Along the Patuxent River

finishing

Finishing the portfolio is just the beginning... so many little pieces of paper.

Why make art?

Making art takes up space, it is perhaps the ultimate act of self involvement to ask people to stop what they are doing and look at artists' work.

I think there is another possibility. As artists and performers, we are exposing something that would not otherwise be seen or experienced. Whether it is ultimately of importance or necessary, externalizing ideas in a form that can be experienced by others is how we, as interdisciplnary artists are known to each other and to the world. It is a way to enter into a shared experience without language, to find community more directly.

I desire balance and harmony. My studio work demonstrates a commitment to producing images that replicate this experience for the viewer. It is not possible for me to know how or if my work effects other people until it is experienced.

The response places the work beyond my personal voice. It enters without words and joins community in the experience or recognition by another person. Some of the first commissions I did in 1980 were for waiting rooms in Boston Hospitals. My work was placed where it would be experienced by the families who waited for loved ones. I finally understood the impact of my work when my son hospitalized at Children’s Hospital. The work becomes a healing, meditative space, where order is restored. In the abstract space I found some rest while I waited, helpless to do anything but wait. Art in this place says, you can wait here where there is light and color, order and space.

packet one

I managed to send out the first 40 pages of my thesis. People ask me what it is about. I hardly know myself. Contextualizing my practice, articulating some personal theory of art, my understanding of interdisciplinary art.. GOD knows what....else..

I feel like my passion for the moment is lost in this process. I am my own archeologist, art historian. diggin around. Trying to remember why I think this or when I saw this...

Last night I was showing the self portraits of an Alzheimer patient to my drawing class at CSMD. This artist continued to make images of himself after his diagnosis, and as he deteriorated.. so why do I like the ones at the end of the series? They are so clear to me.. in their abstraction, they have more room for possibility.. the more academic work has answered any questions I might have, where the later ones leave a lot of room for thinking about the nature of identity.. What does it even mean to make self portraits if we do not go beyond what we know about the face?

portfolio

My brain feel is like mush. A small thought begins to form, charged by a some insight, seems to have some promise but then its gone. The underpinnings are missing, erased, maybe part of the ADD, the substantive or supportive stuff is just not there.

changes in density, shift in the field

(Click on images to enlarge)

I probably worked on this for about 8 hours yesterday and then 2 this morning. I think I am at the edge of knowing something about shells, piles of shells, allowing thoughts to come and go, watching my attachments to something and getting past boundaries.. or at least having a different way of approaching the edges while fighting the mind's need for discrete borders as my tired eyes blur in relaxed confusion.
We operate knowing about the edges of things. I wonder what we are actually perceiving and rely on in the expected perception of an edge?
I have had the experience of knowing that a step ends here, but then finding out that I am very wrong. Free falling, even an inch or two can be very disturbing. I think if we had to consciously relearn what we know about space, it would very interesting. Getting it wrong is stranger that not knowing. In the dark, we 'know' we have to be careful. Getting it wrong, thinking we know something that is not true, wakes us up to something else.

into the piles

detail

I have added more and yet less seems to be apparent... the more I add, the harder it is for me to see what is different? I work for hours putting in shells, piling them, lighting them, turning them around in my hand. I feel like I can’t quite draw them, and my hand feels like a club. I use only mechanical pencils with a #2 graphite, the disposable Bic kind.. The marks feel awkward in the face of this luminous form. When I dig for a definition of the space, the pencil feels like a dental pick. I am sure this imposition is elated to my anxiety regarding my molar that wants to become a crown for $1200. The replica of the forms has a distance that does not easily convey what I see, but records my labour of looking: dissecting the space, ordering the marks, fracturing the forms, selecting the one and then embedding it in the field to relinquish its one ' ness.'

The next morning, all that I have done seems always to have been there, as effortless as breath.

