Look, See

Untitled 3

Untitled 2

Art supplies, revisitied

Lynn says it better than I about the seduction of art supplies.

Me, cynical, bitter, terse: "I am critical of commerical experiences that provide shoppers with illusory meaning."

Lynn, elegant, insightful, picturesque: "Art supplies, like office supplies, are objects of desire. Beautiful, often arranged in nifty fitted cases, colors and textures and tools so tangible. Who can't want to own them, possess them? The clever collapsible wooden easel, the sensual brushes, the elegant clay tools, the vibrant oils, the perfect racks of rainbow pencils-- looking at them, row upon row, induces a bliss of orderliness and sensory delight. As if, unleashed from their snug packaging, the images and shapes will flow from them directly onto the clean, rough or smooth, surface of paper or cloth. Get out of the way and it will happen."

Untitled 1

My aversion to art supplies

Thanks, Lloyd, for pointing to my recent writing about two of my paintings from the 80's [1, 2]. Your comments are much appreciated.

As for my aversion to art supplies, some of what you write about expense and intimidation is related to my feeling. But it's something more. I wrote about this a little over a year ago (where, coincidentally, I had posted a drawing from 1989; I'll also spare the reader here my related Wh*le Fo^ds rants, but if you really insist: 1, 2):

I remember reading a quote in the late 70's as an undergrad by critic Peter Plagens in which he says something to the effect that when all is said and done the really good artists could make great art with a #2 pencil and typing paper. That quote has come back to me a lot over the years. The heart of this idea- value in content, not in material- is something I've tried to use, as well as the value of simplicity and directness; no amount of beautiful or high-quality or serious materials will ever in themselves make a meaningful art object. Of course, art supply stores don't want you to think that.

I should add that money can't buy you art; no amount of money spent on materials will guarantee a level of quality of one's art. It's one thing to have good quality paint so that when you mix it you don't get mud, or paintbrushes that don't leave bunches of bristles behind with each stroke. But it's quite another to spend a bundle on containers, and a palette, and an easel, and the whole setup, thinking that all of these things are necessary. Buying sheets of beautiful Japanese paper at $8.00 a pop doesn't get you halfway to anything meaningful.

So my use of simple and inexpensive materials to make the 1985 painting was a very deliberate action: I don't need to "art materials" to make art. I would be very happy now if I could make art only using materials from hardware stores and lumber yards, and perhaps a fabric store. I am anti-art supply store. I am critical of commerical experiences that provide shoppers with illusory meaning.

On the other hand, and there often is another hand, isn't there, of course sometimes you really need something that can't be found elsewhere. And there you go, into the big expensive art suppy store.

The last light at the end of the branch, 1-12

12th Street, Oakland 1985

12th Street, Oakland, 1985, black and white housepaint on canvas, 47 x 73.5"

This painting is another that I recently hung up at home to look at and be around. During 1984-85 the painting I was doing took a very different direction. I started riding my bicycle around Oakland and doing drawings in small sketchbooks of places and scenes, particularly the downtown area not far from where I lived, including Lake Merritt, the main library (where I spent a lot of time; another view), BART stations, the Alameda County Courthouse, and various street views (see Oakland Film Office gallery).

My memory is a little vague about exactly why I was doing this, but here are some factors:

• My pickup truck had gone kaput and I wasn't in the position at the moment to buy something else, so I became significantly dependent on my new Specialized Rockhopper that I had just got a few months earlier (they were brand new, the first real commercially produced mountain bike) and because I was riding everywhere my view of things slowed down and intensified. Riding in the open air I really felt part of the city landscape, and that influenced what I was seeing and what I wanted to work with.
  
• I was frustrated with the way a few previous bodies of "abstract" painting had gone. I was hitting deadends, couldn't sustain a path from one thing to the next.
  
• I guess I was feeling a new social responsbility or need to communicate, and thought that somehow I was fulfilling some civic or social ... what... duty? responsibility? need? purpose? Something.
  
• It was simpler to paint things.
  
• I really got into the drawings I was doing and the process that drawing a few things over and over and over lead me towards.
  

What I started doing was taking these sketches home and then drawing a few places or scenes over and over, memorizing and simplifying so that eventually the original detailed drawing was no longer a reference, but instead that the compostion that I repeatedly rehearsed became something new and independent.

The painting above came from me standing in the parking lot of the Henry J. Kaiser Conference Center's (formerly the Oakland Auditorium) parking lot south of Lake Merritt looking northwest. There are actually three streets represented here: 11th, in the foreground with three pedestrians and a couple of cars heading east; 13th, in the middle going under the overpass, crammed with cars also heading east where the traffic from 11th St. will merge with it; and 12th street heading west, the big arching overpass where it leaves the south end of Lake Merritt and passes before the courthouse. The courthouse is on the far left, and a generic tower, which is a simplification and exaggeration of an assisted living building on Oak St. just north of the Oakland Museum, the courthouse, and the main library, is behind the overpass.

I drew this scene countless times, various sizes. Many rough charcoal drawings, quite a few really fast sumi drawings, and many smaller pencil drawings. I was going for a composition that gave a sense of place, movement, outdoors, and light. I think I wanted the viewer to feel in the scene. As I drew this scene over and over the overpass, which isn't really this long or arching, became longer and a deeper arch. It became a really interesting sweep across the surface, and fun to paint in long arching strokes.

