I'm a knife, I'm a knife- cut cut cuttin' around.

Hey, I made a wood cut.

It's a small one but I like it. It is featured in an online magazine as well as some older work. I've relocated back to Texas and my work space has gotten smaller. Like, it consists of my kitchen table and that's about it. It makes the scale of my work much smaller.

The act of creating something new was at once terrifying and like slipping on old, comfortable gloves. I've said I wrestle with depression, I've changed meds, and I'm liking the change. It makes me less lethargic and a bit more energetic.

It started out a little different as what it ended up as. My work is born from frustration. Lots of timidity on approach, continuing until my brain is shouting at me to just DO it. I was thinking of graffiti paste ups and the impact of graphics. I wanted to make something to echo that kind of immediate effect. An image that you see while rolling by in your car, bam. Just for an instant, there's an image and you're left with all the wonder and "what was that?" because you noticed it, but don't have time to spend with it. I can't throw it past your face at 75+ miles an hour, but I wanted to leave a little of that ambiguity. Remnants of Santa Muerta iconography and Käthe Kollwitz funeral procession woodcuts. We don't know if the image is in prayer or being set for a funeral. At least I don't. I'm open to interpretation. 

Eleventh Volley: Building a Language

First off: Updates.

I'm veering away from my usual earth tones and muddiness to a newer more purple muddiness. In the images I'm working from and trainwrecking together, you have pale skinned folk with white make up and body paint on. It's a challenge for me to get close to believable skin tones, and now there's the difficulty of representing that underneath paint. How meta, I'm painting paint.

In school I read an article on Sargent's struggles capturing Madame X. He is a master of depicting flesh, and the subtleties of flesh tones, and yet, because the Young socialite spent so much time doctoring her appearance, he struggled with capturing it. It threw his colors off, and according to one historian made her look like a corpse. According to the wikipedia entry, he actually enjoyed painting her, and staying at her manor. College vs the internet. Who will win?

I bring this up because I'm (while being nowhere near the same level) having the same difficulties. The painting has actually progressed further than this and looks even paler. Still struggling with how to resolve the bottom of the figure, and will  be attacking it with a hammer as I get more indecisive, or the painting progresses to a near finishing point.

Lucio Pozzi in a lecture once stated, he was amazed when he asked a janitor for feedback on a painting. The janitor gave him a response that he later used for the title, and it was the most spot on description of what he could not articulate while making the piece.

I'm giving painting lessons to a friend. My student and I were discussing plans for the future, and in her bluntness captured an angle that I could not communicate to myself, or others. I was floored. She remarked after hearing about my troubles, that all of my work was dealing with and silently screaming about my inability to get away and start over. I was (and am) mired in debt. I work a horrible dead end job that utilizes so little of any functioning part of brain or body (that counts) that I wake with dread every morning at the aspect of returning to it. I am abused by slum lords and anybody I've ever owed money to, who strong arm, harass and threaten me on a daily basis. I've been walked over, chewed up, and burnt out to no end. And putting up with all of that, outside of the fact that all I've done is survive (but oh, to have survived!), I have nothing to look back on fondly. Very little accomplished for so much effort.

So I guess art is my spine that I never had. It's the telling those that would walk over me to go to hell, and take their friends with them. And in knowing that (Thanks Emily) I can take steps towards getting out of this shit hole and working towards what I want to do. Which is paint, a lot. I'm not out from under the gun yet. But I can see a direction to go now. 

I promise, more art talk next time around. Also, ending on a happy note. I'm in a show! If you find yourself up in the twin cities of the Great White North, swing by. I like talking. Albeit awkwardly.

Thirteenth Volley: Oodles of Doodles

This might be a bandwidth killer. There are a lot of images here. This is the finished product for the Brooklyn Art House Co-op show. The premise was you could pay to receive a sketchbook from them and had to have it completed by the end of January. It, along with 4,999 other books of various themes will now travel the lower 48 for the next few months. It was kind of scary, working in a theme (Fears and tears), or with one in mind as opposed to trying to modify/bullshit something I already to to fit. I was paralysed in the beginning. Only working when I had an idea. It is a sketchbook after all. It's supposed to be incomplete. The idea of a body trying to fit a theme as opposed to a singular piece. As such, I was much happier about some of the drawings as opposed to the majority of them. And when I started screwing up, I would tell myself to keep going. If you added up all the ugly parts you would at least get something, while not beautiful, at least would be unified.

I figured I'd do a quick, and loose painting for the cover. Inside I stayed with sumi ink and watercolor. I started to tell a story about things I'd been through, like the loss of my sister. I'd falter, backtrack and also look for found imagery to help augment what I was looking for.

