I just finished the second pass on the very experimental painting I’ve been working on for the past two days. I have a few quick tricks up my sleeve that I will employ this evening with acrylic paint before putting this thing in the closet to simmer for a few days. My very small studio is largely occupied by the large still life I am referencing for this painting, so part of my motivation to take space from this painting is also to break down the still life.
I will finish the painting from imagination and memory. The last bit of “rendering” that will need to occur will be from the James Ensor painting that composes a portion of the background. I can reference that while it hangs on the wall, and fortunately takes up very little space in the studio.
After I make some light adjustments to some shapes, I will put the painting up on my critique easel and take a look at it in low light. I am in too deep to abandon this picture, but I don’t think it's going to ultimately work, and I think it's plainly just going to be a little weird. But that's okay, as long as there are some interesting passages of paint and some truly original compositional elements occurring, it is successful as far as I’m concerned. It's important to keep in mind that this painting will be only one in a long line of my artistic progression, something I will be able to refer back to in the future for ideas, scrutiny, and reference.
I am liking the employment of the drone motif. Without wanting to get too political in my pictures, I think it is a powerful symbol that adequately represents this moment in time. My pessimistic sense is that drones are only going to occupy more of our space in the future.
Tomorrow I will paint another snack bag from life. For the last week, I had been looking for those little 50-cent chip bags at the grocery stores, but only just yesterday stumbled upon them. I was starting to think they no longer existed. It's actually still quite amazing that anything costing 50 cents even still exists. I am excited to paint another snack back alla prima style, I really enjoy making those pictures. I think they are very fun and effective, and hopefully possess a certain commercial potential.
I just posted a quick timelapse of the painting of the Cheetos bag on YouTube, and it doesn't look like it's performing well. It's interesting because the first five or seven videos of my painting I shared on YT did really well, but these more recent ones have not been. Me and Magdalene were wondering if their algorithm favors some initial sharing for new channels as in to encourage them, but they putter out very quickly. It’s not that important nor is it very exciting to read about. Sharing those short videos on YouTube is sort of the x-factor I aim to utilize in driving traffic to this website. I don’t find it that tedious to make them, so it can’t hurt to continue to do so. It’s not like spending 3 days making a piece of long-form video content that only gets 20 views, that’s a harder habit to keep doing consistently.
When they write the art history about this time not only will it be central to write about the primacy of social media for todays artists but it will also be important to discuss how each artist, each painter also needs to know how to do online marketing, photography, videography and video editing as well as website design and all the host of other skills that need to be had in order to market yourself as an artist in the age of social media.
I don’t know if it's a good or bad thing, but it is just a matter of fact. I suppose the democratization of all creative outlets as a result of the internet is ultimately a net positive in that you now don’t need a gallery, nor a record label, or a legacy media outlet to put your work to the masses. You just need to be able to do all the background processes that those institutions previously did for you. A large part of what it means to be an artist is having to do all this other stuff anyway: go to shows, schmooze with people, write grants, etc. I don’t do any of those things but I do hear those are the things one should be doing.
To switch subjects while I was painting, I was listening to a lecture from Clement Greenberg in 1971. While it wasn't immensely interesting, it is a nice break from domestic and global politics, which is what I reem daily while I paint. And despite its importance, it does get exhausting, and it does weigh on me existentially. I will do my best to distill what happened at the end of the lecture because I found it interesting. Greenberg was essentially criticizing the art of the times, which I guess was mostly pop art, and its desire to enact political or social change (which I didn’t know was baked into its ethos, I could be wrong). I mean it's supposed to be critical of consumer culture to some extent so I suppose that's political. But the point is that this is around the time of the Vietnam War, so surely there was a very tangible political fervor in the air.
But the first person to ask Greenberg a question after the lecture was very vicious in attacking Greenberg for being critical of artists' ambitions to enact political change in their art, and how Greenberg was an elitist with certain judgmental sensibilities, etc. His response was interesting.
It was something to the extent of: “If you want to make real change, leave the studio and make real change, don’t do it from within the confines of the studio.” He followed up with a self-critical and self-aware point of how he himself does not work to enact social change by doing the things that he does and despite not being proud of that fact, he only has one life to live and this is how he lives it.
I have many thoughts and feelings about this. He is very much a product of the World Wars and he, like many artists prior to the wars, probably did think art had the power to change the world. It was these wars that took the wind out from beneath the sails of the idealized power of art. I, too, don’t think art has the power to meaningfully change the world. I am very Matissean in this regard, yet I employ the motif of the drone. why?
I would simultaneously never encourage someone to stop making art because it has no material capacity to change the world. Maybe part of me still thinks it can. I need to think more about this.
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