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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WORKS IN PROGRESS

 

 

work in progress

In response to this week's prompt by Ruth Schowalter in the Daily Creative Practice group, I had two things conceived that were not yet in process toward manifestation. I've seen the above image in my mind's eye for a few weeks looking for ways to perform it. Had it mapped out to satisfaction when Ruth's prompt came up. Thought I'd finish it before end of week and use it for the project. Simultaneously, I was wanting to make something to call Prometheus Unbound. It would have to do with fire and electricity. It is in process too. May take more than a week. This red and black one began as a study in black and red, two equally intense colors. I do not buy that black is not a color. In pigment, black is the presence of all colors. In light, black is absence of color and white is all colors, the reverse of pigment. I'm dealing in pigment, so black is a color same as purple is a color. My favorite black is made from mixing thalo green and thalo red. They make a black like doesn't come in a tube. Blue and orange make a nice, warm black. The black in the picture above came out of two tubes, mars black and ivory black mixed. I used both because I didn't want to empty either tube, only take each one down a ways. They're good for different purposes. This performance above I have been tossing around for a title. The only words to come to me is the one word, Red. I was thinking about calling it The Black and the Red. But, upon more or less completion, I regret that I did not make the black rectangle half an inch taller and wider. It would have balanced the red. Now the red is dominant and the black looks like negative space. I tell myself, though it is finished as far as original vision is concerned, doesn't mean it's finished. Might even call it something like Warehouse. All that is floating around in mind space. Thinking maybe I could buy a wooden egg, paint it like a freaked out easter egg, or several and fix them to it from behind with long screws. That's the beginning of getting complex and the purpose here is simple as possible without imitating Barnett Newman. This shape doesn't have any association resonances with me, though it does favor a corner of a warehouse door and portions of two windows in a brick building. It was not original intent, which is why I like it. An accidental association, so why not bring it to the front.

 

 

original notes

 

The pictures above are the notes recording original vision. The small one was made in the coffee shop where I was sitting at the bar working a Jumble puzzle in the paper, tore off a corner of the paper to make a note. At home, I put it on a square of white paper to let it start growing. I'm thinking I could make another one a different size where the black is dominant and call it Black. And maybe do another size with balanced black and red, to go together or separate. I like the idea of repeating this shape in variations and sizes. I sketched the colors onto the wood, a piece of 3/4 inch plywood with braces glued and screwed to the back to inhibit bowing, as plywood does. It was already primed from more than five years ago when I prepared it for no reason, just to have it ready some day. Original plan was to print the colors onto the wood by cutting out pieces of cardboard the shape I wanted, paint one side of the cardboard, lay it down, press it and lift. Voila! It works small, but I hadn't yet tried it bigger. The size is 9"x11.5". It didn't take too good. Left big splotches that were ok, but also not. Woke up in the night wide awake and head swimming with how I wanted to print it in layers, one on top of the other while wet to mix several shades into one. Good ideas don't always translate into a physical form with the golden glow the it had in my head. The red was not anywhere near to satisfaction, nor was the black. I mixed up some more paint with medium (varnish, turpentine and linseed oil, equal parts) and started slathering it on with palette knife to spread it more or less evenly to maybe lay the cardboard stamp on top of it and lift it off to give the texture I wanted another way. No. I liked the palette knife strokes. At first, I wanted slick, smooth surface and lines. Once the palette knife started dancing, I scraped the paint left on the cardboard, used it all, spread it like soft butter on toast, making it a point to avoid self-conscious swipes in the paint, just slather it on like a kid, keeping the lines straight with soft edges. I began to see what I was doing with the paint, spreading it like it was plaster can only work when it's spread unselfconsciously. Any conscious pattern found in it would catch the eye. I want them to keep the eye moving, a pattern that is not a pattern. A still flame.

 

jean (hans) arp

 

First vision was slick and sharp. It softened in process. Using up all the paint and smearing it on with the butter knife, I was thinking I'd screwed the whole thing up. It didn't work. What the hell. Not enough black. I could let it dry and paint over it or anything. Looked at it, said, "Sucks." Went back to bed after daylight. Might be good to paint something over later. Woke around noon, got up groggy, made some coffee, talked on the phone with Carole, dreading seeing what I'd done. I liked it, liked the paint smeared with palette knife. Now I want to make one the reverse of this. At the same time of putting this one together, another one is in the works. It is a chunk of cement found on the ground at a building site. I see it a head in profile and a profusion of curly hair. The chunk is soaking in a bucket of pale yellow latex paint and water, staining the cement, letting it soak the pigment into it. Next, I'll take some oil red and orange and brush it on lightly. I want to make it suggest fire. Prometheus, the god of foresight who gave us reason by way of fire. For giving us fire, he was chained to a rock. Thinking about fixing a short, old 3-link rusted chain I found somewhere long ago, rusted. I'd leave it hanging loose to suggest unbound. I'll make Prometheus an Irishman with pink face and curly red hair. It will be simple. The chunk of painted cement is to lie down flat atop the pedestal, 5.5"x 5.5"x 9". The wood will be sanded, steel-wooled and stained ebony. Another red and black. I may use a copper wire in some yet unknown way to suggest electricity with Prometheus. I don't want to think too much about it. I want to let it put itself together, let it tell me what it needs, let things fall into place.

