Doesn’t look bad matted! OMG, I love the vibrancy of water colors! Sitting over my drawing table, they just sing! I think I will be spending more time with water colors — perfect antidote to winter blahs!
Category: Goby’s Journal
Color study: Y O R blue
Working with dominant/subordinate field reversal, where I wanted yellow orange and red for the dominant field, and blue as the accent. An attempt with acrylic was a failure. MUCH easier the other way around, where the warm colors are the accents and blue is the dominant field. I got a nice sheet of Fabriano 140 lb cp yesterday. Cut it up for 5×7 and 8×10 pieces, leaving myself 5 6×3 pieces and a 22″ strip for testing color swatches and combinations.
Here are two… still a difficult combination (though pretty close to what I have in #412) Need to think carefully about the design. And I can’t use red the way I would in acrylic or oil…tends to pink with water color. I could use it dry, almost impasto, in tiny spots, I suppose. Here are two of the 3×6 trials. I’ve posed a problem for myself… think I need to dream on this!
#178 (from 2013) reworked.
24×18″ Flakes of stucco from the Ox, acrylic on back of a Draino Sign.
Moving pieces around until they seem to slide into place. Three years ago.The best scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: making that mashed potato mountain on the living room floor. You know there’s something there but have no idea what it is, and no single piece will ever bring it forth, whole and shining with afterbirth. You have to keep doing it. Over and over. Nursing the symptom.
Something had been troubling me–for a few weeks now. I wrote a piece in that mood, posted it… than deleted it (copied and pasted it below). Too raw. To close. I felt flayed. Looking at #417, I began to get it (See what I wrote on that post) –an insight…. a better understanding of what I’m doing when I’m making art.
What follows, is what I posted and deleted.
I may take this down by morning. I’m weaning myself from FaceBook, so this might be the kinda shit I’d post late late at night exhausted mind weary before giving up on the day and surrendering to inebriate dreams.
Though WordPress will post it on FB. Don’t matter. I ain’t there.
I make no pretense, claiming that my obsession with making art is healthy–least of all for me. Like the walking dead say… it is what it is.
I feel a need to link up with others so afflicted. Hard to find. Lotta peeps make art. The more the better! I’m not looking to throw sandbags around some privileged status! But not all who do… are like 19th C. obsessed. Have.. as good as traded their souls for it.
Oh yeah. I did. I gave it up–whatever that was, that soul thing. I said–you can have it. Let me make art. That’s all I want. Sometimes I hear this weird echo laughter… like.. but I’m doing it.
I have no idea what it means to anyone but myself. Whether it’s good or bad–or what good or bad could possibly mean in our time.. when we have no “posterity” to fall back on… living, as we do, at the edge of human self-extinction.
I’d like to think that what I do might lend itself to imagining a better world. But poets are probly better equipped for that–having words at their disposal. Ideas.
I just…like… see stuff. In my dreams. Play with things. Real things. Pieces of trash… arrange them. Or colors, lines. Maybe they look like stuff you see in your world… mostly, probly not.
Useless. I mean… the LAST thing I want, is to be USEFUL in this bloody horrid corporate fascist world! but it does leave me… feeling useless.
I’d like to live in a world where… there was a place for what I do.. for what I have become. I’d like to be able to make that better world visible. But you can’t “intend” that. It has to come from one’s engagement with the world. If you are. It will emerge in your art. Anything you “intend” will only show what already ‘is.’ To body forth what will … what might be… one can only let go.. .and let it happen.
I did… I made this deal with the devil, like I said. You want to be healthy, happy–or make art? If that’s the choice–which will it be? No hesitation. I want to make art. I always have.
Ok, said the devil. Have at it!
Like my mother said. One should always listen to one’s mother.
“Don’t be an artist. Artists are the most selfish people on earth. But if you are… an artist. There’s no hope for you. There’s nothing else you can do.”
Yeah.. .she really did say that to me.
That’s my curse.
and the worst of it… I don’t want to be cured.
I want to reach out to others so cursed… who know themselves damned, as I have been. We could have a lot to talk about.
