a multi-disciplinary dialog
That Damien Hirst is following me into my own house.
I decided to follow him a little and cook up something for Halloween, based on his diamond skull. The party store didn’t have anything in hard plastic, so I settled for a hockey mask, derived from some scary movie. I then spent too much on plastic rhinestones which I glued onto the mask during hours of granddad babysitting. It ended up like this:
Then I made a poster to hand out to treat or tricksters.
So, what are you doing for Halloween?
Since I last checked in with Art & Perception, I’ve been exploring the synthesis of two of my most persistent obsessions: Manhattan and beatuiful men. I was partly motivated by comments on this blog questioning my lack of people in my city views and details. As a result of that, I have of late gone in a completely opposite direction.
Truth be told, I rarely enoy nude male photography, it leaves me cold. Too obvious. On the other hand the naked city in all of its hardness, rigid angles and cubist statements is to my eye powerfully masculine and quite arousing. So I wondered if I could use my camera to create some kind of visual and emotional communication between the stone, steel and glass architecture, textures and colors of my adored metropolis and the architecture, textures and colors of beautiful men.
I’m not sure I’ve succeeded quite yet, but I do feel I am on the right path. And I must confess–not surprisingly–the exploration has been great fun.
Perhaps the strangest part of this experience has been that the sexual and visual pleasure that I’ve been experiencing during this process of of exploration has been unique and extraordinarily intense in ways I had not imagined. Furthermore, the experience has given rise to intense personal feelings that I’ve not experienced during the actual act of sex. Partly, this is because–with one exception–I have not indulged in sex with my models despite the fact that one of the criteria I’ve used to select my models has been powerful sexual attraction. Limiting myself to the visual experience has opened the door on new sensations and much more powerful visual experience than I’ve ever had before.
This is a painting resulting from searching. Outlines of different figures are visible behind the man and woman whom I ‘found’ in the process. The sketching use of paint is not the way I usually work. That’s part of what makes this picture interesting to me. It bridges drawing and painting which, for me, are usually sequential and distinct processes.
I made this back in April. Now I am returning to this limited palette and exploratory form of painting.
The Dutch have an expression, “fine painter.” I loath this expression, because it tends to force an artist into a position where “fine” (as in detailed, not loaded with spontaneous dabs of paint) becomes the goal of painting. “Fine” or “coarse” are of no interest to me as goals, only as means.
Do you sometimes switch between very different modes of expression, whether in painting, drawing, or photography? Do you think in doing so you are trying to find difference approaches to the same expressive goal? My feeling is that I am doing that, that there is an unity. This is part of what makes its so exciting.
I’m a pushover for powerful art. Are you?
Daniel Chester French. The Lincoln Memorial
And by “powerful” I often mean Big. Big in size, Big in ideas, Big in meaning, Big in its very conception.
At my solo show (here), I happened to notice something about the way people react to the baggage that comes with art. I decided that contrary to popular practice, I was going to add a little blurb to each of the 10 paintings displayed at the gallery in addition to details like size, medium and title. The blurb ran from about 50 words for some paintings to about 150 words for some others. In most cases, the blurb tended to explain the social situation that compelled me to attribute that particular face to a particular facet of social reality. Gallery purists might shake and shudder at the fact that I had sunk to lowbrow levels by condescending to add blurbs next to paintings when it was supposed to be the other way; just view the painting and let the opinions garnered by the visual experience play out in the viewers mind rather than distort/subvert the whole process by an artist supplied opinion.
Surprisingly most of the gallery viewers reacted in a very positive way and were very happy to actually note that I had taken the trouble to write the context behind the painting.
As an example, I had the following blurb next to ‘Stomach Clock‘.
It is estimated that 33 million Americans continue to live in households without an adequate supply of food. According to statistics from the Bread for the World Institute, 3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger (9.6 million people, including 3 million children.) Children are a disproportionate share of the poor in the U.S. Although they are 26 percent of the total population, they constitute 39 percent of the poor.
My question to you is as follows: When would you consider putting a blurb next to your works? Never, sometimes or all the time. Why?
In a recent post, Hanneke looked again at a year-old painting she had felt dissatisfied with. I’m not sure how common this is for painters, but for me and, I suspect, most photographers, it’s the normal way of things. Whether blessing or curse, we have lots of older images that were not immediately pursued. Capturing an image takes much less time than bringing it to the standard of a fine print.
There is one advantage to this state of affairs, namely the enforced editing that prunes the large fraction of images that are, at best, less good than those we spend our limited time on. There might even be psychological benefit: if it’s good to learn to let go, I sure have a lot of learning opportunities. On the other hand, if regret is bad, I’m in trouble.
