Rocktown, Indiana: Unsent Letters Dept.

Dear IBJ:

I read your notice of the IAC course inviting people to drink alcohol while learning to throw clay on a pottery wheel. Kudos! It's about time and with that I offer the following suggestions for future art courses:

- 'Ludes and Looms
- Sniff Glue and Whittle
- Smoke Pot and Fuck Around with an Airbrush
- Mescaline and Decoupage
- Learn to Etch and Wife-swap
- Scrapbook on Acid!
- Jewelry for Junkies
- Readin', Writin', and Ritalin

Sincerely,
Brian Fick

Flashback Friday No. 7

Recluse

Oil on wood, 24" x 26"

1993

Pep Talk

I feel guilty and I shouldn't. I'm in the studio every day right now, and am making great progress, but I'm in a relaxed productive mode. This means I'm not clicking fast, but I'm not destroying anything either. I'm making fairly courageous decisions on what was finished work. I'm risking failure, but I'm not volunteering it up. I'm being an adult about revisions. I think this is good, but it has a different psychological feel from freefalling annhilism, which is more my comfort zone. Annhilism is heady stuff. It's dramatic. It satisfies an emotional need. It's a tad bullshitty that way.

New Panels

Where's Alan? I can't find Alan.

Final Stretch

Bride Thing, 50" x 52"

I'm reviewing the large pieces for my April show at Harrison Gallery (Indianapolis). These have been tucked away as "finished" for some time now. I was a bit afraid to view them again; not sure what I have going on in that painting stack, and being so dependent on them for this show. I was afraid they would be lame now. But when I viewed them with the small pieces I'm doing, also for this show, something clicked. All my verbal thoughts about what I was doing, and all my conceptual organizing of the work fell away. I had such a strong gut physical reaction to the group. They have certainly always been about physicality, in the mark-making and in imagery, but I think they may work more directly than this. I felt very connected to what's going on with them.

I did dramatically alter the painting above. I tried to make small tweaks, but had to go with a pretty major overhaul. I did just tweak a second large one, and completely painted out a mid-sized one. I'm not going to touch any of the other large ones, just these, and I'll also cut some more small shaped panels. At this point I need to work faster, not for production in number, but so I don't dwell on minutiae.

Summer of Love Artifact

Signed: Pierse 1967

36" x 24"

This survived my thrift store art collection purge. I had a lot of these found paintings, but in my storage they were getting some mold, so I passed most of them on.

Kudos to Indianapolis' City Services

...for clearing this mess within 24 hours of my call.

I shot this while the pile was still neatly stacked and condensed. Within a day it was blocking half the street and blowing into my yard. These neighbors sandwiched their move-in and their move-out with identical piles. The move-in pile festered in their yard for three months, blowing trash over the entire block...for three months. It was so depressing. So I got on this one fast. I called three different agencies on Monday, and by Tuesday this was entirely gone. Not a scrap of anything. Frankly, I'm stunned. All of my calls, one each to road hazards, mayor's action center, and health department were met by courteous, professional people, and I spent very little time being routed to them.

It's enough to make a person care.

Embracing My Inner Soft Pornographer

Thanks Abby Kent for this great photoshopping. It was even more hilarious in its original context. I had just posted images of my "Mounts" paintings on a message board, along with some thoughts about them, where I ignored mentioning anything about the blatant sexual innuendo. This particular group of folks were not having it; I was called out.

I truly think of this as a subtext, a quietly humorous aside. When one paints nudes every day for a few months, very quickly the model's physical nudity loses its domination of the experience. Over the past several years, I stopped worrying about having suggestive shapes and meanings in my work. I became less self-conscious about it, and eventually came to encourage it in a playful way. This seems integral to my imagery and to my conceptual considerations. I have always maintained a mental boundary; I have always held it away in its "interesting and funny subtext" role.

Well, I'm calling myself out now. I may have been fooling myself about the impartial nature of my tourettesian tendencies.

I'm finally connecting with these recent paintings. They had been very focused on formal decisions, especially in dealing with awkward and contrarian aesthetic choices. They are beginning to lurch more into an area of personal expression, and it's because I'm letting the imagery be truly sensual, rather than jokey sensual, at least in my own perceptions.

I think I need to give the subtextual suggestions a promotion. I think they may be more real and more important than I admit to myself. So, here's to horns and fallopian imagery!

*1-12-10 Correction made, Abby Kent invented Soft Porn Ben and Jerry's, not Pat Strong.

Russell/Projects Exhibition

I'm very excited to be included in a Russell/Projects' exhibition in April 2010. Russell/Projects is a new gallery in Richmond, VA, owned and directed by Heather Russell. "Terra Firma" is being curated in conjunction with Earth Day, and will include paintings from my "Mounts" series.

Other artists include:
Charles Birnbaum
Priscila De Carvalho
Jeremy Earhart
Lori Esposito
Gregory Euclide
Philipp Geist
Robert Gutierrez
Scott Hunt
Jiha Moon
Beverly Ress
Claire Stigliani

Inaugural exhibition opens Jan. 22, 2010 with "Vanitas" by artist Helena Wurzel.

Is This Blog On?

Chilling at my parents' in my new x-mas Snuggie, this one is called a Cuddlie though.


I found some excellent gifts this year. I should have photographed them. They were that good.

(small piece, in progress/process)

Back to abstraction. Back to the exciting world of making stupid, inelegant decisions, and then reacting to them. MW Capacity just linked via another link to this Time Out New York interview with Steve DiBendetto. His thoughts seem very in sync with how I approach these paintings.

My really bad neighbors rammed into their own house (right of door).........twice (wide area left of door, near shrub, )down low. This did not delight me to a senseless state of delirium. Nope, not me.

Later, gators.