After spending the day not in the studio and attending to other art related however non painting matters I just had a few productive hours in the studio. Productive in the sense that I just put a lot of paint down, as far as making something worthwhile I'm not sure productive is the adjective I would use to describe the last few hours.
I had been on the phone with my mom and towards the end I started drawing on the trash can with a Sakura market and then when we got off the phone I filled in portions of the shapes with oil paint. I liked how the result was both a painting and a drawing and I intentionally left much of the Sakura lines and cast shadows present in the final product - I will attach a photo of the result in this entry.
After that I decided to fill an entire page of Arches 8 x 10 inch oil paper with this same effect. I put down a really uninteresting drawing - not by choice but by circumstance as I have not been drawing with any frequency for probably half a decade at this point. I intentionally did not care about the drawing because I wanted to see how important it would be once the entirety of the paper was covered in paint. The result was perhaps interesting. I need to take a day or two and assess if there is something here.
What I think has potential could be something at the intersection of these Sakura drawings (but large scale) and large landscape pictures from imagination/sketch (still thinking in regards to the Fauvist landscapes I attached pictures of a few days ago). At this point right now I am not likely to develop any super compelling pictures from pure imagination, but working from a series of sketches I think will be the perfect distance from the subject - as to summon imagination - while giving me enough structure to develop a cohesive picture.
It was actually my intention to go to a few sites here in the neighborhood and make some drawings however I didn't get around to it. These days slip by so quickly. I wasn't not doing anything productive. I just didn't make it out to sketch the world - I will do that tomorrow. A lot of today was spent on this website - shopoilpaintings.com - still building out certain pages. I also documented the two new paintings I made over the weekend - the glass and the Ruffles bag - as well as posted a short video on YouTube of the Ruffles bag painting process.
It’s interesting, or rather obvious, but the Ruffles bag is a significantly less good painting, however it is so much more punchy than the glass arrangement and thus reads (in the immediate at least) as a better painting. That’s really neither here nor there however, and ultimately that's part of the appeal of painting these mass produced consumer products, they have colors beyond nature's saturation as well as very interesting shapes. I think of the chip bags as colorful icebergs. I also bought some flowers today which are hanging upside down to dry in hopes that they will be good reference material for my mural idea.
The last thing I did in the studio was take all the extra paint and put it on the imaginary landscape I had started on the square piece of paper the other night. This image has now taken on the scene of the tragic 4th of July floods that occurred here in Texas over the weekend. As I was painting the image just now (from pure imagination) I was thinking how offensive this picture would be if I were to share it publicly. Why would that be?
Is it that “it's too soon”? Would it be less offensive if I shared it in 6 months? This painting is so extremely crude, it looks like a 6th grader made it (I say that with a tinge of pride, actually), does the fact that the picture is primitive and ugly make it worse (more triggering)? My intuition tells me yes, and what this ultimately points to is that paintings still have a gravity, a primacy in our culture. That’s so interesting to me.
While I was painting these pictures in the studio over the last few hours I listened to two interesting lectures, one was by Wayne Thiebaud and the other (you guessed it) Clement Greenberg. The point of note on the Thiebaud lecture was he opened by discussing the difference between art and paint, or I suppose being an artist versus being a painter. Not to pat myself on the back, but I have always identified first and foremost as a painter, so to hear this was quite refreshing. He was describing how paint is very literal, very material whereas art is one of these words that gets immensely bastardized and as a result has no real meaning that you can grab on to. That was really it, he then proceeded to share an immense amount of amazing paintings throughout art history, including his own, which are so good (I am not much familiar with his work).
The Greenberg lecture was 90% over my head but mostly because I wasn't paying that great of attention anyway. It was very heady but the thesis was actually quite concrete and fortunately he reiterated it at the very end so I was able to take note. His thesis was (and I quote) “ asking art to serve a moral, or any other end, except aesthetic quality is to make an illegitimate demand on art.”
I need to let that simmer a bit longer but this conclusion, in my mind, bolsters the Matissean approach which is paintings that serve the viewer as a relaxing arm chair, which are ultimately the pictures I aspire to make. This world is rough, I want to make pictures that serve as a momentary repose, or escape, for that cold fact, not pictures that further remind you of the suffering we all endure in this life.
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