*detail--"Magic Quarter Hour"

A detail of a new painting materializing.

"Magic Quarter Hour"

from J.D. Salinger- Seymour, An Introduction

One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on-some on, some still off-I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was eight. I was using Seymour's technique, or trying to-his side flick, his way of widely curving his marble at the other guy's-and I was losing steadily. Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last cow is being driven into the barn. At the magic quarter hour, if you lose marbles, you lose just marbles. Ira, too, I think, was properly time-suspended, and if so, all he could have been winning was marbles. Out of this quietness, and entirely in key with it, Seymour called to me.

NIGHT RIDE & musings on nature

How does one translate the wonder and beauty of the natural world with plastic means?  It is quite the challenge to produce a work of art that can stand next to what resides out our front door or the landscape through the window before our eyes.  We can evoke or suggest with material means the life that teems around us in nature, but it is near impossible for the dazzling spectacle of the natural world to exist in a still image.  I believe our hearts can be quickened by a work of art as it can be when we experience the world from a mountain top.  But they are still two quite different visual pleasures and experiences.  I have no real answers or assumptions as to how those two experiences could be similar or vastly different, but I do think the search for an answer is what drives artists to still contest with nature.

I think of Monet in his garden.  Toiling to construct ideal beauty on his property as well as in his painting.  He returned to the same subjects over and over again all the while, maintaining remarkable continuity in his work and achieving a complex array of compositions, light, color, and space.

I have begun to regard the teardrop in my work as a subject that could function no differently as Monet would have considered his waterlilies.  The teardrop serves as a foundational object whereby concerns for light, color, and space can perform.  The articulated landscape is a construction of my imagination-an imagined pond where my "lily pads" can exist.  This space can only be visited through the confines of the painting and invokes a longing to be able to enter that space.  It creates a desire that I feel exists when viewing one of Monet's paintings.  The desire to be in his garden.

NIGHT RIDE.   oil on canvas   60" x 60"   2014.

DUPLICATE

DUPLICATE.   steel   2014

The teardrop shape first made its appearance in the paintings and drawings.  I am now making attempts to utilize the drop shape in my sculpture-transforming the teardrop that is by nature an ephemeral/unattainable object.  The tear or water drop cannot be had.  It is born in one minute and gone in the next.  We are unable to possess it, much less name it.  The investigations in my sculptures are to depict the teardrop as a permanent and physically solid form caught in a suspended state of animation/action.  I am striving for  the sculpture to hold both a weighty presence and simultaneously feel delicate and "drop-like"

DRIP, DROP, DROPS

Before settling into prolonged painting sessions, I have been working materials onto fragments of paper that I consider to be drawings. There is usually collage elements that come into play that more often than not are used as a method to edit sections of the drawings and further activate the ground. Even though a good deal of paint is used in these drawings, the paint registers as having been used as a medium/tool for drawing. These exercise drawings explore play and invention with the material that allow for me to have play and be inventive in the paintings. They limber me up for an activity of spontaneity and unhindered explorations with paint.

*all drawings are oil paint, pencil, oil stick, ink, collage on newsprint.

