Reactions

There are lives lived less than the life of a single painting, I suppose

I have received some emails about my latest work, Soft I, that read like frenzied prayers for exorcisms. I guess I've brought forth a ghost; I guess it's the risk of painting people, and in the Internet age, these winst ghost people travel at the speed of light.

First and foremost, thank you. Sometimes I forget the perceived miracle of my medium, I only play with puppet strings while you watch a story unfold. But behind the stage I improvise to your guiding rhythm, and it keeps going, and it keeps going... and I would be incurably paralyzed without it.

There is so much magic –

Soft

Soft I 30" x 40" acrylic on canvas

It's an elementary observation that I desperately needed to make:
To preface, there are things about me that make things about others enviable:
I fetishize the communicative abilities of others
I round off their corners, I sand down my own, I lose almost the whole of myself
And fade into a sculpted landscape of white pebbles, mowed lawns, sidewalk-stunted trees

The worst is, I resist even in painting, I've been depicting the round-about;

time to expose myself.

It took an hour and two months to get here: an hour to trace back two months of navigating the overgrowth. I'm very happy to come upon a clearing, these are new thorns in my side, I've got a compass now, I'll cover new ground, I won't redouble.

As banal as rainbow after rain

I'm imagining a neurosis, under my breath "[point] nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine..." waiting for an unconscious .000001 to interject and bring me to the next second-of-rest plateau. Two months of holed-up experimentation, overwhelmed by doubt, enshrouded in a week of Berlin rain. It's dark in here!

Sita Sings the Blues livened me up a bit today, I laughed out loud five times and I never laugh out loud, and then and then she sang, "If you want the rainbow, you must have the rain," with those big lashy eyes and I Almost doubled over 'cause the cliche hit me so hard (I think I've witnessed true alchemy, from ennui to poésie)

Clutter clutter clutter, it's hard to identify what is and what isn't, so I'm haphazardly shredding it all, including what I paint, how I paint it, and what I'm painting it on.

Funny, I'm compensating with way over-eating [foodstuffs], so here I am in front of my computer setting up Google reader, feasting my eyes instead on an all you can eat buffet of information. I'm trusting that it's a shared stomach - the one for food and the one for information, cause satiation just by the former is foul.

Clutter clutter clutter and I've been eating it too, when you eat it you poop it when you see it you paint it, I'm like a clutter robot with redundant coding, I'm like a human with hope.

Hold in there, I'm starting almost anew, I can't be too focused on sorting and eating and trashing and amassing but I definitely needed to pump the stomach and clean out the eyes, so that from this point on I can differentiate between intuition and compulsion, maybe ask a few more rhetoric Why's.

I live by a teacup prophecy

I give most others the benefit of the doubt, you are wonderful you know so much how do you do it oh will I ever catch up, and the somethings I glance in hot pursuit seem to mock me, "Panting face jiggle cheek stomp stomp boy you aren't enough!"

I think it hurts, even though I laughpant it off.

They're right, through the telephone chain of ear to brain I hear to myself: I've always sought the easy way out, there is no way out, the answer, instead, to the way in, work work work; the question, why; the product, fuck, mostly lame!

See, though, I do strive for perfection, which makes me a lazy perfectionist, because I expect a lot from relatively little and end up quite angry with myself and enamored with the rest of the productive world. There are times… when my logic lines up with my intuition and for a brief moment I think in completed (!!! bad sign already) images, i.e. I fantasize about my place in the world. These moments are beautiful rare and absurd, even more rare as I become even more aware of my irresolvable ignorance, and the author inside me loses another hair, chips a tooth, stubs his toe on a toilet bowl.

Little absurd dictator inside me, hi, I give you full authority because you look funny and by the way you hobwalk I can tell your mind leaps and bounds, I'm a good shell, tug me by the ears and I'll comb my hair, I don't know a damned thing so let's work together like double-team-trouble, two crazy heads who never alone claim to fame can, subversively, absurdly, change the world

broken spoken

I don't care what words, sometimes I just want to be a man of many

In a new city (in new cities) I am new conversing every night, I don't have that much to say, I feel cliche, I feel stupid often, I am mesmerized by people and how much they know

Tomorrow I will shut up shut down and read

Bedsurfing Berlin

My sleeps here, because I’ve been next to a man (last week a stranger, this week an acquaintance) is sporadic, like I wake up and feel his hair brushing against my elbow and I shift closer to the edge of the bed because I know, it's like an essential truth, this isn’t my bed (it's the half-sleep of a watcher or squatter). As soon as he gets up and out my body sighs of relief, it actually curves into an S, Something relaxed not Sensual, my head falls deeper into the pillow, my arm wrap tighter around whatever and eight hours of tension melts away with the help of a rising sun.

