Why I Paint, Part 4 (The Twee Edition)

I just want to warn you up front that this post is going to be mawkishly sweet in parts, not unlike that blackberry wine your grandmother used to serve every Christmas with her mincemeat pie. (See? I'm already dripping cheese.) But it expresses exactly what my aims are, and if you’re looking for something that’s almost like a manifesto for my art, then you'll just have to deal with it because this, approximately, is it.—JG

Also, if you want to see these pictures up close, just click on them.—JG, again

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music—Walter Pater

Yellow and White Palimpsest #1, acrylic on canvas, January, 2012, 16 X 20

When I was a Jehovah’s Witness, I believed in a future millennial paradise during which I would be able to pursue my art with perfect freedom, in perfect mind and in perfect body. Like millions of other Witnesses, I thus deferred my dreams and ambitions to that delirious sky-scorching future, leaving me with a humanitarianly impoverished present of interminable Bible study meetings and door-to-door preaching rituals. Then came my spiritual crisis and loss of faith and one subsequent realization: that this life is not a rehearsal for something else. This, as Kenny Loggins says, Is It. To me, this knowledge is a gift, because it means that I should try to make each encounter, each project, each moment as special and meaningful as possible; that I should use the remaining time I have to do what I love. Like making art, for instance.

And, since I'm not going to be here forever, I want to leave something behind that will feed the next generation, starting with my kids, Max (21) and Liza (13); a body of work—writings, paintings, drummings—that’s just for them. My mission: to leave behind a diaspora of expressions that others may enjoy, but that express me so transparently that only my kids could possibly fully appreciate them and that, when they spend time with them, it will be as if they're hanging out with me. Conversely, it will be like a portal through which I can reach back across the planets to them (metaphorically speaking), offering the reminder only a father can best give, that whatever they're going through, it's going to be okay.

If you haven’t already clicked away, here’s where it gets really smarmy.

Just in case you hadn’t heard (or Robin Williams movies or the Facebook meme-o-sphere hadn’t told you), the time we could be investing in what we love is so easily squandered. And I’m not just talking about spending Hallmark moments with friends and family around the backyard firepit roasting weanies and glugging Safeway Chardonnay, but also hanging out with our own selves alone, pursuing the things that make us more deeply human and more fully alive.

I'd like to render the colors of time in such a way that they’re a reminder of how precious and vital each moment of our life is. Yet, knowing full well that none of us can tolerate living in hyperawareness each and every nanosecond of our existence, the paintings will operate on a gentle basis, quietly encouraging us to do the best we can. 

I'd like my art to be a distilled transubstantiation of the things I love, which I've found—through my life of accretion and subtraction—matter (or that are worthwhile, at least to me). Since I love to paint, this would be an ideal marriage of form and content. The medium will be the message.

This, I believe, is why I'm attracted to the cheerily autumnal shades of medium yellow right now. It's the color of decay and sunshine; of youth and its decline. I've never really articulated this before, but fall has always been my favorite season. (I suspect it's Alfred Hitchcock's, too, likely for the same reasons: hink of all his films that take place in a fall setting: Spellbound, The Trouble with Harry, Marnie). 

 Yellow and White Palimpsest #2, acrylic on canvas, January, 2012, 16 X 20

Okay, I think the worst part of this post is over.

I’m imagining my art in musical terms.

Nope, there's more.

Guitarist Pat Metheny is one of my favorite musicians. But it was only today that I learned he grew up in rural Missouri and that he attributes his particular sound to his particular upbringing. In his music, you can smell the dust of the prairie and feel the hum of tires on the open road. Learning that makes sense. It adds meaning to his music.

Pat Metheny Group’s “Last Train Home,” which, for me, is both a homecoming valedictory and a giving-birth-to.

But some of his recordings are more challenging. For instance, I never really understood his 1996 “Quartet” album—dark, moody noodlings with trashy percussive effects and harplike twangs on his 72-string Pikasso guitar—until today, when I listened to it while working on a couple of large canvases about which I’m feeling a lot of insecurity and, frankly, terror. Simultaneously challenging, opaque and textural, that album is an almost perfect corollary to my aims in painting. It helped me solve a couple of problems I’d created for myself. If I ever get into a gallery, I want “Quartet” to play in a continuous loop during the show.

And Metheny is nothing, if not a reflective, thoughtful storyteller. Likewise, with paint, I'm striving to render the passage of time; of instances conjoined and participating in the experience of flow, which I envision to be like rumbling boxcars or movie frames that shuttle along before you, one after the other, in seemingly endless procession. (But of course, it does end. This knowledge is the key that unlocked my desire to paint—see above.)

In this way, I'm striving for groove just like I do as a drummer. I hope that people will see a cockeyed rhythmicality to my work. I’m aiming to express the rhythm of life radiated through the prism of my unique personal history as transparently as possible.

With this post, I think I’m starting to approach something like a coherent theory behind my art. More to come.

 Yellow and White Palimpsest #3, acrylic on canvas, January, 2012, 16 X 20