First of a new series of paintings

There's nothing quite like the smell of turpenoid and oils after a long break from painting. This is my first painting since I finished my Black Series, and I think you'll see the connection.

I'm using a range of different media here, and this photo doesn't do it justice. I love to let my media interact and create textures I would never be able to replicate by hand. One of the richest textures in this painting comes from the a paint medium I use called galkyd, which helps me get that thick gloss surace, and some shellac I picked up at a hardware store.

I believe the galkyd is oil-based while the shellac seems (and I could absolutely be wrong about this) water-based, and I'm getting this really interesting shattering of the shellac surface when it's sitting on top of the galkyd.

As always, it's all about the process for me.

Here's one from my Black Series for comparison - in these, the shiny surface is entirely made from shellac and oils.

Here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws

Here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws
- Songs: Ohia

the moon is the color of a coffee stain

"The moon is the color of a coffee stain"
- Tom Waits, Bottom of the World

A person is the universe aware of itself

He's looking up at the stars

I’m a long way from home, and he’s just lying there, he’s just lying in that bed and he’s looking up at the stars. The blankets white on his round body must shroud his limbs, and his great round body, and his limbs just lie there.

He’s looking up at the stars, and he sees a bird out the window, and it’s the only thing that he really knows at the moment, and he knows that a moment is a precious thing. It should be a precious thing, but he can’t feel that way right now, even though he wants to. He needs this to mean something, and he can’t just go out without any meaning.

And she could be lying there, sitting there with her head propped up against the arm of his bed. She tried to hold a pillow, but it fell, and she must have dozed off for another few minutes, and her head just leaned up against the railing of the bed, and the white blankets fall from him, and they cover her right leg as they fall from him and down past the chair.

The bird is gone for him now, and his eyes look at the ceiling for a moment, and he wonders when they’ll come.

Why am I here,

And his eyes look around confused, and the room is dark and it’s night time out and there’s nobody around to answer him. What a precious thing lost, and I think how precious it might seem to me, and I think that this must have happened before, and it must have happened many times before, but it is fresh yet, beautiful by itself.

And she puts a hand unconsciously on his arm, and he looks down at his arm where another person has touched with him, and touch seems so far away now, and his brow furls, and he will miss this. He will miss her. But she’s asleep, and I’m glad she is because it’s too sad, and it’s too pristine a thing. I wonder if he’s glad that she was a sleep. If he knew. And his brow furled, and he can feel her hair, and he just had touched her hair a moment before, but he couldn’t touch it now. He wouldn’t touch it again, and it was quite real, then.

"Less is More" is cliche is an excellent collection of Judith Neisser's

Made a visit to the Judith Neisser Collection on display at the Art Institute of Chicago Museum. The title of the display is “Less is More”, which I thought was kind of cliché and a little pointed at minimalist artists – but I love minimalist work, so it’s a display I’ve wanted to see.

The exhibit introduces itself with a piece by Jannis Kounellus entitled “La Rosa”. And yes, as you may suspect, it is the dark rose silhouette above. Actually, that image was probably taken a long time ago. The piece on display shows a significant amount of the unfortunately real force of wear and tear. While first viewing it, I didn’t have a clue that the rose was as flat as it appears in the image above. The sides of the fabric are now curled and frilled. While I observed them, I thought textures to be interesting oppositions to one another. I enjoyed the play of the now-wrinkled black fabric upon the warm-neutral, flat canvas.

So I guess this piece has been like a fine wine. I can’t imagine a flat rose on a flat background, no matter how dramatic the color and temperature differences, would be as interesting as it is now. I found the now-disassembled pieces of the rose especially interesting, which may not have been something Kounellus was intending at all. The rose called attention to being deconstructed a third time – it is observed in two dimensions with the eyes of the artist, translated onto the canvas and the separations of these pieces called to mind the third process of reinterpreting the piece by the viewer.

Another artist in this first room (actually, right next to Kounellus) caught my eye with some really interesting decomposition of the canvas. Lucio Fontana painted this series called Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept) between 1956 and 1966. You can see in the above and below images, the canvas does not function as we expect it to. What we want to be a painting is suddenly an object in and of itself – and I would assert that those are two very separate things.

I should note that these two images are very similar to those on display in the Neisser gallery, but I guess Judith didn’t want them all floating around the Intertubes, so I picked these. And I think they pretty well represent the subtle differences in the two on display. I digress – although they are in a sense quite similar, the interaction with these two objects is achieved differently in either. In the top image, the imagery formed around the holes in the canvas come secondary visually to the holes themselves. The hole interacts with the space behind it, which I thought was an interesting concept.

In the bottom image, the holes are visual elements among the textures of the canvas. Their disobedience of the canvas is less obvious – they seem to ask “What is behind the canvas?” while the top image said plainly “Here’s what’s behind the canvas.” I do think the bottom image is more visually interesting in its subtleties than the top image, but I think they’re both well executed.

The last image I’ll ramble about is this piece by Rosemarie Trockel. This is the part where I encourage you to go see the exhibit – seeing this piece as an image doesn’t come close to how interesting it is. The black wool strings are stacked in places (the one above is similar, but the one on display here in Chi was more thickly covered in wool strings). As you move around the black wool, it allows slivers of the white canvas through and appears visually as this very rich textile – something like velvet. It’s a very clever and quite thought provoking piece.

Anyway, go see the exhibit, definitely worth the trip (especially on free Thursdays) #winning

Piece of the novel

Okay, so getting over my anxiety about leaving this open for everyone to read (does every artist get that...?). This is a passage from early in the novel. It's a conversation between the character and his little bro.

