I've been doing mostly writing and pondering this week as I finished up my final review book and slide show. It's been cool looking back though all these journal posts and revisiting my journey. I just wanted to share this funny thing i noticed.
This is the first painting I did after my midpoint review, kicking off this whole project.
And this is the most recent beginning of a painting I did, sort of winding off this project.
Without intention, look how they match. I find it interesting that despite the color explosion of the past 3 semesters, that I started and ended in the same place chromatically. Oh me...
For those of you who are interested, here is the final draft of my
FINAL PROJECT SYNOPSIS
This collection records the answers to the repeatedly asked question, “What happens when I do this?” To describe the work beyond that betrays it to a certain degree, because at the core, I made these paintings to showcase the loveliness of art materials, namely various pigments, fibers, and binders.
When I begin a painting I uninhibitedly mark or pour or glue papers or fabrics to a surface. Every decision I make after that is reacting to what I see. Ultimately, I try to create balance, but I treasure the challenge of making a mess and cleaning it up. I get pleasure from taking things out of context and also creating new contexts where disjointed elements come together harmoniously. If I see a transparent, liquid, warm, bright layer, I next choose a dark cool or perhaps a near white thick direct mark. Then I attempt to tie those first two together. If I use a strong pattern I slightly obscure part of it to transition into the next element. I love watching paint move, and I feel propelled forward by wonder.
Since I started studying art history, I have fallen deeply in love with the spectrum of New York School (and Black Mountain College) painters from the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s and consider them my people. I can clearly see a tie to Mark Rothko in the sensitive, transparent layers and sophisticated color relationships, early Jack Pollock in the direct intuitive mark making and late Pollock in letting gravity and the liquid nature of paint do some of the work, Cyfford Still in the choppy edges of shapes, Robert Rauschenberg in the use of found papers that left/leave record of a time, Helen Frankenthaler in the allure for how paint seeps beyond the mark— across fabric, and Bill de Kooning in letting women look unflattered. Every artist who I’ve been exposed to has affected my work in some way, though I do not think of my work as derivative. Partly because I could never focus on one thing like Rothko, think I’m done learning like Still, or use so much oil like Helen. I’m always willing to consider a critique and see what happens when I change a painting, unlike Jack.
Alongside the men in that group of artists, I could also be varyingly accused of arrogance (bordering on self-righteousness), partaking in my share of barroom libations, knowing well the teachings of early twentieth century psychologists and letting the parts of my mind I do not control or understand have say in my artwork. I don’t know if those commonalities are correlations, causations, or just freak coincidences. Put simply, many of the physical things interest me that painters of WWII era showed their fascination for in their paintings: the materials. They gave the materials the attention they deserve, highlighting the beauty and the wonder of various media and the endless myriad of potential combinations.
However, I see the original Abstract Expressionists as working toward some lofty goal of minimizing paintings to some essential components; they all had different ways of executing the reduction, just as I have my way of manipulating the materials. That group of individuals seemed to want something back from the art world. They wanted validation, maybe from Clem Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, maybe gallery owners or collectors, but they all seem (through the books and films I’ve devoured over the years) like they were miserable without fame and constant praise.
My abstract work is my most intimate and personal. I make paintings that I enjoy looking at; I win the game just by watching myself apply paint and sometimes even watching it dry. I do not seek corroboration because just making the paintings is validating enough. This work is my anti-care. When I paint, nothing matters but the materials. Not to say I never feel the weight of getting a painting right, but I love it the whole time. Even the pain of painting feels good to me. This work makes me better at everything else I do because I get to do it. When I’m waiting in the bank line I think, “Soon I’ll be painting an the rest of these schmucks will be in cubicles.” This body of work is about the materials. The materials control the images. I am but a middleman or perhaps a partly manipulative observer.
I have the audacity to paint like this because of who I am: brazen, bold, and not obligated to any preconceived standard. To offer a more vivid peek, I giddily and belligerently turned 30 just before midpoint; I exclusively date guys though I’m terminally single; I only vegan food eat (and have for 14 years); I don’t know if I want kids, but work at a baby store; I continue to be completely mobile/dependent-free. My (non-geographically) close little sister’s identity starts with being a genderfucky, poly-queer, shy badass who doesn't know it. Neither of us owns a razor. She graduated in gender studies recently, which prompts regular dialog on various identity spectrums. All of that plays into my taste, which affects what I think is sexy and what I choose to look at and pull from. I enjoy the wide range of androgyny in clothing. Art model and critic, Anya Lynn Gart, said that this body of work “evokes a positively-charged sensuality. The color masses that bleed into or overlap each other remind the viewer of the conflict between sexes.”
