Art & Life

writing or drawing 
while my daughter sleeps
second guessing my labors of yesterday 
while my daughter sleeps
my daughter at her easel 
pausing reflectively before the violence ensues
my daughter and i at MoMa
my daughter and i at an opening
my daughter and i at my opening 
my daughter and i at any number of galleries
my daughter banging her head to Saxon
my daughter telling me to "hear" her
my daughter reciting the lines 
of various and sundry Disney princesses
i'm shopping for tonights dinner 
before hitting the studio 
forgetting that Manhattan grocery shopping 
on a saturday entails the rude, oblivious and insane
i'm putting together a stew before i hit the studio
i'm painting my ass off 
keeping an eye on the snow 
outside the tall windows

Art and the life around it mingle together like furtive teenagers at a basement keg party-- awkward, perhaps lewd, casting glances that may or may not be appreciated... You go through your day
and if you're not there tearing it up in the studio, you are certainly thinking about it.
A specific gesture comes to mind-- a movement, a piece of brilliance that you missed last night or the night before. Thoughts of color and placement, realization, composition and the like...

The beauty is that you can't second guess yourself hypothetically. The making of Art is not simply the application of materials. There is the guessing-- there is the thought and tumult... The major contemplations of Monday are but empty bottles and wads of masking tape come Thursday.

And thats fine (I believe it was Ginsberg who admonished us to never begin a line with "and", but it feels so good to do so and I'm cool with being a bad writer, so fuck it...). We have that beautiful authority to cast out what could otherwise be construed as "failure" and unravel what becomes victory (I grimaced as this was typed, but, again, fuck it, its so true...).

As I played with my Daughter, about an hour ago, word came of the passing of Robin Ross. She was 61. Diabetes...

It seems strange now, but I never thought of Diabetes as a killer. Live and learn...

I first met Robin around '97 in either Brooklyn or LIC. I remember being blown away by the muscular intensity of her laboriously built paintings-- Art troweled on, scarred, Umber soil and carvings of poetry. I was a babe of 30 when we met- fueled by violence and any number of unspeakable vices and doubts and Robin put up with my immaturity and my bravado and went about her business-- perhaps laughing behind my back, but only in kindness. or perhaps pity...

In 2001, she had a brilliant solo show at Andrew Miller's short lived L.I.C.K. Ltd. Fine Art and shortly after that, she moved back to Colorado.

Over the last few years, I kept up with Robin's work via images of paintings and mysterious notebook pages on social media (some of which made veiled reference to her failing health).

And now she's gone...

Adjectives form at my finger tips: caring, odd, lyrical, kind, open, brave, thoughtful, endearing, triumphant...

And while the Gods have managed to gain a great human soul and one hell of a painter, I can't help but feel rather sorry for all of us left behind.

Watching the furious efforts of my Daughter at her easel often brought thoughts of Robin to me.

They would have loved each other...

I'm not as sad as I am numb right now. I will pour another tequila and raise the glass in hopes that will facilitate the appropriate level of heartache.

My thoughts are with Robin's Husband, Noah Baen and the rest of her family and friends.

And I will conclude with Robin's own words, words incised into the ground of a sumptuous painting on paper that hangs in front of me now as I type.

"The Poem is on The Ground
The settler Has Not Yet Found The Boundary."

                                                          1.

Months before my daughter was born, I vowed to work towards creating a life free of the negative-- or, at least as free of the negative as it could be given the variance of life and art and meals poorly prepared. And so I walked away… The "art world" could wait-- I would have a child to raise and train to move in her own style and swagger. My hands would be full...

3 years later, my daughter paints better than me, with an assured authority that belies her lack of grammatical prowess and syntax, or experience with the Russian novel...

                                        If, in 30 years, 
                                        she paints as she does now, 
                                        the world will be a better place…



                                                             2.

