Art: Theories and Provocations

2012-02-01T16:54:00.000-08:00

mike kelley dead... a new member of the joyless suicide club. he lays himself out in good company: gorky, plath, roethke, crane, rothko, mayakovsky, wallace, hemingway (did jackson off himself? that car-dive into the woods...?)...

did his body of work stack up to any of them? I'll be the asshole and say NO.

punk rock and "youth culture" does not make powerful art. sorry...

sorry.

...and then i hear of the passing of dorothea tanning. at 101...

tanning was (or is) one of the female artists nobody knows but should know. a lot of her work comes off a bit spotty to my eyes-- and much comes off as horribly dated. but she was there, working her paint, digging down deep into her own reality. and yes, as a woman, who knows the peripheral bullshit she had to deal with?

the surrealists were a dicey lot. effete, cafe society europeans- laying low in nyc while the nazis did what they did.

breton? please... a bad poet does not a leader make.

but, as a whole, the surrealists took us all to another place-- looking at and making art.

tanning, in her very existence as a woman putting down paint and living the life she led is a beacon for BEING AN ARTIST and LEADING A full CREATIVE LIFE...

all that and she nailed down a multi-decade marriage to an artist.

god knows that can't be easy.

kelley? well, yeah...

at least we still have hirst.

right?

2012-01-20T21:40:00.000-08:00

ok, happy new year...

so much going on-- life, art, love, life, fatherhood, trying to be an artist, etc... what a fine adventure i've stumbled into.

hirst. yeah...

well, he's a whore. a pawn of his own lost, pathetic ambition. a ghost adrift in manufactured "punk" pedigree-- so stupid he doesn't understand that he's one with bad dance music and reality TV shows; bags of potato chips and institutionalized poverty. indeed, he may actually believe that he creates an "art" that is challenging (in a real sense)...

yeah. hirst...

and yes, hirst sucks.

he's just smart enough to exploit the fools and the market and just emasculated enough to think it's cool to do so.... it's so easy. so easy... years ago i understood it was not a difficult agenda to plot a career of "false art"-- an art of parody: the empty space, the ridiculous video, what have you... so easy.

and he will die perhaps believing that he really did something. maybe in his dwarfed way of thinking his oeuvre is a comment.

OF COURSE HE THINKS THIS...

thats where i get caught-- is he part of the joke or just playing the joke?? in the end it doesn't matter. there is nothing there.

the first piece of writing i ever published on art was on hirst. he and i have been odd bedfellows these many years. i was a young drunken, stoned, tangled hair lad in SoHo, finding my way along the cobblestones on Wooster Street- horribly hung over after too long a night of tall drinks and brazilian women.

i wrote, in closing, "art is death, not dead flesh."

and there is no life here.

so there can be no death.

hirst is simply the fat left over from the slaughter

of what was called "post-modernism..."

money and the wretched materialism aside,

it is as if he never belched his foul stench into the void.

his end will be meaningless.

as was his "art"

and his life...

2012-01-01T23:17:00.000-08:00

and now frankenthaler has passed... i've been torn of late trying to piece together my thoughts on her time and her art. i've seen some great pieces and i've seen some real crap and i saw that show at knoedler years ago that was an embarrassment.

helen had a lot of breaks handed her way. you can't deny it or pretend them away... another rich girl out there playing the game-- hook up with the most important critic of the era; marry an established painter, etc... why not?

in the end, i'd say she left more influence then art.

if she gave noland and louis a way out of pollack, she didn't give herself much else...

she blotted and poured and stained away the years and ended up doing poorly wrought landscape-based works that looked like the work of the bankers wife (i think) she was...

it saddens me to think of what she could have done--

how could it go so wrong??

but she did what she did and some of it will stand the test of time.

and as we're told to mourn her,

i'll wonder again to myself

when the pat lipsky retrospective opens...

2011-12-19T17:12:00.000-08:00

another year heading away from me... and what a year-- marriage, baby, strong sales of my work, hawaii, the ocean, etc...

and so, the art world. the art world indeed... saatchi has called them out (irony is a soft, pliant mistress...). miami basel miami basel. the yachts moored in venetian slips...

this is so far removed from the art world i know and work in that it seems ridiculous to even bring up the point. in my rabid youth such atrocities and pretensions would have driven me to extremes of hyperbole and/or violence. now, well, now i just pay a little attention to what is going on and then get back to the work at hand- painting, drawing, training and caring for my daughter. life is short and now, as father, artist, teacher, what have you, i am so very aware of this...

it seems to me that at this stage in the journey battles are to be picked with a hungry, focused discrimination. warhol happened a long long time ago. johns before that... from there we get the ourslers and the finleys and koons and hirst.

fine...

theres a lot of shitty TV that pulls in the $$$$ and adds nothing to culture, save a punch-line. thats where we are with THAT art world.

stupid, vulgar people create and harbor stupid, vulgar creations.

this tawdry fact being what it is,

why should i concern myself?

isn't it more important

to just attempt the labor of good work?

maybe write a poem,

for no eyes save my own...

2011-12-18T19:31:00.000-08:00

yeah... not too late but late enough. an opening reception and then the after party at my place. drunk artists and drunk bulgarians make for a lethal combination. there is, in the eastern european soul, a thirst so heroic as to bring a man to his knees. i know this as fact and yet dance with the realities as often as possible. of course... of course.

so now, a beautiful meal in my belly, beleaguered not by life, but by, perhaps, it's omens-- my thoughts drift towards death. hitchens dead; havel dead; twombly dead; freud dead; the great hermann bachofner-- dead.

what is it that we leave behind? maybe some paintings, some scrawled words on bar napkins in east village dives so long ago it doesn't even seem like it could have been the early '90's...

yeah, the east village... this was my haunt before the glassy towers of $$$ and european architects, too many happy people and productivity.

this was the frontier-- still and, it seemed, forevermore... deli's were where you copped heroin. corners were where you looked out for the law. there was a steadfast democracy that held sway-- you made it or you didn't... fuck you.

maybe NYC life was harder all around in those days. it wasn't the '70's for sure, but there was the chance that for every beautiful story, there was a horror story. and i lived through that... my best friend-- maybe not...

i didn't mean to think about him just now... but sitting here, writing of east village times and great dead men- it happened...

i'm old enough now that i need reading glasses. an indignity of gnarly weight and gravity. my daughter sleeps with some ease in her closet of a room and i note that, indeed, i am happy. happy and sitting down to write a few words of art or meaning and in the end a lost companion of 18 or 19 years comes up. there are sad songs in life and i've lent my voice to many, far too often. now, as a father, i look for the clean, arid lyrics that could define a certain, odd, happiness...

he was younger and yet better, smarter-- a cultural soldier, strident and unyielding, as i staggered about insouciant...

his was an intelligence carved from self-reliance and weathered backbone.

a beacon in the fog of young men searching out futures and destinies.

a sublime warrior....

i didn't mean to write about him tonight.

but i did.

and the only relief i have from the pain of losing him is that i knew him for the time i did...

2011-12-12T10:23:00.000-08:00

with three new pieces wrapped and ready for a saturday opening and exhibition, i've been pondering the meanings of what it is i've been doing of late. feeding my baby i notice how (at 5 months) certain things catch her eye and her focus. if the bathroom light is on for instance, she is wholly transfixed. what is it exactly that she sees? it's of interest in the larger scheme of things because there is no language or fixed definition for her at this point in her life. she experiences what comes her way in the purest conceivable way. no shit-- she's a baby... but it's fascinating in the same way it's fascinating to speculate on the thought process of pre-socratic philosophers-- where did their apparatus come from? what gave them the weight of their speculation? back in the days of good acid in the boondocks, it dawned on me that i was feeling what a baby felt day to day while in the midst of a trip-- everything was perceived anew, everything was vital and i crawled about as a virgin of sorts-- each movement a brave exploration into new territory, new sublimities...

don't we do this with painting? of late, dealing with a slightly new direction in my work, i've felt an odd joy and desperation in my efforts. pleasure? yes, to be sure-- but there is a detached sense of the path never before taken... it's my opinion that we should, as creators, work in this sort of innocence. if at all possible...

with the gestural mark-making going on in the studio, i've noticed 3 rather distinct qualities:

the circular, organic calligraphy; the more formal, "worked" line and a sort of instinctual shorthand, if you will... all 3 go on view this weekend.

and i'll have my baby with me.

she can lend her gaze to these objects

and in doing so, perhaps, give some depth of purpose to all of it,

the notions of art, collectors,

dealers, resumes,

shows,

MFA's and the like be damned...

2011-12-08T21:17:00.001-08:00

made it to chelsea... a half hour before closing time-- they just shut those lights out and the booze is pulled from the tables and the pretty girls are not working anymore.

gordon moore at betty cunningham gallery was purely thrilling. the guy does moves with paint and line that you might dream up stoned, but never work the nerve up to go for. a painters painter and a man so keenly invested in his practice that to say he kicks ass or, perhaps, serves as a beacon to what a painter might strive for, cuts it a bit short...

and i walked 25th street after the moore gig and was delighted to see more strong painting (and some candy, that looked like a bad "LA" painting show-- but thats neither here nor there...).

i'm not thinking, in any way, that we're turning a corner here.

painting has never died and it probably will not make any real comeback. but it's out there.

it takes getting on the street, walking the walk and maybe checking the websites, the shitty magazines and asking around, but there are painters showing true, strong painting.

and tomorrow morning i'll head to the brooklyn studio.

and feel pretty good...

2011-12-07T21:59:00.000-08:00

too late to be up, but the baby is doing her thing from time to time...

aah, deegan faith.

so, with the grace of grandparents in town, i made my way to the studio--

devoid of child.

i hit it hard-- the fine tuning and questioning of work set to be released to the world, nailed up, fastened to the gaze, etc... all of it, far too dramatic. far too dramatic...

there was a bottle of wine and work that was looking good so i did my thing and later went for my halogen light bulbs and tripe soup at the dominican place. rained on for the 3rd time of the day, but thats ok...the artist, deceus, visited for a short time and we shared stories of art and daughters, life and getting it on in spite of that new life around you, surrounding you... and i sipped the wine and did my thing, the work coming strong and easy. it's an amazing reality to be alone in the studio-- sometimes more amazing than you can imagine. and then i headed out and back to manhattan, to the grandparents and deegan faith and soothed her and poured a drink and grilled 2 ribeyes and made a vinaigrette of jalepeno, garlic, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and my own special "Zalsa..." stirred that shit up good and doused it over spinach. it was a fine meal. heroic in it's way, and needed...

2 steaks might come across as abusive.

or maybe cathartic...

2011-12-03T23:00:00.000-08:00

ok, saatchi said the art world is vulgar... fine. it is.

it must be understood that there is CULTURE and then there is the ARTWORLD. the ARTWORLD is a product-- something dreamed up and formulated. it's become a conceptual territory that has nothing to do with the creation and love of ART.... the ARTWORLD, as we know it (fairs, venice, hirst, koons, additions, warhol, warhol's bitches, the DEAD DE MENIL KID, polaroids, videos, politics, feminist identity, queer agenda, etc, etc....) is a pathetic social play that the rich push around on their plate and the poor try to snag a pea, filled with posers and cliche misfits.

the ARTWORLD is about $$$. period... and names. it's about those that know nothing about art laying down coin for art. and maybe, at times, it's good art-- or at least something that has some meaning. but when thats the case it's on the word of an art consultant.

on the flip side there is CULTURE. here we have the refined and intelligent, the sensitive, etc... here we find painters and ARTISTS, along with those that support them through understanding, $$$, compliance and awareness.

i dig it-- rich people need art just as poor people do. it's no different, regardless of what the socialists would say... and believe me, i want them buying my work as the paint dries (what color is your couch?)...

the point is that saatchi is calling out the ARTWORLD and people are getting pissed...

fuck them. he couldn't be more accurate--

obviously...

and saatchi, himself falls right in there. who, in his right mind (aesthetically if nothing else), would lay down good british coin on anything by the likes of emin???

who? well, saatchi..

but here he is calling them out.

that takes balls.

or maybe it doesn't...

yeah, maybe it means nothing.

2011-12-01T20:55:00.001-08:00

there is this sense, as an artist, that you deal with life in a rarefied plain, more emotionally, more subjectively, more objectively, more violently, more sanely. there are the late nights and early mornings of bad women you don't know and bad habits you know all too well. there are the old books falling apart-- brittle with age, the yellowed to brown pages crumbling with each turn of the inquisitive hand. there were nights where i never spoke a word of language other than the language of a brush or a scrawled pen in the dim light under my loft bed in the long island city studio as the street lights of 11th street blew out the glass brick windows of that concrete ground floor space.

the artist, robert kingston (at the time) was on the top floor and while walking his majestic dog, Reina, he would, at times stop to knock on the thick glass and he'd come in and look and we'd talk and think, for awhile, together, sometimes leaving the space to walk along the east river warehouses that, at that seemingly long ago time, lined the shoreline where the packs of wild city dogs crept out from the forgotten basements in the late of night.

at the time, long island city was part small town and part ghost town. part NYC and part??? there were young mexican families and old italians and if you saw someone more than once you at least nodded and said your hello. and it has changed... like so much of everything else in life-- it has changed. the old warehouses are long gone. the young mexican families gone or, if not gone, furtive, in hiding... the old italians? sadly, i'd say they've died off. and their children and grandchildren play at making a living off the new way of life on that side of the river.

but, clearly, i digress.

back to art... it is a singular game. there is little room for collaboration in the quest of a vision-- narcissus, the cruel master... it dawned on me yesterday, feeding my baby, that my wife and child have given me purpose. given my way and my life reason and a cause. i have been steadfast in my pursuits-- art, vice, poetry, violence, sport, what have you... but now... now there is a new speed and a newfound vigor to my practice of existence. and indeed, to the practice of my art

i owe this to them...

the poet, james dickey wrote,

"I begin to move with the moon

As it must have felt when it went

From the sea to dwell in the sky.

As we near the vast beginning,

The unborn stars of the wellhead,

The secret of the game."

yeah. that about sums it up...

2011-11-19T23:26:00.000-08:00

too late to start writing and too late to stop... certain glories come to us at the wrong times and how you deal with it is what sets you apart from the rabble.

gesture, in it's truest sense, is a bitch. it's there- waiting, crouching in shadow and then it spews fourth from the brush or the pencil or the nub of charcoal, as untamed and buoyant as a branch broken off in a nyc october blizzard. and then what? how do you handle it?

i'm trying for as honest, as organic a line (or stroke) as possible. from there i go back into it, but i want that first hit to have some sincerity, some meaning if nothing else.

but what if that first hit doesn't work?? what then? much paint has gone down taking care of this eventuality.

fine...

in the studio of the powerful MP Landis, i mentioned i had been wasting a lot of paint.

"paints never wasted..." he said.

true enough.

and i carry on...

2011-11-14T20:23:00.000-08:00

a few notes:

* the grace of the "gesture" is in it's intimate, muscular urgency. so present in it's own state-- so honest, so articulate... and then you work with it a bit more and it becomes, perhaps, less honest, but no less articulate. i've felt honored in the studio of late.