"            Are you awake

            Yeah

            I can’t really sleep right now

            Yeah me neither

            My brother and I shared a room, we were visiting somewhere, we slept on strange couches, we are young.

            I want to play mega man

            We would get in trouble

            I don’t think mom or dad would hear do you?

            I think so but I don’t know

            What colors would you want to be

            Do I just get to pick one?

            Ok pick two

            I would be the red and gold quick one and the metal one

            I would take the blue one and the freezing one

            Why would you be the freezing one?

            He can stop time and shoot you, you couldn’t do anything

            Yeah actually that’s a good one

            How do you know what colors you see are the ones I see

            Because we can both see red is red?

            No but what if I saw red as your yellow, but we just learn them as the same

            Hmm

            I don’t know… that is weird

            I know, weird

            I wouldn’t want to be the green one

            But what if he was actually the pink one

            We laugh

            They both kind of suck

            No they don’t!

            We laugh        

            I know, the pink one is good

            Yeah I know!

            We laugh

            It would be cool if you could get multiple lives

            Yeah, that would be cool. And if you could just find them around, like on different levels. You could get a bunch of them stored up.

            That would be cool, I bet we would be good too.

            Yeah, really

            But what would happen if you didn’t have any more lives?

            You would just die

            You don’t think you would start over?

            Hmm… maybe

            Yeah, maybe… I wonder what it’s like to be dead.

            I don’t really know. I think it would probably be dark, but that’s about all I know

            Unless you were in heaven

            Yeah, then it’d be different

            I wonder what heaven is like

            I don’t know, I just think of a bunch of clouds and light things and a blue sky

            Yeah, I think of that one too, and God has a beard that’s white

            Uhhuh. I wonder what Hell is like.

            Shut up, I don’t want to talk about that!

            Okay, I just mean I wonder what you know…

           

            Are you okay?

            Yeah

            It sat heavily upon both of our minds, we no longer spoke, we both looked blankly towards the white ceiling turned black with shadow. A fan hummed slowly above, we both watched it carefully, the severity of an eternal torture fresh and new, unexposed to the staleness it would eventually carry. The staleness of a red devil with a mustache, a pitchfork, the severity not yet diminished for repetition. The fires and oranges and demons and torture, and to be cast away from god and everyone else who went to heaven. And in the scope of one hundred years of life, eternity was anything but trivial, the implications of an afterlife were far but real. But children go to heaven, as long as they’re baptized, maybe even if they’re not, it’s not obvious.

            And where was death, how would I know it was coming, how could something be forever.

            Do you think you could really live forever?

            I think so… what else would there be?

            I don’t know, you would just… not be there anymore

            Hmm…

            Isn’t it kind of scary to live forever?

            Yes… but dying is scary too

            Yeah…

            We are lost in the predicament, and which is weightier.

            Are you crying?

            Yes.

            It’s okay… it’s not going to be for a long time probably.

            Probably?

            Well yeah, well… I just think it’s far away

            Okay, yeah, me too

            The light is gone save stars in the window, but they are mild and distant. The darkness encompassed the room, left the possibility for anything to exist in that intangible space.

            What do you think dad meant on the phone. Do you think mom is sick?

            No, he just said she had a cold, she’s not really sick

            Oh okay, who was he talking to?

            I don’t know, maybe the doctor’s office.

            And they said she was okay?

            Yeah, she has medicine, dad picked it up.

            I was a little bit worried about her

            Yeah, I think she’s fine though.

            A short pause enters the conversation, we digest the conversation, he says it first

            What if mom was really sick

            I don’t think she is.

            I know, but what if she got really sick?

            And silence slips into the conversation, into our thought processes. The possibility is unreal, it presents itself as an alien, it is impossible and amazing, it does not connect to everyday life. It is the other, real’s counterpart, and slowly, slowly the realization came. The thought processes synergized, and the gravity of what this might mean was overwhelming.

            It would be okay because she would go to heaven, and I exhale, I have solved the problem

            Yeah, and I can hear him sniffle. The thought has him crying again, harder, it is painful and logical with the world as I know it. Coco died, I will die, Mom will die. But no one knew quite what it was to die, because no one could tell us. We knew only that it was quite separate. And so we must simply believe. And I try to believe, but I am not quite sure what it is.

            But if I was the blue one, I’d freeze time, my grin invisible, but he could hear it. And he laughed, we laughed. And you’d just be stuck with the pink one.

            Shut up, I wouldn’t be the pink one!

            We laugh, Fine, fine.

            Did mom say you have a baseball game tomorrow?

            Yes, in the morning. Can I use your glove?

            Why, I ask, but I already know

            Because… you know why… Mom wrote my name in big letters all over it, it looks so stupid

            It really did look silly, I would have been embarrassed to wear that glove if I were him. She had this big black marker and wrote his name and phone number in big letters across one of the fingers, and again on the inside of the glove. So whoever was throwing to him saw all this silly writing with his name and some numbers, and it really did look silly.

            I let him sit there in the dark for a little while though. It was my glove after all. I didn’t really want him getting it all beat up or throwing it around or something. He probably wouldn’t though.

            Fine, I guess

            Thanks, I could tell he was smiling

            And the darkness to overwhelm the conversation, sleep to follow, rhythmically, the breathing in the room was grounding, he turned under his blankets and rustled his sheets. The sounds of the room, and the darkness just before sleep."

Appreciate any thoughts or opinions you guys have, I hope that my style leaves some room for you to find yourself in the character's perspective - perspective is something which really interests me.