(This is my thought, not hers:) if we cannot clearly state what our artistic aims are, then maybe we don't have any -- unless they are so subsumed behind overt intentions (dreams of fame, daydreams about actually making a living at this) that in the execution we might miss a deeper mark, in the manner of a swimmer who, crossing a channel in the fog, misses his/her island goal. Conversely, chronicling your work as you go can also help you to find a higher purpose for it than mere "weekend arts and crafting" (her words) could ever hope to accomplish on its own. The point (and, once again, I'm paraphrasing -- albeit in my own voice, with my inflections) isn't to just make pretty pictures, but to find your own voice and cut a path to expressing it as clearly as possible. That's why I've started writing about my art.
Meredith's suggestion was to journal these thoughts -- to put them in a private place where only I will see them. At first, she expressed doubts about my desire to put them into a blog, because it's not the publishing (fr. Latin publicare, i.e., to make public) of my aims that matters, but that I ''took the time to think things out.'* Well, I don't work that way. I don't keep private logs of my activities; hell, I can hardly maintain an appointment calendar. I write web logs -- blogs. And since that's what I do, this is what you get.
I started making neo-expressionist paintings in October, 2012. A year and a half earlier, I'd started building an alt-healthcare clinic and among my other tasks (setting up the business and pretty much running it single-handedly) it was also my job to provide interior design and decoration. We were in start-up mode, bootstrapping the project as we went, and there was no budget for artwork. Hence, the walls went bare. Finally, irritated at this bleak situation, I took matters into my own hands and decided to create art for the clinic, mostly at my own expense. Having just visited the astounding Rothko show at the Portland Art Museum, I thought I could create a few knockoffs of his paintings -- pale imitations of his masterpieces that would nevertheless add color to those otherwise eggshell walls. Not sure about how to go about doing this, I surfed how-to videos on YouTube until I found the the documentary Gerhard Richter: Painting. Immediately, I knew I'd found what I was looking for -- along with a great instructional video that would help me get there. To be sure, Richter's a skip and a jump from Rothko, but somehow his large-scale abstractions resonated. It's what I was meant to create. I didn't know why at the time, I just knew.
Here's the first piece I did:
Untitled, Acrylic on cabinet door, 19" x 20" (October, 2012)
It's a flawed attempt, but the sheer pleasure of schmeering paint across the surface of that cabinet door was a joy, not unlike the pleasure I, as an infant, must have had, dragging a crayon across a blank page or the inside of an expensive book or a living room wall just for the sheer thrill of seeing pigment appear as if by magic. I hope to never lose that thrill. So far, so good.
That was the circumstantial beginning. But the deeper, teleological, story can be traced back to my teen years. I think my first real exposure to abstract expressionism came from the cover art for Stan Getz' and Joao Gilberto's "Live at Carnegie Hall" album. It stuck with me. In fact, my painting above is blatantly derivative:
I loved that cover art by Olga Albizu as much as I loved the music.** As a teen I would sit on the floor in front of the stereo with my knees up and prop the album cover on my thighs, tapping my drum brushes along to that featherlight bossa nova locked in place by drummer Milton Banana, while Joao Gilberto softly sang "Samba de Minha Terra." The Brazilian concept of saudade -- a free-floating, melancholic longing for a lost home, homeland, friend, family member or lover -- is pretty much my default mode. And (surprise, surprise) I tend to be prone to bouts of depression. Listening to Joao and Jobim and Stan Getz helped connect me to those feelings and Albizu's paintings will always be a part of that.
My abstracts are an attempt to seek out my lost past (or, frankly, a past that never existed no matter how much I might wish otherwise), to express it in the form of a multicolored EKG, a radar sweep that says I was here. And here. And here. To be more specific, they are about my yearning to reconnect all those lost, perhaps never-existent, dots; an attempt to get at the marrow of my history, in the way that I might chew on a cold sore; a returning to the process like a dog who finds meaning in worrying a bone. Freud called it repetition-compulsion.
At 47, I've created a history for myself and there are layers of relationships both maintained (such as with my children and a handful of old friends) and ended (through divorce and separation from my former religious community and all the others ebb tides of life), all of whose influence will undoubtedly stay with me all through this life. New relationships are constantly being formed as well.
Thus the layers of buildup in my paintings are like the accretion and attrition of lives lived, conversations shared and subsequently half-forgotten; persistences of vision obscured by new images, the parchment and palimpsest of my unique story. All that remains, all that exists in this moment, as I sit alone in my apartment typing on my laptop, is the memory of accumulated experiences.
There's more to come, but that's all I've got for now. Boa noite.
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*As Tony Wendice says in Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder.
**Albizu's work appeared on several albums, primarily from Verve, but also from RCA.
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