Confessions of an Egomaniac, Pt. 2

. . . . . continued

I humbly plead, admit, that yes, I thought I was special, somehow, that I was going to be some kind of star. To tell the absolute truth, that insidious and misleading feeling still persists at some level, despite my attempts to root it out. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that there are a lot of smart, talented, funny, amazing people out there, people with interesting stories doing cool things, people who probably actually are special, more special than me, anyway, by any kind of objective yardstick. And I recently realized that either this would eat me up, or I could decide to become an appreciator, to cultivate a genuine appreciation of other people’s talents and worthy accomplishments, so I didn’t curdle into an unwarranted and unbecoming bitterness. To remind myself continually that life is really not a zero sum game — really — and that the achievements of others don’t reduce our own chances of achieving success someday. And this may sound terribly obvious, especially if you haven’t spent your life laboring under the delusional burden of incipient greatness, but if, like I have, you’ve spent your whole life with an internal monologue which is constantly running down/picking apart/criticizing other people and their works, all to maintain the ego’s fiction of specialness, well, this notion of appreciation is pretty fucking revolutionary. (N.B. This does not mean surrendering the use of one’s critical faculties altogether, and mutely accepting the mountains of shlock and crap in the world, just actually acknowledging when stuff is good. And maybe even trying to find something positive in things that aren’t.)

Try this:  put an activity at the center of your life and work very hard at it without satisfactory results. Have no community, make no money, remain very isolated, and see how long you still feel like doing that activity. Not so much.

I was reading a New Yorker article a little while ago on solitary confinement and how it literally makes people lose their minds, and while I’m not seriously comparing myself to a prisoner in solitary, it did make me reassess how lonely my daily routines are, how empty my life feels.  And how unhappy and bored I am. Maybe that’s why I can’t finish any work: I just don’t have enough input in my life to be able to put anything out. A simple equivalency problem. My equation isn’t balanced.

The studio has come to feel like work, like a sort of dreary duty that I dutifully perform, but am only too happy not to do on the weekends. I’ve lost that joy in paint and all its possibilities by heaping such a heavy load onto it — the desire to succeed, the fear of failure — that it’s too freighted to do anything fun or quirky or unexpected or playful.

What to do? Well, first of all, clearly I need a job. Hopefully an interesting, challenging job, with community and variety. Something that requires me to take painting out of the lonely center of my life and push it a little to the side. I honestly think I’d get just as much done as I am now, if not a lot more, if I were busier. The more you have to do, the more you get done, you know? And the less you have to do . . . well, in my case, I get nothing done. When you have nothing but time, nothing seems to matter very much. There’s always tomorrow, so why force yourself to finish something when you could just go home and have a cocktail? Also, and equally importantly, if I had something that I HAD to do (like a job), painting could again be the thing I WANT to do. The exciting thing, not the dire thing.

We moved to Portland in January 2008 because Dave got a job at the public radio station, so I left my adjunct teaching gig at BU and moved to a new city where I had no job, network, family, or friends. In retrospect, I suppose it’s not surprising that I’ve had a hard time, but in the beginning I thought it was going to be great, thought I was going to get what I’d always wanted:  Dave could support us for a while and I’d have lots and lots of time to paint. I’d always thought a social life was overrated, anyway. (Until I didn’t have one!) My plan was to kick ass in the studio, finish a body of work — say, 10-12 paintings — and then shop them around to galleries in the hopes of getting representation.

That was the plan. The reality is that I’ve slaved over 4-5 small paintings for over a year — and haven’t even managed to finish them. And so I’m forced to confront the fact that I have failed, failed at the goal I set myself.

I have a dear friend who says that embracing failure has been the most liberating thing in her life. She, too, is an artist with fancy degrees from from fancy schools. And so I’ve been asking myself recently if I can be brave enough to embrace my failures, to get over this reflexive need to “succeed” at things, and even if I actually want to be liberated. If I can realize that the model of success I had envisioned for myself maybe isn’t particularly interesting, anyway; that there might be weirder, richer, more complicated, wholly unexpected successes out there in the universe. Or even the possibility that I might not be successful . . . but that I might actually be happy. (And if I can shed my Ivy League mentality that happiness is the consolation prize for the losers who just couldn’t hack success.)

