Midwestern Farmhouses and other Ungrayed Things

And other things from my five-painting workblock last Sunday. I can't remember if this was before or after I got mad at all the art and deleted the artist website. (In my defense, none of it was behaving.) But I didn't physically trash and burn everything, so we're good.

First up: Midwestern farmhouses. Photographed on work trips. Loathed for grayness and squareness. Translated to eschew both things.

A new layer on an old draft. This is the kind of painting for which I have a separate artist name, because that's a naked lady...

Another new layer on an old draft. This one's still driving me crazy. What's new.

And finally, the obligatory first attempt at a take-off on Charles Angrand's "The Good Samaritan." Inspired by a trip to the Phillips's amazing neo-Impressionism exhibit.

Looks like I also didn't bother posting the latest Boston skyline effort, a painting of a photograph of the Harbor Islands and city lights coming in from the air at night. 

And these other newish layers on older draft things also exist.

Song-Paintings

I did "Fool on the Hill" and others when I was little. And I love illustrating my poems and songs. But it's been a while since I did a whole batch of song-paintings on other people's songs.

Kiss the Sky. (Hendrix is the poem. Which explains why he's also a poetry book.)

Ashes on Your Eyes. For which the poem form is Mary Oliver's "I Looked Up."

Sisters of Mercy. Leonard Cohen's lyrics are poems already. But I don't know why this painting, which was meant to be of three naked ladies, came out as a landscape. Maybe this one warrants a retry. (Edit: Oh, right! The song opens "The sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone." So the singer is standing in the middle of an unpopulated landscape going, I'm alone I'm alone I'm alone—wait, no I'm not.)

Also: there, I fixed it. Salomé, retouched.

Layers and Salomé

Layers on four things that were driving me crazy that will now continue driving me crazy.

Also: Salomé failed to suffocate under the shields, and she is pissed.

In related news, I have now hit 40 new paintings since giving away all my LA art in July after giving away all my Virginia art in January. There was a time I sold art instead of giving it away. It was an interesting but ultimately untenable business model: So many ideas, so little time.

Something about having 40 oil paintings in a studio apartment with next to no furniture is perversely ecstatic. Probably the fumes.

Studies for a Pour, and Hope

Lots of glorious work travel. Trips = triptychs. (Or, rather: draft layers thereof.)

1. An iron smelting pour, inspired by a lovely painting in Jacob Lawrence's uber-relevant migration series on view now at the Phillips (on the 20th century mass migration of blacks to northern cities).

2. A "substanceless blue/pour of tor and distances" (Plath, "Ariel").

3. A soul pour.

4. And the hope bird, insofar as perhaps the egress in the music video of the Dickinson poem-song was not quite right. (With debt also to Madeleine L'Engle's description of a cherubim in A Wind in the Door.)

I think if I ever write a blog or something about the art thing, instead of just throwing stuff up here, it should be called "Sh, We're Having a Conversation." Because that's what's going on here, across media, referents, places.

5. Except of course when we're having an orgasm. (I can't imagine why I make art under one name and do relatively respectable things under another.)

6. Also: fuck you, dirt road.

We now return with some difficulty to our regularly scheduled planet.

Mid-November Wet Things

Modernist mid-November wet thing. 

Midwestern mid-November sun wet thing. 

Gentle storm mid-November wet thing. 

Homecoming mid-November wet thing.

Early November Wet Things

Creative titles these days, I know.

Inspired by a plastic sculpture without artist attribution by a mall bathroom in St. Louis. Naturally.

Plus new layers on these two ornery things that I keep painting over, that have good enough grain and color that I don't want to flip them into different things altogether (like the failed sunset could be a pair of wings, part of a peacock, flowers, eyes...). But they're still not working. So I'll just keep using up leftover paint on them until they do...

Yet More Late Oct. Wet Things

Here are more wet things that I hate less.

Now I have a proper camera again to make proper photos of more proper art. Better. Still must take the time and mind to learn to crop on a Mac, though.

Speaking of Googling simple questions, Google is also apparently beta testing an open gallery tool for Google sites! This has been a need for a long time, and is super exciting. So when I get my requested invite for that ((bats eyelashes enticingly at Google)), I can break better photos into categories like trees, mountains, desert, road, and misc. And then recombobulate them online into a slightly more navigable form for no readily apparent reason.

More Late Oct. Wet Things

These things are not the things they were in my head. But now they exist outside my head. Hooray, existence.

Midnight Salvaged Sunflowers (formerly horrific shells). Probably a layer. 

Stairway to Heaven (in Arches). Probably a layer. 

Hiking the Hermit Trail in the Grand Canyon National Park. Maybe a fifth layer. I like it more now at least. Probably (shock) a layer. 

It's weird how little I can like these as products and how good I can feel painting at the same time. It's like a car aficionado keying a car and then going to hang out with his mechanic buddies and being like, "Yeah, I feel good, I worked on a car today. Something magic about working with your hands." There is, though. Something about making a thing that exists in time and space. 

Wet Stuff, Late October '14

I like to work on at least six paintings in a go because it takes time and energy to get out and put away the gunk. But it's typical for me to only feel I've found the soul of one painting in a work block. This is the one.

The others, I feel like there's a block of matter between the world and the painting and I have to chip it away with brushstrokes. And I have some ideas, but I have other work to do and this is more self-care in the sense that I can't do anything else if I don't do art.

 

Someday I will sign things again. This doesn't feel like an era of signing. I don't know what to sign. Everybody go away and leave me alone but first look at my art that is not mine... It's better with grain, you can't see the grain in photos, and so we're not really living in the era of mechanically reproducible art after all but I don't have the heart to hold it against Benjamin.

In which these things are driving me crazy

It's been over two weeks since I painted (busy with other kinds of work). That tends to make me a little crazy. So I took the morning to layer over things that were driving me crazy. And all these things are now still driving me crazy. But they're better. So there's that.

Wet Stuff, Early October '14

Well, that didn't work. The Duane Keiser model in which I exist as a new artist in Internet space without ties to my old markets and do no PR because the work carries itself. (Wait. That's not really the DK model. He networked. I largely refrained from going outside or talking to people. Details.)

That's ok. There is more wet stuff—here is the wet stuff—and as an artist, that's all I care about. Not even the production of the final product that I don't hate—not all, maybe any of these, are that—although that's nice. But the continual presence of wet paint, in one form another.