators and other commercial art jobs outside of making their paintings. For me it's extremely important that I too hold on to this gratitude, frankly. Its challenging because with social media and knowing so many fucking idiots who make good money paintings it’s extremely enticing to want and expect some sort of material success out of my painting. But really what’s even more sustaining (spiritually, and with meaning) is having this thing that I love to do and anchors my entire identity and way in which I relate to the world. So that’s that.
Referring back to the formal elements of the aforementioned mural I am finding some success with collage in that I am finding it to be an effective and interesting way to draft compositions for larger paintings. Collage as a means to an end and not an end in itself. Motherwell discussed collage as still life for the American artist. Surely it has an immediacy and no doubt that's part of the appeal but I am enjoying the process of starting with collage and then slowing it down with the process of painting. I am more or less of the mind that the longer it takes to make a work the more opportunity for “the long look” there is within the picture. I have some paintings planned for the near future and I believe their origins will be based on a combination of collage/still life turned painting from intuition and imagination. I want to design the map and then throw it out halfway through the painting process essentially.
Lastly I am reading works on the Aesthetics of Realism for a class I am currently taking. I will use this last bit of paper to freestyle on some of the ideas I just read about in an effort to encode some of the learning:
Yes, realism was about a “real” and authentic, non-moralizing, non-idealizing, way of representing the world. Especially socially, in that the beggar on the corner is just as interesting as the prince with all the jewelry. Part of the movement was concerned with painting this beggar in an extremely matter of fact way, removing all notions of poetry, removing this character even from a general sense of history other than the history of this moment. The character will be painted in his immediacy and perhaps even generally in that this character of the beggar could almost symbolize beggars in general. Lastly and possibly most important, the world is viewed in an increasingly scientifically minded way. We have stepped out of a religious framework that makes this work of this century (mid 18th century) distinct from all the other expressions of previous painters. The implications of this are hard to appreciate given that I have never not known a world completely saturated in a materialistic and scientifically rational worldview.
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