The question I am continually asking myself now is, Am I flexible enough to change:  my paintings, my mind, my life? To realize that if success or failure is always relative to how you define the goal, that maybe instead of beating myself up all the time, I should just redefine my goals?

A Side-Benefit of Procrastination

I understand the blessing of laughter better than I used to, having — I hope — outlasted some of the portentous solemnity to which, when I am tired or frightened or insecure, I am sadly prone. A light heart has more virtue than romantic agony.

— Anne Truitt

It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.

— C. K. Chesterton*

I must do the work that I am best suited for . . .

— Edward Weston*

So I had been working up to a really melodramatic post about how I had realized that I had FAILED as an artist, and was humbly trying to embrace my failure and learn from it and move on to other things after renouncing my art-making career, but then I put off writing the post for long enough that things changed and I didn’t feel exactly that way anymore. One of the biggest things that I realized was that I was — understandably — depressed after being unemployed for a year and a half, and what I really needed was a fucking job. So more on that in a bit, but here’s the post I had been writing, in two parts, to give you the flavor of my misery.

Confessions of an Egomaniac, Pt. 1

When I look at images of my past work, I feel a heavy weight descend onto me, inducing a thrashing, panicky feeling, like, how can I have so little to show for all these years of struggle? Everything I’ve done so far feels labored, tortured. I long for lightness, less effort, more playfulness, yet can’t seem to shed my burden. I feel within me the potential to make serious, good paintings (necessary self-confidence or misguided megalomania?) but cannot seem to figure out how to bring this intuition of my own potential to fruition; mere “talent” never sufficing but always being subject to a myriad of other factors: timing, will, luck, sheer cussedness, the vagaries of moods. My greatest fear is that I do have everything I need to make it happen . . . and still will somehow manage to fail myself. That I am, deep down, secretly just lazy.

Failure has always been anathema to me, as an uptight, overachieving, upper-middle class girl with no sense of humor about myself. I always had to succeed at things, and not only to succeed, but I wanted to be the best at whatever-it-was, a tendency so innate it has to be genetically wired. And I have been good at things. And have worked hard, I think, although never hard enough, in my personal accounting. Painting was the thing I actually had very little natural aptitude for. In my first college painting class, I was both completely seduced by the materials, and completely stymied by them, utterly frustrated at my incomprehension and incompetence. I still remember crying in class over our first still life assignment. My set up had a yellow background, and gray rubber mice on a plate. As my canvas dissolved into a smeary mess and I dissolved into tears, I felt as though I had landed in another country where I didn’t speak the language, so I couldn’t ask anybody for directions, and furthermore, had no idea where I was supposed to go, anyway. I simply had no clue how to translate what I was seeing to the canvas, or even how to SEE what I was seeing. But I nevertheless wanted so badly to make something beautiful. I was so determined that I was going to be able to paint that I threw myself into it, and worked very, very hard in my twenties to acquire the skills I lacked on my own.

So my history with painting has been one of effortful striving, and insecurity, and fear that I would be unmasked as not particularly good at this thing that I desperately wanted to be good at. And now I’m 32, and I have my fancy MFA from Yale, and I’ve made a few paintings I was briefly kinda happy with, but for the past two years I haven’t been able to get a body of work together, literally can’t seem to finish a fucking painting, and I’m wondering many things, among them WHAT the hell is wrong with me, WHY I’ve been working so hard with so little in the way of results, and HOW LONG I can keep this up. Did I think a career in the “art world” would make me happy? So I would finally get some kind of validation from the world, validation that yes, I was “good at” painting? As though the artist’s ego were not a black hole that swallows validation like a guppy and goes on ceaselessly vacuuming the universe in search of more?

How have I gotten myself into this state of confusion? What is this painting thing all about for me? The only thing I do know right now is that it isn’t making me happy.

