WORKS IN PROGRESS: 17 AND 18

a stack of books makes good clamps

The weather turned cold again. Today the air had floating crystals. I stepped outside to take carrots to the donkeys and felt a barely perceptible precipitation on my face. The temperature stayed just above 32 all day. As soon as the sun set, the temperature dropped below 32. Made a run to town for grocery store and a stop at Farmer's Hardware. Back home, I put braces on the backs of four pieces of plywood toward painting them. Glued the cardboard onto two of them. These two I think of as a pair. Thought about making them a yin-yang of each other, but that bored me. Each is uniquely itself now. One of them has a piece of torn cardboard. I've been wanting to try that. This one is the test. It might be simply dead, though I won't know until it's done. Color is very important on this one. I feel like the wrong color will kill it and the right color make it dance. Thinking about pink. Haven't made one pink yet. I'd like to make a gorgeous, silken pink, intense and soft. Not pastel. Thinking of the two as a pair, I was thinking 1955 Ford pink and gray. May do it yet. The two might go together better as not yin-yang with each other. The other board I glued two pieces of cardboard to. It is standing on its side now with books on top for weight. I wanted to wrap the cardboard around the edge with a half inch lip. I'll keep the weight on it overnight to be sure the glue is firm. Yet, back to yin-yang, the one on its edge has a masculine sense, while the one with the torn cardboard has a feminine sense. Maybe a masculine color would be good for this one, blue, baby colors. I'll see when I get there. 

17

Under the influence of my Daily Creative Practice friends, I've begun to take pictures of works in progress, steps along the way. Before, I'd just get pictures of the finished piece, never thinking of the process from start to finish a unit. Gluing and screwing the braces onto the backs of plywood boards I tend to think of as something extra from the finished piece. Today, I was drilling holes for the screws and feeling the thrill of putting the structure together, the surface for the paint, the rectangle. Tomorrow I'll apply the gesso to these two and paint the black edge. Next day or so, when I'm feeling it, I'll apply their colors. I like pink and blue. It could be fun to put the blue on the feminine form and the pink on the masculine form. It would be totally subliminal. No one would notice but me, That one's ringing temptation through my electrical system. This is getting so involved, I'll probably use some other colors. Already the pink and blue has become a cliche. Don't want cliches. I'll pick their colors without regard for the other. That's how I did the cardboard. One part of my mind sees them a pair. Another part of the mind wants them separate and not referring to the other. Twins that don't dress alike. Gluing down the cardboard is a commitment to an image the paint will make important. I want to make a cardboard statement on each one, individually, its shape being the subject. I want them to have the freshness of chance. The lines of light and shade are the ultimate subject. I don't like to put too much mentation into where the lines will appear on each one. The arrangement of the cardboard is about those lines of light and shade. From half way across the room, only those lines are visible on a plane of color.

12

I like that up close the cardboard is visible as such, while at a little distance it returns to one plane with light and shadow lines. I like that. It's almost a juxtaposition. An added dimension that is visible up close and disappears with distance. I'm looking in mind for a way to make the plywood surface the positive space, subject, and the cardboard the negative space. I'll attempt that on the next one after these two. It is almost a square. I see what I think I want to do. Seen in the mind's eye and the 3-D object, itself, can be very different. What I see in my mind might be terrible on the board. But it's a place to start. On the board I can make arrangements and see what happens. Chance is very important. The structure of the rectangle is not chance, but visual inside the rectangle, though a mental construct, I feel like needs chance in there too. The curved and jagged line of the torn cardboard represents chance in this one. The other one with two pieces of cardboard I saw in my mind's eye and cut to what I saw, arranged it, liked what I saw and when I put the glue on and placed them, it was entirely different from what I set out to do. I realized I was already bored with it, and if it bores me that quickly, I don't want to do it. The new arrangement happened without mentation. Surprise. I feel like I'm engaged in artistry during the construction of the surface period, where before, I thought of it more as carpentry. Two separate events went into each piece. Now that I am seeing the carpentry aspect a part of the finished artwork, it's all the more fun. I want each piece to have freewheeling fun about it. 