Between dead birds and burning trucks, I was looking to convey things loosely. Which was harder than I expected. There's a certain push and pull between expressiveness and context I think. I can make a very angry image, and you can get a sense of the violence of it, the energy that animates it. But I worry that that might be the only thing perceptible at that point because you lose sight of the subject matter. I like to maintain a balance of both.

A lot of the text comes from songs I was listening to at the time. Some stuff you'd expect, like Leonard Cohen. But some things came from surprising places to me. Like Sheryl Crow, or snippets of things I heard on the radio that just seemed to fit at the time. I'm no poet, but I enjoy reading it a lot. And a huge influence on both how I read it, and what I look for stylistically comes from Graham Foust. The book's title, As in Every Deafness, as well as the lines I butchered on the fourth page, come from his poetry. Which is very minimal but has a quiet and frantic desperation to it. Like the last moments of what I'd imagine some one being buried alive feels like - minus the euphoria that comes with asphyxiation.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Pardon the awkward line breaks. Myself and technology are polar opposites. Next time: Painting up dates!

Twelfth Volley

I'm in another show. Go me. The title is "Spirit, Hand, Vision. A Confluence of Self." But actually the idea for this piece is a response to another work. He was looking at the idea of ritual. We were (if you don't want to click the link) looking at butoh, and Baronness. I decided to tie the two even closer together by blending some Neurosis video into the mix. Or rather a more literal take on ceremony and butoh.

So I liked the idea of a ceremony, of creating something and losing oneself in the process. It's sometimes a painful journey to bear an idea to fruition. And making stuff is always a fight with me. I took a few photos for documentation this time because I always send stuff off in progress to Paul for critique. He's pretty merciless, and that's a great thing. So here's the earliest iteration. A quick pencil drawing on gessoed Arches printmaking paper, and water colored for some basic underpainting.

There's a detail.

I started with oil sticks and a turpentine wash. It became a very structural drawing. I have the build of a bridge troll, but I like drawing leaner folk, because I like bones. So I photographed a few poses of myself clinging to things and extrapolated structure and lighting from them. And then I started going into it with actual oil paints.

Oh look, something Freudian. I actually try really hard to consciously avoid phallic imagery. And by trying really hard to avoid it, means it pops up fucking everywhere, in everything I do. Oh well.

Here's a not so great shot of the submitted version. When it comes off the wall, I promise I'll shoot it better.

Fin

So here's the finished work. A little too regular in the back ground noise, but I'm pleased with the figures. Shittiest board evar. I printed it on French paper that I got from a screen printing buddy. I'm selling them for fifteen dollars a piece and actually sold four at the show opening. Which went very well by the way.

Here's a detail (ish). I used four or five different types of blacks before I found the one I liked. the results run the gamut from brownish, to raven's wing. I do like the finish of the oil based inks better. There's a softness to them that the water based couldn't provide. A richness.

I'm also entering a sketchbook show. You can, too. Other things on my plate include designing and printing a postcard for a memorial dinner for my sister, a new painting (both to be seen here soon), and an art talk I get to give to some senior college kids. We'll see how that goes, but I hope I can give something to them without becoming a curmudgeonly old advice fairy.

Tenth Volley

So, Dan is putting together a show. He's a printer by trade and wants to make the mailers and posters by hand. I offered to contribute to this. I started out with a pen and ink sketch just to get an idea.



When I was doodling, I noticed that the skeletal figure reminds me of the Hermit from the Tarot, but I remember it specifically from an old room mate's Led Zeppelin poster. It's interesting what the hermit implies. Someone who has seen and been through it all, whatever that may be, and withdraws from society, disillusioned, cynical. That's neat, but I didn't want it to be, oh hey, I lifted the hermit image from a poster for the poster. I reversed hands, I dropped the corpse/pieta body and kept the wayfaring nun.


It's faint, I know. I draw delicately with pencils now. And I'm still struggling with hesitancy. This means I need to draw much, much more. It's either that or get so sleep deprived that I just don't care any more, and then draw. I like this image better. I scrounged up some old wood that I had laying around and sanded the layers of old acrylic gesso off of it. Note to the future painters everywhere: Acrylic gesso is not your friend. I own a palm sander and go through a ridiculous amount of sandpaper to get things smooth. This is because in the sanding process the gesso actually melts to the sand paper in sticky clots that then get deposited on another section of the surface you will be doing art on. And they stick. I razored a few off, and then I sanded some more.

After a few sessions of sanding, I had a block ready to put an image on.



Neato, huh?

