Nine drawings

    

Nine Drawings (out of 20), 2021

Each: graphite or conté and oil pastel on paper, 12.5" x 9.5"

One day recently, I went on a drawing spree. I completed twenty drawings during an afternoon while also watching video profiles of various artists. I don't recall all of them, and I'm sure that there were a couple of repeats, but I often enjoy watching videos when not listening to music or podcasts while working in the studio. This particular afternoon, I wasn't in the mood to paint and remembered that I had this pad of nice, smooth white paper made by Fabriano and that I had a bunch of oil pastels that  hadn't been used in years, so that was it, a drawing day it was. I made some drawings back in 2004 or so where I used graphite with colorless and white oil pastels that turned out really well. I wanted to see what could happen using those same materials with my glyph images. 

The types of mark making that can happen when dragging the colorless or white oil pastels across soft graphite or conté was interesting to see. The blurriness and break down of the original drawing does something for me and I can't quite put it into words. I think it may have to do with altering the drawing in such a way that it begins to take on a different shape and appears to be morphing as I'm manipulating the oil pastels. The drawing seems to be in a state of flux, receding and advancing out from the paper all at once. If I cover the drawing with thicker layers or darker colors, the drawing gets buried under a confluence of marks. I'm always debating how much of the original drawing to leave visible. I'll start covering it up from the middle or one side and work my way across it from there. Determining where to stop the over drawing is always the interesting part. I like pushing the marks to the very edges of the glyph grid and figuring out how much of the glyphs to leave and where to cover them up entirely. 

I'm not sure where these will lead next. I've already made some on larger paper (22" x 30") and the results were pretty cool. However, the surface of the larger paper has a mild cold-press feel to it and even though it's a shallow texture, I'm not entirely satisfied with the results. I'm going to look for sheets of smooth paper that's at least 140lbs. A hot press watercolor paper will work, I'm sure. In the meantime, I think there's a lot to experiment with on the smaller sized paper. The 12.5" x 9.5" size feels really good, so I'll probably continue with more of these drawings at this scale. Maybe make enough to fill up a good sized wall. 

TM

 

Art Doesn't Make the Artist

“I can't always relate to your work, but I can always relate to you, and that is what mattered.”

This quote is from someone who is a former coworker of mine that I still stay in touch with. We both worked for a long time at a food retail job in Philadelphia as managers. The business switched hands a couple of times after the original owner retired. I didn't last past the second changeover, but Kerry P. did, although he eventually left there, as well. Kerry is someone who will say what is on his mind and is pretty open with people. It's one of the things I like about him. 

The above quote is from an email exchange we had not long ago. What he said here has really stuck with me because of its honesty. What I make as an artist isn't going to appeal to everyone and there's nothing new about that, it's a simple truth of life, in general. I don't really worry about who will like/dislike my work. I'm more concerned with making it and having it out in the world to be experienced. I guess what it brings up for me is the importance of interpersonal relationships and how we navigate them as artists. What I'm trying to get at is that, deep down, we want a response to our work. If that happens, good or bad, then I think most of us will be satisfied. How we handle those reactions is also key. I wasn't surprised by Kerry's pronouncement of not being able to relate to what I do, since he has said in the past that he has a limited understanding of contemporary art. 

This part, "...but I can always relate to you, and that is what mattered.", is key. It brought home the thought that what we do isn't all that we are. Art has always been a MAJOR part of my life, but just one part, not all of it. I live, breath and eat art, but it isn't the only thing that makes up who I am as a person. I've always felt this way. Often, I think that people can tend to subsume their entire personalities and motivations into what they see as the one thing that makes them who they are. While I believe there is no separation between art and life, art isn't all of life. There are so many other factors that go into what makes up who we are. Much of that has to do with perceptions of us from others. Our personalities and beliefs are made up of our own experiences, how other people experience/perceive us, as well as our own perceptions of the world and others. 

I think I could have easily taken offense to Kerry's remark, saying something like, "What do you mean, you can't relate to my art but you can relate to me? Isn't my art part of me?" and so on. However, that wasn't the case. I accepted his comment because that's his truth, plain and simple. He relates to me as a person from a certain part of his life (work, mostly) and he's had difficulty relating to some of my artwork. It doesn't negate my whole being as a person, if anything, it can open up a path for further discussion about my work and his relationship to it. It's easy to conflate our main occupation with the entirety of our self worth, but in the end, there's way more to us than what we think we know through our work. 

TM

Shockoe Artspeak and the enduring myth of the "starving artist"

 

Shockoe Artspeak, episode 71, Rethink: The Artist Formerly Known as Starving

 

The latest episode of the Shockoe Artspeak podcast, Ep. 71, Rethink: The Artist Formerly Known as Starving really spoke to me. In it, hosts Ryan and Garreth break down the unfortunately enduring concept of the "starving artist". First off, I've always hated this cliché. Even as a young college student who didn't have a lot of cash, I still thought it was a unhealthy mindset. I thought of the starving artist trope as a cartoonish myth, at best and at worst, a demeaning caricature of creative life as being comically and chronically poor, bereft of any value and not a way of life to aspire to. If you're an artist reading this, I'm sure you've experienced some version of this messaging, either via pop culture, from family and friends and others.