Fast forward to now as I type this, nestled in the bosom of the San Fernando Valley…   I am a lucky man. I was married in Vegas and left $1,300 ahead. It was a fine omen given the life we have carved out-- our union and all the rest-- travel, art, the ocean, martial arts, cooking, wine, what have you…

As for today and this thing we know as the "present"-- having worked out, swam, cared for a toddler and tussled with the confusions and physicality of art-making, notebooks and an art "career", I sit here typing with a belly full of meat, greens and tequila, understanding that optimism is the one tool we need, bereft of others-- be it poet, painter, chef, fighter, bigot or victim… Optimism for the poet or painter keeps them going and we, the world, need that. Optimism keeps the chef working and we, the world, need that too… It keeps the fighter hitting the bag and working takedown defense and the offensive guard and it can make the bigot understand his fuckups and see the world in a better, more objective light and it allows the victim to understand that there is so much more out there-- so much more life to go…

If you enter into this beast, that is the "art world", you will stumble, you will (perhaps) become jaded, bummed out, lost, frustrated and/or denied. But you will-- you must-- continue.

There will always be the voices of sorrow, art rehab and quitting. Silence them.

Continue. And endure. It's just better that way...

My Daughter worked rapidly at her easel,
loaded up her brush and paused contemplatively,
"I'm going to cast another spell Daddy…"

I am clearly biased,
but words more profound
have yet to be uttered...

This morning I was surf casting for fluke on Long Beach Island and after being shut out, went for a run along the shore. A day of driving and a night in the studio later, time being the ambiguous slut that it is, we will say that, some weeks back, the ladies and I took a taxi down to 25th Street for the opening of Joan Mitchell at Cheim & Read. I will publicly admit that I now feel I never looked at her work properly. I didn't get it, thought I did and worse yet, voiced opinions that now seem pretty ridiculous, given how moved I was by the exhibition titled, "Trees".

Fair enough… Perhaps the recent protocols of dead lifts, tequila and grass-fed beef evolved my patterns and processes.

Sorry Joan, I fucked up. But I can live with myself, I don't worry too much about the guy on the treadmill...

And Soulages… These are the times that make life here a bit more worth the living.

While we dealt with the frozen challenges of the past winter, my Wife and I (more or less) seriously discussed moving to LA. Now, after beautiful adventures on Fire Island, Montauk and Long Beach Island (and a month in LA to look forward to), I think we're both happy where we are… Now, as this season winds down, I'm benefiting from that buoyant optimism that is the reward of endurance in the face of hardship-- the optimism that is the rarefied status of an artist living and creating in NYC. Yes, it sucks that the drive to my Brooklyn studio can take up to an hour. But fuck it-- I live in Manhattan…


And there is the optimism of labor- good hours in that Brooklyn studio…
And there is the optimism of the paint of others showing and selling and sharing.

Having just returned from Montauk, I turned around and drove the German Steel back East to Bridgehampton for the Art Market Hamptons Fair. The triumphant James Austin Murray met me at the  gate and we took it all in before the rush of crowds and plastic surgery. With 4 new good sized pieces in the Lyons Wier booth, my man was clearly (to my eye) the star of show. But there was also (with Lyons Wier) the killer work of Jeff Muhs- painterly, ethereal, what have you…

At Katherine Markel Fine Art, Suzanne Laura Kammin stood out with her painterly attack, as did the nuanced pyrotechnics of Jeffrey Cortland Jones-- a few weeks off of his solo show (that should not be missed) at KMFA.

The day of his opening, Jones graciously paid a visit to my studio. Fittingly, I picked him up in front of The Met. What could be better?

There will always be the talk and the ink reserved for a Marden show, or Soulages, Mitchell or the latest debacle at the Whitney (perhaps a Koons retrospective, or the manufacture of chocolates?). But with so much fine painting in one season, the soul smiles and the drinks taste better...

I hit the studio hard Saturday morning and then cruised Chelsea for a few hours-- conspicuously, the only man with dried paint on his boots and hands. I wanted to catch up on what was happening and more specifically, to see the Julian Schnabel exhibit at Gagosian and my good friend, ex-studio mate, running partner and drinking buddy, James Austin Murray at Lyons Wier Gallery.

