It's All About Me :-)

I had my meeting with Sarah Slavick on Friday. It was very informative. In our discussion we focused in on my struggle with "object attachment" and what I'm now terming as "compositional struggles" as being just that: MY struggle. That it most likely comes from my 25-years as a commercial artist and the fact that I have been working artistically for other people and it has been my job to make sure that a specific message is communicated. And how because of that I struggle with wanting to make sure a specific message is communicated in my own "Fine Art" work... and that it is important that I try and break from this carry over of the commercial world.

We talked about where I "fit" historically and artistically...

• That I have an affinity to abstract expressionism, and I'm using paint in that way, but also there is a layer of systems, order, management and control.


• That it reflects other contemporary artists who are thinking about systems, and organizing thought and rationality, and thinking about layers of understanding, about managing and negotiating their world, and the complexity of the layers.


• And that there is a kind of return to the idea that paint can be something beautiful--that it can be an aesthetic experience is in itself valid and important. There is a longing for that in some way, because we are so inundated with things in the world that bombard us visually every day.

We also talked about the source of my work (and how my "struggle" with object attachment is linked to it)...

• It’s coming out of a place where I always look at things in nature. That I take some kind of solace in that, that I am a part of the world and that I appreciate nature and I am recording the beautiful things that I see and the beautiful things around me and I am communicating that to people because the real world is something people can appreciate and it gives them a doorway in to the work.


• That there is a psychology in me that I need to hold on to something that is real and natural in the world. Yet at the same time I want to transcend that world into a non-physical one.


• That I can think about the physical material of paint and creating a physical/material vision of the world and from that image I can somehow transcend that physical thing.


• That I can use paint to transcend the viewer from thinking that they are looking at paint.


• It’s more my frame of mind. How I feel it, and what my goal is. And a viewer will look at it differently than I will, and that's okay.

Our conversation helped me put certain things into a different perspective, and I'm now interested to see how that will manifest in the studio.

Last weeks work...

These two are finished...




And these two I just started. Here I am introducing a photograph back into the mix (the glass block from the bathroom at Walden Pond). Am going to experiment with layering in some of the painting techniques I've been using and see how they inform/talk to each other. Interestingly though, on the top one I'm choosing to use the paint very transparently, whereas in my earlier works I used the paint very opaquely. Although as I begin adding more layers I may have parts that are opaque and parts that are transparent...