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

where I'm where I am

I took command again of my super veiny hands and grabbed and go, and what came was just for fun, for me, and I'm digging it

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.

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.

Boston, wipeout whiteout

My friend Jordan asked me whether it's better to lose everything in a fire or throw it away. I said I don't know, but that what I'm doing now -- purging my cream-carpeted doll-filled room of its lingering adolescence -- feels good. I'm lucky to be able to say good-bye, actually to make a week of saying good-bye, before I fly away on another six-month transplantation.

Dusty room, dusty paintings, dusty mind. I'd like to rip out the carpeting, throw away the furniture, and paint it all white; but I'll probably just donate books dolls and clothing and then buy some coconut ice cream and vegan cookies and play Wii for the rest of my time here. I hear Super Mario Galaxy 2 is mind blowing fun.

documentation, that's all

Drawing out, sinking in process

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

The art of undoing

I'm painting over more of my old canvases now, and no one need know which ones: I'm easily influenced by outside stimuli when destructively tranced-out.

"It is until it isn't,"

and my own:

"Effort goes into it and comes unto me."

Which is to say that the time and energy spent on a painting is valuable in of itself, metamorphosing into future works; I need not preserve each stage of development like a collector of shells and skins.

experimentation in pure pigments

Experiments with clayboard: my incredibly old and tired bristle brushes apply paint so unevenly that, on clayboard, every stroke of color contains an equal or greater amount of white. No need to use white pigment with these. Changes everything -- it's just a test -- I quite like the color purity and the overall compositional simplification (white pigment you alien boi).

Of course, every painting contains its own problems and solutions... So the tube of titanium white will remain within arm's reach.

Two paintings today, plus images of my palette (used for both) and my lovely shoe/sock combination. Then I got ramen.

External thoughts

I am finding home, and this is a pursuit of the impossible. The ecstasy of a split-second encounter with it (the impossible) is so good, it is too much, but I grab at it and go go go; that feeling of restfulness, yes, is weightlessness before a drop, comfort is just (—where just is everything—) cushioning before a blow. The sequencing glues it all together, and when I grab at it and go go go I trace my motions in pigment so that I don’t repeat. Wash and repeat.

Painting for me is the glue that binds me to others; it is where I do my pursuing, and surprisingly, masochistically, people watch and applaud. (I guess I am highly relatable when I exist as a painting.) I continue for the mini-completions, the arrivals that are immediately beset by departures, the finishing and the restarting that, when layered one on top of the other, up up up and out and back under, take the form of a process unending. It is (just) that, and I make my home in it, and once in a while it corners and I’m reoriented by a lurch and a brake.

Translated to what you see before you: there are breaks and freefalls and encounters and dismissals. I have no qualms about calling [a painting] done because I am just starting. I spread myself thinner and thinner with water to increase my want of reconstitution; and then plops down a confident glob to scatter the weak, and then flies forth a bristle brush to disrupt the geography. Arbitrary intentionality! Impassioned randomness! Take note: I’m clearly confident in something because I admittedly haven’t a clue what I’m doing. In a close to perfect moment I don’t paint I just do and things happen, and if it looks like shit then I smile at its brownness and get some sleep, and if it works… Then I revel for a second in its presence and steady myself for the fall.