prometheus and stand

 

prometheus in process

 

I'm seeing the influence of one of my favorite artists, Jean (Hans) Arp. French/German early Dadaist in Zurich. He cut wood forms with a jigsaw, fixed them together and painted them. I've admired them since I first saw they were his. Saw two, maybe three, at the modern art museum in Zurich. Every time I see something by him, I pause within, receive it, admire its utter simplicity, its accident. I committed a sin against art in the Zurich museum. I saw a stunning piece of white marble, a sort-of circle misshapen Arp-style. No one was in sight. I touched it for a hundredth of a second with the tip of my forefinger. I know it's against all the rules. I also know I did not disfigure or endanger it in any way. I did it to make contact with a favorite artist, an inspiring artist, the Dadaist I connected with best. He played with chance. His simplicity has the same stillness as a Brancusi sculpture, smooth, aerodynamic and hydrodynamic. Arp's paintings and sculptures have a lighthearted air about them. Making a cloud of marble and it having a seeming lightness by association seems like art to me. Arp wrote Dadaist verse as well. I have a book of his poems and essays. He writes a lot about clouds. Change and chance were the subjects that ran through his work. I think it is his lightness that inspires me. I like to embrace the principles of dada in a similar way to how I like to embrace the principles of mountain musicians in my work. It's an attitude about art. Don't take it seriously. Do it in the spirit of play. Marketing not an issue. It's all in the doing. This is why I call making an art object a performance. Off stage. The finished object is on stage. The artist's performance is over when the piece is signed. The performance is from conception to completion, the mental, physical and emotional process of creation. I've wanted to do something that involves colors as themselves. Red and black appeal to me for their strong resonance. I'm feeling inspired, wanting to make some art objects that appeal to me and me only. Make them for my own aesthetic reasons with no consideration to what anyone outside my house might think of it. Something that satisfies me, made freely enough it has no economic considerations, only physical, mental and emotional.

jean (hans) arp

 

 

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A NEW YEAR AHEAD

Jessica stockholder

We're into a new annual cycle, and it starting with a new moon. A good time to start new projects. Ruth at the facebook artist group, Daily Creative Practice, asked everyone to make a statement about what we envision for ourselves through the course of 2014. Not a resolution, but what one sees on the horizon, so to speak, the direction one is moving, projects in sight. Intent. Seeing that it's a new moon, it's a good time to address intent. I'm not one to look that far ahead, a year ahead, so this thinking is new for me. I prefer not to think about the future, except to look at the evolution of police state that has trumped American democracy, view changes in the progression of specifically American fascism, and the changing cartography that will go with global warming. I pay attention to it for self-preservation. Like I know not to use the word Be Oh Hem Be. Or Hen Eye Gigi He Are. NSA will nail me with insta-word check for key words. I'll end up in the deepest darkest dungeon under the maximum security prison in Alaska for using forbidden language. YOU CAN'T SAY THAT! I just did. Targeted potential terrorist. He used the B-word. I figure everything I write here is surveilled in a nanosecond when I click on the publish button. That's the internet landscape as I see it, all of it reviewed by NSA with word check. A satellite can see a quarter in my driveway. I don't see this Snowden episode changing anything. It's a surprise speed-bump for the propagandists and no more.  

 

jessica stockholder

 

I saw the young actress Jennifer Lawrence, whose name I only know because I saw her on the Jon Stewart show,  is campaigning with her celebrity influence to eliminate the word FAT from the language. Now we have another forbidden F-word. Issues of forbidden words have been going on in my homeland for several years now. You really have to watch what you say around white middle-class women. I've become so weary of watching what I say around them that I just make it clear when you're around me, you're on your own where handling forbidden language is concerned. I'm not vulgar, but I'm not obedient to priestesses of Political Correctness either. Get in my face and you just might make me laugh. We have an alphabet now of forbidden words that you get fired on television for saying. It's as bad as the preacher's wife syndrome in the old days. The preacher and his old-lady disapproved. Whatever it was, they disapproved. Middle-class women who get bent over the alphabet of forbidden words have fun disapproving of me. I'll never forget a brief conversation with a white middle-class woman I've been acquainted with for several years when she was informing me the N-word needed to be banned from the dictionary, "and while they're at it, they can ban the C-word." I thought: Oh no, another letter of the alphabet with a banned word! I said in jest, "What is it, Cool?" Answer in no uncertain terms, "No! CUNT!!!" I said, "Oh." I did not see that coming. I couldn't imagine what a C-word would be. Colored? Coon?

