sumi ink

At some point this past spring I began playing with Sumi ink on the wrong king of paper.  It created an interesting accident.  I've been using Arches 88 (a super absorbent silk screen paper) while pouring ink.  Once I pour the ink onto the surface I have to move quickly but can manipulate the direction and flow of the ink wash.  Each time there is a pause in the flow of ink the paper pulls part of the pool into itself and creates a line or a ring (I'm not really sure what to call them). I can keep moving the ink or let the ink absorb into the paper.  The more I move the puddle the greater the initial mark.  The slower I work the more saturated the ink becomes. A nice thing I've discovered about these two media--Archess 88 has no size & Sumi ink is water soluable--you can pour water onto the initial mark and release some of the ink that has steeped into the paper.  These subsequent washes create a pretty dynamic secondary and tertiary mark. One that is controllable too and similar to the first.  I wonder if this is a kind of representation of brewing tea?
The drawings themselves are pretty interesting too: they tend to have an anthropomorphic quality-one that leans toward a substructure.  But there is an uncanny demonic sensibility in them as well.  Oddly they remind me of Baudelaire's Fleur du Mal.  I can't seem to stop comparing contemporary life to the unsavory, and Baudelaire was after all its champion.
This one image is a little sweet.  When I was working on the Alphabet of Stars I kept telling myself I would stop when I found the Unicorn in shape.  I stopped before i found it, but I was very much reminded of it in this drawing. Perhaps it should be titled In Search of the Unicorn.

apology

This was one of the other pieces I made around the early part of the 21st C.  The slide is dated 2003.  The other thing that began to happen while this work was germinating was I became desperately homesick.  I wanted to be back home in Nantasket.  Living in the midwest had always seemed difficult but at this time it became very hard.  I used painting as an escape from my physical place and sank deeper into nostalgia and my work.  Everything around me was a reminder of where I wasn't.  Yet I knew I couldn't afford to live the way I could in the midwest and after all what would I do back east?  Then it struck me again that I was born a creative laborer, and I'd probably be working in a ship yard mending someone else's boat. I could paint, so I thought I could be a painter in a shipyard.  This is when I made the transition from traditional oil paints to boat paints. The boat paints were very sexy: amazing leveling ability, bright and candy colored.  They were made to be masked as well.
So again, I was interested in using this tacit knowledge of place to say something.  I had been towing around this copy of the Blue Jacket Manual since I was a Sea Cadet in the Navy when I was 10 or 11 years old.  I started thumbing through it and came across a lot of very useful information.  I really loved the illustrations on how to fold clothing, but never had a use for it.  But I used the nautical alphabet to spell out F O R G I V E M E.  The painting reads from top left down and to the right. Each of the elements are 11" square.  It's a fairly big piece once it's assembled.
The idea for the piece was really simple.  I wanted to apologize to all the people I grew up with for leaving and for wanting to leave the place that we all came to know each other.  I mean, so much of who I am is because of this tiny coastal New England town. I started to think in terms of metaphysics too.  We were all bound together in space and time.  There was something immutable about the experience.  I felt that I had somehow betrayed the first group of people that I knew and loved, and that that betrayal somehow still caused me pain.  I felt that as we aged it was shameful I wasn't there to help the people I knew through the process.  The painting was a public declaration of a spiritual and ethical problem. 

1...4...3...Means I Love You

I've been thinking about some of these pieces that I made while working in what I call a nautical theme.  It was a series of work that I started in 2001 or 2002.  There were a couple of pieces before this one that lead me to thinking about the language of the coast.  It was also after my grandmother's funeral in 2001.  She was buried in the Russian Orthodox tradition.  Two things began to happen over the course of a couple of years.  While I was at my grandmother's service I found the high key pallet and clarity of the Russian Orthodox icons and frescoes illuminating.  I could see all the colors used an how the color defined shape and helped create movement.  Something similar happened while I was back home in Hull visiting family and friends.  I would take these walks around the peninsular from XYZ street--beach side--and head along Nantasket Roads to the high school and back along to the bay past the coast guard, the village, the alphabet streets and cut across after the water tower back to the beach side and back down to XYZ street, all the while shooting Polaroid.  But what really impressed me was watching some of the big tankers come through Nantasket Roads.  This sounds silly, but what was amazing was that I could see them so clearly, all of the colors and shapes on the vessel were meant to be seen.  I noticed too that this was the case on smaller vessels too.  It's easy to see a boat on the water.  So these two experiences added up to a kind of clarity of sight. 
At the time I had been squishing a lot of paint on to surfaces and using computer generated images and my vision tended to be slightly blurry.  To see light and color with clarity was something that interested me.  I took that further step to think about the kinds of language one knows just by growing up in a certain area of the country.  In my case I was thinking about a tacit knowledge of the nautical. 
1...4...3...Means I love You uses the nautical symbols for the numbers 1, 4 & 3.  When I was in high school it was something one would use as a farewell in a note passed to a lover.  The myth was that Minot's light on calm evenings would flash this sequence of light (I recently read somewhere that the light is actually broken).  We transposed the sequence to represent the number of letters in the phrase I love you.
Each piece is approx 4 foot square.  I wanted the painting to be larger than life size and oriented on the landscape horizon so that it might somehow surround and embrace the viewer.  The piece took on some water damage from a leaky roof, so I peeled them apart, hammered grommets onto the canvas and added the addendum--version 3 Distressed State.  I like that they've become flags more than paintings.  And after all when isn't love sometimes a little ugly?

1...4...3

evening glow

I've been working on this painting for over a year now. I started it just before the first snow of 2009, somewhere in November if I remember rightly. It was a landscape at first out the 3rd floor window, then I started a self portrait and finally switched to figuring out the medium. I was looking for something that would replicate the surface of the boat paints that I had been using but gave up simply because I didn't want the chemicals in the home environment. I thought there must be a way to make a medium that doesn't rely on synthetic resins and other nasty products that seems to be popular with artists these days. So I was looking for something that would self-level, be luminous and have a fluid feel with application. This piece uses a lot of Venetian Turp and Stand oil. I realized several things at this point: so many of the paintings from antiquity that use resins and oleo resins are still luminous and salient, and perhaps maybe the commercial products artists tend to use today speak of a mercantile nature, I know I don't want to be that.

new start

It took me such a very long time to get painting again. I think the birth of Nikolai really surprised me and the loss of the old studio was a deep wound. I loved painting in that large space and I think I mostly liked the aesthetics of the whole thing. Going to an old ag/industrial space seemed to fit the idea of what a painter or an artist is supposed to do. In retrospect now I see that's an ideal set up by academic and popular mythology. One doesn't need a commercial studio space to make paintings.

I thought too that I could convert the 3rd floor of the house to a studio and that would be the end of things. I was wrong. I have a great 3rd floor now but no walls. A painter needs wall simply to put the work up and let it exist around oneself. Without it one can't see. And after all seeing is the thing I'm ultimately interested in.

But after much labor, disappointment and confusion I finished the Chort (Chris's fort) last summer and it's a pretty good working space. I made a commitment to make my own paint and to work on a smaller more domestic scale too. So far it's been a rewarding process.