We've been friends long enough that each has stories the other would sooner us forget. For better or worse, his memorable speech at my Las Vegas wedding is still remarked upon by those in attendance. Over the years I've seen his work go through numerous transitions of uncertain quality and brilliance. But, as he began to understand the radical shift in his art that would come to be defined by potent black oil on canvas and polystyrene structures, I knew I was seeing in my friend the maturation of a fully formed painter. Today, Murray's approach to art making is one of earnest authority. It would be an understatement to say he is putting out some of the finest paintings in NYC (or LA, for that matter). The quality of material, the meticulous paint handling, the content and his capture of calligraphic motion all point towards his importance. To my eye, this is a fact as hard won as it is objective.

The Schnabel show was what it was-- John Yau wrote eloquently (though not quite positively) about it and I'm no critic.  Suffice to say, I felt the 3 works on burlap from 1990 were amazing paintings…

If, when sparring, you never suffer the incongruity of injury, you're not trying very hard.

Michael Lyons Wier and I discussed the Schnabel gig as we looked around the gallery at Murray's black oil, then he moved into action as a couple voiced interest and laid down the credit card. It was beautiful to watch-- the good vibe of dollars spent on strong art, well earned coin in my boy's pocket and Lyons Wier working it all in his bow tie and cowboy boots…

Heading back to my car, I stopped into Berry-Campbell Modern and Contemporary Art and stumbled upon the work of Norman Kanter. One small piece dated 1959, on paper mounted on canvas (roughly 20"x 23"), displaying the pyrotechnics so favored by the post-De Kooning downtown artists.

Violent reds and strategic passages of yellow and white.

I was floored...

How the fuck had I never heard this name? I stood there with my mouth open and in a move as desperate as it was optimistic, asked for the price of the work (oddly enough, once I got home, my Wife didn't approve of the purchase).

In my studio clothes, I wasn't fooling anybody. But gallery owner, Martha Campbell, was very gracious and printed an image of the Kanter piece for me. I have the image pinned to the wall in my studio...

It is easy sport to bitch and whine about the travesties of the "Art World" and it's players, it's dealers and the very "art" that keeps the whole game going. I've done it myself. But there is much good in what we (the artists, the dealers, the curators and the collectors) do: we drive this engine of culture on into the decades we won't even see. We define the future of "Art" by what we do in our daily practices of paint and the deal-- installing shows and sipping cheap wine. Little known artists are discovered, having passed on to their next journey and those of the "mid-career" begin to carve out a living as they realize their finest works.

And sometimes, the good guys win...

The legendary Jackson Pollock work, "Mural", is on view at the Getty Center, in Los Angeles.
Conservators have completed the restoration and cleaning of the painting and the technical research into it's storied, rather apocryphal creation…



while academics and fey Warholians bow down
to the ghost of Mike Kelly, far and away from the riot
of paint and sincerity that fueled the brave
of the mid-20th century, it's nearly impossible
to reflect on a time when the reward of Art
wasn't paying off student loans, or the new car--

it was not starving to death…

I fell in love with my Wife for any number of reasons,
but with reflection I admired her for being a "seeker".
she didn't speak of what she knew,
she spoke of what she wanted to learn.

a legitimate artist never "knows" paint.
he succumbs to it, he delves into it's nature,
he gives himself over to the journey…

in a like sense, one can never "know" a martial art.
the practitioner, over time,
may acquire a greater athleticism
and facility of technique,
but the esoterica of training
is never a rote endeavor.

the "way" of paint is no different.

perhaps the distinction between art and craft
lies in the varied desperation of the former
and the accrued "knowledge" of the latter.

by all accounts, Pollock was so deeply flawed,
he had no choice but to search…

i've limped the road of stone
to understanding that what i paint
matters little compared
to what a painting becomes…

i like to think of Pollock's perception
of nature and the turning of that to art…

yesterday was a hell of a day in the studio.
i hope Jackson found
that unique solace at times--
in his small space
with the wood burning stove--
the rope of black enamel
held, for a second,
above the cotton weave...