...and thats a hell of a statement to make.

* i find that my daughter's presence in the studio gives me a buoyant, playful energy. the brooding seems lessened, the dark waters becoming a little clearer...

* so much talk about the marina abramovic MOCA fiasco... so much. I applaud yvonne rainer in that she had the guts to really say something of meaning against this debacle. i must say, however, that there has been too much talk of "exploitation"and other such nonsense. the outrage over this has nothing to do with the sad condition of marina's participants (oh so willing, it should be very well noted...), the outrage should be over the likes of deitch taking control of a public venue, the cult of exhibitionism run rampant across the arts, etc, etc, etc...

i came up with an equation a long while back: art school girl + camera = nude self-portraiture.

the all female cast of the "performance" will no doubt, look back on this (and it's line on their resume) with a smirk of perfect self-satisfaction. they don't paint, they don't carve, they don't care... they stripped down and someone else called it art, or if not art- performance... there was no exploitation-- only supply and demand.

this is how it works-- ask any stripper.

but then, most strippers are too honest to give a shit about these losers and their postures...

2011-11-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

first day cruising the chelsea galleries with my daughter... i hope she never reaches a point where she doesn't want to do that- but given the art world, who could blame her??

so we made the rounds with the artist, james austin murray providing comic relief and video documentation. and he picked up half the lunch (beer) tab...

* serra at gagosian was, as always, superb. the new works, junction/cycle, are right up there as an experience as any of his other great pieces-- adventurous, daring articulation of space. flat out: serra does what few artists ever have: achieve the scope of their ambition. and with a striking consistancy.

that same power was evident with the late milton resnicks impastoed monochromatic (polychromatic?) work at cheim & read gallery. having never had much exposure to his output, i was really taken with the force of resnick's resolve-- the drive to JUST MAKE A PAINTING AND WORK IT AND MAKE IT SOMETHING REAL...

i asked the desk help if she had an idea as to the number of years per piece-- i was pressing my luck... each work is credited with a year- '87, etc, and no notice given as to how long an individual painting was labored on.

fine..

resnick offed himself in 2004. i don't know what his output was at that time- does it matter? the fact that at some point in his life he put together THIS body of work is enough. there are so many of us out there- painting, striving, or, perhaps, just doing our thing.

how many have a philosophy?

resnick did... and he lived it. i raise this glass of vodka to his work and his memory.

and next door at marlborourgh? well, some hack named newsome, that somehow has already had a solo gig at the wadsworth... according to the press release, this work, "...combines high neo-Baroque style with low-pop advertising imagery..." and on and on and on.

rubbish...

this is just some pile of akendi wiley refuse that got tossed up and hung up. coming off the heels of the dietch "street" show in LA, it just seems a little too conveniant. i'll put fourth the question: what does low-pop anything have to do with art?

and i'll answer it: nothing...

and so i will give no more space and/or energy to this bullshit, writing this to whoever might be reading (me, tomorrow...), coming off a great night of work in the brooklyn studio...

* thursday i hit the opening (once again at cheim & read) of joan mitchell's later work. i was very very curious to see this show. i had written an extensive review of her whitney retrospective years ago and came out of that exercise exhausted and rather emotionally spent... the woman made some great paintings... she also cleaned her brushes on canvases and put them on gallery walls for sale to the those that buy and don't look crowd... it grieves me that her output is so spotty. she could have been our champion-- plowing forward through the decades... instead she became little more than the grouchy, booze-sodden grandmother of the ab-ex movement. and the 2nd generation at that-- aesthetically overshadowed by norman bluhm and the ghost of alfred leslie's early labors.

but she did pull off some great work. and why not? she was from a good wealthy chicago family that paid the bills and bought the paint. fuck yeah...

so i was excited, a few kitchen shots before hitting the taxi for chelsea.

and you know what? there was some great painting going on. the old broad was getting down in her last decade. to be fair, i must say there was some brush cleaning going on-- meaningless strokes to nowhere, at times, a horrid disregard for composition-- but the great moments are what stuck with me. and the great moments are what will stick with me.

mitchell was (is) one of our greats. that she could not step away from the canvas for (to my eye) a day or week or year, or 2 of reflective self-critique haunts her work. clement greenberg wrote about duchamp mis-interpretating picasso's bold discoveries-- perhaps joan (as many of her contemporaries) mis-interpreted de kooning's process.

de kooning worked years for that famous slash and burn-- scraping off and re-painting, scraping off and re-painting... mitchell didn't go that route. there was scant evidence of any truely re-worked passages-- hers was an immediate program and assault. she seems to have had little time to question herself.

but what if- once in awhile, she did?
think about that...

2011-10-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

so they have "occupied" Artists Space now... what to say??

the MOMA protest was juvenile and devoid of any real meaning- prankster-ism, performance, etc... but this smacks of something more sinister.

to protest MOMA was a grandstanding gig put together by some loser from brooklyn with way too much free time on his hands. fair enough. it's easy to get on the soapbox against venerated public institutions. pointless, but easy. the deal with this nonsense is that these fools are the same as any hillbilly from alabama lamenting "cultural elites"... i think the "occupiers" even used a term along those lines. they are hammering what we'll call "high" culture- the culture that has sustained us and endured (not without pitfalls) for generations... this is not a western culture versus diversity bullshit program, regardless of what they want to shout from the street corners. this is protesting culture- period. and thats fine. there are a lot of people with a lot of complaints about a lot of shit going on in the art world, culture in general. i'm one of them. but if they spent as much time trying to make art as they did with such street theater, or watching tv... you get the picture.

there was a lot of criticism of the OWS participants as slackers, trust fund kids, hippies, etc. for sure there are plenty of slackers, trust fund kids and hippies down there, but there are also enlightened, intellectual adults trying to become part of something larger than themselves and trying to add voice to this movement. lets be honest with ourselves: to bring about any real change will take about a century of turmoil. i'm not happy about this, but it seems like reality...

you gotta start somewhere.

but Artists Space??? this was organized (it seems) by some performance artist with a little bit of a career. of course! it make sense now: "occupy" a non-profit that is kind to the alternative mediums and housed in a beautiful SoHo loft-- high and dry from the cops. if this was a legit protest about the inequities of the brutal art world, why not "occupy" gagosian in the heart of chelsea??? dumb question- go-go would have the cops there breaking heads and handcuffing the offending in less time than it takes to say gagosian. these children went for the easy game to cash in on the momentum of a real movement and juice up their resumes for when they start typing up those grant requests.

pathetic...

i doubt if the director of Artists Space will call the cops. this will play out just as the bastards want it to. it will become some horrid waiting game without end.

but if they get tired of the nonsense i'll put together a posse of big, drunken painters and clear the place out...

no problem. give me a call...

2011-10-20T20:41:00.001-07:00

fatherhood has given me many things- and there is no doubt that one of those things is a new found respect for space to think and put together ideas, notions and dreams. every parent knows the beautiful dilemma of caring for and dealing with a baby, a child, what have you... intensity (such as is found in submission grappling and/or parenthood) is a game best worked within a full engagement and a crying baby (if you have the guts) is a take on full engagement in the most titanic of terms.

this then leaves the question of time. time to make art, time to think, time to put together the myriad detritus of a day into a night and the resultant narrative. in short, time alone...

an artist feeds on a certain requirement of solitude-- time to ruminate on matters aesthetic, poetic, romantic, etc. these thoughts take the full measure of a man's energies and (as an artist) he comes out from these reveries, maybe not better-- but stronger in a vigorous sense of purpose, going forward with the work at hand.

almost midnight now and i sit here at the table alone. baby asleep and the dreaming the soft dreams that we can never recall having dreamed in that time so long ago, wife asleep and deserving it...

fatherhood has given me many things. one of the very implicit contributions to my life has been a newfound appreciation for appreciation and for gratitude.

i have been given a chance to feel so much more outside of myself than ever i could have felt from within myself alone... and my daughter gave this to me.

this is but an echo of my own childhood-- an echo of generations... and as an artist, irreplacible as a font of creative vitality.

tomorrow, baby deegan will be with me in the studio- supervising, if you will. paint will be laid down hard, diapers changed, etc etc... but right now i'm alone. i am typing and sipping cold vodka- readying myself for the 4AM feeding.

i should have been in bed an hour ago, but then i couldn't have written this and thought these thoughts, paying so much attention to how very lucky i am...

2011-10-17T20:07:00.000-07:00

* interesting how i find myself going for the grim profundity of black once again... that note of high seriousness, etc. zubaran, goya, valazquez-- the ground, burnt bone of animals.

add to that this new quest to reinvigorate my work with gesture and a baby and all the rest and life is just spinning at speeds that seem, at times, surreal. the crazed energized pitch of the edge that i felt hanging off the fireescape in the bronx after to much of any number of bad habits nipping (then) at my heels... and why not gesture?? there is a very valid reason work such as De Kooning and Kline resonate so with certain viewers-- that coarse, arrogantly physical statement of FACT put down on canvas. in discussion after discussion with the poetic artist robert kingston, we've hashed out the issues of the hard edge, the grid, geometry (what have you), versus the elegiac song of the painterly, or gestural... our main conclusion (if you could call it that) was that the 2 could and should intermingle to create a work of the complexity an artist should strive for given our dicey space in the continuum of art.

i'm taking this operation very deliberately. large canvases line the walls of my studio- some of them having been labored over for serveral years and drawings litter the floor of my apartment, my baby deegan held the brush for the first time on one such outing- her savage markings sharing an honesty i can only hope to come across in my own handling of material...

* the paradox of james austin murray... i've been meaning to write something along these lines for quite sometime now. i first met murray when he was a young dealer (of art). then, ditching the retail trade and focusing on his own chaotic painting, he stumbled across a brilliant melding of tight, graphic portraiture and expressionism that debuted at andrew miller's much loved and short lived L.I.C.K. Ltd. in 2001. 1 week after 9/11...

since that time a lot of paint has gone one way or another, for better or worse. of late however, murray has staggered across a growing body of work in the last year or so that is quietly reaching a fever pitch of importance. an importance that, sadly, is going too far under the radar... his monochromes (and, despite his possible protestations, that is just what they are...), black, radiant, daring in execution and sculptural implication, sit on the wall with a chip on the shoulder daring you not to lose yourself in track of a brushstroke, or the lost wisp of an edge that might round off when (seemingly) it can't, or according to some pythagarian standard, shouldn't, but does. beautifully.

at his recent open studio i had the honor of seeing 3 large scale works for the first time- 2 tryptichs and a stunning (the best nyc painting of this year???) dyptich, titled "bomb proof anchor". these paintings need to be seen and visually labored over. i'll not go into details here (besides, my glass is empty...).

not that it matters much- but i've felt for years that, as talented as murray is, he never understood that talent, or what made selections of his work so important. i don't feel that way anymore...

2011-10-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

* ...the sound of my daughter's laugh. thats what today will be for me. just over 3 months old and now i have heard that beautiful beautiful sound.

and in abundance.

life is good.

* the De kooning retrospective at MOMA is as it should be- a splendid offering of a great artist's lifes work laid out for us. if makes it very very easy to see how far we've fallen in terms of true ambition and realization- our polaroids and installations amount to little more than party favors for a party that means nothing outside of the fact that i wouldn't get invited and wouldn't go if i did...

* a new body of work cooking in the studio. much painting and re-working... but thats a good thing. even my mom told me tonight on the phone, "it's part of the process..."

2011-07-15T21:11:00.000-07:00

* so, fatherhood...

what is there to say that has not yet been said? cliches and stereotypes hold a certain power within the fact that they hold a certain truth. i am in the midst of the greatest endeavor of my life-- and it becomes so much more than that with each second of holding my daughter.

this morning, she opened her eyes to mine as i watched over her dreaming expressions. I WAS THE FIRST THING THAT SHE SAW TODAY... to say (merely) that i was moved, amazed, indeed, brought to tears by this actuality, would be an understatement of the rawest insensitivity...

Deegan Faith.

2011-02-20T21:35:00.000-08:00

this morning, i felt my daughter kick for the first time. it wasn't the kick i imagine i'll feel in 16 years or so, when she belts a roundhouse to my unshaven chin, but it was a strong kick nonetheless... this is the stuff of life. a life roughed up and walked over; swallowed, tossed aside-- left drying on a beach somewhere- maybe negril back in the early '90's, eating fish stew with the rasta men in the woods on the other side of the road...

a strong woman told me, "real men have daughters..." indeed. the context of the life i've lived shifted in a hard stroke when the word (let alone the kick) officially came down. there are reasons why certain rogues cry at odd moments-- too much booze, too much sentiment, too much art. too much too much... we are the bits of the play we write each day the curtain falls and we keep trying to bring back the magic of opening night.

one of these days, over a good bottle of wine, she'll explain all this to me.

2010-11-20T21:02:00.000-08:00

...and there is a glass of scotch.

and if nobody else likes that, at least you do.

2010-11-20T20:53:00.000-08:00

there is a newly fabricated, $300 crate, paintings wrapped and packed into; large canvases on the walls getting worked and numerous smaller pieces-- in brooklyn and manhattan working spaces, getting touched up and done... jazz in the background: coltrane, miles, mojo mancini... the light is harsh in brooklyn around 3pm-- the west-facing windows give no relief... and you wonder what really is going on in this moment. a moment when you may or may not be putting paint down-- but are, for sure, making art. you wonder about this and nod your head and feel like something is happening here. something real and something good. something as close as it should be to what it is that you as an artist should be doing.

and you think about that for a second or 2, maybe smile and get on with it.

all of it...

2010-11-10T05:48:00.001-08:00

I took a break from the studio for an hour to sit in the local hip bar surrounded by these fey art school kids... and whatever it happened to be that they were saying: our future creators.

and it dawned on me-- thats whats wrong with the art world...

2010-11-09T06:20:00.000-08:00

these writings seem to get few and farther between... i guess thats a good thing, in that work in the studio is getting done, as opposed to sitting with coffee and a laptop-- typing away.

* the chelsea gallery scene has been interesting of late. actually having seen some very strong painting in the last few weeks, i'm coming to the conclusion that the world may be reaching it's fill of digital tomfoolery and the like... maybe not, but it's a good thought to think.