(To my generous couchsurfing host, R---, to whom I owe, if not good rest, then everything else that shouldn't be taken for granted)

Love,
Winston

slow

I should want a second to be slower than a decade so to say I've tasted a century, a millennium... and then in that second to forget and forgo time entirely.

This is a wish of mine.

(flohmarkt am mauerpark, Berlin, July 2010)

how now my why Berlin

You won’t get a real answer if you ask me why I’m in Berlin. The only true, albeit shortened, response is long, in which you’d have to let me trace behavioral patterns to demonstrate that my going to Berlin is really no different than spending a day’s allowance on a jar of muscadet honey, a take-away curry wurst and an assortment of German gummy bears (notice, all these things I have never tasted until today)…

It is Berlin, and it is not just Berlin that brought me here. It without a doubt is the compulsion to up and leave that pushed and continues to push me away from comfort, routine, friends and family. Berlin is secondary to the compulsion, whose kinetic force will drive me from here, soon, too.

One thing though has changed since Paris at seventeen – I no longer expect to discover something altogether better. Newness, I’ve come to realize (what with all of the money I’ve blown on “new” foods in foreign supermarkets, for example) teases me with the promise of something tantalizing, beyond imagination, something ideal, something—and here’s the clutch—inhuman. The actual result and the old usurper of my unconscious anticipation, named confusion or just bland banality, prompts the opposite of disappointment. Yes, two negatives make a positive, and I find my senses opened, my mouth ajar with a dropped jaw a sideways smile and a chuckle.

Time to get to work, I can’t wait to get to work, when I settle into my studio next week.

NIGHT SWEATS 2

Part two, I bonding-breakfasted with L---- who slept opposite me these past three nights in Aloha Hostel’s 8-bed dorm room, and maybe within our first thirty minutes of conversation we opened up the lid on sleep, engaged with the ghost, shiver-shiver-freaked a little about our shared “sleep paralysis” afflictions. Ah! For each of us, two nights of severed consciousness and psychical intestinal ruptures!

The question superseded the conflict of answers—chemical imbalance, spiritual sensitivity—and settled on, “What could have happened in this building?” This is Berlin, built upon people over people upon people, dead and now alive. Who, what, where, when, why, and how at 60 Torstrasse, Berlin, Germany?...

NIGHT SWEATS

If you believe in ghosts, take this at face value | If you don't believe in ghosts, decipher the metaphor for me (please)

Aloha Hostel, Berlin, deserves a positive review on hostelbookers.com save for the debatably German debatably female ghost that's kept me awake for two nights straight -- I think she has long hair, and I think she died by stomach trauma because she won't stop churning mine.

Sleep paralysis is my family's affliction, we are a sensitive bunch.

This is when I wish the ol' garlic trick were true, or maybe a cross on the headboard and a silver chain 'round the neck. But only superstitions can be dispelled with more superstitions, and my night sweats tormenter is very real, and very annoying.

Welcome to Berlin, besides her I love it.

continuums

The moment after I'm here (here is Paris, is lunch in my temp apartment, is a window wracked with rain), then I'm there, and there's nothing to hold onto except maybe the ghost of an image. I think this all started ten days ago when I turned 22.

(Photo from weekend at La Baule, Brittany, France)

Good night, Boston, Good bye

My youth art projects in skyward sparks: Tiger, he burned up through and through, I believe, I mean four years of waiting does expedite release

Thanks, dad, for helping me set him free; and tonight, when I, too, ascend, the glistening of steel wings in the clouds -- that's both of us waving goodbye.

Good Morning, New York, Good Bye

6 AM in Greenpoint a walk good bye

Interrupting the flesh

I've reached a point, I think, where I've mastered painterly "tricks" (how specific they are to my five-year-old-and-counting brushes remains to be seen, when I purchase myself a new set this summer...) and with that has returned a sort of amateurish phobia: that a signature style has developed into a stylistic dependence.

I drafted a manifesto once that outlined vague "rules" in painting, such as: do not use white pigment until the final layer (--I've since X'd out this one--); when blending turns to unconscious muddy-ing, hit it strike it and drip it (the gung-ho enthusiasm can take a back seat but I'll still share a ride with it); etc.

The manifesto served its purpose, but has become historical -- because I've moved on from essential rules, and believe more in a dynamic system: if I do this, then I need to do that (for example, if I use bright colors, then I should thin them out). And in a moment when you take your circulating system and drive a dagger right into its flesh, it hopefully can adapt, first by absorbing the shock, then assimilating it into a new web of functions. The hardest part is thrusting the dagger, and the second hardest part is sticking out the recovery.

vegan seepage

A silk-thin-skinned man sporting a sugary ensemble of peachy pinks and baby blues (fanny pack, visor, socks) assumes the role of MTA poetic missionary on slow Sunday afternoons, and last week as my train car approached 1st avenue he let out a, "Ladies and Gentlemen! We are approaching 1st avenue, enjoy your vegan blueberry cheesecake because your loved ones secretly hate the stench of meat that -- well, for some of you, anyway -- seeps out of those enlarged pores USE-SPF-AND-SAVE-YOUR-SKIN-LADIES-AND-GENTLEMEN!"