In the podcast, "starving artist" is also said to be used by art students as a badge of honor, a way of proving your devotion to being a "real" artist by adopting a mindset that poverty equals artistic integrity; that you're "keeping it real". In reality, adopting the poverty mindset of the starving artist trope is just setting yourself up for failure as a creative person. While it's true that fine artists might not, as a group, make as much money as people in other occupations, it's ridiculous for artists to take on the negative mindset of thinking of themselves as starving when they aren't flush with cash. Now, it can be tough making a living solely with creative work, but if you set priorities and really look at what art means for you and what you want to get out of it, then there's no such thing as being a "starving artist".

One of the things that has kept me from falling prey to a poverty mindset as an artist is understanding early on that I would need to have day jobs in order to have the life I wanted as an artist. For most of us, this is a fact of life, with or without gallery representation. Selling work always goes in phases and there can be gaps of months where little to no money is coming in from sales. It's been important for me to understand that there will be, and have been, downshifts in art income and that understanding has helped me adjust things when needed. If you're able to have some kind of steady income from another source, like teaching or working other jobs then you're likely to keep yourself fed, hosed and pay bills. If you can feed yourself, you're not "starving". That's a rather literal interpretation, but I think it matters. If you're able to maintain your basic needs, then that gives you the ability to continue making your art and the ability to find ways to be a THRIVING artist, not a starving one. 

Anyway, if you've ever wondered about this myth and how it affects artists and the popular view of art making, give this episode a listen. It really got me thinking about some things and maybe it will do the same for you. 

Commitment: Fuel for the Marathon

 

Not too long ago n the studio...

I was recently a guest on an as-yet-to-be-launched art themed podcast. Early on in the conversation, the host asked me how early did I make the commitment to become an artist. Commitment. Words have impact and this one hit me like a ton of bricks...in a good way. Let me explain: One of the most common questions creative people of any stripe get asked is "When did you know that you wanted to do this?". My answer has usually been something along the lines of, "Well, I've always considered myself a full-time artist in my mind, even though I've held day jobs since the age of 13...." For some reason, I could never think of another way to answer that question, until now. 

Commitment is the word that I've been searching for all of these years! It seems silly for this to be a thing after so long, but that's how things work sometimes. I mean, saying that I've always thought of myself as a full-time artist wasn't wrong, it's just that commitment gets to the core of my being an artist and how I've sustained myself mentally and emotionally all these years. Through all of the ups and downs, setbacks and triumphs, my commitment to making art is one of the main things that fuels my creative drive. 

I think that my drive to make art has been so intrinsic to my character over time, that I never consciously thought about what word or phrase best fits All I knew as a high school student was that art was the one thing that I felt I could make a life for myself with; it was one of the few interests that I truly loved and wanted to become better at. There was nothing else that held the same grip on me. I liked my english and science classes, but nothing gripped my imagination and fueled my curiosity like art.  It boiled down to the alchemy-like usage of the raw materials of paint and mediums to translate what I saw in the world around me to paper, canvas or other surfaces. That was and still is magic to me.

I understood at an early age some of what I was getting myself into as an artist. I'd read a lot about artists from the past and what they often had to endure to continue making their work. I also made it a point to educate myself as much as possible about what it may take to be an artist in the present day. I understood that, in no uncertain terms, I would be in it for life, full stop. I didn't know what that would really mean until later, as I began navigating my art life after college. The demands of adult life- bills, loan payments, jobs and relationships, in addition to art has proven challenging and the path stressful, at times. However, none of that has dimmed my continued passion and love for what I do. 

Being committed to art means continuing to do the work when no one is looking nor necessarily caring about what it is that you're doing. When I was a younger artist, I had ambitions of having my work "set the world on fire", of gaining wide recognition for what I did early on. I look back now and feel relieved that I didn't gain early fame because a lot of that work was bad. Bad, but very necessary for me to make. I still make bad work, but it's those unsuccessful ones that make the better ones that much sweeter to claim. I've made the choice to put my work out into the world through a variety of means. That's only the smallest part of my activity. What matters most is what happens in the studio, which almost no one ever sees (unless posted on social media). Even then, no one really knows what I do in there and that's where the commitment  and drive comes in. I don't need anyone to know exactly what i'm doing in the long run, as long as I get to do it and share some of the results. Everything else is icing on the cake. 