The fashion industry has played the biggest role in both gender defining and gender neutralizing. I have fully immersed myself in high and pop fashion the whole time I have been working on this project. I have literally seen every single look go down the Fall and Spring runways at New York, Paris, Milan, and London fashion weeks in since midpoint and watched every episode of Project Runway, America’s Next Top Model, and limited various international renditions, precursors and knock-offs. I consume mass quantities, and this work is what flies out. Sometimes it truly feels like I’m a marionette of sorts, or a radio receiver with information merely traveling through me, info in code so I have to solve the puzzle. Yet no metaphor fully encapsulates the power dynamic. Regardless, I could never be so prolific without the constant intake of media and design. My friend asked me if I ever regret, because I act so impulsively, and quickly. I never worry because most of my favorite paintings had phases that were embarrassingly heinous to look at; the pentimenti of the figuring make the final surface so interesting.
Fashion has felt relevant to my art throughout this program, considering that my final for Crossing Borders my first semester (a class about art and culture in a global society) was a skirt with vocabulary words illustrated with happy (and sad, and confused) little fruits and veggies. As I made that skirt, I was thinking about how clothing both tells the world how we want to be perceived and also hides our physical bodies. I was thinking about communication in a very literal way.
As I continued my studies I became more interested in fashion as a commodity and temporal item. I’m fascinated by the way the passing of time affects the value of garments, how a fall sweater comes out the previous spring, so by the time fall actually arrives that sweater is already “last season”; then I also wonder about the line between passé and vintage. I also love and employ the concept fashion designers use of combining muses from throughout history and intertwine their influences into a new, fresh idea. The whole industry is a never-ending bountiful font of fodder for working from as inspiration. I also use textiles and fashion advertizing to pull in colors, textures, and patterns from the current season connecting my work to a larger product of now.
Fashion marks the noteworthy events of humanity and converses with fine art throughout world history. As part of that story, I do not always want to describe it literally. I borrow exciting elements from new work churning out of fashion and incorporate them into my abstract paintings. Not to say those connections are always clear to me in the moment, but I can pretty much build a case about abstract art on anything on demand.
The one thing I could never wax was drawing skills. I needed to become a better drawer in order to consider myself a “master of fine art”. My drawing lacked confidence. I have always loved looking at slightly awkward drawings like those by Egon Schiele. Even though I wouldn’t call his renderings “perfectly executed” they have a sexy, confident air about them. Mine, rendering aside, always seemed weak, timid, like that of an amateur. I know from my past that the only way to get good at something is to do a ton of it.
I set out, with the guidance of Mark Elliot, Bay Area artist and Academy of Art University faculty member, to draw feverishly daily, to study and gain control. Mark’s sketchbooks inspire me, and I keep figuring out the things he told me. Long after that class ended I was doodling out of Vogue, and suddenly what he had had said about filling the page and using different weights and textures of pen marks just fell into place. I knew before but hadn’t previously been able to take a drawing far enough without either losing interest or overworking it. During the semester I worked with Mark I collected many prismacolor markers. But ever since I realized what I think he was trying to get me to understand the whole time, all I need is piece of paper and a cheap ball-point pen to get the results I want and the practice I need.
If a drawing has too much media on it, the essence of the thing the drawing is of is pushed down or in competition with the materials. Figuring out that simplicity is what I admire in drawing released me from feeling my paintings needed to have subject matter. I finally realized that traveling back and forth between controlled studying and reckless paint application actually propels me forward as and artist and a person. I never get bored. If one extreme gets frustrating or monotonous I let the pressure out by doing the other.
Where there are two poles, one can usually find a whole spectrum. At first was looking for work in the dead center of the spectrum between figurative and abstract, using rendering and media surface to manipulate the thoughts of the viewer. But then I realized when I paint, the paint itself is so fantastic and surprising and beautiful that I don’t want anything to distract from that. If a painting is of something, having a recognizable subject, say a person or a shoe, the materials get knocked down the priority list. Working on this project I challenged myself to use outside references to create shapes that I wouldn’t necessarily think up, but to still keep the “things” playing small enough roles, roles so that the paintings would still be “of nothing” and therefore obviously about the pretty surface of the materials.
So in summation, this series of mostly abstract paintings meditatively extract, combine, distil, and distort all of the things I have thought about as I painted over the past two years. Even though I push frivolous thoughts about materialism, the want for things, and heavy things like major social justice issues out of head while I paint, it’s easy to put them back in as a viewer. I think talking about and figuring on and discussion and growing from making art and sharing both process and product with others both is and shapes my identity and my art. I have fun connecting and disconnecting from the world as an artist.
I recognize this project as only one tiny manifestation of what piques my curiosity. I already have so many ideas for further work based on everything I’ve learned in the past few years. I have my hands and mind on many budding projects that fall on various places on the scale between abstract and figurative. Some community-based like an RVA Drink ‘n’ Draw Exquisite Corpse exhibit. Some 3-D, I started some clay figure sculptures last winter that have finally dried and been fired, ready for surface treatments, including a head and neck that will go into a fashion illustration inspired stained glass window. I have more skills now for communicating in both subtle and direct ways. I will continue to consume and digest and excrete fashion and art and media and culture. Now I will do so as a Master of Fine Art.
