Craft Plaques Statement

I was referring to the painted shaped plaques when I wrote this. I'm still not sure yet, how the 3-d materials-based plaques relate.

"I try to create visual images that are different from anything I already know or imagine. I use painting as a process by which to find this new imagery, and set up various frameworks for guidance. The frameworks themselves are always evolving, and they reveal broader areas of interest. My intended focus may be about materials and formal paint handling, or personal experiences, both cognizant and sub-conscious. Very often I create work around an iconic figure or structure of unknown purpose or meaning.

I began using shaped wooden plaques because they offer an interesting compositional challenge, and because they hint of an incongruous craft genre. They serve to foil any conventional aesthetic intentions I may have. I'm deliberately staging an awkward proposal, so that I am forced to find new solutions and new imagery.
 
These shaped also panels set up a paradox, for they are neither 3-d sculpture nor a picture plane rectangle. These shapes taunt the illusionist world that I treasure, forcing me to make conscious choices about their existence in reality. I must choose to place a representational image on/in these 2-d planes that are also objects. Such images no longer materialize with ease. The outcomes are inevitably negotiated compromises, where painted illusion and personal subject matter and 3-d objects struggle to co-exist in the same perceived reality."
 
-Carla Knopp 3-18-12

Studio Happenings

 I plan on moving the 3-d craft plaques to Dewclaw, and using that as a second studio in July and August.

 Above and below are the recently cut shaped panels, gesso primed and then base painted with arbitrarily suggestive color washes and textures. A few are full into painting mode - acrylic painting mode. There are benefits to doing these in acrylic, sometimes just as a start, and even all the way to completion. Things dry and tend to become permanent to the ongoing process/image, much more readily than with oil. This can help me stay within certain parameters, and keep things cohesive in a good way. The downside is that I don't get quite so engaged as I do when using oil. I tend to fret over things drying, both on the painting surface and the palette.

I have also been painting some non-series works, and getting very disparate imagery. I'll post those once they make some sort of sense.

JYST 1

New recurring post theme - JYST, or "John Yau Speaks Truth". 

The best way to navigate a world overcome by hype and branding is to be honest and open, willfully and brilliantly so. John Yau does this.

This is good for the broader art dialogue, and it is especially good for the individual artist. So much that we do runs counter to prevailing issues of theory and of expectation and of success. Personal fortitude can wear down over time. Yau's essays remind us of the marvel that is artistic exploration. It's very reassuring to have someone presenting such a meaningful dialogue about art. 


His two most recent articles at the Hyperallergic blog:

 A Truly Subversive Artist Is Not Necessarily Someone Who Is Theatrical or Gimmicky
I've coined this notion as "innovation within convention", and thought of it fairly narrowly in terms of style, and more recently in terms of medium (traditional vs. new media). It's very frustrating that art is categorized according to a few signifiers of identity, rather than by actual experience. Yau reviews Thomas Nozkowski is this article. Can it get better?


"At the heart of Nozkowski’s practice is improvisation, a willingness to take something (anything) and do something else to it. He seems to have been one of the few of his generation to understand Jasper Johns’s declaration: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it, etc.”

" This is what subversive artists working in our postmodern epoch share. They don’t have a style, which is, in the end, both a brand and a judgment. How can you produce a brand and be subversive? (It’s like selling torn jeans made by Armani!) Subversive artists always try to undermine conventions, including those that might influence their practice."

And finally:

 "We have yet to consider Nozkowski’s work, and all its formal compressions, in a broader context, preferring instead to isolate him. The reasons for this withholding seem obvious—a deeper analysis of his work would go a long way toward subverting the art world’s elevation of all those other artists who possess an abundance of style and opinions, but, in the end, have very little else to offer us."

Slam-bam!

The Daily Practice of the Impossible    


I thought it was brave for Dana Schutz to move away from the gorgeous color and application in her previous works. Even her most peculiar imagery was rendered with a certain painterly elegance. These newer works have harsh color and flattened spaces. They are not appealing to the eye. Yau's article offers insight into Schutz' conceptual positioning, which I hadn't really considered at all, because, you know, her paintings are so interesting as images. 