Black and Abstract

Shapeshifter (Sm. II), 2020, acrylic on panel, 11" x 14"

Last year, during the social upheaval and protests after the extra-judicial killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black and Brown people by police, I questioned whether my work could be relevant for the moment. Being a Black artist working with abstraction, I felt like what I do wouldn’t mean much to people, and other Black people, in particular.  Art made by Black artists has almost always been expected to reflect the Black community; its struggles against white supremacy, strength in community and various aspects of Black life. Realism being the preferred avenue of messaging. In this context, abstraction by Black artists, until relatively recently, has been, at times, disdained by Blacks and willfully ignored by the greater art world. This is the lens through which I understood things as a young artist in my late teens and early twenties, even though it took me a bit longer to fully understand and fully embrace my own need and reasons to make non-objective art. 

My last years of high school on through to my sophomore year of college saw a big shift in the type of work that I wanted to pursue as an artist. I had learned and practiced the basics of color, drawing, line, form, composition, etc… through realism. Going into my last couple of years in college, I had begun to discover that realism had limitations for me that I couldn’t ignore. By this time, in the late 1980s, I’d begun paying more attention to contemporary art through regular trips to galleries and museums in Philadelphia and New York. A whole other world opened up for me. At the same time, I was finding out more about how Black artists were highly underrepresented in the wider mainstream art world and when they were accepted, there seemed to be a very narrow view of the type of artwork made by Black artists that was acceptable. Basically, almost anything that centered around Black figuration and themes of struggle and community were “acceptable”, a trope that seemed to be the consensus of the Black community and the white-dominated mainstream art world. This is how I understood it at the time. There were very few Black artists, male or female, that were being recognized with shows in New York and other big art cities around the U.S. The biggest exception that I knew of at the time, was Jean-Michel Basquiat. It wasn’t until much later that I would become aware of Black abstract artists like Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Norman Lewis and Ed Clark, to name a few.

Around the late 80s to early 90s, I took an interest in the work of American Abstract Expressionists and later abstract artists, which provided the aesthetic kick that I needed to move into the beginnings of discovering and molding my own non-objective voice. Just prior to this, I had begun to lean into a kind of rejection that would fuel my practice for a long time. The rejection I focused on was what I perceived at the pigeon-holing  of Black artists and art by both Black and white establishments. Both Black communities and the mainstream art establishment only seemed to champion a type of social realism that felt overused and limited in its scope, in my view. An only child, I had developed an independent streak pretty early on, so it’s no surprise to me that I took the route that I did in my work. Later, after high school, one of the things that spurred me on as a young artist, was wanting to prove, mainly to myself, that I could make non-objective work that was just as good as any of the white abstract artists that I had knowledge of at the time. 

Flash forward to now and with almost 40 years of art making behind me, I still have moments of wondering if what I’m doing matters in certain ways. The truth is, what I do as a Black artist working with abstraction isn’t going to resonate with everyone and it definitely isn’t going to directly solve any of the social ills that continue to plague the Black community or other communities. What it can do is provide another way of seeing, another way of helping people to see, to question their world and themselves, perhaps. Also, to show a way forward, to be a testament to hope and a future. The one certainty about making art is that it is an act of faith. It’s an act of faith that assumes a future simply because of its existence. The will to make a painting, sculpture, film or other creative endeavor means that there is some amount of faith in the maker that a future is possible. 

The events of 2020, now bleeding into 2021 are way beyond the scale of what my painting can do. However, the smaller scale individual value that I and my work bring to the table is that of questioning, standing in one’s own truth, through confidence and perseverance. I don’t know what people look for or see in my work. My only hope is that it can provoke a feeling of some kind, good or bad. That is communication, that is making a connection. Whatever connections viewers make with the work is out of my hands, on the other hand, having had the faith to make the work and put it out into the world for people to witness and experience is all I need. I have other goals, like having my work represented in major art institutions and collections worldwide. However, those ambitions have been a secondary concern for me. At this point, I have good  gallery representation, my work is included in many private and university collections and I continue to have work shown, something that I didn't imagine would happen as a teenager, so I now know that it's possible and I welcome bigger things. However, continuing to paint and make the non-objective work that I want, being in dialogue with other artists across time, regardless of who may or may not see it, like it or not, or whatever else is going on in the world is the ultimate success for me. 

Housekeeping

I was supposed to be painting all day, but I finally reached the end of my rope with how the studio had been arranged for the past couple of years. There was also the annoyance of the cats using some paintings as a way to get up to the table on the far side. To finally thwart them and maintain my sanity, I took the room apart mentally and started figuring out the best new situation to go for. 

The main thing was to move the table from the middle of the room to closer to the far wall, as seen above. I took the paintings that had been against the wall and moved them into the closet area, giving me a little more floor space. A win/win. It's funny that doing this is coinciding with the coming of the new year tomorrow. Cleaning is a ritual for many at this time of the year, ushering in the new with a clean slate, of sorts. Doing this rearranging today made a big difference in my mood regarding the space. Even though I don't have more square footage, it feels renewed. 