#417 Blue dominant: A language more primal than words.
View GALLERY HERE.
24×18″ Acrylic on scrap pressboard. Why… with blue dominant, didn’t I choose a horizontal and pacific design? I don’t know…. and yet….
… I look at this again, as something in a dream, or an image–not even an image, but movement. Remember when you were a child, watching runoff along the curb after a rain? Imaging yourself watching a great river from space, a deluge slicing through continents. Is it that these patterns are there in our unconscious, so when we think we are working with abstract, non-figurative visual ideas, we are mapping those patterns, and the degree of satisfaction we feel as we work derives from how close we have come to those unconscious patterns? Before we had words for what we saw, images–moving, always moving–crossed our fields of vision, without names, without the burden of language–or rather, with a language more primal than words?
How can it ever be irrelevant–to map what is hidden–to what actually drives our actions? We give so much credit to consciousness–to conscious will, when it’s no more that a pipping bird on the back of a Rhinoceros.
Planning color study series. Each a Fugue in 4 voices
What I have in mind: each piece with 4 hue scheme in 4 variations
Let A be point One on color wheel, B it’s compliment, C-D split compliments
1. A = Dominant, B,C,D subordinates
2. B,C,D Dominant, A subordinates
Each of these with its inverse for each chroma. Theme and variation.
For 1, if A= Blue B, C and D would be Orange, Yellow orange and Red orange respectively,
with A Dominant and B C D subordinates
Inverse would be Orange=Dominant, with Blue, Blue-violet and Blue-green as subordinates.
Tone and chroma would vary as I might see fit.
David Bowie… reflections on our human failings
Have been following the emotional outpouring on the death of David Bowie–from those who mourn his loss, and of those who call out, with equal passion–call attention to his sexual abuse–and not always different people.
I was 28 when he came out with his first album. The year my oldest son was born, Thirty-one when he emerged into the iconic image he was to occupy for the rest of his life. The only song I could name of his… I guess would be Changes.
There would be no one I could name–certainly no figure in the popular spotlight, who had the life changing impact for me that I’ve been reading on FB. More a solitary journey, that coming into my own life. Books. Camus’ Resistance Rebellion & Death. Leaves of Grass. Blake. There were artists that had that kind of force–Kathe Kollwitz, Daumier. There were no friends, no one my age, I shared this with.
Music? Nothing will ever change me more than that half hour sitting on the front steps of my parents’ house, 12 or 13… listening to… and hearing, really hearing… a recording of Bach. I think it was the Musical Offering. Nothing could be more different than the collective release and joy people have been describing–their first Bowie concert. I envy that… to have had an experience that connects–that brought people out of their felt estrangement, when all such analogous moments for me, have been to fortify my own spiritual isolation.
Also has me thinking of how difficult it is to emerge from the culturally accepted miasma of confused notions about what’s ok… and what’s not… into something like a clear understanding that there is no way to ‘get it’… to get what is right or wrong, good or bad–but through observing and listening to the effects of what you do, what others do, what the conditions of culture does– to others–on other lives. Real lives. Lives, not your own. It doesn’t come by ideology, isn’t learned by rules… “rules” are the biggest problem.
It’s a kind of learning that comes by fits and starts. There’s no sudden perfect enlightenment. Where all at once you see… that no matter how your friends, the supporting cast of your young life, sees sexual conquest as a good thing, as something to be admired–that you come to see what that has done to a life that is not your own, for whom that cacophonous drum of collective expectation, is a kind of death–if not a real, physical death. That what we do, without thought, has other names, deserves other names: abuse, rape, murder… spiritual, if not physical.
By fits and starts we learn to free ourselves. As abusers, would-be abusers or actual, and by fits and starts–as the victims of power and privilege. By fits and starts.
