Woodshedding
Reflections From the Woodshed
On the backend of 2018 an agreement was made between two artists to duck into the woodshed in the tradition of Jazz musicians and (in my case as soon discovered) in the spirit of Jack Whitten. Our aim was to shut out the world or as Agnes Martin would say “Turn our backs to the world and paint”. This meant disengaging from most forms of social media, limiting all distractions, settling in and focusing purely on the work. The rest was established as the year progressed. Shortly after our pact, Whitten’s own ‘Notes From the Woodshed’ quickly came in to my purview. The insights into his practice, his cosmology, and his meticulous observations of the natural world were like a homing device. For example, the following (imperative) objectives of Whitten’s from his studio log in ‘98 (not typed in situ):
1) Remove the notion of me.
2) Don’t wallow in the past and with God’s help avoid Romantic Nationalism.
3) The painting is not an illustration of anything.
4) Don’t succumb to populist aesthetics.
5) Accept the fact that there are multiple dimensions in time.
6) Don’t ever beg for anything.
7) Accept God’s guidance and forever be FREE.
8) Learn to live by the philosophy of Jazz.
9) Only fools want to be famous avoid at all costs.
10) Avoid Art-World strategies.
11) Erase all known “isms”.
12) Balance the Apollonian and Dionysian at 50/50.
13) I MUST CHANGE THE COURSE OF ART HISTORY.
14) Don’t ever use the phrase Avant-Garde.
15) Learn to hate the history of art and above all don’t trust it.
16) THE PAINTING AS OBJECT MUST EXIST ON ITS OWN TERMS.
17) Use science as metaphor.
18) REMAIN TRUE TO MYSELF.
What ensues are reflections from my own woodshed year. 2019 was filled with joy, curiosity, exploration, hardships, heartbreaks, hard-fought wins and lessons, lessons, and more lessons. It is too much to condense into one little post—I’ve processed and output some combination of over 9,000 images/works which by no means implies all of these images/works are noteworthy or even salvageable. Where applicable I’ve included writings that coincide with the particular month’s output. In many cases, while a decent way to augment and document one’s practice, the writing lapsed primarily because the preference and overall aim in my own practice remains to create a lasting visual lexicon. In those instances I took another cue from Whitten and noted where I had “gone wintering” aka gone star-gazing. In these instances, I have provided words from sources of study.
Cataloguing this Woodshed year is a massive undertaking, as such the major works and projects created during this year will have their own tabs for you to poke around in as you see fit. They may or may not be in any particular order depending when you land on this page. Some of course will be stand alone projects and others are just what the best of that month had to offer and may be one offs.
image to the left/above:
M Theory (These Go to 11)
Acrylic, flashe software output, digital processing on fiberglass fabric
36x60
Reflections From the Woodshed January
1/1/19 It took Agnes Martin 20 years to arrive at what she would paint and more specifically to produce one work that she found pleasing—This year is about the monastic call to art; to really take up my “orders”; be still and listen for direction. All monks have a guide for a time—Although I will be studying with the masters this year: Rothko, Martin, Sage, O’keeffe, Mitchell, Dali, Klee, Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Goethe, af Klimt, Kandinisky and many, many more— I pray that I am emptied of all the fears and woes and anxieties and false starts, and ego driven bullshit; that I let go of all that hinders me and has tried to bind and deter me—I ask that all of these obstacles be removed and most especially those of self-sabatoage. So, here’s to a year of exploration, discovery, adventure, study and the ecstasy of art making.
image to the left/ above:
Dark Matter
Acrylic, graphite and digital processing
42x56
Reflections From the Woodshed February
Gone star gazing.