I did get to paint this evening, after fixing something to eat for dinner. I have a 40" x 40" painting that's been on the wall for almost a week without me working on it. I slowed down a bit because of the holiday, but now I'm gearing back up for January. I spent Monday documenting some small works from this year that I'm sharing between Bridgette and Paris Texas LA. Yesterday, I sent a batch of images to both places to get things moving for the new year. I have a few larger pieces that I need to have photographed by someone else. I can handle smaller works, but my studio setup and equipment isn't favorable to taking photos of works above 16" x 20". 

Another change I made today has to do with the title of this blog. I was thinking about the former title, "Practice", while walking home and listening to an art-centered podcast, The Conversation Art Podcast. The particular pod I was listening to featured a conversation with a director at Lehman-Maupin Gallery in New York. The conversation included thoughts about the language of art, specifically, the language of art as filtered through academia. I thought about the use of the word 'practice', as it relates to studio work and realized that I had been uncertain about renaming my blog 'PRACTICE' for a while now. 

The main misgiving that I had about it revolved around the idea of practice when it comes to studio work. It doesn't feel right to equate what I do in the studio with "practice"; I'm doing the work, not practicing. I may be getting hung up on semantics, but in my head, there is a difference. Practice infers that an activity is being done in preparation for a bigger, more involved activity, not practicing. Doing the work is what happens in the studio. I mean, it's possible that this is just splitting hairs; that "Practice" and "Doing The Work" are the same thing. Perhaps, but I feel much more drawn to describing my time in (and out of) the studio as "Doing The Work". 

TM

Clap 'Cause It Feels Good

 

New work :: Clap ‘Cause It Feels Good, 2020, acrylic on panel, 14” x 11”

There’s no denying that the energy around us has been visceral this year. I can’t think of another word that fits so well. Sometimes, it felt as though our nerves were being stretched to their snapping point with stress, anger, anxiety and grief.

But then, we also found moments of hope, life and laughter amid the madness. Finding space to revel in the simplest of uplift; a dance, humor, making eye contact with strangers over masks hiding our smiles, but not the humanity in our eyes.

Clap ‘cause it feels good, that’s the only justification you need.

Artist Interview on Yale Radio with Brainard Carey

I recently had the pleasure of talking with, Educator, Author, Artist,  and Director of Praxis Center for Aesthetics, Brainard Carey, on WYBC, Yale University Radio. The discussion centered around my studio activities throughout the pandemic and how this year has affected my art practice, as a whole. You can listen to it here: Tim McFarlane on WYBC

TM

 

Dreams and artist statements: translating singular experiences

This morning, I was attempting to describe a dream I had last night to my girlfriend and failed miserably, yet again. I was laying in bed, staring at the ceiling concentrating hard, trying to tell her about what it was like and what was going on in it, but couldn't. Beyond a few words about what I could describe, I was at a loss as to what to tell her about what I could see in my mind's eye about the experience. Images of the dream where still very fresh in my mind, but it was really tough translating what I had experienced in dream time. 

The key word here is 'experienced'. I haven't done much research into dreams, but being that they are a perpetual and integral part of my existence, I can say with some clarity that dreams are pure experience that can barely be translated in a woke state of mind. My inability to recall large swaths of dreams comes from the fact that they are unadulterated, unfiltered experiences that resist translation into our conscious and (we think) rational vocabulary of words. No matter how hard I try, I have always come up short when attempting to relay to someone large portions of my dreams. i can go a whole day, even more, replaying aspects of the dream to myself, but will not be able to describe them to someone else. Dreams are so singularly ultra personal to us that we lack the ability to relay the information that will make real sense to someone else.

This is the same thing that happens when you try to explain a concert that you attended to someone else after the fact: 

Them: "How was the concert"

You: "Oh, wow, it was the greatest concert EVER!"

Them: "What was so great about it?"

You: "It was just fucking amazing!"

Them: *states blankly*

You: "I mean, the lead singer was all like *WAAAAAHHH* and the guitarist was all like *wild air-guitaring gestures* and ..."

Them: *staring blankly*

This brings me to a point about creativity and the folly of translating ideas from the visual to the written in an effort to give other people a way to understand what we do. Artist statements exist to grant viewers and others a way of understanding your work and motivations behind making it. Many artists, myself included, sometimes find it hard to try and encapsulate our creative experiences into a written form that lacks the ability to properly relate the artists' experience of making the work. Most of us want to give viewers a way into the work by writing about our processes and influences, we don't normally talk about the deep, concentrated state of mind we might be in when making the work. However, that deeper state of mind is where I often begin when I'm writing artist statements.

When an artist is engaged in the making of their work, they are having a singular experience that no one else can imagine, much like how we go through life-there's nothing about how we deal with it that anyone else can understand, not completely from our perspective. They can only relate through empathy and/or having gone through similar situations. None of that is a substitute for how each of us experiences anything. Our creative visions, and the execution of them, are ours alone. When we attempt to talk about what we do, verbally or written, we are often at a loss for words. In our artist statements, we trip over ourselves attempting to make our internal journeys accessible to an external public. 

