le sacre du printemps

this dream I had the other night, was riding on a falling piece of concrete with a number or other unfortunate souls bracing for the impact but the thing actually landed like an aircraft and no one was harmed..  if you look closely in the lower LH you will see the back of Igor's head

stones

trouble staying out of the pottery business.  something about the textures...

got to get this one on the site. it looses something being photographed again but then, so does everything.

getting something clear in my heart oddly enough.  nothing I've got to post here reflects any of that.  F*ck!

this has managed to stay relatively uncluttered.  some of the latest are so dense that I can hardly get a grip on them

turquoise

february sumi are more or less revised, not dated. there's danger of mixing the march stuff up with the feb.  I think I've already lost track.

saw a painting at one show, a David Konigsberg;  Christopher Wool/Pierre Bonnard hybrid, certain poise to the piece..  there was one with a cat but the scale was disturbing,  and a painting with a gratuitous cat is seriously offensive.  everything struck me as decorative.  even the things that aimed high felt like art school.

of course that's not really such a problem if I just don't make any more sumi til I'm done with Feb.  did work on some old canvases this morning.

yahoo!

feb is 9 days from over.  I've been  trying to assess the latest output.  so...  it's about  time to forget all that and get to work and let it happen.

steerage

finding some of the most problematic stuff...  I really have to get me a croissant this morning.

first post of  sumi for a while.  I have not been doing them in the quantity to which I have become accustom.  these come with a certain sense of theatricality that has become unavoidable in the lexicon at that point.

this is way creepier than I suspected now that I see it on the computer screen ...  tough.  I guess there's a reason I was shy about showing these latest.

panelorama

best of all possible worlds.  and then some.  I want to make a panel really long now so that you can scroll down and go from the top of the empire state with all the tourists into the sewers with the sanitation workers and all on one continuous...

el tumulto del mundo

this is a monoprint from '07?  or early '08... not sure but I felt like I got something when this came up.  for the longest time I wanted it to be something it wasn't... something more abstract than it really is.  something more formal.  it's actually personal and very sentimental.

this is from the end of '09.  unlike the one above it, there's brush work on the paper, not just printing.  I dreamt the house I was living in was having work done on the foundation and a storm was coming up and the thing was rocking on it's supports.  so when I big gust came along and pushed the whole thing over it really wasn't that big of a surprise.  there was no one around and I was going to crawl in it to get my things and then I remembered that there was a body wrapped in mummy cloth in the closet (in the dream,right?).  what a drag if the authorities were to discover that...

the basinets.   there was an explosion on 6th ave. this morning on the other side of the block. some kind of fuel leak sent a fireball up the side of the building and it caught fire.  no one was hurt as of the last report.

been wanting to post this one but it got buried on my desktop, this photo of the print.

this one too, I think it's from the same morning in dec maybe?

these are revisions or between the revisions.  that whole process went more smooth this time around not even thinking about the months in a panic.  january is dated and filed.  the sumi part of it.  did some new ones this morning.  first I've done since the weekend.  with the panels they've gotten second billing

I found something I've been deliberately ignoring and it's seriously more of a problem than I ever could have imagined.  on the inside mind you.  to complicated really to go into here but it boils down to carrying a torch for someone I forgot even existed,

can't get to the shore this week.  just too busy really.

zygomatic

not like it makes some huge difference in the grand scheme of things, there's a point the impulse hits, rebuild the cheekbones.

ink

elementary, Watson!

making the monoprints has a photographic immediacy...   Click.  it's done.  there have been times when the atmospheric conditions have been quite conducive to making them... it's like one after another, pop right out of the cookie cutter. these I think are from the extremely wet june of 09.

this post has languished in draft file for some weeks now... I guess the images are such distillations it's kind of sad to write much about them.  (some people can't stand vanilla?)

and this is from the extremely wet may of 2009... (something good came of it)

some dark chocolate here...  with nuts in it.  this needs something of a rhumba beat.

this next one is kind of old.  almost 4 years after the disaster...

this wasn't too clear to me for a while after I did it.  and then for a long time everything looked like it was referring to that.  along the same lines I found myself w/a pencil starting on one side and drawing a mouth... I rarely use a pencil except to make marks for masking... this started with the jaw and sort of drew itself, not sure I can remember what i thought I was drawing at the time.  had no real sense of purpose... it's kind of typical of Homer... I guess I needed to draw about it.

mons

yeah,  sparkie...  I started this thing from scratch last night.  not using the trampoline of the past as a jumping off point.  got to say that the first 20 minutes of the process were pretty aggravating. as was the middle part, then I started to get used to the jars and the tubes.  I was on the verge of starting an international incident.  sumi ink is such a spoiler.  you just have to have the nerve to pour it in the tray after that, it's all about the brayer and the brush.

foolproof

what the hell does that mean?  even an idiot can't eff it up?