image to the left/above:
Mind the Gap
Acrylic, compote, and digital processing
32x36
Reflections From the Woodshed March
3/8/19 Last night veraciously devoured Rollo May’s ‘Courage to Create’. So many connections just as he theorizes: unconscious—the potentialities for awareness or action which the individual cannot or will not actualize. These potentialities are the source of free creativity…”insight never comes hit or miss, but in accordance with a pattern of which one essential element is our own commitment”. This very idea is what I have struggled to articulate. What follows does seem terrestrially irrational—but at the same time makes perfect sense. Often I see things in my paintings that I realize others may not see (as is the nature of perception), but in these mental phenomena there is an encoded message and it becomes a bit like solving a puzzle. Again, I understand this may seem highly irrational—perhaps a speculative madness, a cognitive bias or more simplistically apophenia. But take for example this particular series on which I am working: some marks (in my mind’s eye) clearly make out a number that when I researched its symbolism and/or its representation in some facet of the physical world—was a gene pattern called BVEs or epicardial substance. This was illuminating in the truest sense of the term as one of my current works (in which I’ve been stuck) is a massive sculpture like painting of which its form appears to me as an anatomical heart/sacred heart. This is a very potent symbol in my life as much of my studio is embellished with them. It is also, a symbol that formed in one of the first real works that I produced. I am constantly searching for heart stuff—meaning I am trying to understand the fundamental nature of the unified heart and operate from that place. Someone else making this painting and this work very well could have seen an identical number embedded in the work, but when looking for the symbology discovered something entirely different altogether. Or perhaps might not have even seen a number emerge. I understand this fully, but it makes it nonetheless fascinating—all of these connections. Yes, as May states, “Insight never comes hit or miss.” Ready to explore this concept more in depth. Reinvigorated on the path.
image to the left/above:
Ghost Heart
Acrylic and spray foam on wood panel
48x72
Reflections from the Woodshed April
The [Art]hood is powerful. It has many members. They are of all times and places. The members do not die. One is a member to the degree that [they] can be a member, no more, no less. And that part of [them] that is of the [Art]hood does not die. —Robert Henri
Is art indeed a priesthood that claims the pure in heart and takes them over completely?—Cézanne
image to the left/above:
When the Body is Away the Mind Gets Wild
Acrylic, compressed chalk, photograph and digital processing
36x78
Reflections from the Woodshed May
“Nevertheless, such self-detaching on the part of the artist goes somewhere. As performed today, it pushes against the current in an epoch of celebrity worship and its related feedback loop, increasingly universal visibility and access. A big part of the artist’s role now, in a massively professional art world, is showing up to self-market…Full withdraws register as an exasperated reaction to the intolerability of the art world, to the limits of political potential, to gender bias, the presence of repellent personalities, and neon egos.”—Martin Herbert from ‘Tell Them I Said No’.
“The great man of tomorrow in the way of art cannot be seen, should not be seen, and should go underground.”—Duchamp
Just finished reading an article about the way art is shifting or even dying out due to over democratisation and over-proliferation of movements such as Zombie Formalism & ‘Like’ Art in an ever increasing attempt on artists’ behalf to remain present, relevant (read to achieve a shot at fame which only further lines the thick pockets of social elites in one of the last unregulated markets/rackets) . Granted this isn’t the first time in history someone has exclaimed, “Art is dead.” But this particular perversion twists me dangerously: the author suggests in this post-post modern age of “creatives” aka entrepreneurs (more disgustingly referred to as artrepreneurs), art is merely a product, a market commodity and nothing else. This, of course, makes me want to wretch because this fatuous trend is odiously epidemic and something I forcibly rail against—color me a refusenik.