He opens with a pretty funny paragraph outlining a (what is still prevailing in the hinterlands) typical 'scum of the earth' attitude towards painters:


"Dana Schutz, who is in her mid-30s, belongs to the generation of artists who grew up in an epoch where painting was routinely thought of as a dead practice. One couldn’t just be a painter, because doing so would be to enter a dusty domain crammed with empty signifiers. It would mean you were doing something that was obsolete (and reviled) — like speaking Latin to the drugstore cashier. The lines were pretty clear: dumb people became painters; smart people became conceptual artists who painted only when and if the subject called for it. This viewpoint might have started out as speculation, but now it’s a stupid and persistent prejudice."

John Yau at Hyperallergic. Bookmark it, baby.

60 Blanks

In endurance terms, it was about six too many. Sanding lies ahead. Priming will be a breeze.

I'm juggling using these as bases for the craft plaques and/or for the 2-d painted abstractions. It's not a smooth transition back and forth - work space organization issues and also very different ways of thinking. Having plenty of them will help me plunge in however and whenever I need to. I will also be using Dewclaw as a studio for a couple months this summer.

I should have swept before I started.

Forgotten painting from the past

 Greg's Gypsie Dream, 11" x 14", oil on panel, 1996?

This gifted painting recently emerged from a friend's collection. He had described a dream to me, and I had a very strong visceral reaction to his description. I remember the piece well, but it's still a trip to see one's own work in person, after a long separation.

Lineup round 4, From the Gut, with Heart

Gwendolyn Skaggs has re-opened SUGAR with her unique curatorial presentation of Lineup round 4, From the Gut, with Heart. I'm honored to be included, along with Erika Keck, Christy Singleton, Alicia McCarthy, Ed Sanders, Mary Addison Hackett, Vincent Como, Art Guerra, Nina Meledandri, Jacqueline Skaggs, Becky Kinder, Liv Mette Larsen, and David B. Frye.

More photos of the show.

Post on Process blog.


Lineup

round 4

From the Gut, with Heart

04.21.12 - 06.03.12

This installation focuses on, and gives emphasis to, the give and take/push and pull that develops when positioning artworks together as objects, releasing them from their makers reins, into my own. In round 4 these objects are kin to words. A narrative that begins with Erika Keck's Rosebud, and punctuated with a period by Carla Knopp's Prone. The artworks anchored, and securely suspended, in between are rich with sentiment, weight, implication, complication, and justification bound by my continuous will and determination to "write" a complete sentence defining "relevancy and meaning" (and the art of). The end result is From the Gut, with Heart, an installation at SUGAR, and, what I have recently been told... "A writers dream". -Gwendolyn Skaggs

Forget everything I've been saying, and just read this

This recent Katherine Bradford review by John Yau (Hyperallergic blog) sums up so much. It's insightful, concise, and even has a conglomerate dissing of  Eric Fischl, Celine Dion, and Tiger Woods. 

In regard to the generation of women painters who have come into their own after they turned fifty, and to the flawed mindset that negates such occurrences, he says: "Their presence argues for a thorough reevaluation of the canonical thinking that has prevailed in America since the early days of Pop Art. That bankrupt narrative, based on the rather flimsy, narcissistic assumption that the art world got it right the first time, with its own obsession with surface and spectacle, leaves little room for the quiet adventurousness and formal variety of these artists' explorations."

It's important to note that it is the nature in which this group of painters are working, that I find fascinating, and that resonates with me. It's not simply a kinship of clan, or of sameness.

Again, John Yau says it best (this after pointing out that we are in an era where nobody knows what is going on; we have no central paradigm): "The possibility that one could be independent; that one doesn't have to belong to any stylistic tendency or group; and that one need not ally oneself with any of the currently fashionable discourses, is both liberating and daunting, but why should it be any other way? Given the openness of the territory, one should not be surprised by how many artists find a way to be a conceptual artist that paints, for example."