My Nemesis

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Working at my easel I heard a thump and a rustle of papers somewhere behind me.
Cat.
Murphy had finally clawed his way through a box holding drafts–some 700 pages worth–of my great but destined to forever go unread first novel…. The Magic Slate… cardboard shredded, fell apart, pages sliding down the side and between other boxes to the floor.  ‘Nemesis’ was its first working title.
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I wish the photo of #499 were better–I was pretty happy with it. I think I’m finding my way with metal point, my own signature.
A couple of painting I’d pulled out and set aside to paint over were rescued by Sire for his room. When I like–or dislike– one of my pieces, it probably hasn’t much to do with it’s actual merit–if such a thing is measurable. What I like isn’t so much the painting, as it is its power to suggest what I want to do next. The pieces I paint over are like closed doors to rooms I’m no longer interested in visiting. Metalpoint seems endlessly fresh, because I’m finding new ways to use it.
I’ve got the ground now where I like it. I can get beautifully modulated tones, and almost hear the grit of the silver as it slides over the surface–I detested the plastic-like feel of the unadulterated Golden Silverpoint ground. I use about 1/4 cup of high quality gesso, a heaping TBS of fine marble dust, maybe a teaspoon of water soluble brown ink (with soft Golden Titanium white if the ink makes it darker than slightly off-white–and the rest, Golden ground. Two cups.
 ‘Nemesis.’  The muse as fatal temptress… that an artist, writer, poet… can achieve the best of their ability only by pressing themselves beyond that… pressing on to an ultimate, and fatal failure.
I look at that dusty heap of papers… Fail… fail better.
(My second novel, Ari Figue’s Cat, was published in May, 2015. Check out the reviews on Amazon!)

The Ineluctable Tragedy of Existing

larvalsubjects's avatarLarval Subjects .

tumblr_nfolu6LbZ81rrajnno1_1280There is something unbearable about the Lacanian teaching; something that makes you want to turn away and flee, or at the very least forget.  It is not his opaque style, though that style performs the very thesis he wishes to articulate.  At its heart, the core Lacanian teaching is that there is no cure for existence, that the horror and dissatisfaction we experience in existence is a structural feature of being a speaking-being rather than an accident that befalls some.  Our introduction into language produces an ineluctable fissure within our being, generating a structural loss, forever fracturing jouissance, condemning us to be creatures of desire and drive.  Desire becomes a hole that can never be filled, that pervades every aspect of our existence, and that haunts the entirety of our world and social relations.  Everywhere we see cries raised to heaven, striving to treat desire, this fissure, as an accident

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John Cage…& the Queering of my Master’s Impulse

Listing to this…

I’ve been listening to a lot of John Cage. I think it’s cause my art has become so centered on the tension between intention and accident.
You think of Cage, you think accident, random patterns–but it’s never just that. There is always the constraint within which the random is allowed to happen, and in much of his work, where there are performers, you hear in the performance, exactly that kind of tension emerging again and again… in little snatches of melody, in coy references to known melodic lines: it’s delicious!
I’ve been doing this since I started making art again–I mean, exploring that tension between control and accident… but never so aware of it as I’ve been since I started playing with silverpoint, where even the reference to the medium calls up associations with great Renaissance draftsmen, da Vinci, Durer… at least, if you are familiar with European art history.
There’s something so satisfying in turning their obsession with control inside out, in the one medium most demanding of that control… you can’t erase a mark in metalpoint. You can’t even cover it over… as it will eventually show through as the metal oxidizes.
… which makes covering over one of the techniques I’m working on… layering. Accident… but also… intention. Structure. I hold those great artists in extraordinary reverence…(too much so… in that this accounts in a major way to my 40 years abandonment of visual art)  and admire those contemporary artists who emulate them, mastering their technical facility. But technical facility, without invention?
The artists of Renaissance were in love with science; they explored their understanding of the physical world through their art. Cage releases my imagination to explore my fascination with the layering of perceptions… how we comprehend the world through layers of the received, the given, and the accidental: revelations into what we might never otherwise have imagined.

 

Mediating Vision: a class in drawing meditation?

Drawing found things

Walking this morning in the bright spring sunlight, I happened on a pine cone, a weathered piece of wood, a twisted twig with peeling bark: the kind of objects I like to have before me when I want to draw, slowly–in a state of concentrated attention. While few of my finished pieces are representational–it’s in drawing that I learn to see. Drawing mediates between what my eyes encounter, and the corresponding inner vision that is the source of my art.

The photos below are examples of what I think of as drawing-meditation.

It occurred to me on my walk, that I would enjoy teaching this kind of drawing–for anyone, but primarily for people who don’t think of themselves as artists, who believe that art is for special people with ‘talent,’ who have convinced themselves that they “can’t draw a straight line with a ruler”

The goal would not be to learn to draw–in the usual sense of what that means: making drawings that “look like” what you see, but rather, to learn to see through the mediating act of making marks on paper. Drawing as meditation, as the key to opening the third eye–to seeing what is there, and what is not.

There can be no right or wrong, no good or bad to the drawings we would make–because the marks and patterns we would be creating/dis-covering, wouldn’t be on the paper, but in the mind, where no one else can see to judge them.

We could begin, for those with no background, with some ideas about how to make different kinds of marks with a pencil, how to use a fine pen nip with ink. This too, is about learning to see: acquiring a simple vocabulary to use when we begin to translate the vision of the eye to the vision of … but why give that a name? …as there is no label that would be common to all.

We would need three pencils: a 2H, an HB, and a 3B. (later, you might want to add an even softer/darker pencil: a 4 or 6B.

A pencil sharpener (or single edge razor and piece of fine sandpaper)

A #102 crow quill pen nib and holder.

A bottle of India ink.

And paper.

If I had space to do this (I was thinking that a picnic table in a park would be perfect–where we could always find objects nearby to draw), and people who would like to do this with me, I might ask for $15 a session… but no one turned down for lack of funds.

Would you like to try something like this?

Silverpoint practice featherdrawing bark#459 silverpoint dry flowers#399#335 Sidewalk 2