I hope, for the sake of those who loved this man, who found in his art a gateway wide open to wider awareness and freedom–for their sake, if not for his memory–a memory I don’t share… that through fits and starts, he learned. He learned to know what he had done–felt the shame and remorse of having hurt, having damaged another life… and moved past it. If he did… I hope… for all of us… who learn by fits and starts, out of lives where none have been free–of what we have done, of what has been done to us… learn to forgive. Not to erase the reality–but to embrace that freedom–that we can live a life of healing, beyond hurt, and hurting. What else is freedom for? What other meaning can freedom possibly have?
Harman on Latour’s Politics
This article made me think, how the material reality of the house where I live (I’m remembering the Ox, the communal warehouse where I lived) shapes our lives in ways that are beyond what we intend or choose. The material reality we make or choose, makes us. This made me think of our kitchen. My increasing dissatisfaction with how we use it. Our shared and progressively less shared and more individually fragmented kitchen–how the physical kitchen, by it’s small size, its limited storage, shapes this fragmentation into a less and less communal space. In the Ox, a dozen people could work, sit around and schmooze, clean up and cook, all in the same room. The huge work table and ample space not only made this possible, but it invited it, and the space of the Ox itself–a space with its many rooms and open areas, good for music and hanging out, needed to be filled–and that in turn, required a degree of cooperative action for cleaning and care–which when resisted, made us (FORCED us!) to be aware (to different degrees) of our mutual dependence (and how unready we were for this, having come from the dominant culture) in ways that living in an apartment, didn’t. Living in a house divided like this–like most middle and working class housing– people can comfortably settle into their habitual, individuated lives; can see in this how a shared house, arranged for isolated non-extended ‘family’ units–needs a high degree awareness–and experience with more communal living–to resist being re-formed into something closer to the cultural norm–the divided and alienated consciousness suitable for capitalist exploitation.
My way to Speculative Realism was through Harman’s was through Harman’s Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. It’s difficult, after all these years, to convey the sense of excitement I felt when reading this book. I had felt it before, my first year of graduate school when reading Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology (I actually dreamed about that book). There I felt as if an entire opaque world of theory opened up to me that both allowed me to understand the thought of figures such as Lacan but, more importantly, that allowed me to put that theory to work and comprehend the world around me. Harman, of course, is a consummate stylist. There is a certain charm and style to his writing that is difficult to put your finger on. Often it occurs in the margins, when the reader comes across offhand asides that he makes such as…
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#277
View GALLERY HERE.
Three Who Saw Truth. Oil stick, acrylic, dirt & sparkles on weathered plywood.
This was my first post on this blog, January 23, 2015. Windows 10 changed how it handled pictures–which led to some confusion, and my deleting almost 400 images added since that first post. With much cursing and hair pulling, I’ve begun to restore the images.
I found this piece of plywood put out for trash. I liked the textures, the large knot-rings suggested eyes. I worked it over with oil sticks and these three–or are there four? — faces emerged. Two of them seenm to share one of the eyes. Not the kind of ‘beautiful’ piece most people want to have in their home, but I think this would look awesome on a well lit wall.
Anselm Kiefer: Negative Worship of the Capitalist State
He likes Merkel? …and calls himself ‘underground?” I guess, like Weiwei, it takes millions to be underground. I like Weiwei’s politics better. For all the brooding spectre of his work… smeared with the soot of German history. Art that only exists by the largess of power and wealth, cannot but stand as a monument to the glory of the Capitalist State–is a kind of kitsch. Like the architecture of Speers he admires.
Anselm Kiefer: ‘Art is Difficult, it is not entertainment’ An interview in the Guardian.
#409 – with color inversion
View GALLERY HERE.
20×16 Acrylic on wood laminate
Something not right with that orange. While chromatically brighter, it appears darker, when everything else become lighter in tone toward the center.Now look at a color inversion in Picasso. Wow! I should have stared at it in bright light, then painted what I saw when I closed my eyes! I don’t know if it’s a distortion of the digital image, or an optical effect in the painting that makes the orange darker in tone. That can happen, colors aren’t true to themselves, but are altered by the colors around them–in both chroma, and tonality–but the orange in the inversion (now blue), is no longer darker, but lighter.
Now I want to use the color array of the inversion!
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 