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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

* 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...

* ...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..."