Why is this so difficult? Because, like dreams, our art making is pure, unadulterated EXPERIENCE! When I'm painting, I'm in a mental space that defies the laws of time, physics and the physical, just like dreams. In dreams, our subconscious minds override our "rational", woken thought processes, allowing for a more unfiltered experience that even we don't always have the ability to control. There is the concept of lucid dreaming, but I have to do more reading on it to feel capable of understanding and writing about it. For my purposes here, I'm sticking with what I know of dreams and not having control over them. 

So, what I'm basically getting to is that trying to translate creative thought processes and experiences into written and verbal mediums is very similar to explaining dreams. We literally can't. We've had to find physical language that most of us agree on in order to make our visual language and actions more understandable to others. It's difficult enough to figure out what we're doing ourselves most of the time. Usually, when working, we're in a constant state of existing in two (maybe more) mental planes at once: the creative space of the work we're making and the here and now. Constantly moving back and forth between what we know of as our physical reality and the realities of the creative work space in our heads. 

Artist statements have always been a challenge and now, having thought about the reasons why, based on my "aha" moment today, I have a better understanding of why, at least for me. My artist statements always feel stuck in a certain moment while my creative mind is continually evolving. Often, once I've gotten about midway through a new painting, my mind has already processed present challenges that I may pursue in the next piece or something further down the road. There is this constant swirl of thoughts about the work that makes a written artist statement just about moot. However, because there is a need to provide some justification for what we're doing to show jurors, grant committees, art school faculty, collectors and the public, we have to be able to capture some of the elusive alchemy of what we do and make in the written word. Of course, not every person who makes use of their creativity has to do this, but for the rest of us, it is a necessity. 

The good thing about writing artist statements is that it can give us some amount of clarity about what we're doing and why. While I love unfiltered creativity, I still think that it's good to have some idea about what's influencing us, even if it turns out to be something completely mundane, which, honestly, often it often is. My goal over the years with maintaining and updating my artist statement has been to make it as general as possible, without being too vague and within a certain parameter of concerns. I have found that this way, I'm able to update my statement for different purposes (grants vs. specific exhibitions, etc...) without losing sight of the overall concept of the work and with having to make more and more minor changes along the way. Sometimes, only a word or two need to be changed in order to fulfill a mandate about what I'm doing in the work currently. 

The experience in making a of a work of art is, like dreams, on a lot of levels, still unexplainable outside of it's visual incarnation. That unexplainable bit of mystery is what makes creativity special, what makes us all special because no one can truly understand the mechanics of the singular experience of living nor of creating and therein likes the magic.

TM

It's all new again

Details of two works in progress (11.25.20)

It's a great feeling to follow through on giving old ideas new life. In this case, I'm referring to works from 2013, like A Hazy Reverie and Channel (the former (the former is in a private collection, while the latter is in a corporate collection. I mention those paintings because at that time, the overlapping hard-edged forms felt like something I could explore, but at the same time, I felt like there was something limiting about that work. The problem is that in the making of that particular body of paintings, I'd already started to move on to newer ideas in my head. So, I did just that.

The thing is, there was something about that series that stayed with me: a vertical diptych titled, Everything Happens At Once (seen above, currently in a private collection). It's a black and white piece, composed of two 36" x 48" panels. It was the most successful of the group,  I think, because of the sense of movement and I kept it relatively simple compared to other works in the group. It also felt the most accomplished, the one that was the most daring of my 2013 works, aside from We Dance to Pray, the 13 foot wide piece that I painted on the wall during my show, Presence. 

Flash forward to now and I've once again found a space and time to consider some of those older ideas in a new light. I stopped making those paintings because I'd done about 14-15 in 2012-13 that were of the same concept and I wasn't sure that I wanted to continue with those ideas just then. Once the show happened, I no longer felt that I wanted to continue along that same road and, as is my habit, I started anew. Recently, I had an opportunity to have my work presented for consideration for a commission. The work that had a good response was a piece from 2013 that had sold already. To remedy that, I made a new, smaller painting that had some of the same attributes. I don't usually like attempting to make something that was of an older concept, but for some reason, I jumped at the chance to do this painting. Thinking about it, I realized that I'd still held onto some of those ideas, hoping to explore them again, which is what I'm doing now. 

Since 2013, my work has changed and gone off on some interesting routes, but now I'm happy to have two distinct bodies of work to pursue that offer different challenges and interest for me. The glyph works of the past three years has been great in terms of moving my work into uncharted territory, where every step is a journey unto itself. This work is very experimental. The new iterations of concepts from  2012-13 are very different in terms of how they are approached and executed. There's already a conceptual template with this work that doesn't exist with the glyph pieces. However, that template doesn't make the new work any less challenging. There's just differences in thought and process between the two ideas. 