image to the left/above
Variations on Death Valley
digitally processed image
Reflections of the Woodshed June
Gone star-gazing
In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images every day of our lives. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently. In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.—John Berger
“‘The older buildings around the concrete centers already look like slums, and the new bungalows on the out-skirts, like the flimsy structures at international trade fairs, sing the praises of technical progress while inviting their users to throw them away after short use like tin cans. But the town-planning projects, which are supposed to perpetuate individuals as autonomous units in hygienic small apartments, subjugate them only more completely to their adversary, the total power of capital…’AlI mass culture under monopoly is identical and the contours of its skeleton, the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly, are beginning to stand out. Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted. Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors' incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products...In reality a cycle of manipulation, and retroactive need is unifying the system ever more tightly. What is not mentioned is that the basis on which technology is gaining power over society is the power of those whose economic position in society is strongest." Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It·is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself”—excerpt from ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
image the left/above
Fall of the American Empire
Ink, Acrylic and Digital Processing
30x40
Reflections of the Woodshed July
Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you—catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life—only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead—that you must always keep working to grasp—the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear.—Georgia O’keeffe
Burn it down. Burn it all down. Indulge those run away days. Disappear into the wild unknown. Cannot not say with any certainty how many years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, micro moments I have had these thoughts, desires, leanings. Could not calculate when asked to add up all of the times I have ever contemplated driving off of a bridge, jumping off of a sky scraper, cliff, out a window; how many times I have wanted to escape out the back door of my life and disappear, start over, burn this life down, erect a new one. The French call this urging L’appel de vide—the call of the void. If taken literally these urges can seem a horrifying death wish or a childish selfishness to avoid the responsibility of one’s life, but this interpretation conceals the real ask in this call, which is the call to be fully alive. And what I want is to be FULLY ALIVE and fully embodied in myself, my work and the wisdom of life’s experience. Smell all the smells, feel all the feels, see, touch and taste all the things. To know the round of round and the full of fullness, wholeness, what is, what is possible.
Consequently, my artistic practice also quite often takes this form. I spend months, years creating a work to only at a later date (perhaps due the offhanded remark of someone’s subjective opinion or senseless uttering, or more likely due to my own at that particular time) destroy the work. Burn it down, rip it up, paint over it in order to start over, to build something else alluring, beautiful, full of meaning, perhaps to answer some line of inquiry within myself or to solve some problem; to wade in the abyss and see what I’ll find lurking there waiting to be born.
image to the left/above
L’appel de Vide
digital painting
Reflections of the Woodshed August
Gone star gazing:
Every contemporary painter who has studied and reacted to the marvelous innovations and variations developed in painting during the last two generations, every such painter who has any sense of initiative, and the fearlessness indispensable to an explorer, has sought in one way or another to contribute to the accelerated tempo of an art that has practically been infused with new energy; this art of painting that has been the springboard for so many developments in the realms of architecture, science, optics, chemistry and psychology. It would be easy, but it would take a whole book to show how many of our most prized discoveries and additions to living had their origin in the palette of the painter. In many instances it was the painter him [her/themselves] who turned [the] brush into a magic wand, to project into space, into three dimensional world his [her/their] dreams, and to give the more timid scientist his incentive to exploration. Leonardo da Vinci, Daguerre, Fulton, Morse, are a few names. The restless nights spent by Ucello to work out that perspective which was to enable him to penetrate the surface of his canvas, to permit him to enter a new world of space and illusion that would compete favorably with the most prosaic reality, and displace it;…It is the effort of the human mind to reduce the irrational and the inexplicable to a docile reason. Why shouldn’t the artist be allowed to pursue this avowedly absurd activity, when the axioms of [persons] who made a speciality of logic and reason, were found vulnerable. Some may call your work tricky—I tell them the tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.—Man Ray from a letter written to Knud Merrild
image to the left/above
Untitled
Acrylic, graphite, digital processing
20x24
Reflections of the Woodshed September
Must I not stand under a dome of silence to see? And this stillness ferments a mood of peace, of contemplation. Yes today I saw something. I took the memory of that thing with me.—Max Weber
The following poem is an ekphrastic response written during a pilgrimage with my fellow woodshed-er to the Harwood Museum to see the collection of paintings housed in the sanctuary Agnes Martin designed for them:
In the Span of an Afternoon
How is it that once again
another has taught me
to see, to really see
the intersecting nature
of planar realities?
I gaze in—
I breathe
with the painting
at first I feel like Alice
[ t r a p p e d ]
too big or too small
depending on who you ask—
Oh! How I want into that garden
that serene, blissful garden.