Ignatz on tour

trail ride

hard to read on a screen?  never had that problem.

well,  see this seems entirely too emotional but you can either go with it or push it away and pretend it never happened.  what do they mean by 'foolproof'?

smiles

got to have some color at the top of the page.  carnival coming up. these are revisions so they start from a forgotten set of priorities.  the vibe I can follow.  just seeing where they take me.

this one  not finished yet but looks better on the screen than I would have thought.  was thinking of cutting this into two paintings.  the old paintings I really never liked in the first place.  but imagined they looked like paintings.  funny how completely the standards change when looking at my own work.

pink plastic buddha

went to City Ballet tonight and saw Firebird.  so great to see the Chagall drops and costumes.   the piece really came alive with the solo of Ashley Bouder as the Firebird.  such great arms and intention.

wondering if I should just cut this one up and see what happens.  this is the left half.  unlike the first one, none of the colors have come up the same.  I don't know if it looks better or worse?  opposites, right?  they did Prodigal Son in the same program and the trap is playing right into the feeling.  He's pounding his thighs with anticipation but one of the reasons he has to flee is he can't handle how he feels about his father, a very contradictory process but the more you pursue the feeling the more it flattens out and the closer you get to the impetus, the more it comes across.  but it's not that safe really.

this sort of says Max Beckman. not that I ever tried real hard to make that happen

see, the problem is the shape of the paper.  it's just such a long way from right to left and the composition is not strong enough to make it..  I may be able to fix it but it's just so big (27 x39") that nobody's gonna want it anyway.  oh well.  these revisions are really essays anyway so big deal.  fun to see some life come into a piece that I wrote off years ago.

der ferne Klang

this revision I think is done.  found Lenny talking on youtube about getting the Vienna Phil to play Mahler for the first time.  an uphill battle that certainly paid off big... the emotions...  wow!

I love the Belgian Painter, Constant Permeke who lived in Ostend... painted the North Sea mostly.  there's an honesty to his work that really wasn't the kind of thing the Nazis liked.  they forbid him to paint during the occupation.  when I was 15 I thought Turner was the greatest thing... It's funny how you want to choose your influences, but your influences choose you...

nobody said it was going to be easy.

actual size is just over 4" across the bottom. this is my Santa Fe phase.  i never lived there but waited tables in a place with that vibe on the UWS.  these things are indelible.  I started this fresh on sat. afternoon trying to make a suitable card for a party.  this didn't make the cut but with some extra work on sunday...

Klang

seeing what sticks.  this used to be paisley...

faith, hope, and impossibility

Faith, Hope, and Impossibility by philip Guston

there are so many things in the world -in the cities- so much to see. does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? the difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.
To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. the canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish. (what a sympathy is demanded of the viewer! He is asked to "see' the future links.)
for me the most relevant question and perhaps the only one is, "when are you finished?"
when do you stop? or rather, why stop at all? But you have to rest somewhere... of course you can stay on one surface all your life, like Balzac's Frenhofer. and all of your life's work can be seen as one picture-but that is merely "true." there are places where you pause.
Thus it might be argued that when a painting is "finished," it is a compromise. But the conditions under which the compromise is made are what matters. Decisions to settle anywhere are intolerable. But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting prove its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all- or is not even possible.
The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance: it is too primitive or hopeful, or mere notions, or simply startling, or just another means to make life bearable.
You cannot settle out of court... You are faced with what seems like an impossibility-fixing an image which you can tolerate. What can be Where? Erasures and destructions, criticisms and judgments of one's acts, even as they force change in oneself, are still preparations merely reflection the mind's will and movement. there is a burden here, and it is the weight of the familiar. Yet this is the material of a working which from time to time needs to see itself; even though it is reluctant to appear.

To will a new form is inacceptable (sic), because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. these strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else- a condition somewhat unclear, but which in retrospect becomes a very precise act. this 'thing' is recognized only as it comes into existence. It resists analysis-and probably this is as it should be... Possibly the moral is that art cannot and should not be made.
All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art-with their need and contempt for one another... Of necessity, to create is a temporary state and cannot be possessed, because you learn and relearn that it is the lie and mask of Art and, too, its mortification, which promise a continuity.
there are twenty crucial minute in the evolution of each of my paintings. the closer I get to that time--those twenty minutes--the more intensely subjective I become- but the more objective, too. Your eye gets sharper; you become continuously more and more critical.
There is no measure I can hold on to except this scant half-hour of making.
One of the great mysteries about the past is that such master as Mantegna were able to sustain this emotion for a year.
the problem, of course, is more complex than mere duration of "inspiration". there were pre-images in the fifteenth century, foreknowledge of what was going to be brought into existence. Maybe my pre-image is unknown to me, but today it is impossible to act as if pre-imaging is possible.
Many works of the past (and of the present) complete what they announce they are going to do. to our increasing boredom. Certain others plague me because I cannot follow their intentions... I can tell at a glance what Fabritius is doing, but I am spending my life trying to find out what Rembrandt was up to...
I have a studio in the country-in the woods- but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It make me feel a little better... But i do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what i have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.
Everyone destroys marvelous paintings. five years ago you wiped out what you are about to start tomorrow.
Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, annd somethimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and connot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.
Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing.
Two artists always fascinate me- Piero della Francesca and Rembrandt. I am fixed on those two and their insoluble opposition. Piero is the ideal painter: he pursued abstraction, some kind of fantastic, metaphysical, perfect organism... In Rembrandt the plane of art is removed. It is not a painting, but a real person- a substitute, a golem. He is really the only painter in the world!
Certain artists do something and a new emotion is brought into the world? it's real meaning lies outside of history and the chains of causality.
Human consciousness moves, but it is not a leap: it is one inch. One inch is a small jump, but that jump is everything... You go way out and then you have to come back-to see if you can move that inch.
I do not think of modern art as Modern Art. the problem started long ago, and the question is: Can there be any art at all?
Maybe this is the content of modern art?