Tag Archives: painting

my artwork, part i

hand as drapery

forgive me, my friends, if i take a shortish blogPost to talk about the evolution of my artwork as if — in some delusional way — i were some famous, well-known artist

you see, unlike many of the brave folks i happen to know out in the performance art and music circuit in and around Boston, i did not delve into what i consider to be my original, innate passion and expressive gift for art as my core creative activity — and i’m not sure if that’s necessarily a good or bad thing for me in any way — at the tender age of 45 i think i’ve come to realize that there is not just ‘one way’ to pursue expressive, personal, creative work as a means to be ‘an artist,’ but there are potentials to take many, varied paths, and i appreciate now, after occasionally struggling with some internal philosophical and lifestyle-based concepts — or personal hang-ups — around what it might mean ‘to be an artist,‘ i think i’ve finally let go of those heavy sandbag preconceptions pertaining to my own previous beliefs and inner conjecture around what exactly qualifies an individual to official claim he / she actually is an artist

from about the age of 3 or 4 my passion for drawing filtered the way i looked at and learned about the world we live in

the drawing above from 1991 i titled ‘the hand as drapery

i think that — after completely dropping my daily practice or drawing { or almost ‘completely’ dropping it } by about 10th grade, at least as an official class in public high school — along with the physical act of drawing as a performative act, my rather playful nomenclature for the work i started up again through my own more lone, personal pursuit extra-curricular course work and eventually as part of my return to practicing visual art at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, started to exude a less introspective and shy aspect of who i was becoming as both an artist and a young person

my reference to drapery in the title of this hand-drawn study of my own hand surely derived from studying the Pre-Renaissance art of Giotto as his mini-mountainous, diorama-like landscape backdrops for the religious setting of his painted storytelling gave off this wonderful sense of undulating folds of fabric, very similar to what we might see when children sometimes build little tents in the livingroom with blankets, chairs, tv trays and pillows — the reading and research into a more classic style of painting definite influenced and touched me in a manner that i wanted to at least reference back in homage to these greater works through my somewhat encrypted and silly nomenclature

henryMiller

this portrait of Henry Miller — painted in only red, white, black and blue oil paint and medium — was one of my many beginnings for potential serial sequences of work, what i now call streams of subConscia, that evolve or at least sometimes fit a theme

i originally intended to paint many more of these primarily red, white and blue portraits of famous literary and art-related people and call the body of paintings something along the lines of ‘The Great American Portrait Series‘ — hopefully keeping this rather liquid, shadowy, shape-based sense of movement throughout the entire collection { of course, somewhat influenced by Thomas Hart Benton and also highly influenced by a profound affinity with anything and everything visually ( or otherwise ) Surrealiste }

a bit more on the evolution of my personal life with art after these messages …

asking the right question

sometimes i wonder { and it actually came up today while commuting to Schneider Electric in North Billerica } when am i going to get back to painting again?

i mean, sometimes i bump across something as wonderfully tactile and visually beautiful as this little detail from one of Suzanne Unrein’s paintings and i think, ‘i should just fucking start painting again, right?’

323402_10151149459174886_555787374_o

i wouldn’t have even seen this painting were it not for that there despicable ‘Book’ we all seem to supposedly socialize on, right? its the new micronetted, fenced-in and illusionistically ‘secure’ subconscious playland that the entire internet used to be … Facebook, that is, not the Suzanne’s paintings … the painting is obviously creamy and gorgeous, right? shit, its just so inspiring

but then, 2 clicks away i come across an image like this

1012399_457445777685585_364773746_n

and i don’t know, maybe i’m an anarchist at heart or something, but … this painting, or rather this object, sings to me in a different way — this one really resonates with me on an entirely different and more honest level … i guess in some ways this painting — ‘Niagara Falls,’ by Valerie Hegarty — better reflects the way i feel about our times … its equally gorgeous and seems to comment, too, on the medium of paint and on the memory of what painting used to be and what it is today

after seeing this work and reflecting a bit more about it, i started wondering, ‘why would i get back to painting?’ which might just be a clever excuse to not even start any sort of active creative endeavors at this point in my life, right?

i seem to find plenty of excuses to think about this shit tons more than i actually do it, though, right? and loving both expressive artworks shown here shouldn’t stop me from just making art of any kind, maybe starting up with one medium and seeing where the artmaking leads me — sort of a follow the leader via artistic and designerly media

anyhow, i gotta get over to work now, right? wake up, lou … jeez, what the fuck are you doing?

heh

 

Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (1968), Excerpt

Michel Foucault. This is Not a Pipe (1968)

6. Non-affirmative Painting.*

Magritte pipe This is a surrealist plumber

Separation between linguistic signs and plastic elements; equivalence of resemblance and affirmation. These two principles constituted the tension in classical painting, because the second reintroduced discourse (affirmation exists only where there is speech) into an art from which the linguistic element was rigorously excluded. Hence the fact that classical painting spoke – and spoke constantly – while constituting itself entirely outside language; hence the fact that it rested silently in a discursive space; hence the fact that it provided, beneath itself, a kind of common ground where it could restore the bonds of signs and the image. Magritte knits verbal signs and plastic elements together, but without referring them to a prior isotopism. He skirts the base of affirmative discourse on which resemblance calmly reposes, and he brings pure similitudes and nonaffirmative verbal statements into play within the instability of a disoriented volume and an unmapped space. A process whose formulation is in some sense given by Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

  1. To employ a calligram where are found, simultaneously present and visible, image, text, resemblance, affirmation and their common ground.
  2. Then suddenly to open up, so that the calligram immediately decomposes and disappears, leaving as a trace only its own absence.
  3. To allow discourse to collapse of its own weight and to acquire the visible shape of letters. Letters which, insofar as they are drawn, enter into an uncertain, indefinite relation, confused with the drawing itself – but minus any area to serve as a common ground.
  4. To allow similitudes, on the other to multiply of themselves, to be born from their own vapour and to rise endlessly into an ether where they refer to nothing more than themselves.
  5. To verify clearly, at the end of the operation, that the precipitate has changed colour, that it has gone from black to white, that the “This is a pipe” silently hidden in the mimetic representation has become the “This is not a pipe” of circulating similitudes.

A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell. [1]

* Translator’s note: the original title of this chapter is “peindre n’est pas affirmer” literally, “To Paint is Not to Affirm”.
[1] Foucault’s reference is not to Magritte but to Andy Warhol, whose various series of soup cans, celebrity portraits and so on Foucault apparently sees as undermining any sense of the unique, indivisible identity of their “models.” See Foucault’s comments on Warhol in the important essay “Theatricum Philosophicum” reprinted in Language, Counter Memory, Practice (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977).

this is NOT a posterous post