The legs are too short for the torso and the arms are weird, man. I'm still retouching the arms and I've since redrawn the legs, to be posted at a later date. It's a lot of detail packed into face grain of the pine. I'm curious as to how well I can stick to rendering those soft lines and things. Perhaps the carving will add some aggression that the drawing lacks.

Ninth Volley

I entered a show. Wish me luck. This piece is about my sister.

A little back story: Two and a half years ago, my younger sister died. She had lupus. Her kidneys went out, and then she was in and out of the hospital for three years. I remember her telling me about how she had really bad headaches. How she was terrified because she didn't know what they were from and why she kept getting them. She was taken to the hospital one night because her blood pressure was 200/190 She was blind in one eye because grease and humors had spilled into it due to her blood pressure being so extreme. She had to go for dialysis three times a week, and she was always sick and tired afterwards. She had a restricted diet. Eating a banana would have made her heart explode.

On Thanksgiving of that year she got an infection in the lining of her heart as her dialysis port ran from the hollow above her clavicle to her heart, or some of the vessels connecting to it. She gained weight from retaining fluids. She got a fancy pouch put in her belly and could do dialysis at home, every night. It was the equivalent of drinking a two liter bottle of soda all at once and carrying it around with you all day, she once told me.

She got married. To a man who was a match for her kidneys and agreed to be a donor. Then he backed out, and from what I've heard second and third hand, was a real shit. They fell out and she lived with my mom. Her stomach pouch kept getting infected. She was in a lot of pain. She had seizures. She had to wear a mask whenever she was in public because her immune system was beyond broken. She was so sick.

The last year and half of her life was spent in the hospital more than at home. She developed vasculits. Her fingers on both hands turned necrotic and started rotting away. She lost her hair. She developed calciphylaxis. Large patches of skin on her legs started rotting away. She was in constant pain. Her arms and legs atrophied and her skin hung off of her like a sack. The doctors gave her dilaudid. This built up in her system.

The last ten days of her life, she did not eat. My mom was in the room with her, watching tv, and thinking that she was going to sleep when in fact her body was shutting down. The staff brought in a crash cart and tried to bring her back, but my mother refused. She made the right choice.

When she was first diagnosed, the doctors and psychologists and whoever else looked at her also diagnosed her with severe clinical depression and PTSD. When I asked her how she was doing, she kept telling me she was ready to pull the plug. We tried to cheer her up. When she was married it was the happiest I'd ever seen her outside of when she was a child. Towards the end she was in so much pain she wanted to die. My mother wanted her to live, and what mother doesn't really?

So this piece is about her choice to end her suffering, and her inability to do so. And other things. A promise never to forget her, and a reaffirming of that promise. I'm doing my best not to get all emo-ey on you. So we'll leave it at that. This is an art blog first and foremost. You've gotten the back story, and I've grieved, and am still grieving. Sigh. It's a pine box, coated in tar, with a hammer, a jar of whiskey with a lock of hair in it, nails, and a candle. It is 51" x 26" x 8". Some details below.



Sometimes I blend my paints with tar. It never ever dries and the second you hit it with anything that has a hint of solvent on it, it softens up and blends it with whatever you are putting on top of it, making a sickly color.



Here's another shot. The candles on my pieces, to the ire of Fire Marshals everywhere, are meant to be burned. The wax creates a history. And over time, the smoke given off will stain and hide things. I like things that have history to them, whether I'm manufacturing it myself, or looking at dirt on other things, I enjoy imagining the use, or how it's been used. I have a bucket of roofing tar patch that I use. I used to use fancy stuff, printer's asphaltum. But this stuff works just as well, and has texture to it. Because it only gets semi hard/dry, everything sticks to it. My studio, which resides in the living room of my apartment, is cat territory. When I took this out from under its covers, there was a grey coating of cat hair and dander. Some of it from me, most of it from him. I spent a good two hours dusting and hand pulling clumps of hair from the tar. I then lit the candle and burned up the stuff that wouldn't come off. It's good to know that I can clean these pieces without having to recoat them in tar.


Meth-heads used to lived below me. Every night, when they weren't fighting like cats, or fucking noisily, they would commence to remodeling their unit. For hours, from around ten at night to seven in the morning they would hammer tin plates to the walls, build false walls, sand, put in doors and listen to shitty top forty music. This is my contribution to noise making. I hammered each one of these nails (with a sheet of ply wood under neath the piece to protect the floor) directly over their bedroom. It is my understanding that in Fetish Art, the nails are driven in by the people of the village to seal a contract. I treated it as a continuing promise to never forget my sister, and while I'm alive, to not forget that fact, because she wouldn't either.