The Visual and Static Portion of My Work
I feel uncomfortable archiving my material work online so I will just write a bit about them. We will go by genre as if we were going by sorted toybox.
Paintings
Presently I make a lot of watercolor paintings. It is a compact and moveable system, and it works best in a series of short spurts of working, due to drying. The colors must settle in the water. I have always painted to waning success but constant pleasure. I have no ability to keep a constant style, I have even tried. A tactic I have held onto is working to make the surface I paint on. At one point I was making paper over frames to create a topography of panel to begin painting with. Similarly, I have enjoyed painting on wood. The natural patterns in the materials give me something to respond to or trace and be in conversation with. I like to start out with a painting in this way much more than to have some idea for a painting. I can draw and replicate to photorealistic reproduction but only when the mood or poetry of the labor strikes me.
Materially I favor non archival everything because I do not want these things to last. I have no idea where any of my paintings are now aside from ones in a collection. I like latex paint a lot because it gathers up into a form. I have used paint to hold things together in sculptures where glue or nails would otherwise be used. That is funny to me. But just in making it. I am sort of past that.
Sculptures
I am very happy with my sculptural history because I have been able to escape cleverness which is a huge temptation in this material world. They aren't puns they are mostly illustration of fantastic images. The best sculptures I think I have made are human figures kneeling to giant animals. They accomplished exactly what I wished for them to communicate. They were felt.
There is always so much discussion and theory in image making in a time of image saturation- it has always struck me strange that we are so ready to consume and demand materials expressly to construct our "discursive" material works, in a world already so saturated in material forms. I do not make many sculptures from materials that need to be bought. I do not think this informs the content of the sculptures, it is a choice of sensibility and pragmatism. It is also a choice made in personal admiration of the mystery of lived materials. In short, I collect trash and assemble it. That is a whole sub-genre of my sculptures. I like to put these on the wall. The trash I get is relatively destroyed and rid of its object identity. They are strips and forms and yeah.
The promise of sculpture is inspiring to me and I have conceptualized many more than I have ever executed. The dream and thought process that goes into amassing required materials and time for sculptures seems to be the essence of it. Then there is the labor of assembly. For me there is not so much labor and it's more going into conversation with the stuff like with painting. For me this is some opportunity to transcend my mind and draw ideas from the world without me. To me this is something with great spiritual mystery. It makes me very sad that when people would view these things in a gallery or home, that they would think to the artist and attribute great tact and knowledge to them in their decision making. To me these forms are a great opportunity to exhalt the maddening hilarity of endless assemblages and variations and possibilities. The opposite of absurdism, which delves into a serenity of assured meaninglessness. This is meaning without bounds. I've written much more about this in my exploration of Ligma.
Photography
I have been taking pictures feverishly since I was about 10 years old. My mother was a property manager and had a digital camera to take pictures of the homes before and after, for legal security deposit purposes. I took over this responsibility and it was nearly impossible to separate me from the camera. The camera became a companion and remains one, though our relationship is strained after so much familiarity. I don't know who is at fault there. Today I am feeling it is me, taking it so for granted.
Anyways, what can be said about photography? Photo theory makes me groan. I became totally obsessive about it for so long, it was the subject of all of my papers in college. I can locate a few catalyst moments that transformed my understanding of it, however:
On the first day of my first photography course, my teacher Christine Osinski did not show us any photographs. She took us to her office and had us cover her wall of windows facing a busy street with black papers. Then, with a sewing needle, she ceremoniously pierced a single point in the center paper, which illuminated the entire opposite wall and let loose an inverted live stream of the outside street. She had turned the room we were in, into a pinhole camera. We returned to our classroom and she passed around a short story by Raymond Carver called "Why Don't You Dance?" that blew my mind, especially as a story in place of a photograph.
Drawing
The act of drawing to me is really beautiful cause I see it as just athletic finesse like those who can aim well in archery or carve waves well on surfboards- the skill and gesture of it comes from built strength and the creativity required to embrace your body in such a driven manner. I truly think everyone can and should draw as an exploration and that if Anyone wants they can learn to draw the world as it "exists" it just takes lots of repetitive practice and time and built strength in the hand as well as the eye. Like I said with painting, I rarely am driven to do this in a manner of replicating photorealism.
And like I said with sculptures, I will go through all of these mechanisms of dreaming up a project sometimes only to think- I would rather just draw this scenario, and create the visual world it exists within. Sometimes that is more apt. It is the difference of needing the material to exist versus needing to manifest the form outside of this world. 2 dimensional divestment much like the written word. Drawing also feels more daily, more acclimatable to any context.
Printmaking
At Tallahassee Community College I took a printmaking course and this was my first official foray into material art. I had a fantastic time experimenting with the behemoth type rolling print creature with its felted blankets and notorious cost. It was a method of image making that felt miniaturized- built within a set size to be fed through a printer. We carved into slick materials, painted onto plexiglass for one-offs, and soaked our drawings on plates in acid. It felt like a great exploration of ancient technology. My teacher was from slovakia and recollected on her childhood- they carved stamps into potatoes and erasers as children, this was printmaking. I was very fortunate for this to be my situation.
During a labor of love cutting into linoleum while watching television, I gave myself a deep gash on the inside of my left index finger that still bears a long scar and limits its mobility right at its central knuckle.
Outside of access to these machines and facilities, I would scratch at cheap wood with a knife and burnish the inked drawings onto rice paper.
I long to return to this form.
Textiles and Weaving
Candles and Windchimes
In the bahamas my aunt has store on an island with one road that is a gift shop but its mostly a point of sale for her artwork. She has walked the beaches of eleuthera her whole life, paying witness to the trash of the world that comes ashore from deep within the atlantic, tumbled by storms and waves to pure unrecognizable states, in beautiful arrays of faded plastic colors. I make things with her that she turns around and sells for ridiculous amounts, especially considering they are made of trash. People feel they are doing something good and green by buying windchimes made of cd's and metal scraps and fishing line.
Our best sellers have always been candles in used tuna cans. For whatever reason, canned tuna is extremely popular on the island. I make special labels for the cans and print them out and glue them on and they sell like hot cakes. My aunt lost her sense of smell when she was a child. She broke her leg and had to have surgery. They put her under with laughing gas and when she woke up she had no sense of smell. When we spend a day making candles, I have to, chemist-like, mix all these extremely potent aroma concentrations that she's ordered from some obscure source, to try to concoct fruity and inviting smells.
When I am off, and it is not quite the correct smell, or I can no longer tell because my nose is so over saturated, I will compensate by concocting a beautiful color for the wax. I enjoy that logic.
Ropes
Boating requires lots of rope and knots. I grew up sailing in Panama City bay every summer and winter with my father. For a time I worked as a dockhand at the 31st street marina in Chicago. Interestingly enuff, my earliest memories of explicitly learning knots was due to my computer literacy. When I was 10 or so, my brother was taking an online exam to certify himself for his Z card as a merchant marine. He didn't know any of the answers on the test so somehow with my family gathered around I was tasked with standing by to look up the names of knots. This lasted hours and triggered some apperciation of their flattened form. Before then I had only seen them in light of their immediate utility. You needed a rope to do So and So.
Now my days are ropeless and my knots are only long cords to instruments.