TM

 

Stretched thin, holding too much

A new untitled work in the studio: 12" x 12", acrylic on panel

I've been making some new, small, non-objective paintings over the past week, of which the above is one. I'm returning to these connected, elongated forms that I started working with back in 2013 with paintings like Channel, which I showed in my solo show, Presence, at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery. I felt something about the forms and constructed spaces I used then, but, as has happened in the past, I felt that I couldn't really continue making paintings in the same way, even as I thought then that there was more to investigate. Instead, as how it happens often, I went down another road and set about exploring the glyph forms that I experimented with years ago (late '90s). So, here we are seven years down the line and I'm once again digging into the past and bringing something forward (art as time travel). 

The paintings I did in 2013 weren't about the body, but they spoke to the conditions of the body as being acted upon by external and internal forces. The main paintings I'm referring to measured 72" x 24", dimensions that a human form could fit into. I looked at these canvases more as mirrors reflecting a myriad of possibilities or incarnations for the human body. It's the human body being acted upon that's spearheading my latest investigations. The social upheavals of the past few years in the U.S. over the relentless and senseless killings of black and brown men, women and children by law enforcement and especially this year with the backdrop of the pandemic, the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and white supremacy being enabled by the president (and followers) has been almost too much to bear. Combine that with the absolute criminal anti-Black and, frankly, anti-human policies of the president and the Republicans making each day a stressful unknown and you have a recipe for mental and physical breakdown. 

The trauma and stress that I have because of all of this is both physical and mental, internal and external. There are days when I feel like my mind is being stretched so thin that it might snap from attempting to comprehend all of the anger, hatred and outright criminal behavior coming from the GOP, the president and their followers, not to mention having to adapt to how rapidly things went bad. The new paintings are shaping up to be avatars for a lot of what I feel is going on within and around me. The forms within the paintings seem to contract and stretch against the boundaries of the panels at the same time, reflecting the conflicts I feel internally. 

So far, I've only been working on small paintings (12" x 12", 14" x 11"), getting a feel for how I may approach the subject matter on a larger scale. I feel like I'm in a good place with how things are progressing. I keep finding novel ways of dealing with a limited set of forms, and a limitless amount of potential colors to use. It's a good place to be. I'm pretty sure that I'll start working on the third five foot canvas I have here this week. I'm feeling pretty confident about handling the work on a larger scale, so I may as well get going on it. I have three, almost four, small panels completed and will have more done by the end of the week. 

I'm not abandoning the glyph work, but I am reassessing how I want to work with those forms and reconsidering the proper formats for them. I'm currently feeling like they work better on a smaller scale than, say the 60" square canvas I just finished today. I also think that they work better on panels or heavier paper instead of canvas. I'm looking into making some collages with paper and cardboard glued together instead of adhering the paper, etc... to another surface. There's a lot of work to get to this week. 

TM

A look back: Roam (Blue), 1999

Roam (Blue), 1999, mixed media, 33" x 48"

I've been thinking about some older work for a while now and this piece in particular, over the past week. I don't know why, but I've felt the urge to unwrap some older work and post them up on IG for "Throwback Thursdays". More importantly, I just haven't just looked at a lot of older work in a while. I need to document a ton of work, but haven't figured out how that will work with Covid, especially with the sickness and death counts getting worse all over the country again. I need to order a light kit soon, right after my next payment comes through. In the meantime, I'll just pull out works unwrap/rewrap them and at least take some studio shots of them, until I feel safe having someone come over to shoot a bunch of work. 

This piece (above), is one of my favorite older works. I made it out of wood scraps, plexiglas and hardware. At the time, I was heavily interested in expanding my idea of what painting could be and wound up suspending a sheet of painted plexiglas above the wood surface and adding another piece of plexiglas to the bottom. Movement, color and materials were the things that drove the making of this work. One of the challenges of Roam was how to integrate the hardware into the work.This was the first time that I was attempting to have a "floating" surface, so I spent a little time figuring out how to make that part work, in addition to choosing what the image was going to be. To keep things simple, I chose one color and that was black.There were a couple of darker elements already and I felt that the black floating above the main piece would create just the right amount of counterpoint to the other colors. An unexpected treat were the shadows created when the piece is lit from the ceiling when installed, creating another layer of visual interest. 

I also liked working with the plexiglas because it was just thick enough to create a layer of distance between the viewer and the painted surface (the plexiglas was painted on the back). I painted the main body with three divisions which enhanced the feeling of movement with the floating plexiglas, which also echoed the bottom panel that was also divided into sections and had a small area of "cells" emerging from the bottom. 

I made a few pieces similar to this around the same time period ('98-'99) that incorporated a mix of materials with varying levels of success. With the other pieces, aluminium, enamel paint and shellac were major components. This approach ran its course and I returned to a more traditional way of making paintings on single surfaces around 2000. 