18 having its sides clamped

The verse from the Tao te Ching I posted yesterday spoke what I am aiming toward in each of these, simplicity, patience and empathy. The simplicity is self-evident. Simplicity is a primary guideline. When mind starts complicating a visual idea, I pull back at a certain point and declare it too complicated, not what these pieces are about.. They are about the most simple I can get it, a line of light and a line of shadow on one color. The only way I can see simpler would be not to use paint, just show the raw materials, though that gets into a degree of visual complexity. Patience, I see patience in a certain stillness they have. They are quiet, even when the color is loud. I see a stillness in one color. These two will be 17 and 18. I've been following what I learn from one piece to the next. The progression is becoming visible. I'm leaving rectangular shapes and going into more interesting shapes, though the rectangle is important. And empathy for itself. I'll interpret empathy to be each one's reference only to itself, it is what/who it is, complete in itself. Each one is it's place in a series and each one is itself. They work well in a cluster of them on the wall and they work well alone. I don't know that anybody will ever see what I'm seeing in this series. The beauty of it for me is that it doesn't matter if somebody likes it and somebody else doesn't. I'd know that would be the case if I painted like Norman Rockwell. Some would say, Oh what great art, and some others would say, What a bunch of shit. I don't think what I'm doing is "great art" by any means, though I feel like this series is touching art, getting there. It's neither pole of the extremes. I'm playing with art like a child. Therein, I'll say, is the empathy.  

braced for next

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PAINTING IN CYCLES

robert mangold

Every day I feel good about getting older unto old. It's the best part of my life. I have good people in my circle, love all around. I ran into Matt in the grocery store yesterday with his two kids. As we spoke, I forgot something and remarked I like the forgetfulness that goes with old age. I said I like blank mind. He said, "I'll look forward to that," in irony. I do enjoy that information falls out of my mind. I think of it as a groundhog hole. I'll be talking, or writing, and the next thought just falls down a groundhog hole. Gone. Writing, I can look at the previous sentence and bring it back, but talking, I have to ask, What did I just say? Answer usually comes back, I don't remember. This tells me how important what I have to say is. So what's the point talking? When the groundhog hole swallows a thought, oh well. All the better that it's gone. Whoever is listening isn't hearing, so why talk? Because I'm expected to talk. Never on a subject. Never. One runs the mouth while the other daydreams waiting their chance to talk, jumps in and starts talking while the other daydreams and waits for a chance to talk. I don't even encourage conversation anymore. Quips. Brief notations, letting off steam. Somebody has something to say, I'll listen, and I'll talk making it a point to come as close to saying nothing as I can think of at the moment. It's like I'm in a sitcom everywhere I go. We tend to talk in sitcom punchlines. Not tuned into that medium, it's difficult for me to talk like a sitcom. When I try, it sounds silly. Sounds silly on a sitcom. I've never held the sitcom with canned laughter as anything but the lowest form of entertainment. I'd rather watch underwater terrapin races. I used to try to talk frivolous sitcom talk, just to have somebody to talk with from time to time. Now, I'd rather have no one to talk with. I'd rather stay home and be quiet, enjoy quiet mind. Talk less: forget less. 

robert mangold

So much is changing within that I sometimes wonder if I'm not rounding the last turn in a running race, where the runner goes wide open and runs the feeling out of his legs. This cycle I'm in is so fulfilling it makes me wonder if I'm nearing the finish line. Yet, I tend more to see it as I've finally come to a place in the life where my heart is open and mind uncluttered, no desires, no wanting anything but a new book, now and then, and wanting to give the donkeys a comfortable and happy life, Caterpillar too. I want to be an attentive friend to my friends. I want my art expression to be fulfilling in the doing. I'm way past caring about attention as an artist, a reputation, shows, money. I don't want any of it. I stepped into that world some many years ago, but jumped out like the frog dropped into boiling water. Too much jealousy, envy, hierarchy, judgment, pretend. I'd rather my friends have my art than anybody else. I'm not driven enough to pursue art as business. I've stopped painting in the past every time art turned into business. I wasn't going there. Every time I started painting again, it was a completely new style, new subjects, new mind, new cycle. This cycle of doing single-color abstractions feels the best of any before. It's like everything I was doing before was learning art. Suddenly, I'm pursuing an interest that is the natural next thing. Natural for me. Natural because I've leaned toward abstraction all the way along, am in bliss at a museum surrounded by abstractions. A wonderful abstraction can take my breath more than much that is figurative, though exceptions abound. I think I've learned how to breathe life into a figurative painting. Now is the time to breathe life into abstractions. I did not hold abstraction as a goal I was consciously working toward, though am able to see in retrospect the super-conscious had been progressing in that direction. 