* speaking of chelsea, the brice marden shows at matthew marks should not be missed. the large paintings in the "letters" show are simply and stoically, beautiful. i was very pleased to find that the palette is of soft, restricted, earthy tones-- the approach quite painterly. and i gotta say, the borders, or margins (to my eye) really push the compostion forward and, obviously, give it some sense of order, outside the gestural... the smaller show next door of earlier work is equal in it's pleasures, but from the other side of things. here was marden as a young artist, dealing with his influences and fighting through it. but, god damn, what a fight it was... these paintings are rugged as hell and, given the small size (indeed, scale) all the more physically vigorous.

art of this quality makes me feel good to live in manhattan and, that said, here in manhattan, we're lucky enough (as we should be) to have one of the most important (to my mind) shows to be put together in, well, quite a while. MOMA's Ab-Ex show is as purely beautiful and important (on many levels) as one could wish. all the greats are there-- the artists and the works-- and some of the lesser known artists as well-- alfred leslie, grace hartigan and, from the earlier years, bradley walker tomlin. in some instances, artists are afforded their own gallery: the newman offerings are particularly strong-- onement 1, white fire, abraham and, of course, vir heroicus sublimis... to this day, i look at vir heroicus and i shake my head at what newman was able to accomplish in his solitude. the space he created was one where the optic takes on the physical-- you look into this work and you just know that there is importance to what we, as painters, strive for... no matter how far we fall from attaining anything at all-- our efforts are worthwhile, in and of themselves.

in the morning, i'll meet with the painter, pat lipsky, and we'll take all this in together. something to look forward to...

as far as the studio goes, it's been a very productive time. right now i'm getting work ready for a january 15th solo show at 210 gallery in brooklyn and getting ready to crate up work to ship to paia contemporary in maui... life is good. sometimes it's better.

2010-07-14T19:43:00.000-07:00

managed to make the reception for the matisse exhibit at MOMA. the beautiful people and those that fund them were out in force and the booze was free and the frankenthaler piece (chairman of the board) looked better than any number of sunsets, next to rodin's Balzac... interesting to me to muse on the helen F. on the night of the biggest matisse show in years... the color, the daring form. it's all there. and on and on...

but this should be about henri- not helen F. or ocean park or anything else, picasso included.

over the years, i've come to grips how much matisse has meant to me and my own work. initially, much of the influence was, perhaps, second hand. but his is an influence that radiates more now, in this post-post-modern era-- the re-working, the process, the energy...

suffice to say that, great as picasso was, matisse is (to my eye) the father of what we dare to achieve today in this world of art.

he dared to find beauty in the vast space that became newman and rothko and serra...

2010-06-18T06:11:00.000-07:00

* the new large piece has been cut down a bit in size and proportion... thats not a bad thing-- just my studio reality-- a matter of real estate, if you will... having rearranged the studio and measured, etc, it looks like this new work will measure about 70"x 124"... fine. i also have stretchers set up that measure 60"x84" and 45"x84", so this sweeping landscape evoking space i've been dreaming up is now (more or less) ready to go... still working on some of the smaller (24x24) pieces, but today will (largely) be spent stretching canvas... another question: how to fully exploit exposed, unprimed (raw) canvas? i think of newman's examples in the stations of the cross suite and that raw canvas created a stunning contrast... yeah. it will be an interesting day...

* tuesday night i checked out a reading by novelist francis levy at the writer's room. you never know what you'll get when a writer steps up the the microphone- but, as i suspected, levy (reading from his upcoming novel, Seven Days in Rio) delivered. his is a literature born out of a stifling intellectual curiosity and funny as hell... his language is at once poetic and vulgar, feverish and refined. i also had the extreme pleasure of reading his essay in the spring edition of American Imago, recounting his 29 years of psychoanalysis with a "Dr. S." not having engaged in such pursuits (being somewhat content with my psychic shortcomings...), outside of having read some of freud and jung, i was moving in uncharted territory, but the sheer weight of meaning in levy's prose and his insatiable sincerity made for a candid, beautiful read.

* i've been re-reading phoebe hoban's biography of jean-michel basquiat on the subway, to and from the studio of late. it's been, perhaps, 12 years since i first purchased and read this book... on this second reading, 12 years older, though probably not wiser, i'm finding her premise (more or less, that basquiat was a visionary naif, martyred within an artworld run amok) just this side of ludicrous. lets be frank-- a young artist is given space, materials and wads of cash and cache'. not to mention exhibitions, catalogs, the attention, he so obviously desired and... he's a martyr?? exploited??? rubbish... he was a young dude who couldn't turn off a drug problem, so he didn't have the time to really become the artist he, perhaps, could have become. thats all. nothing more and nothing less...

2010-06-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

life is short. so, perhaps, paintings should be big... in the next day or so, i'm going to staple up to the wall a canvas, roughly 6 foot by 15 feet. i was going to go whole hog and go for 18 feet, but realized i might run out of wall... fair enough. 6 by 15 feet- gorgeous proportions and (excluding the installation i did in '05 at POST at 11'x43' on the walls) the largest work i've yet attempted.
there is the seduction of quixotic adventure in the offing here. this is exciting on such base and purile levels. but exciting it is...

i'm a very physical painter. canvases (and their supports) are put up and taken down to be laid out on the floor for pouring and the loaded slapping of housepainting brushes, bought at the hardware store. orientations shift day to day- minute to minute. this will be a very different endeavor. the canvas, firmly stapled to the wall, will become a wall itself. part of the challenge will be to deal with this fact- to face the "wall" and it's reality.

newman loved to pontificate that it wasn't size he was after, but scale. well, yeah... that sounds good and indeed, that is part of the enterprise. but size is an undeniable factor and i'm interested in seeing where that takes me and where it takes this work.

for good or ill...

2010-06-02T08:15:00.001-07:00

a late start to getting out the door to the studio... so, yeah, dennis hopper and louise bourgeois dead and now we can add peter orlovsky to the list of the gone and remembered. sadly, very little has been mentioned thus far on his passing. in a way, thats fitting, given his life story. if orlovsky is remembered at all, he is remembered for many things- his gentle soul, his empathy and his 3 decade relationship with allen ginsberg. you can add to that, his madness and the sparse body of work that is his poetry, maybe in that order... like all the Beats, his output was spotty on quality and heavy and hard with sentiment and feeling. but as with most of the Beats, there was true beauty to be found. if you can find his piece,"frist poem" (misspelled, as much of his writing was...), read it a few times and then meditate on it. it's a golden, lyrical work-- as strong as anything written by his more celebrated contemporaries.

2 weeks ago i was staying in north beach, san francisco, walking the same streets and hanging in vesuvio's and city lights and remembering these poets and freaks who gave me so much as a much younger man... in 1991 (or thereabouts, it's a bit of a haze...), i met peter, gregory corso and ginsberg at a reading and book signing. corso was crazed and mumbling, ginsberg carried himself as a stoned academic (fitting) and peter sat smiling, cinematically handsome-- as i recall, now and then patting corso on his back, as if to placate and mellow out the youngest of the Beats-- his hair grey and uncombed, sadly incoherent.

as a young-ish poet, trying to establish myself and publishing for the first time, it was a heady, tragi-comic evening... but encounters with true poetry sometimes are.

2010-06-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

dennis hopper and louise bourgeois dead-- a day apart. thats as much as i have to say right now...

2010-05-12T18:00:00.001-07:00

so, once again, the long lost writings... strange how easy it is to get away from the word these days. i remember the room in harlem where i would start the days with 4 or 5 hours of writing. i guess that energy is elsewhere, for good or ill... it has been a time of art, confusion, fun, energy, travel, pain, etc. basically- life. fair enough...

* chelsea has been a madhouse. the streets packed with the real and the hopefuls, the wasted and the sad, the rich and the wish they were. there has been some strong painting out there- most notably the donald baechelor show a month or 2 back at cheim reade. just a truely incredible scene, to start with, not to mention the fact that, to my eye, this was the best work of his career. it must be easy to get complacent at a certain point for an artist of success and wealth. it could, perhaps, be inevitable. but here, baechelor laid it out and got down... the familiar motifs were there-- the beach ball, the flower, but it was the handling of the paint that mattered most. that and the beautiful detritus of a ground of drop clothes. my god, yes. there are shows that make you proud to be in this game-- this was one of them. no doubt... no doubt at all.

* another big point in the recent scene was jay kelly at jim kempner fine art. kelly's last few shows have been stellar and then, last year, he added sculpture to the mix and brought things to another level. kelly's work has been based on a tough, rugged line, a sense of material and fine taste in what is before him. with the sculptural work, this holds true, but comes around a corner in the beautiful way he brings his vision to the 3rd dimension in a seamless transition.

* and then there is the paige williams piece i actually purchased, from her show at blank space: great color, great line... and i can't wait to hang it. when i saw it, there was that shock that you rarely get, but always hope for.

* a thought i've been thinking: at what point did the handling of paint, or, indeed, the application of paint (or medium) become (almost) more important than the composition of a painting?? is this even accurate? relevant?

* finishing a commissioned painting for the DC Four Seasons Hotel. they also bought 2 drawings... this is, obviously, a good thing. at the same time, trying to nail down a few new pieces for the san francisco fine art fair, once again, graciously, with andi campognone projects. these are the times that come far too infrequently, and yet, when they do, it's so hard to enjoy them, given the reality of trying to make it happen.

that could be the real challenge-- to find that space, that moment to relish being an artist.

2010-04-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

couldn't make it to the brooklyn studio, so (oddly enough) instead of pounding beers at the mcmanus tavern, i cruised the galleries...

* jill moser at lennon, weinberg is a great show by an under-appreciated painter. moser has been around and has been consistantly strong in her work of line and gesture. in the new work she's working the color more and is (perhaps) a bit more rugged in her approach... i do miss that singular blue of her last show however...

* the late, larry zox at stephen haller gallery: the later painting doesn't work for my eye, but the earlier geometrics are incredible. so much great and near-great painting came out of the late '60's and early '70's-- what a period... what a time to be young and making art. i've mentioned before the names that haunt me that i've never heard of-- those unknown talents who labored and loved and brought it on in nameless studios around manhattan about the time i was learning to crawl... and then there are those whose names we know but whose work we should know so much more of: when does the pat lipsky retrospective come?? good question, that...

* i was reading "the screaming pope," the blog of poet/novelist, francis levy the other day and he mentioned "in the belly of the beast," by jack (henry?) abbott... today, in the dojo locker room as levy and i prepared to spar, i mentioned to him that i had first read abbott's book when i was about 12, (maybe older, who knows??) and that it contributed to my misbegotten youth (i added dostoyevsky to the list of influences...).

abbott's life and work was what sartre and camus had pontificated on, writ large and set in a most visceral reality. this was not theory, or cafe philosophy-- this was fact-- real violence, real bars, real fear, real blood and real tragedy...

of course, it took an american (mailer) to try to write his way around all that reality, for good or ill...

* an afternoon spent buying drawing supplies for a spring and summer of working on the terrace...

this will be a very new experience, indeed...

2010-03-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

so, yeah, chelsea...

* you get the list and you hit the streets between 10th and 11th and just hope that something reaches out and grabs the eye. gallery after gallery, plastic cup of wine after plastic cup of wine. but, now and then, something hits: maureen mcquillan at mckenzie fine art has a great show of drawing and drawing "inspired" photos. her fascination is with the line-- in all it's circuitous frenzy... as far as chelsea goes right now, there are a handful of galleries you can (somewhat) count on to exhibit strong works on canvas and or paper-- mckenzie is, for sure, one of them...

* as always, there is a sameness to the "alternative" media, an academicism that chokes on it's own self-referential wit... best of all of, they have their own martyr: the de menil kid who overdosed 'cause he could afford to. like the song says-- "it's so easy..."

* had a good studio visit with kathy markel on wed. she left with 4 20x20's to hang in her new bridgehampton space (soon to open?). it was good hanging and talking with her. novros' name came up and a few other cats from the '70's...

after she left i got back to work. feeling a little better and a little stronger...

2010-03-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

for as long as we've been smearing paint on a surface, it's indeed rare to come across a young artist who (perhaps) labors over work that could be called singular. rare, but possible-- as exampled by alex couwenberg these last 10 years or so.

i'd like to think that the act of painting is one of discovery and daring. you can toss triumph, fear, loss, destruction, etc, into the mix as well... couwenberg toils along (as we all do) and he brings it together in a fresh, invigorating art. in doing so, he elevates this ancient form of communication that we humbly and passionately embrace...

his exhibition at Markel Fine Arts should not be missed.

2010-03-05T12:55:00.000-08:00

sitting here in the andi campognone booth at the red dot fair... happy with the work i've got here though no sales as yet... thats cool. the reception last night was a good time although they managed to run out of beer and we were left with a choice of brandy or straight gin... indeed. fortunately the artist james austin murray went for beers and the party continued...

afterwards stopped by gary snyder project space for the john griefen show... griefen is one of the truely heroic painters at work in nyc today. his monochromes have a meaty, physical feel thats at once lyrical and wholly masculine. a formidable colorist, he moves between high octane and soft smoky tonalities with ease...

right now a few people are cruising the red dot... slow scene. earlier in the day i did the armory with the lovely erica, andi's assistant, and was amused to note how utterly (and predictably) bogus the contemporary art was... no real point in going into it, but yeah... the modern wing was truely inspirational-- particularly some great work by sam francis and norman blum-- but the best that could be said of the contemporary wing was that there was champagne to be had for $16 a shot...

2010-03-01T15:01:00.000-08:00

a lot of life since any writing here...almost too much life.

as for art (as opposed to life) i'm ready for the red dot fair... I'll 3 new pieces with andi campognone projects, out of pomona california. new work seeing the light of day is a blessing that is often taken for granted. not this time.

i'll keep this short for now (if anyone is out there) but i'm back on it...

2009-11-05T05:47:00.000-08:00

Some NYC action:

*surely one of the most poetic visions committed to paint on canvas this past year was offered by robert kingston at the randall scott gallery in DUMBO. harshly brushed, worked canvases that invoke, at once, landscape and masters of the past such as twombley and, at times, klee. last year i was lucky enough to attend the opening of kingston's san francisco show and was simply blown away by his achievement. now it seems he's taken the possibilities of that show to new heights. if it's possible for a mature artist to further that maturity, kingston has done it. of particular note was a suite of small works-- a brilliant example of taking control of the issues, not of size, but of scale.

*david hockney at pace was about as dismal a show as i could imagine. huge, multi-paneled paintings of childish landscapes, built up with a clumsy paint handling that just should not be seen from an artist at this stage in a celebrated career...

*you walk chelsea and there is this awesome proliferation of incredibly beautiful japanese women...

*bjorn ressle will be opening his new space downtown...

2009-09-19T15:26:00.000-07:00

spent the morning looking at and meditating on the re-worked painting started in 2001. after several months of working mostly in acrylic, all this black oil is really moving. while the speed of acrylic opens it's own possibilities, i'm really digging the slow pace of working in oil once again-- it makes you look and understand what is actually going on in a painting... there is a lot to be said about good acrylic paint, and the improvisation that is readily available while working in acrylics has it's own poetry. but, yeah, oil paint... black oil.

something else entirely...

2009-09-16T05:57:00.000-07:00

so, after crazed intensity of making four 8-foot paintings in less than 2 weeks, I'm back to the slow pace of studio work. i've spent the last week re-visiting fairly large drawings that were started last year, created in a span of 4 or 5 months of solid work on paper. now, i've pulled a 6-footer out and put it back on the brooklyn studio wall. this is another work thats been with me since 2001. worked, re-worked, set aside, etc... it's been hanging out now for about 2 years. every now and then i'd take it out and dig it for a while, for one reason or another, never hitting it. that ended yesterday...