So what am I really doing? I should leave room for speculation..well, that will come in the next series. Maybe that is what I am doing, setting up the question for the next series?

lost in time and space

People ask me if I work from photographs... I guess that would make some part of the process faster, certainly different. I wonder about the imposition of speed or facility when the whole point is for me to spend many hours in a state of not knowing what is to come next. I will probably break the continuity between the panels, because the work is more interesting out of order. I ask the viewer to wonder about the attachment to linear visual experience as a way of exploring how attached we are to things making sense, the relationship of things in a group, context and order. This drawing for hours is tedious, I often disengage from the notion of better marks and allow the chaos of the simple minded exhaustion of my hands and eyes to unravel the layers. When my eyes get tired the signal becomes looser, unsure, arbitrary.

I want the viewer to wonder where the shells are in space? What is their relationship to surface? Where is the viewer? What assumptions do we make about images of objects?

I think about making a more carefully rendered observation, loaded with illustrative knowing, but I think I want the process of finding the line and battling the space to be open to me as well.

I think about the drawing as a way of documenting a way of seeing.

There is a awesome symmetry and a reckless organic chaos.

I have added some miocene fossils.

expanding the grid 66" x 90"

each panel is 22" x 30" .. . I have made a design problem by using the central clam shells in the first sketches. As I work to embed the original five studies, I experience the blur between what my mind knows to be separate ideas about each shell and what my eye sees as a blurred unsettled visual field. As my eyes tire, it is less possible to impose. My Psyche's labor of untangling the textural uniformity is a process by which the many holds each one, strictly by the numbers, the more you have the less you get.. and it is harder to discriminate, to see into the overall pattern. The eye that wants to see one or two at a time. In the actual work of drawing, I can only see so much as I can, but if I dwell too long on one shell group, it creates too much interest. The time spent working an area is parsed by visual fatigue and active restraint. If it gets too fussy too soon, I have entered too much of my ideas about the arrangement. It is a visual game where the options, many at first, dwindle as each of my choices narrows the field of what is possible in a next/last dynamic. I try to keep the widest number of options open for as long as possible. My goal is to observe my uneasiness as each new set of variables changes the space as I avoid the easy fix. I believe the only way to make new decisions is to make new mistakes. I create the tension of not knowing and that keeps me visually engaged with the surface until I am too tired or hungry to make another mark.

piles of shells

Looking through boxes of shells collected over fifty years...seeing what I have kept and wondering what I have divested, thrown out, let go, or put into garden, the objects I have picked up on the beach.
The object in the hand, isolated, removed for closer observation, the one selected from the many begins to have story of its own. Somehow in the threads of memory, a clear moment of seeing reflects something in me that I want to make more solid, so I pick it up and the moment begins to imprint the object.
Walking along the beach, up and down the east coast from Maine to Florida, the feel of the sun, the sinking of the sand around your feet, the wash of the waves, it is still a thing I like to do. There is the light, the water, the shining bright cleanness of things swept up by the sea and also the foetid, rank and rotting stuff that also rises with the tide. These things seem to be laid out in some mystery of comings and goings, cycles of birth and death, a tangle of random elements woven together by a bit of fishing line, a piece of drift wood or a half rotted carcass of a sea turtle.
All of these things were important to my dad. They all had a hidden story of journey, an arch of beginnings, middles and ends. The waves heap them up to remind us of the way of things.
Thoughtful, morbid, a story teller who made up stories about pieces of bone, he ignored the story of his own life in favor of wandering thoughts of things he could only guess at, what he could not know; how this whale must have gotten lost or was sick and came to the warmer water of her youth to end her days. His stories were a reflection of his observation of the things that run to shore. As such, they were unreliable, but to me, his stories were far more interesting than the random event of something just washing up. I think he believed that everything in life had some meaning and it was up to us to work it out. To him, things were placed in front of us to tell us something we didn’t know before.
The secrets of the sea are diffuse, layered and optional. The objects are transitory, taken out of their time and space, they have an artificial life one that exists only in the mind of the viewer. These drawing are maps of seeing, reflection and shadows of something that is left, washed up detritus, informed by the process of spending time unlocking the surface, the form and playing at getting it on a piece of paper.