In her excellent blog about her search for the principles and secrets of happiness, Gretchen Rubin writes that one of her revelations was that her happiness is not the same as other people’s happiness. I recognized the truth in that, but thought immediately, “But I don’t even KNOW what my happiness is!”

to be continued . . .

*Thanks to Gretchen Rubin’s site also for the Chesterton and Weston quotes. So apropos I could not resist them!

Fundamentally Contrary to Human Nature

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. . . The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature:  actually write stuff (as opposed planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.

I cackled to myself while reading this snarky introductory paragraph (italics mine) to Louis Menand’s essay about creative writing programs in the summer fiction issue of The New Yorker, particularly the last sentence, as it was so apropos of my recent reluctance to blog. Because I have indeed been planning to write, very, very soon . . . for at least the past three weeks!

I have been hesitant to write of my recent personal goings-on (largely internal and emotional as they are) with too much explicitness, or indeed, at all, on this website. Part of it is that I want to “retain my reticences” about certain things, as Anne Truitt puts it, and another part has to do with the fact that, although I have never been much for journal writing, or journaling as people call it these days—a noun-into-verbage that I particularly dislike—whenever I have reread things I have written in the past at times of stress or unhappiness, I have cringed. I find it terribly embarrassing to relive the travails of my earlier self. It all seems so hot and heavy and labored, and I can’t believe, now, that I got so worked up about it, having passed through whatever it was that seemed so all-consuming at the time, relatively unscathed, or at least enrichingly scathed.

So I haven’t written here in a long time because I haven’t known what to write about if not what is truly going on in my mind and heart, which has been much painful wrestling with the role painting plays in my life and work, and how I might decide to make some changes to that, which has been hard to think about and scary to talk about. When you’ve invested 10 years of your life and your whole identity into one thing, it’s both liberating and gut-wrenching  to contemplate loosening your grip on it, even a little. I’m not so much incorrigibly honest by choice as bad at dissimulation by nature, a characteristic which is occasionally inconvenient, but on the whole it’s more comfortable to be truthful, I find.

At any rate, as scary and potentially regret-inducing as writing candidly and exposing oneself to scrutiny on a blog is, one potential upside is the effect that the medium has on the writing process, in that that it forces me to write more carefully and to analyze my own emotions more critically, to not simply succumb to the gush and flow of uninterrupted id as one can do in a private notebook. To be, in effect, a tad more dispassionate about the facts of my own life, a detachment which, if it can be attained, I find beneficial. To basically get over myself, maybe a little tiny bit.

But while I’m working up to writing about all this, I might also mention that I haven’t been paying my studio practice very much attention recently because I’ve become completely obsessed by a new love.

I’ve been cheating on my studio with my sewing machine, a sturdy vintage Singer, made between 1958 and 1962, bought for $20 on Craigslist, and going strong after a bit of a tune up. It occurred to me one day that I really liked quilts, and that they didn’t seem that different from paintings, actually, in that they have the same lowest common denominator:  fundamentally, they are arrangements of colored shapes within a rectangle, whether constructed with fabric or painted with pigments. And I thought, I could do that. And decided to learn.

So I found my sewing machine, and then before I could decide on a quilt pattern I fell in love with this fabric, and decided to make a dress.

This has eaten up the past several weeks of my life, because I have had to teach myself sewing from the ground up, with the aid of several reference books and my laptop open next to the sewing machine so I can google things like “how to cut out a pattern” and “how to gather” and “seam-allowance” and “fusible interfacing.” I was saved from much unhappiness by my mother’s suggestion that I make the dress first in a cheap muslin before cutting up my pretty fabric. This proved invaluable, as I had to remake every part of the dress several times before I understood what the cryptic pattern instructions wanted me to do. BUT . . . I am almost done! And it looks pretty good. The final hurdle is the installation of an invisible zipper in the back of the dress, a feat which I plan to attempt now that I have my new zipper foot.