Beauty

The aim or rather purpose of art and why it is what creative individuals do is always at the top of my list of things to dredge up. It is a really old question and is only questioned because as far as can be discerned on the surface of things, art does not immediately serve any particular need; it is rather useless in a utilitarian driven culture. The irony in this is that as more Americans seek modes of comfort and a technology that is created to make life the simpler, the more Americans invest in the devices of a useless nature and alienate themselves from the needs of one another.
Certainly one of the reasons why artists make art resides in, a need to relive through the fabrication of images and objects a moment in their life that they wish to re-experience or in some cases put to death. These hope filled pursuits drive the creative individual to create, but in the summation of their action, produces hopeless results. Glimmers of the glorious (or dreaded) thing or moment might be revealed in the created art, but it will never equal the impact of the actual thing or moment. Thus the catalyst for constant investigation and persistence in the artists practice.
As far as there being an aim/purpose to the art, many have their beliefs and philosophies as to what this answer is and many of the answers come in the form of a verb. At the moment I remain set on an answer to the question that would appear to blanket all other given answers. My answer is derived from a quote that I stumbled upon by (I believe it to have been from) Chardin. Chardin claimed that “the chief end goal for a work of art must be that it be a visual feast for the eye; all other reason follows after this”. These words would seem to emphasize that the aim of art should simply be to provide beauty.
The word beauty has lost some luster over time and while there might exist some conflict over what is beauty?-what is beautiful? Very few of us would argue that we prefer beauty over the drab. Beauty has attached to it a good deal of skepticism and sarcasm when we talk about it in relation to a work of art. The belief that art is made only in times where there is a deficiency of beauty is false and ridiculous. Art will serve its purpose as long as people seek to find escape from reality and put faith in silent pictures and forms. All of this would see to welcome the idea that people like to project their thoughts and ideas upon things that are defenseless and chameleon-like; a thing that exists where we as the determined viewer, have the ability to deem the formidable thing beautiful. Twisted but true.

*Top image: "The Ray" by Chardin
*Bottom image: Photograph of Franz West romancing an object

Passages in Modern Sculpture

In Rosalind Krauss’ book, Passages in Modern Sculpture there is a chapter on Dada and Surrealist sculpture-particular to its origin. The chapter is titled, A Game Plan: the terms of surrealism-the word “game” should be highlighted as the key by which many of the poets and artists would subscribe to birth irrational works.
Krauss opens the chapter with one such game for poets, disguised as a recipe by Tristan Tzara. It reads as follows:

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose an article of the length
you wish your poem to have.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out carefully each of the words in the article
and put them in a bag.
Shake gently.
Then pull out each cutting one after the other.
Copy them down conscientiously
in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And you will be a writer of infinite originality and of
charming sensitivity, although incomprehensible to the masses.

Krauss goes on to state that, “…if an ordered structure is the means of endowing a work of art with intelligibility, then the breakdown of structure is one way of altering the viewer to the futility of analysis. It is a form of shattering the work as mirroring the rational powers of its viewer…Dada’s enemy was a priori, the power of reason, and, most particularly, reason as a vehicle of power.”
Further in the chapter is a bit on objective chance that follows a similar pattern to the poet’s recipe, “Andre Breton’s documentary novel L’Amour fou is an account of the workings of objective chance. At its outset Breton and Alberto Giacometti wander through a flea market where each purchases an object without knowing why, only later realizing that the object, found by chance, answered a question that had been unconscious. Breton’s question, posed by the automatically produced phrase “Cinderella ashtray”, a phrase that had obsessed him earlier, had been the unwitting formulation of his own desire for love; and the slipper spoon that he had found in the market became for him the double sign through which he could read that desire and believe that he would gratify it. Giacometti’s object served in the completion of a sculpture.”
I believe that Surrealism and Dada have had the longest lasting impression on contemporary Western sculpture with post Minimalist works right on the heel. The grab-bag reasons of chance, disorder, and irrationality have reigned supreme for quite some length of time in the past couple of decades. It is perhaps the notion that chance and incoherence are the easiest ways of dodging rational explanations for an irrational practice, but its long standing explorations may be because it is still such a fertile vein for revealing subconscious thought and desire.

Jake Berthot

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

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”.

The Inexplicable Moment

Inexplicable moments are upon us. If we have not had one, the time will arise. These are sensory moments that have the ability to paralyze. The experience presents itself disguised in beauty and when we least expecting it, the veil is dropped. The experience is fleeting, usually leaving us desiring for more or we are so overcome by the magnitude of the experience that we are left in a depressive state with the knowledge that we will never be able to recapture or translate that experience. As creative individuals, these are the moments we strive to relay and though it may be futile/unattainable, it is what fuels our creative capacity.

This is one moment that the architect/sculptor Tony Smith tries to relate.
Tony Smith: When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get onto the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first, I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art.