TM

...for what I want to see

New painting in progress

Last night, I had a bit of a revelation about where I am right now with my work. There is now an overwhelming need for less density in the paintings, or perhaps a different type of density. I'm not sure what that will look like, but it will be different from what I've been making lately. I came to this realization after making connections between my recent work with the densely layered compositions of glyphs and my current emotional state.

The past few days have been rough, emotionally. The death of Walter Wallace at the hands of Philadelphia Police is the latest in a too-long line of similar events that did not need to escalate to an extra-judicial execution in the street. He was having a mental health crisis, had a knife and approached the police, who fatally shot him ten times from at least ten feet away. 

This didn't have to happen. Wallace didn't have to be killed in front of his mother, family and neighbors like that. I keep asking myself, "Why couldn't they at least shoot him in the leg, incapacitate him and de-escalate the situation and get things under control?" The outcome is always the same with Black lives when it comes to policing; shoot to kill, maybe ask questions later. 

Standing in front of a newly repainted work last night, I realized that I really needed to step back and re-evaluate things. I took some white paint and covered up all but one pink, blob-like form. When the white dried, I made a loose grid of lines with an acrylic marker, over which I brushed some matte medium, smearing and blurring the grid. I looked up an album of the Daily Observation photos in my photo stream and sought out something that I could use from one or more of those shots. I found a couple of curvilinear forms that loosely replicated and over those, placed a reddish blob form in the lower left corner. 

I felt such a relief looking at this relatively pared down image! All of the denseness underneath showed through in the textures, but other than that, this painting now breathed like it hadn't before. The heaviness was gone. I realized in that moment that I wanted and needed to move to a different phase of this project with the glyphs; that I needed to focus on some of the other surfaces and instances of marks that I see every day in the streets. So far, I've been concentrating on the 'communication' aspect of this work, which has a very graphic feeling to it. The painted, multi-layered systems I make are full of a type of tension that I like, but that same density now feels overwhelming to me. 

I'm sure that my emotional state has finally caught up to what I've been doing in the paintings and it's just too much. Between the ongoing problems associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, the continuing social strife brought about by the killings of Black men, women and children by police authorities and the current toxic political climate, I'm just feeling overwhelmed. I've been fairly successful at keeping myself focusing energy on painting, but now, I need to change the energy of my paintings to reflect the breathing room I need, instead of the suffocating mournful feelings that keep coming back because of everything going on. 

TM

 

The same and yet, different

In my studio: It's Not The Same You, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 60" s 60"

I've been letting this one sit for a while, although I mentioned it in my last post. It's a new 60" x 60" painting on canvas titled, "It's Not The Same You" (the title comes from a line in The Cure song, Labyrinth, that I happen to like a lot). This is the first large painting on canvas that I've attempted at my home studio in a while because, until a few weeks ago, I didn't have room to even think about making something of this size there. Most of my work in this space has been smaller and was being made in a former smallish bedroom that lacked adequate wall space for something this large. Most of the work that I've been making in-studio has been up to about 30-36" on the longer side. 

I realized a few months ago, that I was going to need more work space, but was stumped on how to make that happen. I don't have money to pay for an outside space, so I chose to convert the front room of the apartment into a work space in addition to the bedroom. I got rid of a couple of dressers and a bookcase, put plastic on the walls and floors, plus and additional layer of drop cloth on the floor. Now, I have a version of a studio that I've envisioned for a long time. I can make larger paintings like this and be able to step back at a decent distance to evaluate them. However, the only way that this is possible is because I've moved a good amount of my personal belongings into my girlfriend's home. Without that support, I would still be trying to figure out how to make this work. 

Over the past couple of years, I've been able to make large temporary murals and installation pieces, but they were either made on-site or in another space that could accommodate the scale of those pieces. Being able to return to stand-alone paintings on canvas of this scale has felt great and has also brought some of the usual challenges. From the start, this painting has felt like one that I had to get out of my system; it's a large scale amalgam of ideas that I've been working on in smaller contexts over the past four years or so. In the past, I've been fond of working on similar paintings at the same time, forming a series of sorts. My present feeling has me looking to break with the past by having more visible distance between some of the paintings. The glyph forms are the only thing that will carry over from one painting to the next. Some will have more of those forms and others will have fewer. For example, I've already begun painting a second 60" x 60" painting that will probably have little in common with this one, compositionally and colorwise, in the end; it has a shimmering black/purple background with a layer of gridded glyphs, so far. I've gathered a lot of new visual ideas these past few years and now I'm feeling comfortable exploring them more deeply on a one-on-one basis, and not rushing to make too similar paintings so much. 

