Holes of Bisbee

Gesso, ground chalk, ink, graphite on Newsprint.

To Modify

After sitting and examining the work on the left for about a month, I came to the realization that every time I looked at it I felt uneasy. It was wrong-seriously wrong. I set myself to modifying the work and pin-pointed the restlessness to have resided in the central portion of the composition. Making quick work of exterminating the awkward shapes, I settled upon the arrangement on the right. I now feel at ease.

Jake Berthot

Jake Berthot speaks about the irrational impulses in art making and becoming a servant to the painting.

Calamity Jane

Gesso, Ground Chalk, Ink, on Newsprint/Newspaper/Phonebook Pages

The "Break Off" Point

This is an excerpt from an interview with painter David Reed taken from the book, ‘Between Artists’.
Reed: Painters discover in the process of working that painting itself is a kind of nonverbal thinking. This kind of thinking is difficult to describe-often it can’t be expressed in language for a generation or two. What can’t be verbalized is unnerving. When I first started working abstractly, part of me would identify with the painting, as if I were inside it working through the forms. Another part of me would stay outside and watch what was happening. I felt split in two. I was afraid that I couldn’t come back together again. In some of my first stroke paintings, the idea was to work so quickly that I knew I could get the two parts back together. Finally, I decided that this experience of being split apart was necessary to make a painting. I learned just to grit my teeth and take it. Then in Tom Wolfe’s book ‘The Right Stuff’, I read about a similar experience. When the test pilots for the X-2 got up to the edge of space, they reached a point they called the “break off”. The pilot was no longer in his body but saw himself from above and behind at the same time. He felt at one with the plane. He belonged in space, not on earth, and could do anything he wanted-then he crashed. I still have to go through that break-off point with each painting, but now I know it’s part of the process.
*image, David Reed, Color Study

Sculpture Manifesto-Serra Verb List

Serra’s verb list serves as a reminder of the possibilities an object may undergo. The potential success of a sculpture rests in one or more of these determined actions. It is satisfying alone to take one choice material and subject it to any one of the following practices.
An object is polluted when it becomes victim to one too many idea or physical/material manifestation. I speak not of a Minimalist notion, but simply of clarity in vision- purity in the inspiration. Reactionary impulses with materials can be both intuitive and systematic. The result of either of these sculptural practices should remain local to the object and not force an awareness of its creation. The object should simply exist.
If the object brings the viewer to a realization of its craft it detracts from the whole and trenches the viewer in cosmetic drudgery. These kinds of moments bring the viewer back to “self” and away from “other”.