2009-09-14T05:49:00.000-07:00

a few notes:

*if you see a gallery show this week, make sure you see david novros at the paula cooper gallery on 21st street and vivian springford at gary snyder project space on 26th. these are museum quality shows of 2 painters who have not had their due. novros is still with us. springford is gone...

*the first big week of the art scene has come and gone. we could hardly walk the streets of chelsea, the crowds filled with those who make art, those who buy it and, of course, those who can't, or don't do either...

*another show to make would be jesse mccloskey at the christopher henry gallery, downtown on elizabeth street. this is heavily allegorical work-- painted collage, worked and re-worked into a strange poem of life in the studio. autobiographical? maybe. maybe it's the tale of what we all go through facing the canvas or the panel or the sheet of paper laid out on the work table.

* there is a bar in brooklyn i might not be allowed to enter for a while. thats probably good for both of us...

2009-09-13T19:19:00.000-07:00

and now the floating in the pool is done... i'm in the reality of NYC. fair enough.

a good friend is using (and abusing) my studio for a commissioned work. there should be a standard for artists bumming anothers space, as favor, as chance, etc... but i guess there isn't.

a poet from san diego is in town long enough to get me really drunk.

this is life. life attacked or life followed. either way, life...

where am i going with this?? good question.

good question...

2009-08-31T00:59:00.000-07:00

the fires are burning around LA and it's late. about 2 weeks ago, while sitting in traffic on the LIE, i got a call from my atlanta gallery about a commision for the Palazzo Tower in las vegas. so i ended up having 4 96"x48" canvases made and delivered and flew out to LA to get down. that was august 19th. after 7 days and about 90 hours of work (given breaks for the pool) i've got 4 eight foot paintings standing in the studio, waiting to be picked up and i'm still trying to understand it all.

luck? the gods, finally smiling? a matter of time? who knows?

i do know this:

keep making work. go to the studio and lay it down. find a way to make the rent. find a way to make someone understand. keep in it. remember why it should happen. believe that there will be your moment. continue to fire up the dream. life doesn't always work for you. thats not what it's supposed to do. but sometimes, once in a very blue moon, it does...

and tomorrow, i will float in the pool and sip a cold mexican beer and remember just that.

2009-05-28T08:18:00.000-07:00

the days after an opening are strange... personally, i tend to drift a bit.

troy tecau of 210 gallery and michael brennan met me U in the afternoon before the reception. before they showed up i actually laid a little paint down. it had to be done...

the opening was an awesome experience. great, large, happening crowd including gary snyder, lilly wei, the artists james little, michael rouillard, don voisine, linda byrne, jerry thomas, wayne dobson, The Artist Without a Name (heroically slurring by 10pm),and of course, bjorn ressle and the beautiful denora... the wine flowed and when it stopped we took the party under the BQE to mojitos and kept it going a while longer. i think i drank my first 10 beers in about the first 5 minutes...

and today it's back to work...

2009-05-25T06:04:00.000-07:00

so, today i set up the lighting for the show and figure out any additional fine tuning... i'm actually thinking i might put a little paint down on one or 2 of the pieces... so hard to let them go.

last weekend bjorn ressle came out to the studio before i began installing the work in the gallery space. he was very positive on the large work and also the smaller work in the square format. i think with these large pieces finally behind me, i'm going to focus once again on the square (24x24) and my drawings. i'm going to go back into the large charcoal and graphite drawings of last year-- new layers, new insights...

2009-05-22T17:46:00.000-07:00

so today i installed my paintings for the show at the gorgeous and enigmatically christened, U... This is my first 2-person show, fittingly, with a sculptor. the challenge of course was the reality of walls versus space. though it seems that reality has been met with aplomb. the sculptor is christine howard sandoval, an artist of intense focus and realization. i've been challenged by and interested in the pursuits of her work for over a year now. there is a ballsy, historical resonance to her recent endeavors and, at the same time a rather playful exploration of form and material. this isn't the "exploration" you might hear or read regarding some MFA discourse on culture and or what have you-- this is real exploration and real discovery-- the found object made real, if you will, etc, etc...

the work i've included in the show are paintings that have been worked and re-worked for years now. 2 of the pieces were started in 2002. the other 3 first saw the light of day in 2005. for any number of reasons they were set aside and brought back and set aside, etc. of course, today i actually laid some additional paint down after the installation... and then came back and put down some more. such is life. a painting is something that becomes what it should be. long ago, i gave up trying to "make" a painting. these objects are beyond us, they resonate of their own volition and our hand merely guides the motion. the painter comes to the canvas with an idea, perhaps with a compositional theory or possibility, but it ends with the painting itself...

the space is incredible. i stood there in the unlighted expanse surrounded by art and a weak raking light from windows shrouded in plastic. it was ghostly. a powerful way to end the day.

2009-05-13T17:40:00.001-07:00

so, back to james little...

color. yeah, what of it?? to start, it's rather overrated. white and black hold as much profundity as is needed in painterly expression. but, having said that, color, taken to it's apex, packs the weight of a bulldozer in overdrive. color can be tough. it can be lyrical... it can be anything in between. these are easy thoughts. no big deal. color makes for pretty pictures. it also makes for serious ass-kicking painting... the pink (or yellow) one artist lays down has nothing to do with the pink (or yellow) another artist lays down. in the end, it's about intent and an understanding of the material and nature of what it is that we do. the great colorists understand how one color (and, or hue) relates to the color (and or hue) laid next to it. the truely great, in this contemporary age-- so much history behind us-- twist our notions of color a bit to the side of what we think we know about COLOR... the color of james little is just that-- the color of james little. they are earthy and temporal when you want them to ground themselves in some sort of pastel definition. they are hard and bombastic when you want them soft and powdery... this is his strength, his mission perhaps...

and culturally, intellectually, we are all the better for it.

2009-05-08T19:09:00.000-07:00

yeah... paint in NYC.

this afternoon i hung out with troy tecau of 210 gallery in brooklyn. we discussed hunting, motorcycles, violence and art. and then i had to make some art.

but last night was a big night... i remember holly solomon's space on houston street. it still stands, more of less. of course, now, it's a clothes store, or boutique, if you prefer. i remember the scene, not so much the art. bad art is not a new phenomena, much as we'd like to think... but, yeah, SoHo. we would make the scene and the streets would be empty until you neared whatever gallery was having the show. there, a crowd would be hanging out-- smoking, drinking, getting ready for the next show a block or 2 away. even in the early 90's SoHo was vacant and alluring, cobblestones and firescapes and uneven sidewalks and hot chicks puking in the trashcans and turning to you with a smile... what i remember is how silent and peopleless it was, as the sun went down and especially in the darkness. and then, suddenly, it seemed, we were enduring chelsea... yeah. anyways, last night at june kelly gallery, the artist james little unleashed his latest work. to say it was good to be in a SoHo gallery is an understatement. that it was a james little show-- well, fuck it.

i've know james since 2000. we've shown together and been represented together. in chicago, we tore it up-- booze, food, strippers... it was ours. our town, our time... last night, it was all james.

there are 2 artists that i think of when i think of color; james little and pat lipsky. there's an irony there that i won't go into here. both artists deal out tones and hues of understood "color" and then take it a bit farther than most are ready to deal with. in james little's case, he takes it to places where (for me, anyways) you just shake your head and try to understand what (and why and or how) it is that makes it work. little is a hard-edged, unabashed painting machine. he doesn't give a shit. fuck you. he will do his vectors and lay his tape down and nail the wax and oil and leave you guessing about how the hell he came up with this blue next to this grey or orange (if it is an "orange"), or green or red... and the paint lays think and heavy-- flesh on bone, with all the implicit perfections and/or imperfections... i remember, in a bar in chicago, james discussing my own work, saying to me--"...all that shit means something, the drips, the marks...". yeah, you're right...

it's good to know there are masters at work...

it's even better if you've been able to drink away an afternoon or 2 with them.

i raise this glass to you, james.
thanks...

2009-05-08T06:07:00.000-07:00

it seems that paint is alive and well in NYC... it's nice to be able to say that.

a few weeks ag0, there was the paintings of michael brennan at brooklyn's 210 gallery, a great space with a strong curatorial program put together by the artist, troy tecau. last year i wrote about brennans' new work, as i saw it at the gary snyder project space. this is the kind of work where you look and, after the initial pleasures, you can't help but try to figure out how the artist does what he does... for me, part of the majesty of brennan's painting is that mystery, that and the firm commitment of the hard horizon line at the bottom of each piece. brennan brings oil to life and seemingly arrests it's motion, creating works that are both lyrical and rugged.

in chelsea, last week we had don voisine exhibiting new work at mckenzie fine art, just across the street from the madhouse scene of chuck close's opening at pacewildenstein. voisine is a master of black. there is a cold black, a warm black, a reflective black... all held tight by his hard edged line and the limited palette of (at times, surprising) contrasts. for my eye, the big thing with voisine's work is the surprise you get with each viewing-- that shape in the middle of the composition isn't what you think it is-- there's that tilt, that corner shaved off just so... at times a willful diagonal cuts across and stops short... and then there's that black....

that i've been so moved by these shows is no surprise in that i've been working black in the brooklyn studio for sometime now. there is an intensity is these labors that i believe comes from the force of the paint, of the black... there is the black of night, the black of water, of oil itself, the flat, sensuous matte of gesso, the grays that darken into tones of a black you just now discovered as you laid it on with the 4 inch brush... and now i get to bring these pieces together in a 2-person exhibit with the sculptor, christine howard sandoval, at the beautiful, newly renovated (and renamed, midstream) 124 performance and art space in brooklyn. and my long delayed solo show at roger ramsay gallery in chicago is set to be installed. and then, last night there was the opening of the james little show in soho's june kelly gallery.

more to come...

2009-04-17T05:33:00.000-07:00

i had the great pleasure of attending a lecture by irving sandler, author of the seminal work, The Triumph of American Painting, published in 1970. the lecture was to introduce his new work, Abstract-Expressionism and The American Experience: A Re-Evaluation. sandler was concise and eloquent. his main point in the new book being his idea that pollock, de kooning and interestingly enough, clyfford still make up the most important artists of the ab-ex movement, particularly from the pivotal years of '47-'50. the clyfford still pick was a bit of a stretch to my mind at first, but sandler seems to believe still offered heavy doses of influence to both rothko and newman. he didn't go into whether or not this influence was more intellectual or with regard to formal composition, but it made sense. another premise he pushed was that both pollock and still were from the western plains, and that that experience pushed their vast "landscapes" and vistas-- hence the influence on rothko and newman; 2 very urban artists. makes sense.

one point he made really resonated with me, particularly with regards to my own work. sandler mentioned that, in writing his new work, he wondered why certain artists didn't meet his criteria of the most important art. what was that criteria?? his finalization was that there was great "lyrical" art being done (bradley walker tomlin, was mentioned), but that only the art dealing with the tragic and the "terrible sublime" reached the level of the "most important art."

yes...

2009-03-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

i've been looking through some old issues of Artforum. i leaf through the pages and here and there an ad will jump out at me. the text is a non-issue, as is the featured art and the artists involved in the making of said art. yes, we have art from india, south america, africa, eastern europe, the middle east, asia (especially, china, of course...), etc, etc... but are we better for it?? especially considering that the video crap coming out of ghana will look pretty much like the video crap coming out of hamburg, that looks remarkably like the video crap coming out of taipei. the twisted, misunderstood legacy of duchamp mutated with the additions of raushenberg and warhol and we've been living with the afterbirth ever since. and thats what you see in Artforum, or any number of rags with the pretensions of dealing with art. there is the photography, the aforementioned video, installation, actions, conceptions, etc... and at this point, they've been around for a good 4 decades-- time enough to have developed significant variations of language and meaning, both singularly and collectively. sadly, as clement greenberg foretold in the late 60's, the "alternative media", if you will, has become homogenously academic, to say the very least.

by the nature of it's democracies these media are an easy out for those who need it. the juvenile humor takes the place of high seriousness, the video protects from the visceral reality of paint, stone and metal. fine... but the horror of it IS THAT IT ALL LOOKS THE SAME. EACH "ARTIST" IS AS ANONYMOUS AS ANY OTHER FROM ANY OTHER LOCATION ON THE PLANET. IT IS THE SAME LOOK, THE SAME ATTITUDE, THE SAME POLITICS, THE SAME SHOCK TO THE MIDDLE CLASS (OR SOME OTHER DISTENDED ENEMY), THE SAME VITRINES, THE SAME LIQUIDS, THE SAME BODY FLUIDS, THE SAME NUDITY, THE SAME SELF-CONSCIOUS POSTURING AND PROMOTION...

something else i get from checking out these Artforums-- there is some damn fine painting being done in the world. and it looks good and it looks powerful and looks like an individual work of art. and you wouldn't know this by reading any of the reviews or featured articles, you would arrive at this realization simply through looking at the ads. every now and then a few of them will jump out at you. maybe it's only a detail of a particular painting, but it's there nonetheless...

one of the joys of mid-century modernism was how the diversity of international flavors developed and matured. for sure, there was a definitive "american" painting going on. and the same could be said for france in the 50's and 60's... i think it was greenberg who brought up the comparison between the work of kline and soulages. yes, both artists leaned on black and white and, obviously, the abstract expression. but there it ends. and then there were the germans, the other sordid examples of northern european art and, quite romantically the canadians, toiling anonymously and powerfully. a few years ago, on a trip to montreal i was struck by the sheer number of GREAT paintings by various artists from the last 50 years I HAD NEVER HEARD OF... and each one, though (for the most part) sharing the interest and exploration of abstraction worked through very different means, purposes and aesthetics. i won't act like i know much of mid-century art in asia and africa. but i'd guess that there was an aesthetic set of principals and understandings much different than those of the western world. but now? now cultural variation is only in the name on the slide label and maybe related somehow to the various pretensions involved. now, we have a hegemony of poorly realized, international regurgitations of weinerourslermccarthykelly and thats really about it and it's sad and it's futile to worry too much about it and it's more important to just (somehow) make it to the studio and make the work you need to make and maybe read a poem and maybe drink some wine and then come home and cook dinner and go to bed and then it all starts over again and you look back on the yesterdays and smile, having done what you could... add to that going to whatever job is allowing you to pay rent for a studio and buy paint and all the rest and well, my friend, thats life.

there has been a lot of talk and a lot of writing about what the economic shit storm will do to (or for) art and the art world. well, the idea of artists making money on their art is, all things considered, a relatively recent concept. galleries will close. collectors will be a little tighter with their dollars and all of that is fine. artists will keep on with their work.

and perhaps there will be a merciful culling of the herd...

