Like I wrote about last week, I’ve newly come back online — This time, In a little rowboat, in the center of the sea of possibility… How do you decide which way to start rowing?

Most tasks that humans do can be done by humans, so it’s really no surprise that I can manage some of them myself. That boyhood fear of arriving at an incompetence as an adult has mostly withered by now, and I see that I’m a capable fella.

To pick a task is the new task now, and to stick with it for a good while.. Long enough to become fluent, and use it as a tool to display my mind and soul, and to share that with others. And to do so for long enough to accumulate a body of work that feels substantial. That’s basically the conversation I’ve been having with myself these days. How can I amass that substantial body of work without narrowing my aim?

So it’s a question of medium. And method.

In college, we talked about Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” so the conversation has been kicking around for a while. Yet, there’s a new sense of urgency I’m feeling about the whole ordeal.

I used to hesitate to publish the “multi-disciplinary” side of my creative self/practice, because it feels disorganized, chaotic, hap-shod, what have you. I used to feel like “they” want you to be more buttoned up, more put together. More streamlined and minimalistic, like an art-making robot, living in a climate controlled white cube on polished concrete floors… a robot that does the one task, and makes no human mistakes, and makes no human poop.

The unfortunate reality is that I’m all over the place at once,

and sometimes I’m a disembodied voice.

Deniz (for the uninitiated, my lovely wife) was giving an artist talk at Louisiana Contemporary the other day, and made an interesting point about choosing the language of “conceptual artist” carefully, and what that meant, as opposed to being a photographer, a sculptor, or god forbid, a painter. Aren’t all artists conceptual? So why choose the label? It must mean something else. “visual artist” feels to vauge… “Multi-disciplinary” too scatterbrained… “photographer” too rigid.

*deniz addressing a crowd of eager museum-goers*

It was a point well made, and one that resonates with me. How do you communicate to an audience that you’re not a shithead? How do you fend off accusations of being a “hobby collector,” or “unemployed”?

Well, I don’t know… But I do know that ever since I was a little boy, gnawing through medieval history books and losing myself in a curated imagery of the Renaissance, I’ve been enamored with painting… ah…

ah…

Ahem…

It has an unfakeable swag that can’t be touched. It’s walking on air. It’s timeless and vast. Prophetic at its best; of and for this world, but otherworldly all the same.

At first, and still to this day, I was impressed with the technical skill of the old masters. The academic, the trompe l’oeil, the Florence vs Venetian method. And I looked at my own work, and saw that I was clearly lacking in the skill department.

let’s skip a couple of steps… so we Get skilled up -- as quick as possible, but don’t rush! Don’t be too loose or too stiff, and learn it right the first time, so you don’t need a teacher! Boston School painting was a new wind in my sails, for reasons I plan to elaborate on in the future (wink, wink) and the skills are getting better.

a Gnawing Realization:

The technical skill to draw/paint what you see only gets you so far. That it’s so much more than this. Big Painting with the Big P is really a whole different game. The “medium” itself, and your skill in wielding it are the shoes you run the race with. If you want to make join the club with the Big P boys, like [insert any painter you can name by name’s name here], you’ve gotta fight your way through this line of every other halfwit that learned how to paint a lemon to look yellow like that.

Besides, unless I’m missing something obvious here…

I can’t get my imagination to hold still enough to get a good look at it!

but i can catch snippets in a sketch, and I can think through the rest. and maybe, just maybe, I’ll catch some of that lighting there in this here bottle, and boy howdy, then we’ll really have something to be proud of.

We’re painting the sun with the yolk of an egg, but more than that, we’re painting the light of life, optically and otherwise. We’re trying to catch lightning in a bottle; the human spirit in 2d. So there’s the craft side to painting that can’t be denied… but there’s also the narrative capacity, the illustrative, illuminating, almost too-human thing about it. It’s tough to put a finger on what this thing is, this deep ache, magnetic force pulling our attention…. But we know it when we see it, and people are drawn to it instinctively.

Actually, I think I do know what it is. It’s the philosopher's stone. The human soul, in polymer crystalline format. I’m riffing on a Terrance McKenna passage here, something like:

The Philosopher’s Stone is your soul objectified—a holographic matrix of space and time. It can carry you to distant places, become food when you're hungry, a shower when you're dirty, or even a source of clothing and knowledge at a thought’s whim.

at the end of the day, I believe that, sometimes, the image itself contains the true alchemical power, and that the medium by which the image is achieved can be an afterthought. The important thing is for the image to live in the world. The world needs images, and dooming an image to a life in a dust sleeve by clinging to an ideological stance on painting vs, let’s say, photography, and failing at “achieving it,” whatever “it” is, in the painting, like you could have conceivably accomplished with a lens and a sensor.

My mentor Frank introduced me to the work and thoughts of Todd Hido, who says he “shoots like a documentarian, but prints like a painter.” That quote, in conjunction with working with Frank on his own images and seeing the true power of digital tools and archival inkjet, created a turbulence in my mind that blurred the line between photo printing and painting. So photo becomes a game of clean capture, and painterly printing… Fun problems to have in that game.

So what?

so…

Photo and painting (with drawing included, as a matter of course) are attractive to me over video and installation work, because they are easier to self-fund, and therefore evade censorship of thought/speech. They are also usually much smaller group projects than film demands, if not completely solo work. This can be lonely, but is liberating: financially, economically, logistically, and otherwise. They are also inherently commodified, as they are physical objects in space. Editions can, and often should, be limited in photography, and paintings are inherently limited, as they are one of one’s, discounting studies. It’s easy to wrap your mind around how to economically interact with these art objects. The same is not true for video/installation. Film is a different story altogether, involving ticket sales/downloads. And then there’s grant funding…

When I was a kid thinking about careers, I was tempted to choose to be a doctor or a lawyer, something that made real money. But the deeply human presence I felt in the works of some of the old masters felt like an old friend, or a mentor, reaching across time to comfort me… to assure me that I’m not alone… to welcome me into the fold… That’s what good art does. To bring good objects/images like that to be in the human vernacular and in the collection of great works on Earth is to connect with other souls like mine throughout all time, reaching toward both future generations and backwards through time, engaging with the long history of thinkers and makers… this feels to me a more noble endeavor than the acquisition of material wealth, but that’s not to say that the two are mutually exclusive…

I want to make great work, and I can feel that it’s there... I want to put little pieces of myself into the world, and hopefully leave something meaningful behind when it’s all said and done. And hopefully I’ll be able to feed my family through these efforts in the meantime. So then, friends, let’s come back on line…

To pick a medium, or not to pick a medium? pick your poison, i guess.

pick your poison…

ainting!

a Gnawing Realization:

So what?

pick your poison…

ainting!

a Gnawing Realization:

So what?

i’m awake!