And for a second there, as the train steadied itself into a slow stop, were smiles and giggles and dead eyes that came alive.

low-budget Narnia for little wasp children

I decided to scatter my trinkets in a public place frequented by little wasp children because I know how exciting "the discovery" can be as a kid... And I like to imagine stretched-face mothers scanning the hills and triangulating trees for kidnappers, 'cause only freaks leave frogs and conch shells and pewter people and troglodytes on the ground, right?












(... all the while avoiding poison ivy 'cause that shit's bad news)

car crash coincidence

Coincidence, a search for meaning, I'll tell you what I found.

Yesterday morning at breakfast I explained to my parents why I was throwing away grade school art projects (a fiery orange paper-mâché tiger, a Harry Potter puppet): "If I rid myself of personal ephemera, then when (if) I die you won't feel compelled to contain the memory of me in things, like a shrine."

They were confused, me talking about death over scrambled eggs, though I often speak detachedly and they're starting to take it upon themselves to infuse my words post-dialogue with emotion. They paint me pretty.

Anyway, I left a couple hours later on a kid's size bike (I'm 6'2"), redoubled immediately to switch from a handbag to a backpack, then glided down Pond St. to the rotary crossing, saw an opening in the traffic, crossed, wrongly gauged my speed (bike was in a high gear), didn't look to the left, went went straight straight rolling sluggishly and BEEP and BRAKE and FLIP head over handlebars right where the silver car going about 40 MPH had just barely brushed by my front tire. Hip knee ankle hit hard on the pavement, but I sprung up grabbed my bike and jumped onto the grassy knoll in between two opposite lanes of traffic; a few cars stopped rolled down windows and asked if I was OK, my seizing ankle shook "No" but I smiled "Yes" and off the world went.

Consider the post on Thursday (Boston, wipeout whiteout), the picture from that post, the next-morning conversation, the upcoming month of life changes (I'm done with school, I'm archiving the strewn around tangled past into bullet-point lists in Helvetica partitioned to the E: drive, I'm moving to Berlin, etc.) and any shock at the unexpected will quickly be absorbed by the plush padding of expectation.

It all fits; in retrospect I could've predicted it; I'm shaken humbled razed to the ground when I think how everything would've changed had I been hit -- and I was so fucking close to being hit. Another definition of Coincidence: justification for being stupid... I should steer clear of that ... And instead see myself sitting in front of my computer, typing this, with just a faint throbbing in my hip and a kink in my ankle, as pure luck, another chance to make the most of what I have, now, and to wait for the walk sign and look both ways the next time I try to cut my journey-time by a few minutes.

Fuck. I'm alive.

Four Days Photo Forays

Two Iphone photos abutted

evokes a day's proceedings

Imagine a little Winston in the Invisible Inbetween!

To distract me from the still

[Movies and a rapid succession of images as source]

My newest painting acted upon a leap of intellectual faith (an emphasis on working the source before moving to canvas), whereupon I saw all of my old habits resurface (over-blending, simple geometric shapes, hidden brushwork, nude pastel colors, under-paint omission, etc.) because I felt uncertain.

But I'm pleased with the result.

Re-organization of the same variables (--I'm a slightly more confident but in no way more talented technician at 21 than I was at 16--) when left to the unconscious function can compose something as good as new, the test of which is how immediately people can still see me, and my past, in it, without the correspondence being formulaic or predicated.

I am distracting myself from the still to move past constancy; my relationship with visual expectation is narcissistic, a search for solace in my mirror; reassurance of my abilities won't come from a head beyond the glass...

Push away!

I know I will be frustrated but I will be free

obvious suggestion

Someone successfully perverted my perception in the most subtly unsubtle of ways: by contouring Justin Timberlake's face with a thick black sharpie, this vandal was able to disfigure Mr. Sexy Back to a point of non-recognition.

Manipulation of the actual image (photoshopping) is a painstaking process, a definite skill; but to be able to achieve the same, or arguably an even greater, transformation without touching the image itself (working solely on a superficial layer) affects us on an unconscious level because we, or at least I, never suspect that something so vulgar and obvious could still trick our most relied upon sense. Someone, that vandal, is a masterful trickster, and I want to learn from him!

(This is an idea to incorporate into future works, guiding the viewer's visual sense with additions rather than working from within; in the least, I'll be utilizing a new layer, the top-most, and may even venture into that ever-evasive negative space. My intentions are to raise the intensity of the work, and since I haven't a clue what the actual effect will be then there is no malice in this, just a want of impact).