TM

 

Thorough considerations

 Detail of a work in progress, September 2020

A few weeks ago, I purchased three 60" x 60" pre-stretched canvases made by *Fredrix. In the past, I would not have dared buy a pre-stretched canvas, preferring to stretch my own instead. Back then, and I'm talking about 15-20 years ago, store bought canvases were simply not well made at all. They were usually prone to warping and the quality of canvas, in addition to overall workmanship, was pretty bad. However, having worked at Artist & Craftsman for just over four years, I got to see and experience first hand the different kinds of quality of art materials that are out there. Seeing how well the Fredrix canvases were put together was great to see. The solidity and strength of the wood stretchers themselves won me over. That, and the fact that a very well-respected painter colleague of mine uses them for her work prompted me to try them out. 

Aside from the occasional temporary mural-sized pieces I've made over the past couple of years, I had not been making larger paintings of 60 inches plus for at least 6 years. All that changed this year  because of two things: needing larger sized works for some of Bridgette's clients and starting to work with a new gallery in Los Angeles called ParisTexas LA. Before this year, going back to 2013, I hadn't worked on canvas much at all, preferring birch panels, instead. For a lot of my work, I prefer the hardness of panels over canvas because the panels can take a lot of abuse from sanding and scraping. The flexibility of canvas is nice in it's own way, but I still prefer panels, overall. The only thing about panels that I don't like is the propensity to warp above a certain size and they tend to become too heavy and cost a lot to transport. 

So, a couple of weeks ago, I began painting on one of the three canvases I have and I love how the first one has turned out. With canvas, my painting habit is one that's additive, as opposed to the panel works where I can employ both additive and subtractive methods of image-building. What I love about the Fredrix canvases is that they are really tight. I've been able to stretch larger canvases pretty tight, but these are drum-tight for well into the painting process. 

The one new larger canvas I've completed is titled, "It's Not The Same You" and employs a lot of image-making practices I've introduced over the past three years of so on smaller surfaces. I feel like it's one of those stand alone paintings that I absolutely had to make in order to fulfill the promise of so many recent small works and ideas pulled from the temporary mural pieces  and wall- based installations I've been making as of late. The second of these canvases has already started out being something entirely different in how I'm envisioning it and I'm loving the potential in it. 

One thing about being able to focus on my painting full time is having the time and head-space to more thoroughly consider what I'm doing with my paintings. Being able to have the time to really let a painting sit for a couple of days and to be able to look at it any time of the day is still somewhat foreign to me. I'm excited at being able to engage with the work on a day-to-day basis and not have my energies redirected to day-job tasks. Having had all of those years of making the most of a few hours a week dedicated to my painting has helped a lot in terms of realizing how much I can get done now.

*Note: this is not a paid endorsement for Fredrix products, I'm just voicing my own opinions about their canvases*

Processing...

Detail of a new painting in progress-August, 2020

It's been about two and-a-half months since I became a "full-time" artist. Even though I've worked my entire teen and adult life (my first job was at age 13, working as a bagger at a neighborhood grocery store), I've always considered myself a full-time artist, in spite of having day jobs. Art was (and is) always at the forefront of my being; it's been one of the few constants in my life and really keeps me going. I could never picture myself doing anything else with my life and now I have the opportunity to explore and expand my life and practice without giving over so much of my time and life energy to a day job. 

I touched on this a bit in today's virtual conversation that I had with Sandra Felemovicious. The interview was part of her "Tap Into Your Creativity" artist interview series on Instagram Live. The short version is that before the pandemic and lockdown, I was involved in a couple of art projects: one with a group show at Towson University and the other a mural through Philadelphia's Mural Arts program. During the pandemic, I completed a print series with master printer, Alexis Nutini. So, there were all of these opportunities that required a lot of time that I knew I wouldn't have if I continued working at Artist & Craftsman, so I gave my two weeks notice. 

It's been a little surreal, in a way, being able to fully concentrate on my artwork and related projects exclusively. The transition period is still going on, even if it felt that there wasn't much of one. Every day is different within the overall structure of daily events. There were no heavenly choirs singing the day after I left the job, just the knowledge that I had a lot of work ahead of me. There was no time to reflect because I had to get to work right away on a few things. I'm just now beginning to have some comprehension about what my life is now. It feels like both a natural state of being and completely alien at the same time. Still processing.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

One of the things I've been trying to figure out is how to have a larger studio space with the need to make larger paintings again. Both Bridgette and ParisTexas LA have requested larger works for clients. The least expensive way to do that was to clear out the front room of the apartment. So, last week, Julia helped me empty out and move three dressers to the curb, along with my bed. Opening up that space was the best thing I've done in a long time here. The only tasks left are to find floor coverings to protect the wood and to cover the wall I'll be using to paint on with plastic and wood railings to hang paintings from as I work on them. 

• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

I'm in an extremely fortunate position, particularly since we're in the midst of a pandemic, but I also know that this is the time for it to happen. As Sandra pointed out in today's conversation, I've worked my entire life to get to this point. And it's true. While things have turned out somewhat differently from what I imagined when I was younger, I've had steady opportunities that I was able to take advantage of and worked my way to where I am now. I don't know what's going to happen next, but all I know is that I need to keep going and keep painting.