2009-03-19T19:50:00.000-07:00

ok... making black (predominately black) paintings can be a wonderful, invigorating experince, or it can lead one into a personal blackness of the soul and intellect. i'm working out these canvases that have been worked on and worked out for years now... and while i'm trying to understand what they try to say i'm reading essays on the late, dark (black) work of rothko. these late works, of course, came to conclusion with rothko slicing his forearms and bathing (in a union suit, it is said) in a widening pool of blood... where am i going with this?? good question. i want my work to be invested with emotion and truth and a somber quiet romanticism... these are heady terms and needs to bring up in this day and age in this time and this art world. emotion is tough to deal with and truth is the truth, hence (we would be led to believe, untouchable) and the quietly romantic, austere qualities of real art and expression are way to hard to come by and deal with-- hence, our state of the art of nonsense and non-art... fine. yeah...

2009-03-11T19:47:00.000-07:00

once again, it's been a long time...

so, last week i dragged out a 58x84 canvas that i started 4 years ago. needless to say, it has become something new and important to me. black and harsh... it's going to be a good journey wherever it leads. to paraphrase the eastern sages: the goal is the path... and today i went back into the 60x48 canvas i've been working on since 2001... we'll see. time in the studio has been good, bad, frustrating and invigorating. kind of what one can expect if this is the life chosen. moments in there of complete ennui and then suddenly the drawings are going and the paint flies and hits its mark with aplomb. or not...

a commissioned piece is finished or nearly so, there are possibilities brewing (to be firmed up) and spring is coming sooner or later. and i'm trying to make my work. to paraphrase once again, this time brice marden, "it's not about a single painting, its about doing your work and the evolution of a vision." fuck yeah...

2009-02-02T18:06:00.000-08:00

this is a tough game we play-- this making of art, the laying down of expression-- visual, tactile, heroic, lyrical, what have you. anyone brave enough to labor through these wilds publicly needs no apologists or defenders. the act and or action or activity of the creation is validation and, indeed, defense enough. but there are times when words must be laid down to right a wrong, and clear up foggy notions.

a year or 2 ago, holly myers reviewed an exhibition of paintings by alex couwenberg at the now defunct, DEN Contemporary. her review was concise, literate and, in it's conclusion, somewhat damning. fine... her arguments were points of aesthetics and composition. and, to be fair, though one may or may not agree with said points, quite relevant...

skip ahead to her review of couwenberg's recent show at William Turner Gallery and we have a much different review-- the same tone, granted, but a much different review all together. here (in the LA Times, Culture Monster) myers brings up couwenbergs "...pronounced fondness for Midcentury Modernism..." ok. in a recent post on this site i mentioned how writers have fallen into the ease of this reference regarding couwenbergs work, and here another writer moves forward for the hook...

but now, with this new piece, we go along a strange and dark path of discussion as myers continues: "--so pronounced, it seems to have shouldered out any competing inspiration." this caught me for a moment. what?? had we seen the same work?

where was the discussion of the muscular composition? where were the words discussing the bravura use of material and stunning technique?

to give myers the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she has not experienced couwenbergs work of the last 5 or 6 years... my first encounter with the artist's work was one of stunned silence in the face of a singular, proud originality. the moves were there-- the use of material, stunning and innovative, the composition-- well, yeah, flawless... at that time, couwenberg used an elliptical, near organic line to divide vectors of the panel and the composition. it was a line, that, while not unanticipated, was also startlingly new. from there couwenberg went into a phase of investigation involving monochromes and various takes on gloss, and or luminous surface. he pared his compositions down to mere blocks in space, or perhaps soaring arabesques. then he turned to the more graphic, referential forms of his current work. all the while couwenberg exhibited his precise, austere sense of craft and composition. his innate fine taste and balance...

yes, midcentury modernism... why not?? myers herself calls the work; "...sleek, multilayered, spatially sophisticated compositions...". whats the problem? she goes on to write that, "...there is much to be said for a handsome, well-crafted picture." yeah, no shit... again, why not?? where is the problem? it's hard work to make a good painting. damn hard work. it takes guts and your hands get dirty and the stress eats away at you and keep at it and maybe it works. maybe not. but thats what it takes and understanding that process is part of the understanding of paint. it seems that myers' take on art is one that goes beyond the power of aesthetics and sincerity. ok, thats the way of the world, looking at and digging good painting isn't easy. that might explain the proliferation of so much crap installed in the galleries and museums, it's the yearning for the unique and the "lower east side", if you will, of the art world-- the look and the take on things of an artistic nature that frowns on the seriousness of intent found in the best of art and shines simply on the vapid, pedestrian POSTMODERNIST regurgitations of any number of galleries and MFA programs. indeed, any number of college graduate idiots nailing polaroids of their asses to the limpid walls of limpid galleries.

yeah... so how far to take this? how ugly do i get to get my point across? fuck it... myers (and the couple of lightweight dimwits who commented on the LA Times website, one of the lost actually brought up COBRA as a point of quality...) confuse fine art with their vision of labels and purpose. if myers came out and said these paintings were for shit, hell, why not? that would be a real statement and a fight worth fighting and standing for. i'd probably be tearing up words against that notion, but at least it would be a battle for the winning. alas, myers came out and told us how good the work was, then turned that into an attack on the very optimism she wrote of.

perhaps she didn't look at them long enough. and if she looked at them long enough she sure as hell didn't have the chops to dig the work for what it was. sadly, it must be said that it seems myers is missing something in the evaluation of painterly activity.

in conclusion, this particular piece was lazy journalism and, at worst, lazy intellectualism, camouflaged, conveniently, with a yearning for something outside the sinew of the aesthetic.

and now i will have another drink and look out the window at a cold new york night,
not unlike any number of painters--

great, lost, dead or forgotten...

2009-01-30T20:18:00.000-08:00

a good day in the studio and then the hassle of trying to find a parking spot... life in NYC. we deal with it... or we don't. after i filled up my xmas present flask with a bit of vodka to ward off the winter night, i hit the subway uptown to the performance/exhibition/collaboration of artist, mark wiener and Panman Productions, on the roof of 123 East 47th street. film, music, and wiener with various programs on his laptop, layering images on the whitewashed wall of the neighboring building. it was cold and the artist asked who had a joint and i seconded the notion. where was my stash when so sorely needed?? it was that sort of night-- cold, cold and the wind started and then the mere cold became something a bit more horrific. but who's counting?

2009-01-22T23:15:00.000-08:00

i hadn't realized how long it had been since i wrote in this... it's kind of like trying to keep a correspondance up with a beautiful woman a world away-- you want to put down these words, but life gets in the way and the words don't get down. and then you may or may not forget each other... but thats another story.

it's been a great 10 days out here in the valley-- mid '80-'s throughout the trip, while nyc was hovering around 6 degrees. nice... so tonight is the last night. i took out 4 new paintings (completed on this trip) to the william turner gallery in santa monica and bill seemed pretty excited by them, so thats not a bad thing. now it's the usual holding pattern of waiting. and waiting. but they're out there in the world, not cluttering up my small space out here under the orange tree. and i'm proud of them-- i think these are paintings that helped me learn a bit more about my art. there is a lot of moves from the latest nyc work in them as well, thats their strength-- these new moves entering the fray. and the best part is that driving back, on the cramped 405, i started envisioning new pieces to be made, new color, new form, what have you...

so, last saturday, jan. 17th, my great friend, the artist alex couwenberg had his first solo show at the turner gallery. the day i flew in i went out to the gallery and checked out the installation in progress. we shared some beers and discussed the orientation of three birch panels, along the massive main wall-- alex settled on an 8 inch seperation. then i drove back to the valley and got back to work...

the opening of his show on that saturday was (for all his commercial success) alex's coming out party. this was the kind of reception you dream of as an artist... period. there were the senior abstract painters of LA (ed moses, jimmy heyward), the writers (mat gleason, george melrod, peter frank and kerry kugelman) and the hot women you would imagine coming to a hot painting show in santa monica. indeed, the art was great and a lot of it was wearing high heels... sadly, i must say this isn't always the case in nyc. and, when i think about it, it's not always the truth in SO Cal, it just seems that way sometimes... and thank god for it. but yeah, the art... couwenberg has always been an inventing and gripping artist of a most graphic quality and intent. the first time i saw his work (we were both in the holiday group show at ruth bachofner gallery, maybe 2002, or so) i was floored by the material and that sensuous curve of line. through the years he's managed to maintain a startling consistancy, while, at the same time, invigorating his work with dynamic shifts of interest and compositional twists. in the end, this is the work of the wholly charged, fully engaged and focused artist. there are many painters tackling the issues of process and surface, etc, etc... there always have been. i do it myself... alex couwenberg gives us, however a bold and (dare i say?) original take on matters of such painterly importance. others, including the above mentioned writers have discussed such concrete influences as mid-century design, surf boards, etc, on and on, trying to pinpoint a hub for couwenbergs unique perspective. fine. perhaps its important to have that firm a grounding... i'll say this: alex and i were talking in NYC about inspiration. someone asked him what his inspiration was, earlier that night. it's a question that i've (and probably any other artist) had lobbed at me countless times. to paraphrase (we both had a lot to drink that night, funny enough...), alex looked at me and said something like, "...it's everything-- how can't you be inspired??"

2008-12-27T23:06:00.000-08:00

i went into the cobalt blue and tossed in some flake white and mixed it up a bit. i can't avoid this combination out here-- how could i?? to deny these would be as phony as a murakami piece of crap tossed into the lobby of some skyscraper. i drive with my mom to get groceries and am blown away by the horizon line before me on sherman way, giant palms lining the street, the mountains ahead of me, the sky above and the sheer lines of white cloud. driving to bergamot station, in santa monica, was a bit of poetry in and of itself. no traffic, clear skies, green hills and a morning of painting behind me. yeah... of particular note was the work of audra weaser at ruth bachofner gallery. truely, some of the best painting of the year, to end the year. roughly sanded, vigorous work. very, very impressive...

now, at this late hour, i'm figuring out some paintings. theres some new directions here, the LA trip always offering it's own take on what it is that i do. how to tie it together?? do i need to even bother with such a question?? out here i'm seeing and coming to terms with the relationships between the recent drawings and my paintings, completed and in progress, of the last few years. i really think that the distance, the time away from the work, totally away and apart from the work has a great deal to do with this... in NYC i work. i see and touch paintings day in and day out, they evolve day to day and are with me, in my minds eye before i sleep and as i drive home. in LA, i walk out to the studio in the morning and the dew is on the grass and the work comes to me and i understand it with a passionate (or perhaps dispassionate) resolve. i know that i have these few days, or even, sometimes, weeks to make them come alive and sing their song. and sing they do, or perhaps not....

2008-12-26T20:59:00.000-08:00

a cold day in LA... spent some time out in the studio and did some good work on small drawings, started on the last trip and work on the new large piece. but it was just too cold to be out there, drinking beer and listening to the bamboo, coming off of the gluttony of christmas dinner (dozens of oysters, foie gras, prime rib, an '83 chateau le tour and a '77 grahams port, etc...). tuesday evening before the flight i went uptown to the bjorn ressle gallery. bjorn was there with the artist marjorie welish, the artist mark wiener and a curator from the morgan library, who was intently checking out the work. it was really nice to be able to actually look at the work in relative peace. bjorn cracked open a bottle of white wine and mark and i moved about the walls taking it in. wiener is a sensitive and physical artist. we discussed the ephemera of mark-making and various notions of intent, admiring the wide range of expressions installed in the gallery. once again, the 2 drawings by the composer, john cage really hit me- this stuttering line, moving about the toothy paper in non-committal arabesques... i also spent a lot of time with three drawings by ron gorchov-- as with the cage drawings, these are tough, hermetic efforts, on tough, heavy paper. there is a lack of control that engenders it's own signature of beauty when working with the graphite line on such meaty, heavyweight papers. the line quivers and blurs, coasting along the curvature of surface. regardless of the artist's hand, the line takes off on it's own. and you deal with it or don't... i've found, that with my own drawing, i'm becoming more comfortable working with a lighter, smoother paper. the drawings bjorn exhibited (and the accompanying 9 in a portfolio) are all notebook drawings, autonomous works, but in their roughly handled immediacy, notebook drawings all the same. for my purposes, the acrylic (and/or oil) staining and re-workings of graphite (and/or india ink) come across truer on the smoother surface, the physicality of my efforts taking center stage, as opposed to a physicality imposed on the work by the support itself.

later i went for drinks with bjorn and mark, taking the downtown bus to the legendary, gino's, across from bloomingdales. not my usual stomping grounds, to be sure, but a fine establishment. bjorn and i ordered martinis and then we were joined by the beautiful rocio.... she was impressed when mark said he always painted while wearing a tie.

i can't blame her...

2008-12-22T18:25:00.000-08:00

the sausage, garlic and red onion is simmering in the wine and san marzano tomatoes... this morning as i left for the dojo, it was 14 degrees. no shit. 14 degrees... but thats winter and we deal with it. in any event, after hard training and harder xmas shopping, i needed the comfort of pasta, the aforementioned sausage and broccoli rabe. and there is a bottle of chianti waiting as well. and i'm wearing a stocking cap indoors as i type this. winter...

speaking of winter, to revisit the winter salon at bjorn ressle gallery, i must say again it was quite a trip. an opening of your own work is always a beautiful time, but to see your work alongside the works of legendary greats is a totally new and humbling experience. it also (obviously) makes you feel pretty damn good. it makes you feel like you're an artist-- an artist involved in the continuum of this path that we follow. i leave for LA on wed. it'll be a good time with family and food and wine and my new niece and hopefully friends i haven't seen in a while. and the art i left behind from the last trip. LA in december can be gray or it can be brilliant blues and greens and intense sunsets. either way will work for me....

2008-12-21T20:22:00.000-08:00

been a while... the reception for the winter salon at bjorn ressle gallery was pretty intense. the crowds were huge and there was coffee instead of booze, so i was on edge. having said that, it was a beautiful time-- great art, good crowd, friends, etc... of special note were the 2 drawings by the composer, john cage, that hung right below my work. they were free moving, circular works that one might actually expect from cage. a 1958 drawing by robert ryman was also very very special, to say the very least. tuesday i'm going to check out the show myself-- the crowds precluded any real viewing of the art.

2008-12-02T07:56:00.000-08:00

early morning thinking about de kooning's "montauk highway..." i've no idea how many times i've stood in front of this piece over the years. to my eye, this is de koonings nadir, this where it all came together-- the surest of brushstrokes, the visceral labors to define a landscape... this body of work has been called "imperial". yeah. that pretty much sums it up.

2008-12-01T23:58:00.000-08:00

so what is it about paint?? this act we are so involved in... there are numerous considerations, not the least of which is that of the cultural. we are bound to this practice by the hours of those who came so long before us and those that continue on. for better or worse, when we are long long gone, our work remains to mark our trail along the continuum. there are moments of sheer creation and moments of meditation, where we sit and look and look deeper and try to make a sense of it all...

sometimes, out here in the valley, the birds singing and the sound of bamboo in the wind, i have sessions of painting that are so perfect as to perhaps be far too good to be true. indeed, the amount of work painted over would seem to be proof to that. but those times are and have been very very real. the other day, as i was working on a painting on the floor of the studio, i heard a sharp rapping above me. looking up i saw the silouette of a huge crow exploring the leaves on the studio roof for bugs. i just stood there and watched until he grew frustrated with his labors and took off.

that wouldn't happen in brooklyn...

california always gives me ideas and/or evaluations or affirmations. i will be going to black once again... perhaps my flirtations with color have been too much of a figurative journey. it's one thing to see and yet another to replicate. thats what my camera is for... by the same token, i was so taken by the blackened landscape of the north valley hillsides.

in the burnt branches of trees, clinging to a mountain, there is a black so dark that we can't even say it's name.

that might be what i'm looking for...