This is painted in black and white house paint from gallon cans I bought at Standard Brands Paint that used to be near either 23rd or 25t Ave. on East 14th St, which is now called International Blvd. The paint itself, 19 years later, is in really good shape. The lightweight canvas is stapled over stretchers I made of of clean but not clear 1 x 2". Another aspect of this period was that I wasn't going to spend a lot of money on materials: cheap wood, cheap canvas, cheap paint, black and white. It was my plebian phase, one of simplicity and directness, of and for the people. (Actually, I still have an aversion to "art supplies," but that's another story. Don't get me started, or then I'll have to tell why I don't shop at the Valhalla of naturalesque foods Wh*l* F**ds.)

Just like I drew the scene over and over before making the painting, the actual making of this painting was something I did over and over, iteratively, sometimes quite quickly. I don't think this shows very well in the reproduction. I would paint the scene rapidly and then scrape it down with a knife while the paint was still wet, then repaint it all over again. If you look at the sky you can see that much of it is approximately three inch-wide scraped marks. I would just paint it over and over like this so that my body had memorized all the movements required to reconstruct the painting. I was heading towards having the painting realized in as few confident and well placed strokes and shades of gray as possible.

I remember having a really hard time with one particular area. In the middle bottom of the painting which is the pavement in front of the largest car I had to bring that area to life, to make it fit into the rest of the painting, which is full of expressive marks. I couldn't just paint it as a flat area, and I couldn't just moosh it full of paint; the marks had to have movement, but lie flat, and I couldn't just paint the strokes in a logical way, like having them lie horizontally in front of the car. That would be too deadpan, to expected, too "realistic." I finally was able to assemble a few strokes in the area that achieved what I wanted: an active area that kept the kind of space needed. But I had to do it over and over many times.

I still have four or five paintings, all in the 4 x 6 foot range, from this period. One painting, of the Oakland Main Library from inside the lobby looking past the checkout desk through the doors to the outside, was exhibited at the first Pro Arts juried show in 1986. There is another painting similar to above, and another is a view of double, facing stairs from 12th St down to Lake Merritt that lead down to a tunnel under 12th to stairs that come up in front of the courthouse.

I've enjoyed having this painting up to look at and walk past, to think about the process it took to make this painting a success, and to relive in memory those days of riding my bike and sitting in my studio for hours looking at paintings. I have had this painting in storage for about 16 years, and so haven't had a chance to look at it for a very long time. It surprises me how much I enjoy it. I think maybe this is the best one from this period. I had come pretty close to throwing away these paintings in 1988, too, and am glad to have them as part of my life.

Shed goes WMD

Jim Harris' Shed WMD's all over the place. And after you've read that poke around the site and read a whole bunch more.

12. The last light at the end of the branch

Untitled (Hammer) 1981

Untitled, 1981, acrylic, tempera, ink on canvas, ca. 28.25 x 46.75"

Beginning around 1979 I started making multi-panel paintings. Not exclusively, but pretty regularly. A lot of labor went into making, for example, this painting: five stretched canvases rather than just one. That's why there weren't many of these paintings (10-15?). Most of these were taken to the Berkeley dump in 1988. I now wish I had them. I think I was trying to clean my life out a bit, to move on, as painting, while vital to me, wasn't going anywhere in any way remotely related to a profession, and I was thinking then about going back to school to earn a teaching credential.

I was doing a lot of work on paper, quite a few things in colored pencil on drafting paper. There is a drawing on drafting paper I made after doing this painting; it's a drawing of the painting, and on the drawing I write about how this painting is dedicated to my father, even though this painting is something he would never appreciate, in fact, quite the opposite. I nicknamed this painting "Hammer," which is a little obvious given the overall shape and my fathers job- he was a carpenter, now retired; note that is a nickname, not the actual title.

I recently hung this painting on a bedroom wall in the house into which we moved about two months ago. I felt I needed to hang it so I can look at it, have it in my peripheral vision. It's interesting how twenty three years later this painting is giving back to me, feeding me, motivating me. It's hard to describe the immense pleasure this gives me, that a piece of my own production is helping me, and how I can feel this connection and continuity so many years later.

I remember that I wanted different colors and surfaces abutted to create a variety of spaces and depths from panel to panel, while also trying to bring about through color and surface an overall coherence, a unified package, a holistic individual thing. I still think this painting works.

At this time I played a lot with the idea of breaking outside the rectrangle, and made many drawings of combined panels in various configurations. I consider this particular painting a success because for me it doesn't read as a shaped canvas, which I felt would be a conspicuous and self-conscious attempt at transgression. Instead the overall shape reads as a body, something more organic, a shape required by the colors, surfaces, and space experienced across the plane of the overall surface created by the five joined panels.

Each of these surfaces was painted many times, sometimes scraped off while still wet to let dry and try again, sometimes scrubbed with water and a stiff brush. The black and blue panels abutted horizontally are painted with dried tempera mixed into acrylic medium; this made the paint thick, stiff, and clotty. On the blue panel, the vigorous, mostly vertical strokes are plainly evident, very grooved and kind of dry looking. The lower black panel cracked into a kind of lumpy turtleback texture. The green and black-over-red panels are thinly scumbled, and the far left panel, painted in white gesso and black india ink in acrylic medium, creates- ala Franz Kline via Willem de Kooning- the greatest depth. The four panels to the right, being more spatially shallow, can visually detach themselves from the left black and white panel on the far left and form a cross shape. I also like that the two panels stacked vertically provide a kind of visual slippage or movement, as if the blue sky above had filled in the sunken black ground below that was fighting to pull itself back up again.

It's all about balancing a variety of factors. I enjoy looking at this painting.

11. The last light at the end of the branch

10. The last light at the end of the branch