antoni tapies

Painting figuratively, I used in my mind abstract principles, whatever that means. Though I was painting a recognizable subject, I saw it abstractly. This series of abstractions came out of seemingly nowhere. One day I was messing around with some shapes, rectangles in rectangles, and saw something I'd like to try, using cardboard. It started as two colors, but the two colors killed the cardboard as an element. One color makes the cardboard the subject. I like that it is two planes that look like one with a light line and a dark line. I've seen so many styles of abstractions, that when I looked for something that could be my own, somebody else had already done it. Antoni Tapies turns me on about the most of any abstractionist I'm aware of. There are many I love, but Tapies has my full appreciation. The few of his I have laid eyes upon have pulled the breath right out of my open mouth. I especially remember one I saw at the Carlos museum on the Emory campus in Atlanta, largely black. A luminous black. I can gaze at Tapies paintings on google images and be in awe, but seeing one, face to face, is a very special moment in my life. Another, Robert Mangold, who makes a canvas of a beautiful color applied perfectly smoothly, and a pencil line in varieties of shapes, circles, rectangles, ovals in wonderful ways that are unique to the given piece. Recalling one I saw at I think it was the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, a canary yellow I'd never seen before. It was a big rectangle. The pencil line a rectangle where the left and right lines were not parallel and missed meeting by about an inch. At the Mint in Charlotte, I saw one in a pale olive, a square canvas with a pencil line of a circle. Where it started and met at the bottom missed by about an inch. It's that space in his art eye of that period where I find his "art," what van Gogh called It. I found a book of Mangold paintings and never tire of looking at the images. I never dreamed I would one day be making abstractions of one color. 

robert mangold

Of course, there was immediate concern I'm imitating Mangold. It's not imitating. Like I saw his art in the small gap where lines fail to meet, I see my art in the lines of light and shade made by the edges of the cardboard in relation to light source. I love giving light and shade a part in my "art." The first one I made using cardboard, I didn't see those lines of light and dark. Used two colors. The second one used two colors too. The lines of light and shadow are rendered absent. All one color, those lines around the cardboard are the life in the piece. This is to my eye. I don't anticipate someone else seeing this. Its why I'm telling it. The cardboard shape becomes the subject. I like that as the oil paint dries, it shrinks into the texture of its surface. Paint wet, the cardboard looks like the same surface as the plywood. Dry paint the ribs of the cardboard show; that it is cardboard is apparent, as I want it. Cardboard is so common it's like the most common. Yesterday at the dump I looked at the cardboard pile, surveying big pieces for something larger I might want to make in future. I love about cardboard that it is the most common thing in all our lives. We all know cardboard. I love the commonness of plywood too, especially scraps. I see influence of Mangold up front, which I don't care about because it's not like Mangold. I see Tapies influence and Motherwell influence. My way of making an abstraction is as new to me as it is to someone looking at it the first time. I'm looking for what I see influencing these new pieces I'm having a ball making. If I can make something that takes my breath like standing before a Tapies, I feel like I have touched art. With each one I'm making now, I feel that awe upon completion. I'm following that awe to see where it goes.   

antoni tapies

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QUARTET 13, 14, 15, 16

Another good day of staying on the mountain, no need to run to town, no schedule someplace else, home where I can take a nap when I feel like it, do nothing when I feel like it, or do something when I feel like it. It's good for art projects to have days in a row not needing to go off the mountain for any reason. Made some progress on an art project, good progress, fun progress. Sunday I asked Justin to cut a scrap piece of rough plywood he had left over from a project. It was seven and a half inches wide and eight feet long. I asked him to cut two thirty-two inch pieces and two sixteen inch pieces. I carried them home delighted as a child with new toys. Monday I ran rough sandpaper around the edges to knock off the burrs. It is not finish plywood. It's rough. What I wanted. They are parts of a four-piece site-specific project for my friends, Lucas and Judy Carpenter. The living room has two triangles that have called to me for years to find something that works inside a triangle, that includes the triangle as geometric shape, one of the three elements of the visual world, the square, the circle and the triangle. I'll insert two rectangles in each triangle. Splinters gone from around the edges, I was ready to start. Get out the drill, the bits and some one-inch wood screws. I glued some wood strips, two on each rectangle, and screwed them to the back, to brace the plywood and inhibit warping. Using a powerful wood glue from the hardware store. My attitude putting together a construction is that if something can break, it will. Murphy's law. I'm confident all four pieces are as firmly put together as can be. I put hangers on the back that will make them easy to hang. 