2008-12-01T21:06:00.000-08:00

there are early mornings when i step out onto 7th avenue, about 7:20Am, on my way to the dojo. the sky is the most brilliant of light cobalt blues and i look up at it from the shadows of the buildings around me. it's a unique, incredibly alive moment. and there are the the encino sunsets i look at from my fathers garage as we drink beer, or what have you... there is the early morning fog out here in the valley, the fog that burns off to leave the sun and it's crisp, true light.

good work has been done in the few days i've been out here. pushing the drawings, trying to see where they're going. 3 are being framed for the show at bjorn ressle fine art, but i want to have as many as possible ready, should heavy action start up... i re-visited 2 paintings, one black and one red. red is unusual for me-- a bit too loud, perhaps, but it's working. the black one is a tough, solid work, could be done, whatever that means. and i've gone back into one of the 5-footers started on the last trip. i laid it out on the lawn and hit it with a dark gray liquid acrylic, then went to lunch at my sisters place and fed my new niece. and got to hold her for the first time. when you feed a woman, they usual end up digging you. this chick is no different... back to the painting, i went into it with the same dark gray and did some rubbing, etc. it's an aggressive surface right now, looking pretty good. we'll see... this is either a good thing or just "a thing", about having a studio on 2 coasts-- you make the moves and see what happens and it looks good and then you go away and come back to it and think, "what the fuck???". but thats ok... i try to use it to my advantage. in the end, it's beautiful to be able to paint and walk (or fly) away and forget it for a bit of time and come back and look on that surface anew. and then begin again or pick up again and figure out what it (the painting) is really supposed to be about. and thats how i'm approaching the sculptural projects i've got going... we'll see how they develop as the time comes that they need to develop.

art...

crissy and i spent the day at LACMA on saturday. first time i'd been there, since all the new renovations and construction. in the end, it was pretty glorious... the modern collection is beefed up and given ample room to flex it's muscle-- a truely great (and enormous) sam francis, a tough, tough diebenkorn and de kooning's "montauk highway", a great, massive motherwell "elegy", and one of the best clyfford stills i've seen... clyff is great-- if for no other reason than his ambition and need, but he was a most flawed critic of his own work. too much went out of the studio. period... but this piece at LACMA gives us what he meant for us to have-- the epic expanse, the physicality of color and pigment and awesome vision of 1 man against the hours of a day and the days of a week into a year or however long it took to realize the final work.

and then there is the broad collection. well, what can one say??? a fine, late twombly, any number of sad jasper johns, rusha (of course) and an entire 6 to 7,000 square foot gallery of fucking jeff koons... theres no point to discuss the koons nonsense, so i won't bother... having said that, however, i'll get up now and pour another scotch to ease my sensibilities.

ok, so if you make it past that bullshit, you are rewarded with serra's "band" and "sequence". these are 2 later works that offer a navagational tilt to the maestro's body of work. i've gone on at length about serra's importance to me, so i won't re-hash my admiration. suffice to say, it's a great experience to be able to engage with this artists work. and i consider myself very, very lucky to have done so as much as i have.

my parents took me for a driving tour of the burned out hillsides of the north valley. i took some cool photos climbing about the charred hills and my father and i returned with the pick-up to salvage a large stump/root, blackened and scarred and a 7 foot piece of PVC that had been partially melted and cooked to resemble the bone of some ancient beast. these will figure into sculptural projects sooner or later....

2008-11-22T20:31:00.000-08:00

bjorn ressle has taken 3 of my small drawings for a show in december. it's a salon show, of a large number of artists, but i'm in there with beuys, ryman, anastasi, howard smith, etc... it feels good. real good... and right around the corner from the Met. beautiful...

more on the kingston show in san fran...

yeah.

kingston has consistantly figured out how to make a great painting. i'm saying this from the view-point of having seen many of them in his studio. whats interesting is how many great paintings have been painted over, never to see the light of day. this is part (a large part) of kingston's poetry-- he paints. and paints... obviously, there is precedent for such practice (i follow it myself)-- picasso and de kooning both were reluctant to release works from the studio despite crushing poverty. throughout the ages, artists have been in situations where the single canvas represented a lifes work, by form or by function. by necessity or by obsession..

i believe there are times when the artist retreats to a simplicity of practice to simply exist as a working artist. moments lost in the mere application of material on support-- lost in the activity of motion and creation. this is not rosenbergs "action painter", i'm discussing here a tantric, mature approach to creation and a physical necessity and practice of application.

kingston approaches this with his determined re-drafting of composition. in the dolby chadwick gallery, i pondered briefly what paintings lied underneath the paintings i saw. in the end, it didn't matter. whatever had come before had bred the work before me.

and thank god for it...

2008-11-19T17:36:00.000-08:00

ok, so poetics and booze-fueled revery aside, a discussion of the kingston show...

i sit in a rarified space, in that i have seen kingston actually apply paint to canvas. we have upturned countless mexican brews as we pontificated on the act and passion of paint. that being said, the kingston show was truly spectacular. i have seen his faults and i have seen his glories-- kingston glides about at times-- but this particular show made any past discrepancies a very moot point. he is a child of klee, de kooning and guston. these influences peak out, but yeild to the single-handedly emotional, yet stoic brushstroke of kingston and his notion of layering forms and mists and files of information. the best of kingston is in the emptiness of space-- an emptiness that is, in fact, quite dense with information, fecund with reference. nothing is left out of a painting-- history, philosophy, geography, etc... the end result is a solidly consistant exhibiton of paintings that meet in a space of beautiful synchronicity.

kingston seems enamored (as i am) by landscape and the mysterious gloss of it's potential. his approach, however, is one of interpreter-- he sees and evaluates according to his practice...

this is painting of a high, high modernist slant, with the salient gist of a man and artist engaged in his time and it's precedents. we need more of this.

much more...

2008-11-16T19:17:00.000-08:00

Notes on San Francisco:

* the martin puryear retrospective kicked ass... as with kingstons painting, there was the quasi-literary, or representational quality of the work. shapes and forms (and ideas) that rest in the collective unconcious-- trapped or lost by travel, work, love, life, etc... we lose things and regain them inspite ourselves. in any event, this was sculpture of strength and understanding. as moving a show as one could wish to spend an afternoon in.

* the matthew barney piece at san francisco museum of modern art (martin puryear): this is drawing taken to a certain extreme of risk and intent. this is art taken to an athletic format of daring adventure. this is art, drawing in particular, not to be missed... Barney actually climbed the turret of the museum and while hanging with carabiners, "performed", if you will, the drawing in question on a wall of the turret. and it's a hell of a drawing, regardless of the physical baggage attached. yeah... indeed, as irrelevant as much of barney's work is, there are elements and particular events and objects that cannot be missed or ignored. much of his work (including his failures) move us forward, as artists and viewers. and it must be stated, in the end, he is a gutsy motherfucker. period...

*with the exception of kingstons gallery, dolby chadwick, the spaces in san francisco aren't very impressive. some in fact are downright depressing-- windowless, cramped cubicles.

* in the secondary gallery of dealer, claire carlevaro, i saw a small piece by the artist renata mclean. it was a violently gestural work, the strokes done in heavy, linear motions, seeming to join in the near middle of the the panel. mclean and her husband moved to nyc in 1960 and there is no biographical data since. a tragic mystery. who was this woman?? in the same space there were strong drawings by james budd dixon, frank lobdell and small works by hassel smith and karl benjamin.

the work of the san francisco school always seemed rather playful to me. too much so, truth be told. perhaps this was the experimental nature of the beats and of the city itself. perhaps it was a lack of seriousness, or a certain all-too democratic nature and pursuit of art. in any event, the work, no matter how inspired, generally fell short for me. the exceptions of course, being diebenkorn and various artists in various moments. but, yeah, it never measured up for me. or for history, for that matter. but here was something to bite into. these works, works on paper, wood and canvas were solid, tough expressions of the time and of the tradition. good to see... i just wish i had a few thousand bucks in my pocket at the time.

* if you're in san francisco, don't miss the de young museum. a strong, strong collection and a view from the top that is worth any number of entrance fees. the whole of the city stretched out before you.

*i bought some earrings from a street vendor. she made them herself that afternoon on that very corner. she told me she was a painter and asked what i was doing in san fran. when i told her i was an artist she asked where i was from. when i said new york, she asked if i sold my work. " as often as i can," i said. she looked at me with a straight face and asked, "are you rich?"

* 3 nights i had dinner at la fina stampa and enjoyed the marinated beef heart and broiled tripe, with numerous negro modelos and shots of cuervo. the intensity of these meals cannot be overstated...

* there are men ( and some women, though seemingly far fewer in number) who scurry about the streets in worn clothing and dirty shoes, lacking teeth and bathes and haircuts or shaves or meals, for that matter. they aren't the homeless you see in nyc or LA, in fact, they are (many of them, i'm sure) not homeless. they are the casualties of the 60's and the promises and missteps of a certain segment of a certain part of the american left in a certain part of late 20th century history. they are the casualties of MFA programs and acid, literature and buying into your own (or another's ) romanticism.

they were looking for something.

i hope they remember what it was...

2008-11-15T18:36:00.000-08:00

as usual, this is late in coming... but san francisco was quite a trip. the robert kingston show at dolby chadwick gallery was nothing short of a triumph. that first afternoon, the day before the opening, i cruised in and checked things out. in fact, truth be told, i cruised in and got blown away by serious kick-ass abstract painting. this was the show kingston could have done years ago, but, saddled with a passing fancy for geometric abstraction, didn't. this was the art the 2 of us have discussed in studios from nyc to LA, over beers and over mexican food in both cities. this was the art that any true painter should aspire to. this was the art that should be made. there was the heartily consistant, ballsy quality to each piece. the pallet limited to earthy tones and bone whites. there was the ubiquitous kingston moves-- the semi-literate sketches, the cross-hatching of brush strokes, the newspaper pull off of passages of color. and there was the sure handed strength of an artist at the ready. this was the show that artists long to see on those nights out to the galleries. this was the show that was so needed today. today and any other day for that matter...

as for the city itself-- san francisco still has it's whores and junkies stalking downtown. my hotel, mere blocks from the gallery and union square was surrounded by them. but it's a different take on the seedy nature of urban america. this wasn't the land of the walking dead that downtown LA was and (for the most part) still is, this was a living, working, disordered level of society and, indeed, america. this is the seediness of being on the make, looking for the next move, the next outlet. furtive, endangered and dirty...

and there were the numerous pints of stella in the vesuvio cafe, ducking into city lights bookstore to read pages of poetry and criticism, back to vesuvio to talk to the aged beat poet, her hair long turned gray, but still turning it on. she spoke of the main men-- kerouac, ginsberg, mcclure, snyner, rexroth, etc... life is good.

but sometimes it's better then we think.

more to come...

2008-10-31T06:41:00.000-07:00

so, yeah, richard serra... what can you say?? at beacon, i walked in and among the series of torqued ellipses, musing that it was an experience that can't be described. serra's achievement is one on the order of nature itself. by that i mean that he has surpassed the experiential facet of art and elevated it to the the level of the natural world. i've been caving and i've seen some spectacular caverns here and in europe. i've had lots of time on lots of beaches and in lots of boats, big game fishing. the feeling i get in these intense natural settings is very similar to the feelings i get while enveloped in serra's spaces. it's a sense of awe and, indeed a feeling of one's own insignificance in the scope of certain realities... this had been acheived, to a certain degree, in the painting of newman, pollock and rothko. it was the goal of clyfford still and perhaps motherwell.

what sets serra (and heizer) apart is the unnerving ambition and final realization of an art that goes beyond what we know as art...

next week i fly to san francisco for the opening of robert kingstons solo show at dolby/chadwick gallery. i haven't been to san fran since i was a child, so this is pretty exciting. and it's always good to meet a new dealer. we'll see what happens...

2008-10-17T05:44:00.000-07:00

last week i drove up to millbrook, new york, to hang out with my friend and former dealer, andrew miller. he renovated a stone barn a few years ago and it's a truely awesome space. we ate giant ribeyes and went through 3 bottles of good st.emilion. and a few martinis. next day after bacon and eggs, we drove down to beacon to check out the dia center. in a word: amazing...

if you don't know much about michael heizer, try to find out as much as you can. the man's vision and his art is as profound as his ambition. of particular note, his piece magalith #5, rates for me as one of the most important sculptural statements of this century. the work includes a vertical recession into the wall of the gallery, maybe 18 feet high and lined with steel. inside the recession is anchored a boulder filling the vertical space. you can't really write a description about something this intense and pass it off. yes, i've written before about first hand experience with art, but this is taking that idea to a new level... i'll get back to this, not to mention the awesome holdings of serra, agnes martin, bob ryman, etc...

2008-10-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

40 something degrees this morning on my way to the dojo... fall in nyc.

to 20x20's are looking good. 3 of them are now a very strong tryptich, horizontal, a rich, opaque black. now i'm trying to figure out the alignment. spent several hours the other day moving them around and just checking them out. but, yeah, it looks good... multi-panel works have always excited me and i haven't done one in quite a while. the multi-panel work demands a different viewing practice. the eye moves differently and the space between each panel is so important-- breathing room, etc...

2008-09-23T20:22:00.000-07:00

david foster wallace is now with the dead of their own hand... tragic.

he joins hart crane, rothko, gorky, schwartz, plath, chatterton and untold hundreds more who none of us have ever heard of. perhaps this seals his genius. there are no arguments from the grave.

off his meds, he fucking hung himself.

and let his wife come home to that...

ok, i'm done.

2008-09-22T05:19:00.000-07:00

dragged myself out of the studio to make the scene in chelsea once again... the 12 20x20's are coming along nicely. the possibility of a grid may or may not come about. we'll see. several stand very much alone, while a few are looking a bit like a suite of paintings... so, yeah, we'll
see...

last thursday was a good night. 25th street was jammed with the usual hangers-on, the art world pros and the hopefuls. of special note was jay kelly at jim kempner fine art on 23rd street. i've seen kelly's work before-- small drawings on vellum; hermetic line and atmosphere spaced elegantly for such a small support. the word intimate comes to mind... this show also featured his new sculptural pieces, of a suitably minature stature, each about 5 to 6 inches high. there is a heavy surrealist bent to this art, most notably in the sculpture, but these are very pure statements by the artist-- not some vague reference to the past.

then the artist james austin murray and myself found ourselves in the half-king, at the end of the bar, appreciating the barmaid and toasting the evening with stella artois.

