Full Fathom Five installation shots

What a great time we had in NYC—thanks to all for coming out to the opening & celebrating with us.
Thank you to our hosts at Jenkins Johnson Gallery! The gallery has some great installation shots of the show as well as images from the entire series of mine on their website (some of the work isn't even on view in person).

I have some exciting things coming up in the spring, stay tuned!

my wall from the front entrance

Max & Jess at the opening

Full Fathom Five opening November 3rd!

If you are in New York, or the general area, come have a drink with us & celebrate!

Re-visiting, re-thinking, re-engaging

A recent discussion with a curator for an upcoming show has left me reflecting on some drawings that I haven't thought about in a long time. It is such a treat to have an outside voice plant a seed in your brain which then makes you see your own work in a new way.

The upcoming exhibition (details soon once things are more finalized) has me thinking of transformations. The curator was interested in some drawings from 2007 from a series called "World Machines." The larger drawings use notational and gestural marks collaged together to form teeming masses—mechanisms that make me think of the movie Brazil—that teeter between a state of potential rebirth or decay. The smaller works are a bit looser/lyrical with ink washes in addition to the collaged marks.

Reflecting back is of course making me think about my current work in new ways. I'm working primarily on unstretched canvases and planting suggestions of structure within them by adding chunks of wood stretched within the fields (see Sattha's Mmmm... as an example). I hadn't thought about this work in terms of transitions before but now I see that the idea is very relevant. I have always liked my work to feel like it's caught in the process of becoming; not yet fully matured and retaining a sense of potential energy. This often makes for a fairly awkward object... and I like that too. It's as if I'm creating adolescent artworks—all knees & elbows—makes for some fun angles!

Some images from the World Machines series, all from 2007:

World Machine #1, 18x24

World Machine #2, 18x24"

World Machine #3, 18x24"

World Machine #5, 18x24"

World Machine #7, 18x24"

World Machine #8, 18x24"

World Machine #9, 18x24"

World Machine #10, 18x24"

World Machine #11, 18x24"

World Machine #12, 18x24"

Machine Garden, 40x42"

Machinescape, 58x42"

Sky Net Machine, 54x42"

Convergence Machine, 42x41"

Formulation Machine, 50x42

New American Paintings!

I'm in for the NAP West Edition! This edition was juried by Cassandra Coblentz of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art:

Cassandra Coblentz is Associate Curator for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA). A native of Los Angeles, Cassandra has spent her career all across the country, from L.A. to New York, and her years-long focus on museum education has largely informed her practice as a contemporary curator and how she approaches exhibition-making.


Read the full interview for her views on process, emerging work, and the importance of considering viewership when making curatorial decisions at the New American Paintings/Blog. 

Exciting stuff... should be out in the fall. Now I must pick 6 images & get the 'ol paperwork together.

About New American Painting:

Somewhat related notes on poetry

In an article titled "After the Drips" by Jerry Saltz in the April 4th issue of New York Magazine, Saltz says "A lot of the work in "Unpainted" is hard to take—even ugly. Some of it looks like junk. But much of it I love because it shows how fluid and uncanny beauty and form can be. Sit with the work here and you will find you are using you imagination more than  you eyes."

On a somewhat related note, I have recently been thinking about the kinship between painting & poetry.

I have never really been a fan of poetry but the more I look into it I think I've just been lazy about it.  My dear friend Colleen Sanders recently shared the article  "Laugh While You Can" by Kay Ryan with me that, though actually about poetry, is all about painting. I particularly love this passage:
Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast iron manhole cover was dancing in its iron collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, producing an occasional bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.
For I do not want to suggest in any way that this aquifer under poetry is something silly or undangerous; it is great and a causer of evry sort of damage. And I do not want to say either that he poem that prompts me to laughter is silly or light; no, it can be as heavy as a manhole cover, but it is forced up. You can see it would take an exquisite set of circumstances to ever get this right.

In terms of structure, layers, dangerous hilarity, undercurrents, and the role of the reader/viewer this article and how it can apply to painting make me giddy. The parallels of painting & poetry were originally introduced to me in college by professors Michael Byron & Julie Burleigh—but it's taken me this long to really delve into the idea.

And so, again on a somewhat related note, I leave you with one of my favorite poems of all time:
Poem, by Frank O'Hara
Lana Turner Has Collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and sudenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

"Not" installation at TSK!

For those who haven't had the extreme pleasure that is Tanya's Soup Kitchen, get over there!

Max is a fan!

NAP contenders

Ceegee!, 5"x5" 2010

Satha's...mmmmm, 20" x 46" 2010

Trophy, 22" x 16" 2010

Ahbwak, 11" x 17" 2010

"Not" installation at TSK!

Ahbwak, 2010

For those in the Wichita area, today marks a special day! Our own local & beloved Tanya Tandoc is opening the new & improved Tanya's Soup Kitchen! I am pleased to have a new painting installation up for the occasion. Details below, photos to come!

"Not"
finished, unstretched paintings on canvas & linen
site-specific installation, April 2011

Tanya's Soup Kitchen
1725 E Douglas at Kansas

Apple & Asafetida in painting!

Reading an article in the New Yorker about pastry chefs & the evolution of dessert & one particular passage was a great parallel to painting:

asafetida

"The key thing for a cook is to develop a library of flavors that you can recall. If I say to you, 'Apple & cinnamon,' you would click in immediately. 'Yes, apple! Yes, cinnamon!' The library of your mind contains that. But what if I say "Apple, asafetida'? Nothing! You have nothing stored there." He added slyly, "Now, this is a benefit to the chef, because if I do apple and cinnamon and you don't like it you think there's something wrong with me, but if I do apple and asafetida and you don't like it there's something wrong with you." He laughed briefly, professionally. "The development of a pastry chef is not the development of techniques. It is the slow, careful development of a catalogue of savors and flavors, which you can develop the way you develop muscles. There is a logic in every dessert worth eating. Consider the logic of white peach and rich cheese. We must be conditioned not by sight but only by flavor, the tongue, the nose, and the feel in the mouth."

Really?, mixed media on paper, 2009

An artist who really wants to push her/himself and make something new must develop a cache of flavors as well... but in doing that cannot just "paint" apple & cinnamon over & over again. Doing apple & cinnamon over & over makes you a baker/crafter/artisan not a true artist. I love apple & cinnamon but that combo isn't going to teach me anything. Apple & asafetida? I have no idea what the hell that is. That is exciting. As an artist, it's my job to push comfort zones stretch our collective ideas of "flavors" because only by letting new information & experience into our lives do we grow & learn as individuals & as a society.

There is a logic in every artwork worth experiencing. However, if you approach said artwork with your own apple/cinnamon baggage, your experience will be that much more skewed. However, if an artist can present you with apple & asafetida, then you are forced to approach like a child & take in something new. What a beautiful thing... if we were really able to take in new experience like a child & notice our own processing with freshness!