We live in a teeny doll’s house, and for the past several weeks my sewing apparatus and accoutrements have utterly overtaken the all-purpose front room and strewn it with detritus. My sweet husband, who is generally the non-neurotic member of our union has just one phobia:  a fear of stepping on sharp objects, which is justified by his several experiences of stepping on glass and needing stitches in the soles of his feet. And as they are an unavoidably necessary component of sewing, there are a lot of sharp, pointy pins scattered around our house right now. I have tried to keep track of them, but Moby-the-cat just loves to play with them and bat them around.

Anyway:  Dave, Painting:  the dress is almost finished, and life will return to normal, pins safely back in their lidded container, and me to my studio.

Um, hello? It’s me, your blog.

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting much recently. I’ve been navigating some heavy internal weather and am working up what is likely to be a somewhat epic post about it.

In the meantime, here’s the latest with the Guerra paint experiment:

It’s going pretty well, but it’s really different! I’m still figuring out what the colors are like, and how to mix them. This process has been hampered by the fact that I inexplicably forgot to order any white. (It’s on the way now.) The main problem is figuring out how to mix a range of any given color, from dark to light, something I routinely do with oil paint. With the acrylic, if I do it in small amounts, it just dries out before I can really get into painting. The solution, I guess obviously, is to mix larger quantities of paint and keep them in little tupperwares. I don’t know why I’m such a miser about it; I guess I just don’t want to waste the paint. But if I don’t mix enough, then I run out of paint and I’ve wasted both time and effort. So it’s probably better to accept a certain amount of wasted paint as the cost of doing business, and, somewhat counter-intuitively, the only way not to waste it is to make it in sufficient enough quantity that it won’t dry out too fast. I’m still very far from being able to really control it, though—to be able to make very specific, exact colors. To do that, you really have to be intimately familiar with the pigments, their tinting strength and mixing qualities, and I have a ways to go.

I have to say, it is really nice to just have a big bucket of water to swish my brushes around in, and not feel like I need to decontaminate myself at the end of the day.

For a kind of “get to know acrylic” project, I’m painting a copy of one of my all-time favorite paintings, Titian’s Concert Champetre, by way of Euan Uglow’s The Massacre of the Innocents (after Poussin); a kind of Concert Champetre (after Titian by way of Uglow), if you will.

The Titian (yeah, yeah, I know art historians have argued for years about whether it was painted by Giorgione or Titian or whether Titian finished it off after Giorgione’s death; the Louvre has called it for Titian, so that’s the attribution I’m going with) is a glowy, magical touchstone for me:

Concert Champetre, oil on canvas, 105 x 136.5 cm, c. 1510

I saw it a few years ago when it travelled to the National Gallery as part of the exhibition Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting—which was an absolutely amazing show—and have been kind of obsessed with it ever since. It has a certain enigmatic quality that has enabled it to remain mysterious despite centuries of scholarship, keeping itself to itself, while still allowing the viewer a full measure of lush beauty, as compensation.

The British painter Euan Uglow made rigorous, in many ways extremely conservative figure paintings, but I think that his exactly measured, super-precise compositions are softened and made unexpectedly contemporary by his amazing color.

The Massacre of the Innocents (after Poussin), oil on canvas laid on panel, 16.25" x 19.25", 1979-81

I thought of copying the Concert Champetre because I loved the way Uglow made a copy of the Poussin in order to gain access to it. From the book Euan Uglow:  The Complete Paintings:

Questioned about his occasional decision to copy an Old Master painting, Uglow somewhat reluctantly answered:  “I just think it is such a fantastic image. I am not trying to  make a better picture or a worse picture (silly trying to make a worse picture) but just to say,  here’s a marvelous picture, I know Poussin is better . . . but there are some pictures you may get somewhere near and other pictures you won’t get near at all.

I don’t know that it’s even possible to “get near” to Titian, but copying is certainly a way of getting to know as intimately as possible a work of art you love. It reveals to you the structure of the painting, its compositional bones, how everything all fits; people, sky, trees, space, all the funny little shapes locked tightly together and all packed inside a rectangle. Copying a painting is like both putting together a jigsaw puzzle and taking it apart at the same time. You understand more about its mechanics, if not its magic.

