Back to work after a short break...

Pastel & pencil on BFK

Acrylic on Paper.

The Print And Its Companion.

Oil on Canvas

Black and White in color

The other day, someone told me that my paintings are always black and white, meaning that they feel, or reduce themselves simply to black and white. This is true. I paint with vivid colors, but I use those colors as values, rather than color for colors sake. It is this inventive use of color that is my own. The colors, become shades of gray. This also matches with my thinking while painting. If I am looking at the figure and see a little tint of orange in that skin, I put it on the canvas as pure orange. I later, once all the colors that I 'feel' are on the canvas, I unify them with base colors directly on top and begin mixing on the canvas, or in this case paper. With acrylics, I have to work super fast and wet. Painting begins to resemble a sprinting race in the Olympics. I would rather and prefer to work this way than pace myself and take months on the same work. Even in running I am a sprinter not a cross country runner; distance isn't my thing.

Also worthy to note on the black and white comment, when I watch a black and white film, I see color. Not at first, but gradually, it begins to take on colors. By the time the movie is finished, I swear it was in color. I don't know if anyone else does that, but I certainly do and that is going to manifest itself in my painting.

ink & neocolor on BFK

A thought on time...

I was thinking today...

Time is relative. Einstein is a genius. Why do we measure life by this set unit, when time is merely the process of change that happens at the speed of thought and development. A history book, tells the story of time, but a clock does not. Time is the chaotic speed of thought. The time is always now; this moment. It is thought that elicits a difference. A clock, although it moves is stagnant. Sixty seconds is a minute, but the thoughts that happen in that passing are the true teller of time.

I realize that a lot of me must die. That life is a process of death and rebirth. Life truly is a dialectic. I must kill myself to grow. I must let the stagnation decompose under the moss and mold of new life.

Existential anxiety. Why am I born to die? An answer not so easily apparent. The romantics had it figured out. The meaning of Life; to develop the potential of oneself. This brings us to a problem though. What is one's self? Is it me, the physiology of me, or something more? Are other's me too? Where is the line? Is my life, what is meant? Is my life so separate from everyone else's that my actions and thoughts don't influence theirs? Is that influence a connetive tissue that extends myself to incorporate them? Where is God in all this? Maybe the Hindu were right? That you and I are god. That we are the same god, but have forgotten, forever trapped in a game of hide and seek.

How much time has gone by in that paragraph? Is it just the thought that tells the story of time, or is it also the resolution and implantation of that thought? The thesis and anti-thesis...the synthesis...thesis...anti-thesis...Synthesis... A machine? Constructing answer to prove that answer wrong. Modify the answer to find fault in the answer again. That is the unit...the only unit of time. A rhythm of chaos. Not like a sin wave...not a cosine...but a sound wave...yet three-dimensional....and then tetra!

*for a visual definition of time look up Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hand in Glove.

"Slight of Hand."

Hand in glove, is a new series that I am currently working out somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain. This is the first image that has resulted in a complete form. The series, is a very personal one. Its scope is to include many different ideas that are being synthesized in my interior from the circumstances of my current life-situation and past art. In short, my art is and this series are the results of 'my dialectic' (Hegel's philosophy).

This series is based of American colloquial hand gestures. It also incorporates the ideas of sound that are bleeding in from my other series of three dimensional poems. Within the hands I am also playing with the thumbs and their significance to human relationships. I am also incorporating the history of the hand and thumb, as it relates to human history. Musical dexterity, mysticism, longing, selfishness, personality, humor are all entering the work.
I do not know how the series will end, except that it will be a synthesis of the reading, drawing, painting and living that I am involved in now.

I say series, but I have been so bogged down in working, with trying to define that word. On my webpage, I define it straight out of the dictionary. Prior to this series, I have always had this conceptual definition that a series has to be a set of works, that all look the same; same dimensions, same style, etc. This series is really challenging that infantile idea. It has freed my work to be more about the synthesis of ideas and content, rather than a marketable product lined up nicely on white walls. I want the idea to be consistent, the feeling to come across whether it is a silkscreen, drawing, video or painting. Who ever said that a series is contained in the way the product looks, is a child. It is about the ideas, not staying within one specific media on the same size material, slightly altered from one to the next. It is about the subtle differences between the definitions rather than the spellings of the word.

I must rid myself of the typology of the art world, to develop the voice.

Another.

The Collision...

These 3 below are acrylic paintings on BFK.

Often, I will paint on top of the image that has been drawn, then rubbed out, drawn again and rubbed out many times. I like to use the same page. Often the charcoal mixes with the paint. During the painting process, I also draw on top of it and paint it some more. The finished product is a layering of the image, that exist somewhere between a drawing and a painting; somewhere between thought and image. Somewhere between the reality of this world and the reality of the art world.

I choose to work this way, fast and exciting, to remind us that it is merely and image, yet that it is its own reality. I think that art is not the reality in which we live, but is it's own reality entirely. The two realities collide when we try to bring art into ours. This colliding is the piece of work that emerges.