Next step, cut some cardboard rectangles to glue to the boards. As I said, the boards are rough plywood. Each one had bad places, deep grooves around knots, I did not want to arrange the cardboard rectangles mentally. Wanted chance to arrange. I let the bad places determine where I'd put the cardboard. I sat with them, one at a time with a pencil and drew on the places and shapes for the rectangles. It worked to satisfaction. Every board is uniquely itself, arrangement of cardboard determined by the boards themselves. Cardboard covered the bad places, and the rest of the board is smooth. No patterns in the arrangements of the cardboard, which I have come to think of as the subject, the positive space, while the board around is negative space. The part I see most is the light along an edge of the plywood and a shadow along the opposite edge. This part changes according to the direction of incoming light. By day, light coming from windows, the light and shadow lines will be one way, and by night, lights from inside will make the lines shift; a line light before will be a dark line from another light source. I think other people see the cardboard the subject, though I see the lines of light and shadow the subject. The triangle on the left is a left angle triangle, the right side vertical. The long board will be horizontal across the lower part of the triangle, and the shorter board will be horizontal a few inches above it. Looking at the long one a red not yet determined, and the short one a blue not yet determined. Today I'm looking at an earth red and a deep sky blue. The triangle on the right is a right angle triangle, the vertical line on the left. In it, the long board will be vertical and the short board vertical too, a couple inches between them. The long one white and the short one a rich egg yolk yellow. The white standing tall will be its own statement. The yellow will make its own statement too. And the yellow will enhance the white, give the white a jolt of energy.

This project has lived in my head for a few weeks, waiting for the wood to come through and waiting for the paint to arrive in the mail. Today's part after the glue bonding the cardboard was overnight dry, apply the gesso. All four boards came to life as entities. They are a quartet, belong together, site specific, so I'm putting the whole project together as one piece. I won't rush the laying on of color. May color them one at a time or a pair at a time. I lay the paint on emotionally and want the quartet to all come from the same emotional place. If I paint one, then wait a week, I'm in another place. It would be ok if that's what I wanted, but I want these of the same emotional place in self. I don't mean dramatic emotional. I feel the mixing of the colors very closely until the one appears that is It. It has the feeling I'm looking for in the color. I couldn't name the feeling going into it, won't know what it is until application. Even then, won't know how to name it. I see a stillness in this series, a stillness I like. Thinking of naming this quartet, I really don't want to go beyond 13, 14, 15, 16, looking for titles. Maybe something cool like: Quartet; 13, 14, 15, 16. Sounds kinda beatnik. I'll go with that. It tells their sequence in the evolution of this series of gluing cardboard to wood and painting it. Next, or soon, I want to do one on paper. See how that goes. Watching how one feeds an idea for the next one enchants me. I'm coming close to the end of my found plywood and the wood I use for braces. That just means go on to something else. I have some blank canvases about. Plenty of paper. I don't want to do plywood on and on. I have small wooden boxes to play with, blocks of wood. This project is about using up the things I've found over the years and haven't done anything with yet. It's about using up excess paint, too. 

These are the days of I'm-gonna. It is due to the inspiration of this Daily Creative Practice group on facebook. Different people showing what they're doing and telling about it. It's inspiring every day to see what my new friends are doing. Many of them are quite extraordinary. I don't do anything like any of the others, which is a good thing. Most of what the others do is so far beyond anything I could do, I look on in awe, honored to be among them, happy to know them. Everybody does something that is uniquely their own. I love that about the group. It has no agenda. Only to get people together of an art interest as we all live our lives in a wasteland. It's nice to be in touch with people of art interest. I felt like the only way my minimalist approach fit with the others is that it's what I'm doing, like what they do is what they're doing. I love it that everybody's expression is uniquely their own. My minimalist approach to plywood, cardboard and pigment is the first time in my art life I feel like I have touched "art." What van Gogh called "It." A little bit ago I walked over to the most recently finished one, the white one, drying on an easel. I looked at the light and dark lines either side of the cardboard and looked at the slashes of paint, To my eye, the art in it is the fall of the light, the glow of light on one vertical line and the dark line of shadow on the other, neither of which was painted, and they change according to the direction of incoming light. I'm the only one on earth this would matter to, making it all the more my own. This white one and the one before it, bic lighter orange, take my breath when I see them. In the same way a Mark Rothko takes my breath. This tells me it satisfies my own personal aesthetic. And it's more fun than watching a dog chase its tail.

tj worthington

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