 

jessica stockholder

 

All this time we're throwing away our freedom of speech as something reprehensible in need of controls, I'm in awe to see the American people, after two-thirds of a century of television, don't want democracy or freedom of speech, these precious aspects of America The Land Of The Free our flag stands for. Not just let fade away, but thrown out like broken children's toys. In the Fifties it was called the Throw-Away Society. We're so far advanced in tossing out that we're spoiled by it like we're spoiled with what we want by Wal-Mart. We've gone from landfills to making mountains of trash. I remember seeing a trash mountain beside I-95 near Stuart, Florida, that was so high the bulldozer on top looked like a matchbox toy. I point to television, because it has rendered the American people collectively unconscious. It's purpose. Crowd control. It worked. Keep the masses ignorant and they vote republican. Like it matters how they vote. It's a game, like a card game, a cyber poker game between propagandists using hate to divide us into Us against Them. Divide and conquer. Because I see how conquered we-the-people are, I can't involve myself in paying attention to politics or the news anymore. I say "paying attention to." I hear it on radio a time or two a day and see internet bits of current events, but will never again let political, religious, or ideological influence clutch at my heart with a pang that says: It hadn't oughta be that way. Maybe it hadn't oughta, but the Titanic hadn't oughta neither.

 

jessica stockholder

 

Because this is how I see the world that is the landscape I live in, I chose to abandon a life of supporting the military machine USA has evolved into. Fear created and cranked up by the tv to a stress level that longs for security. Tv cop shows kill offenders, criminals, the unspeakable word, the enemy. I choose every day not to live in such mind. Even though I am not manipulated by the corporate belief system directly through television, I get it from everybody around me. I live in television culture even though I don't watch it. I see it once a week for a few hours. It reminds me why I care nothing for it. I'm grateful to God every day for landing my parachute on a back road in the Blue Ridge Mountains where I need a gun to take a walk in the woods anymore. I see images of cities around the world in movies and feel claustrophobic. I remember standing on the highest point in London and seeing city to horizon all the way around. It was the reverse of being at sea out of sight of land. The place I'm located geographically and mentally is about as good as, "at sea out of sight of land," as is reasonably accessible. I don't want to live someplace it takes a Land Rover to get to. I'm ok with a road running by the house. I'm ok with neighbors. I need trees desperately. I can't participate in the mind that values only money and the appearance of money. Tv is about money and money only. I don't value money. A guy in a gold-chrome Cherokee wanted to buy my house one day. I told him it's not for sale. He said there is a price I would sell it for. I laughed. Didn't say it because it wouldn't sound the way it was meant, I don't think you know who you're talking to. Our conversation went nowhere.

 

 

 

jessica stockholdeer

 

A month ago I decided to let go of listening to the news in any form. I asked myself one day, Why am I giving attention to people like Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Bachman, Boner, Mitch and Paul? Any of them? I have no respect for anyone involved in American government anymore, would cross the street to avoid one. I need to get my mind out of that thinking. I say that's the landscape I live in, but it's not only that. It is that if I turn it on. I have a choice. To turn it on, or not to turn it on. It is my creation. I scroll through the facebook political images that used to amuse me as if they were commercials, which they are, propaganda commercials. The republicans are taking us on a downhill run, I can't stop it, and I don't like to watch it. I see it enough at the grocery store, rising prices and the huff-n-puff swat-team mind of town cops these days. State cracking down on citizens with outrageous fees for everything. Mandatory sentencing and outrageous prison sentences. I'm so paranoid about getting out in the world anymore, I want to stay home all the time. I'm stuck to it and there's nothing I can do but acquiesce, stay at home, draw minimal attention to myself, watch international movies, read international books, pay attention to international art. I can ignore as much as possible, while at the same time not being in denial. I know what it is to my own satisfaction and praise God every day for the insight to get out of that mind. Beyond the writing and the art projects for 2014, I want to separate myself even further from concern about anything to do with American politics. I want to hear American political news with the same dispassion as if it were North Korean news. I want to sit with picture books of Ai Wei Wei, Larry Rivers, Robert Irwin, Robert Mangold, Constantin Brancusi, books in reach of where I sit. I tell myself to look at art more, not corporate mind-rot.     

 

jessica stockholder

 

 

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