2008-09-20T05:31:00.000-07:00

take the time to find out something about these artists: vivian springford, howard mehring, thomas downing, leon berkowitz and albert stadler. these are the painters exhibited in "color field revisited", at gary snyder/project space. springford, in particular, grabbed my attention. her work, violent, organic, heroic (in scale and intention) offered some of the boldest color and execution i've seen this year.

i'll be very honest in saying that (with the exception of berkowitz) i'd never heard of these artists. somehow their legacies coasted along under the radar these past decades. i've mentioned before the reality of artists toiling in the harsh solitude demanded of the painter, never to gain recognition, let alone the contemporary accoutrement of financial security. it's our lot in life. some combine the luck with the talent and some just get lucky.

some don't...

later that night we checked out a party for novelist, francis levy and his book, erotomania: a romance. the bash was held at the museum of sex on 5th avenue, a fitting venue given levy's subject matter. levy is a large man with a large mustache (a muscular ford maddox ford, if you will...). each thursday morning, i can look forward to sweat and spit flying off that mustache as a large overhand right makes contact with my collar bone or chin. in the clinch, levy sports a fine uppercut...

i'm half way through my copy. so far the cast of characters include a hatian/german stripper who studied architecture, dance and french theater, but found that, "...the esthetic rewards of the classical stage didn't justify the near-poverty conditions", and a hooker withwhom the protagonist discusses Rilke's "letters to a young poet".

it's easy to cast about comparisons in the discussion of literary matters. when a writer takes on the subject of sexuality, it's really easy. fine. here are some names for you: bukowski, bataille and genet. but levy adds the sharp intellectual edge of a real new yorker to his prose. and bataille and genet aren't funny.

2008-09-19T18:39:00.000-07:00

this one might get interrupted... in any event it was a week of culture. thankfully... tuesday night i checked out the opening at gary snyder/project space. historical, stain based painting from the late 60's, early 70's era. good stuff.... i'll go more into this show later, after a bit of research. suffice to say, major paintings were lost to the pantheon and certain painters never got there due.

the highlight, however, was walking into gary's office and seeing a stoic, yet dynamic horizontal piece by the artist, john griefen. this piece stopped me (and the artist james austin murray) in our tracks. a bony white, the work (as a fool, i have no title) arrested the space and the wall and, obviously, my eye. this is the monochrome taken to it's potential, and driven home. period... easily, one of the stronger pieces seen this year.

2008-09-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

this day of training, and the rest of the week, will be dedicated to the memory of Evan Tanner-- warrior-poet, traveler, adventurer and seeker. Tanner was also a former UFC middleweight champion of the world. he died last week, in the desert of southern california. his body was found a week to this day.

the sheriff said it was exposure to the elements.

and we are less because of this loss.

Tanner was the real thing. i have been shaken to the core by this tragic news... but, perhaps, there is some poetry to this-- Rimbaud died running guns in africa...

as a man involved in pugilism and grappling of various forms, as well as the asian martial arts, the news of Tanner's passing was painful.

as an artist and man of letters, it was more so.

i believe in saints. but the ones i believe in are never recognized...

i raise this glass of cold vodka to you, Evan.

many thanks...

2008-09-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

i never thought i'd be a part of the gentrification of LIC (a once great neighborhood in west queens, across the river from manhattan. it was once a small town, idependent of the CITY, you walked the streets and ran into people you knew, you went to the irish pub and ate and got drunk and the girls knew you so it was ok... you walked along vernon blvd. and always loved the view of the city but didn't think about it coming after you and then you get evicted for luxury condos and the world changes but not much and you end up in brooklyn and LIC and all the fun and all the rest seems long, long ago), but i guess i am now... i stood out on the balcony of an apartment along the river on the 26th floor and looked east to see the very window of my old factory loft studio in LIC. behind me, on the wall hung a 6x5 painting, birthed in that studio, long gone, but still, mere blocks away. it (the painting) had come home...

strange. strange indeed.... in any event, we ate a couple of rabbits and drank cote du rhone and now i have a commission for a piece for the dining room.

bruno said he liked to challenge me.
very well...
bring it on.

2008-09-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

i wrapped 2 of the pieces sold and my art handling guy (eliot markel, via transport) made the delivery this afternoon. and i put some more paint and (finally) gesso, on the 20x20's...

its good to have this momentum going into the art season.
its good to be able to make work and come home and enjoy being home.
its good to know that there are people out there
waiting to see what you have come up with
and loving it when you show them what the hours have brought out.
its good to sit in a chair and look at the stuff tossed about the studio.
you pick up a book and read a few pages;
you listen to music (bill evans);
you scratch some charcoal into a drawing and sit back down
and the sounds of an old building creak under you
and you feel like an artist.

2008-09-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

sold 3 big pieces out of the studio on saturday afternoon... my collectors, bruno and agnes theirry, moved back to NYC from paris and picked up 2 paintings. their friend, catherine, got another. that feels good, the drought being broken... strange how collectors never have checkbooks with them in the studio.
no problem. none at all...

got the grounds finished on 12 20x20 canvases. they could be a large grid-- not sure yet. we'll see.

but, yeah, 3 paintings sold-- it feels good. real good.

2008-08-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

there is this small piece in the encino studio. it's been on the wall for probably a year or so by now... for some reason i turned it horizontal (doesn't really work that way) but the big thing about it is the black band of curving motion that cuts thru it's middle. so it seems i've brought some of that back east with me. right now, about 5 pieces in motion have a variation of that gestural marking. it's rather liberating to load up a brush and drag it along that near circular form. back in the spring in california, i was drawing flowers-- caught up in how the charcoal carried along the paper surface following that very feminine form. was that the attraction?? probably always has been.... but yeah, it's found it's way into the large painting. we'll see where this goes.

ran into ed moses at the frank lloyd gallery in santa monica before i flew back. he's about 82 or 83 now. still making art. and most of it- good, maybe great...

i don't really think he remembered me, but he said it was good to see me again, so thanks, ed, it was good to see you as well. keep it going...

2008-08-15T23:00:00.000-07:00

ok, last night in LA... or the valley, as it were. a good early morning painting and then hanging in and by the pool with beers and my dad. then grilling steaks for my nephews birthday.

last night the artist, robert kingston came out and checked out the new paintings. since the time i've been here, i've danced around the new ideas and then revisited the existing body of work with 2 pieces left over from my last trip out here. so it's come full circle: the paintings to the drawings to the new paintings and how it all comes together as a whole... good words and good advice from robert as we drained can after can of mexican beer under the orange tree. i'm off the idea of following some plan and am back into the rush of confusion that usually gives me (to my mind) the tools to make good (or great) art. the last days out here are always tied up with bummed out feelings of leaving my family and the pool and the killer studio and my sculptures in the garden and the bamboo and the flowers and all the rest. at the same time i get that excitement once again of flying back to the city and the scene and the crazy life of making art in NYC.

a random thought:

i know when i go to bergamot station in santa monica that i will see some good painting.

period.

in NYC i hope to see good painting. more often than not, i end up pissed and pissed off...

a few more random thoughts:

*the art of southern california has (in general) become so geographically self-referential that it seems to deny any chance of true power or relevance to the world outside it's borders of highways, ocean and desert. everywhere you look there is the imagery of the beach, of suburban ranch homes, car pools, swimming pools, drive-thru fast food joints, film noir, hollywood retro, etc, etc... and the glare, that bloody glare of resin and the slick surface of "the shine..." now, granted, there is a huge audience for this in london, berlin, tokyo, etc. there are MFA candidates across the country who have never even seen a beach, let alone a palm tree, foaming at the mouth in an effort to get this very subject matter down cold. but consider this: imagine a new york scene populated by statues of liberty, coney island freak shows, taxis, hot dog stands, yankee stadiums, rockefeller centers, central park horse carriages, what have you. to be fair, you might see one of these examples now and again (sadly) but it's not the dominate strain of imagery and content. not even close. there is (and should be) a universal, historical and international mode of expression that is there for the taking. for art to succeed, in any media, it must reach for this language and come to terms with it.

*any writing on art done in LA (or surrounding areas) can't help but mention NYC, one way or another... there is the constant song of "ignored by...", "passed over by...", or even, "...recognized by...". the most glaring culprit is the magazine, Art Ltd. almost every profile, discussion, or announcement seems to fall into this trap.

*a random piece of criticism i read last week offered these tired, sagging cliches in discussing a group show: "exploring our perceptions..."; "challenging pre-conceived notions of..." and,"questioning our ideas of..."

except for a very few, this is what art writing has come down to. everywhere...

*in LA, dennis hopper is considered an elder statesman of the art world.

i'm not trying to bitch, just checking things out and typing it... there is, quite undeniably, great, important art (painting) being made in LA, the inland empire, orange county and the rest. the sheer cultural weight of the region cements this fact as a given. at the same time, however, there is this incestuous cultural circularity within much of the art (good and bad) being made that ties it to the land and, to that end, the time of it's creation. simply put, this labels and dates the art involved in this practice. the phrase, "california artist" flows off the tongues of too many, too often to be healthy. i should know-- i've been labeled one several times, in various group shows i was fortunate enough to be involved in around the country. out here, there seems to be an apprehension at the thought of being a "regional artist". its an apprehension so dense and tactile you feel the tension rising up in conversations and writings before you hear it or see it. sadly and tellingly, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy for many artists, in many ways...

2008-08-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

a bit after 10 at night... a very productive couple of days. i ended up pulling out the second virgin canvas this morning and now it's nearing some sort of completion. that makes 2 works that are looking strong and standing for themselves. maybe not... i've tossed myself into the void for this work. why not?? no sales of late, so fuck it. and there are the drawings back in brooklyn to back this adventure up. so now, the drawings have begat the paintings. and i must say, i'm very happy. for now. the work is rather harsh-- spontaneous and organic. as formal as the drawings seemed to me, these works are pushing the painterly edge. there is the formal structure, the geometry, if you will, but beyond that the space abutting the rectangular forms is violent with the rigor of paint and gesture. the drawings (at their best) were brought together from the formal structures as well as the incidental activity about the margins-- the dusting of charcoal; the fingerprints; the shots of liquid pigment... now that activity has been replaced by the trowel of gesso dragged across the canvas; the hammer of the brush; the harsh caress of sandpaper.

i sat under the orange tree, sipping a california red, trying to understand what i had brought about in these 2 or 3 days. i spent a bit of time photographing the work, but too much was lost to really make that count for anything. these works, as they stand, must be considered in the flesh. in general, as i've stated numerous times, abstract painting cannot be taken as fodder for reproduction or documentation. by the very nature of the medium, painting of an abstract nature (or, indeed, painting as a whole) must be confronted in the most intimate of viewings. sadly, thats not always possible.... regardless, i'm thinking that this work might be my strongest to date. it seems that the concerns of my preceding bodies of work are being addressed here and brought forward to a mature reasoning. so much of my past output has been refined and re-worked and refind again. i'll always stand by that work, but right now, this seems a more honest and athletic offering. perhaps the battle between influences has been decided, or smoothed out. there (has) is always the tension between the romance of pollock and the intellect of newman and (romance as well) rothko. much of the work on these paintings was done while they lay in the grass by the pool, outside the studio. the brush didn't hover over the canvas (dripping), it slapped down onto it and then moved accordingly, some of the trail left behind, some wiped away after its use had run dry...

under the orange tree, with a glass of wine, i mused that the most important thing to do is to actually look at a painting-- to see it and study it, bringing it into your conciousness. the reality of seeing a painting-- really looking at and seeing a painting, should be an active, wholly involved endeavor. the time must be set aside and relished... a quiet, profound slice of the day before or behind us, just looking... sitting and looking.

2008-08-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

back in california... late last night i checked out the studio to see what was left behind. a few 4 footers that were in progress and 2 untouched 5x4 canvases ready for heavy action. good.

i've decided that my time out here will be spent on only 1 of the new canvases. i want to take my time and see how far i push the acrylic, before hitting it with oil. i've knifed the underpainting on heavily in a few different reds and some gel medium to get a good body of surface built up and now it sits in the grass under the sun. next step will be a few layers of white gesso and then the real work begins....

yesterday, before the flight i spent some time with gary snyder at his gallery on 26th street. i told him about my intentions and he mentioned that sometimes the slow periods in one's career can be the most creative. the group show he has up is closing soon. ?abstraction. do yourself a favor and check out the work of tad wiley. tough, totemic work that shows a sure hand and a most vigorous intent.

now i'm gonna see if the paint is dry. or maybe i'll just have a beer first and float a while in the pool...

2008-08-04T18:25:00.000-07:00

so it seems i've reached a cross roads of sorts... the drawings i've been so engaged in were birthed from my paintings of the last 3 or so years. now, it looks like a new body of work will come from the drawings (paintings based on the drawings)... i've done no practical work on this as yet, just thinking about it. but, i must say, this seems logical and rather sane. the margin of the paper becomes the margin of the canvas, etc. this can happen.

tomorrow i fly to LA. i've a few untouched canvases there in the studio... i guess this could start out there. out there as well as anywhere. yeah...

2008-07-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

i was reading some writing by the artist, christopher rico and he asked where the heroic painting was... good question. the answer is that it's in the studios of inspired artists of strength and vigor, in studios with stains of paint on the floor and slashing brushstrokes across some walls. there may be drawings scattered about the space, perhaps old coffee cans of brushes and turp, paint spattered newsprint and masking tape are strewn about... yeah, the heroic paintings... the epic, profound painting, and indeed, art is out there. we just have to look a bit harder to find it. perhaps we just have to make it. as barnett newman admonished us (i paraphrase), sometimes a painter has to paint something to have something to look at-- sometimes he must write so as to have something to read. great art is not easy. it can be difficult to look at and it is for sure difficult, if not nearly impossible to create. fine. we continue... i've been thinking a lot about this lately. there are untold numbers of unknown artists who may have shared beers with the great of their generation, but did their own work in utter obscurity. but the work was done. perhaps they sold a few over the years, perhaps not. you look at joan mitchells work and see it's not much, for the most part. think about how many stronger artists were out there working hard that never made it. but i digress...

at the action/abastraction show at the jewish museum, i got (once again) what it was all about-- the act; the act and the values that the artists before pushed forward... what i'm talking about here is intent and emotional content, perhaps spiritualism and yes, heroism-- the epic utterance of creation.

late this afternoon i drove out to the brooklyn studio. digging the natural light flooding in, i worked 3 or 4 canvases, went into a large drawing (acrylic and charcoal) and sat back and checked it all out... then i drove down the street to steiner studios and picked up my woman from her tv gig and drove over the bridge to manhattan. after parking, we stopped into an opening at the 2/20 gallery on 16th street, curated by the dealer larry sobribski. it was good work-- late 60's modernism-- works on paper and some sculptural works... some good names in there as well, michel steiner, pozzi and moss. some others that escape me now... but i'll get back to it in the next day or so. and then we kept walking home a few blocks to a hot bath and glass of cold vodka.