I let go—
I give up my breath
to this moment
where sheer and utter joy overwhelms;
the lines dissolve-dissipate into the now
and all at once
I am lost and found
full of silence and sound
I let out a gasp
of grateful understanding
to you who once again
teaches me to see anew
to you—Agnes—I owe
a debt of gratitude
in the span of one afternoon
you taught me
how to Have a Lovely Life
how to Love
the importance of Friendship
how to have The Perfect Day
how to achieve Ordinary Happiness
(well, it’s extraordinary really)
how to regain my Innocence
how to never stop Playing
most of all you taught me
how to come out of the haze;
to extend my gaze into pure light.
image to the left/above
Nothing Real Unless Beheld
Acrylic, digital processing and photo transfer on wood panel
48x48
Reflections of the Woodshed October
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not.—Frank O’ Hara
The photograph is capable of realizing the most complete, scrupulous and moving catalogue that man has ever been able to imagine. From the subtlety of aquaria to the fastest, most fleeting gestures of wild animals, the photograph affords us a thousand fragmentary images culminating in dramatized cognitive totalization….In addition to the implacable rigor to which photographic data subject our mind, they are always and ESSENTIALLY THE SUREST VEHICLE OF POETRY and the most agile process for perceiving the most delicate osmoses that are established between reality and surreality.— Dalí
I’ve seen things like this before
as I have in the past;
disparate associations, grey areas
Outsiders painting memories:
colour starts to appear
and elsewhere movement captures emotion
in never ending shapes of epiphany.
I like to get lost to then in time and fantasy
and intricate feathers;
to exist purely without a precise outcome in mind;
to journey back to a landscape we knew
beyond the mountains—
DNA— the connection between
time and space,
iconic patterned snakes,
that which makes
deep inroads into our awareness
of criss-cross consciousness gaze
into the infinite, the original womb of imagination,
I take great care here
like Dalí of adjoining page daydreams
and like the white rabbit
try not to be late.
poem above embedded into painting left/above constructed by cut-up technique using words excised from Foam magazine, a publication about modern day photography.
image to the left/above
Why I Am Not a Writer
Acrylic, graphite, photo transfer on wood panel
48x48
photo transfers generated from photos of rat hippocampi and hippocampal cells used with permission from OHSU courtesy of Sydney Boutros in conjunction with NWNoggin project.
Reflections of the Woodshed November
Gone star-gazing:
An art consciousness changes the significance of all in time and space and matter. It modifies hope, it changes proportion, it makes for new number. It flavors the entire reason of being. The consciousness of art, which ranges in intensity from creation to appreciation, develops a richer and riper humanity. This art consciousness is the possessing of the spirit of things, rather than the matter of things…art consciousness means the possession of human right—the spirit of things. Material possession is an outsideness. Spiritual or art consciousness is an insideness. Material possession is finite, spiritual consciousness infinite. Nor is there a monopoly of the art spirit…Art awakens us to a farness, a beyondness…
Science proves to the mind; art reveals the heart. To infer from the visible the invisible, to penetrate the opaque, to soar high into space, and dive deep into the seas, to walk the fissures to the center of the earth, to imagine one’s self a being a fish or a bird, is to penetrate more into the spheres of the unknown…To invest all darkness and emptiness and all inanimate objects with human energy and feeling, is to reveal the mystery which art alone can reveal. To transplant mentally whole continents, whole cities; to shift the immovable, to bring the past into the present, to bring the distant near, is revelation. The psychic or spiritual energy made plastic is the purpose of a work of art. Its process of formation lies in its spreading out into infinity upon the waves of time and light.— excerpts from ‘Essays on Art’ by Max Weber
image the left/above
Halcyon Hemicube
Digital painting
24x48
Reflections of the Woodshed December
Gone star gazing:
If it isn’t too late/let me waste one day away/from my history./Let me see without/looking inside/at broken glass.— from Sequestrienne by Dorothea Tanning
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of [artists] who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need [artists] who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a large reality…Right now, we need [artists] who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.”—Ursula K. Le Guin
image to the left/above
Sequestrienne
Acrylic, graphite, digital processing
56x60