2008-07-27T16:56:00.000-07:00

ok, yeah... it has been a heavy few months. but that just means you're living life. the day back i fucked my knee up in aikido, training with (6th dan) gary snyder. the next night gary and i work on the Pinan katas and then went out to the brooklyn studio and looked at paintings. First of all, i must say, gary is one of the most talented martial artists i've been in contact with. Having said that, i will go on to say that his understanding, in regards to painting, is an understanding of the finest connoisseur. he said he saw 20% weakness and 80% strength in the work. fair enough. of particular note, he mentioned his criteria for looking art... a fascinating evening. and much appreciated.

a few weeks later the dealer, bjorn ressle came out. we shared a bottle of cote du rhone and looked at the work. we'll see what happens... bjorn wants to get some of the big critics out for lunch and to the studio. both lilly wei and bob morgan were mentioned. as usual, we'll see what happens...

the openings of chelsea have been pretty pathetic. not only is it summer (when nyc closes shop) but it's just an uninspired mix of student art and general crap. enough said... having said that, the action/abstraction show at the jewish museum is truely incredible. i mean that-- truely incredible. i met the artist/author marjorie welish there 2 weeks ago. marjorie is a true new york intellectual, old school, hard core intellect. but as for the exhibit-- major works by major artists... the single greatest rothko i've seen in the flesh-- an incredible piece (untitled, 1961), a dark, brooding piece, of strong painterly notion and intent. fine minor works by newman and a singularly sublime piece by reinhardt. yeah, beautiful...

and now i'm coming off several really good days in the studio.

right now, i can't complain...

2008-07-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

ok, i'm back on this... life throws many difficulties your way, as an artist, or as anybody... so, you deal with it and then get back in the studio and do your work.

it's been a heavy couple of months... more to come.

yeah.

2008-05-04T21:20:00.000-07:00

nyc... a couple of martinis in the burbank airport and then i'm on the plane, trying to study japanese. reading some paul thoreau and waiting to get home. the line for taxis was brutal, especially having to hear the conversations around me... so be it. back in the new york groove.

with a tan...

2008-05-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

so while floating in the pool with a cold beer and looking around me at the water under the sun, i was thinking about the small moses piece at the blake gallery that was really my favorite. i wish i could remember it's title. in any event, sometimes you just wish you walked around with 4 grand in your pocket... water, motion, etc.

checked out bergamot station, some strong stuff going on... at ruth bachofner, barbara kerwin and gary edward blum made for a really impressive pairing. blum's work has that full-on originality that rarely comes about-- he's working the representation of the abstract that my friend, wess dahlberg has so eloquently operated in for the last few years. blum goes a bit too far for me though. his hand and his eye are sure, but i'd appreciate just some straight abstraction, the representative just a bit too much. but nicely done, really well done...

barbara kerwin's work has gone from the sculpturaly minimal to a take on the grid and it's potential. she works in encaustic, now adding acrylic and it's flat opacity, for a more complex visual give and take. the wax rests in relief on the surface almost quivering there in it's armature. this is sensitive, poetic stuff that one should expect from an artist of her stature.

at frank lloyd gallery there was some great porcelin sculpture by cheryl ann thomas. the pieces were modest sized and very powerful, given their scale. modestly priced as well. like i said, you just want to walk around with 4 grand on you when you check out the scene... thomas somehow manages to give the work the look of fabric layered upon itself, or indeed, carelessly tossed into a corner and left behind. this is a work with the handsome incidental quality i really relate to. to be honest, this is probably the first time i've seen porcelin as a medium of real power in contemporary art-- outside of the utilitarian or decorative. very refreshing...

bobbie greenfield presented david shapiro, the show consists of a few paintings and works on paper.... tough, organic labors-- gesture, soft line, earthen palette. startling compositions in horizontal formats that really seduced the eye...

2008-05-02T21:50:00.000-07:00

6 ribeyes on the grill and i ate 2 of them... life is good sometimes.

last night was in laguna beach at peter blake gallery, checking out the andy moses show. good crowd, great area, beautiful night and beautiful women. the art? well... moses is working the landscape/seascape horizon line, i've mined this myself, still am. when he ties it together with a signature sharp white pinstripe across the center it all comes together. when he eschews the sharp line it tends to blur. maybe thats the point, who am i to say? but i'm saying it... he's capable of making some really strong work. his use of blue and of black is poignant and indeed, sublime. when he strays off into the neon and electric things go awry. but that holds true for any painter.

all in all quite a night. the perfume of weed permeated the back gallery and the patio, the women tottered on high, high heels and there were a few tussles with a rather sad band of hipsters, one of whom got dumped on his ass, another chased around an alley by a 52 year old painter. good fun for all, except maybe the hipsters in their outfits and bruised egos.

earlier in the day i was at the studio of robert kingston. he had a few pieces in there, a new large one that was looking good and 2 smaller pieces that, though very minimal, were powerful, intense works. i mentioned to him that perhaps the smaller proportion lends itself to a pared down composition-- his scale rarely changes-- the larger works offers the appropriate arena for grander gesture and content...

from kingston's studio i drove (endured traffic) east to alex couwenberg's home and studio. then alex and i took off for laguna. i reflected that it was a pretty cool to be cruising to an opening in the black mercedes of another painter. success is a sweet energy...

spent the day in the pool and working with pastels, charcoal and graphite. trying to hit the color i'm surrounded by out here-- flowers, olive trees, eucalyptus, sky, grass, life, etc.

it was a good day.

2008-04-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

flying to LA in the morning... i guess the reason i still love NYC is that i leave it as often as i can.

maybe...

last week was a good week of work in the studio-- still working drawings and still really excited by them. there is a certain intimacy to the act of drawing that is so different from painting. right now, i'm still wondering where these works lead, or, indeed, if they lead anywhere.

flying between LA and NYC always has an affect on my art. what will happen now?? soon enough i'll be sitting under the orange tree again trying to bring it all together. we'll see...

2008-04-21T20:22:00.000-07:00

well, its been a while... life.

as for the nyc art world, the best thing that happened was the benefit for non objectif sud at gary snyder project space. a fine salon show, of smaller works, the notable standout being a modest sized piece by michael brennan. i must say, no bullshit, this small work by brennan was one of the strongest works i've seen this year. a very,very powerful painting-- hard edged precision met with (seemingly) spontaneous brushwork. just a gorgeous and profound statement.

in the studio i'm working drawings in pastel and charcoal. layers and layers of each, some rubbed out, some layers sanded away, etc... perhaps i'm actually searching for a monochrome or just stumbling upon one. i'm not sure... i do know that i've been seduced by the sheer space and scale of these drawings, not to mention the practice of making them. this is a new adventure for me, one i'm just going to ride out and see what happens. for good or ill...

ok, it's late enough. late enough to try to sleep...

2008-03-28T06:34:00.000-07:00

it's the week of the armory show... tuesday night i went to the phillips de pury preview show. big crowd, crowded bar, 2 or 3 good pieces in the whole 2 floors. ran into the writer, anthony hayden guest. we talked boxing and fighting in general... his nose is pretty bashed up, missing some teeth, so he looks the part. my friend andrew miller, former dealer and bon vivant, was visiting from the bahamas. he's known hayden guest for a while and has some good stories... we took a cab with anthony to the home of the publisher of modern painters and art and auction-- top floor of the richard meyer building on charles street. fully catered (i parked myself at the tray of crabcakes when she started her speech), guys in black walking around with trays of champagne and wine. ran into an old freind, katya and her husband greg, a good painter. she introduced me to some girls from pace wildenstein including arnie glimcher's wife or daughter. the cute pace girl from houston looked at me and said, "you're more a brice marden kinda guy..."

hit some openings last night and somewhat predictably, ended up at an outside table at half king drinking pints... met a gallerist from belgium, jan. cool guy, white glasses and long hair. he didn't seem engaged by talk of painting... fair enough.

which actually brings up the really, really wretched amount of bad photography and video nonsense i've suffered through since tuesday. why are people doing this?? why is it making money? of course the answers to those questions are easy to come by. or maybe not... a lot of it is the blurring between media and culture.

a lot of it is just having a little art school, a tepid creative buzz and a fear of getting your hands dirty...

2008-03-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

so, once again, i've read something that sets me off... an article in new york magazine about dealer, larry salander and his troubled times. seems larry tried to hedge his bets and go for the old world works of masters, versus the koons, hirst bullshit of the day. and it seems he's paid that price. i won't go into his hardships-- suffice to say he had the guts to try to place real value (in the international commercial art world) on the works of masters like tintoretto, rafael and canaletto. it cost him. big time... of course, this is the business end of this game, so there are accusations of some sleazy actions behind the scenes. but anyway... these rich guys don't play nice. lets not kid ourselves and think he was doing this for the sake of culture (well, maybe a bit) he was looking to cash in like the rest of them. anyway, it was a good read. try to check it out...

and now, i'm gonna relax a bit...

in the end, life is good.

but much of the art isn't.

2008-03-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

ok, back in nyc... it's colder, but sunny. of course, my first day back i noticed that it was gonna be 86 degrees in the valley. fine... i need the hardship. give it to me.

so i read the jerry saltz review of the whitney biennial. as one would think, it's crap (the show, not the review)... i won't be going. the only good thing to be said is that one of the curators is good to look at. sorry, but thats it. and i will proudly say that i've never been to a whitey biennial. actually i have-- and jason rhodes rocked it. fine... the irony here is that, years ago, i was writing about rhodes and thinking about how much i disliked the work and at the end of the essay i realized i made him sound pretty good. thats the trick-- you might not like something, but you might think about it a bit and realize a bit more. sadly, at 41 and a veteran of the nyc art world, i know what these girls at the whitney are putting out (no pun intended).... its the same ole' same ole' that was on shop last year and the year before and the year before and i've tired of what they're selling-- long ago... it would seem they have no faith (read: understanding , or sensitivity) in painting or sculpture. fine. thats the way the world works. they play video games in their off hours and text message untold hours away into nothingness, waiting for the next career move. to each their own. as for the work, it's the sameness of it all that rubs me the wrong way. sure, lets wrap a garden hose around the perimeters of the space, lets take nude, polaroid self-portraits, lets figure out cute riffs on environment and race; class and bullshit takes on what could be considered "culture (if we tried really, really hard)..." enough already. where is the art? where are the balls?and if that makes me sexist, fine, what would joan mitchell think of this crap?

not much...

not much at all.

but we move on. i no longer concern myself with this aspect of the art world. i will comment on its frivolities and it's inanities and pound my chest for a sense of honor and quality.

all well and good.

fuck them...

2008-03-18T02:38:00.000-07:00

so i made it. or so it seems now... i titled the painting, "nagoya". while i studied it, the images of that city came back to me. the first morning, walking along with my camera and map, stumbling across shinto shrines and buddist temples tucked away off alleys and side streets. the painting had this quiet, insular feel to it. i'd been sitting out there in the night, hearing the raccoons stumble through the bamboo and the painting was really talking to me. finally.

sometimes this art nonsense comes together. sometimes it even makes sense beyond the romantic...

yeah.

2008-03-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

just in from the little studio under the orange tree... trying to pull together a horizontal piece to take down to the gallery tommorow. that would make four new pieces. we'll see... getting a painting ready for the world outside the studio is always a precarious undertaking for me-- the final adjustments, the final sanding, etc. anyway...

drove out to alta loma and spent the evening with alex couwenberg and his wife andi campagnone. after dinner we finished off the night at andi's gallery/wine bar. dba 256. a beautiful space in pomona. andi had a group show up of 6 or 7 women. and as far as the art exhibited went, a little testosterone would have gone a long way. having said that, the work of virginia katz was looking good. i first came across her work in nyc and she is an artist of a certain consistancy and inventiveness. i particularly enjoyed a suite of painted drawings. andi asked me to write the exhibition essay for the next show, a survey of the american landscape. several artists i'm not familiar with are going to be involved along with my good friend, james austin murray. but the main point of the evening was winning about $15 rolling dice on the bar and the girl who lives in the upstairs loft telling me that the only hair on her body was the hair on her head. good to know...

somehow andi made me drink a lot of belgian beer and then the waitress who served us dinner earlier in the evening came in, sat next to me and smiled.

2008-03-15T23:54:00.000-07:00

so, i must say, after much reflection, as far as the group show at turner gallery goes-- peter lodato is a heavyweight painter. period... in terms of scale and proportion, as well as pure paint handling-- this was good, good painting. the work was totemic and clean; epic and serious as a heart attack. i have to add- his is a work that must be seen in the flesh. digital imagery does nothing for this man; the work can drift into vapor. but live, standing there in front of it's form it becomes a very real force of nature. a few years ago i explored a very similar aesthetic. seeing lodato's efforts gave me pause enough to appreciate what i was doing and examples enough of what i was missing. any serious artist should seek out this man's work...

2008-03-15T17:18:00.001-07:00

i guess it does work... drove to bergamot station in santa monica and checked out my buddy alex couwenberg in the group show he's in at the william turner gallery. the show, curated by peter frank had alex in there with peter lodato, larry bell, mike braden and charles arnoldi. alex's work was kick ass. in particular the piece, "guardrail", a large, thin horizontal in blue. yeah, a serious work. the matte surface created it's own light and allowed you to check out the detail and intimate workings of the piece. i was telling alex later, on the phone, while navigating 405 traffic back to the valley, that, with all the gloss, "finish fetish" action out here, so much gets lost... in any event, it was great painting, as was a large dyptich that didn't get in the show. alex said he's saving it for his upcoming st. louis show.

also checked out the ed moses show at frank lloyd gallery. pretty solid-- liquid paint laid out and spread with a trowel-- sparse, strong. ed came in for a moment or two then turned around and split before i could say hello. an enigmatic dude going strong in his 80's. god willing...

some good richard serra etchings at bobbie greenfield gallery, next door. heavy, circular works, very intense surface... it's serra, what could you expect? i would like to see some straight up drawing by the man though-- some pencil on notebook paper would be cool. maybe...

when i'm out here, it's always good to get out into the scene. tough to pull myself from the studio and the pool, however... the day after i got into LA, i went out to the secluded studio of robert kingston. i've known robert for about a decade now. his work has gone all over the spectrum, but always with a strong, intellectual resolve. in any event, the few pieces he had working were looking good. a gold piece, very rugged, was ready to be titled and wrapped. the question was which gallery would get it. and kingston pulled out a large black painting that was truely awesome. he flipped it's orientation several times and hit it a few strokes editing and adding elements here and there. it was a winner. and i gotta say, it was an honor to be there as he worked it...

so tuesday i take 3 works down to the the turner gallery and rob brander, bills director, will take some photos and take them in. i guess i'll bring back a few pieces they haven't sold. fair enough...
looking outside the blinds, it seems the rain has stopped.

good...

2008-03-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

a rainy afternoon in LA... still not sure if this thing works. or if i do, for that matter...

Welcome

2008-03-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

Hello - Welcome to Zimmermann on Art. Postings describing events in the New York and Los Angeles art worlds will be forthcoming.