I think I will probably have to finish it with a layer of oil paint, if only because I’m unable to achieve the exact colors I want with my as yet ham-handed acrylic color-mixing. But it has been marvelously speedy so far, and I think will be finished much faster than if I had done the whole thing in oils. Anyway, that is what I was hoping might be possible with acrylic, to do the bulk of the heavy lifting in acrylic and then do the fine-tuning in oil. If it turns out well, I might make a companion copy, as a little art-historical in-joke:  Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, which, besides being a fabulous, weird painting in itself, is also a kind of latter-day reworking of the Titian. Nothing (that) new under the sun, after all. Kind of a relief, really.

Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, oil on canvas, 81.9" x 104.5", 1863

Luddite Looking Forward

In trying to finish this painting I spend a lot of time waiting for my eyes to see things in a fresh way, for an unexpected vision of possibility to jump out of the by now dull, locked-in, familiar sight. It’s like staring at one of those visual puzzles that have two potential pictures in one—a young lady or a crone? a vase or two profiles?—and trying really hard to see the young lady when your brain stubbornly refuses to see anything but the crone.  The alternate vision cannot be forced; seemingly of its own accord the brain flips between one thing or another. Similarly with this painting I cannot seem to force new solutions to the visual puzzle. Often it helps to turn the painting upside-down to jog my brain. It definitely helps to go away for a while, or turn it to the wall for a bit and then look at it fresh. A couple weeks ago I went to  hip-hop dance class with my friend R., which was really fun—and hard—and involved totally unfamiliar body movements, and I noticed—happenstance?—that I had an awesome day in the studio the next day. I’ve read that doing new activities literally makes your brain grow new connections to process the information, strengthening ye olde brain muscle, and I wonder if those new pathways in turn can help with creative thinking. I get so stuck in my safe, comfortable ruts. It takes a lot of energy to heave myself out of them, but whenever I manage to do it, I find there is corresponding energy from new experiences that more than compensates.

Speaking of new activities, I’m embarking on a new studio adventure. I just received a shipment of acrylic paint from Guerra Paint, and I’m getting ready to try it out. I’m super excited, and also totally bewildered by it. Guerra Paint is a company in New York that sells a DIY paint making system—but without much in the way of instructions. You purchase the colors you want—and they have an amazing array—as pigment dispersions, that is, the pigments come already mixed with water as super-concentrated solutions, and you also purchase the acrylic medium, which is the binder, and then you mix up the paint yourself. (The binder is what holds the pigments together in a paint film on the canvas; if you tried to paint with the pigment dispersion, the paint particles would just fall right off after the water evaporated, because there would be nothing to bind them together. In oil paint, linseed oil is the binder; in watercolors, it’s gum arabic. In acrylic paint, it’s acrylic resin.)

This is going to require a lot of experimentation to figure out the right paint “recipe” for my painting style, which will involve jiggering the proportion of pigment dispersion to medium, the amount of water, and this stuff called Silica Flat, which you add to make the paint more matte, acrylic medium generally being quite shiny. It also means I need to get a bunch of containers with lids to store the paint in once its mixed so it doesn’t dry out before I can use it. It really is a lot like cooking, stirring and mixing and measuring and tinkering with proportions, and ending up with a bunch of stuff in Tupperware. Why not buy the paint already ready to go in tubes? Well, as I understand it, the advantages of making your own paint with the Guerra Paint system are many. First, they have an amazing range of pigments. Second, once you get comfortable with using the components you have complete control over what kind of paint you want to make, thick or thin, matte or super-shiny, and can make it to your own exacting, particular specifications. Third, the paint will be better quality, that is it will have a much higher quantity of the actual pigment in it compared to commercially mixed acrylic, as explained on the Guerra site:

Acrylics most often used by commercial artist paint manufacturers generally have a solids content of 45-50%. Generally more water is added with the pigments or fillers, bringing the solids content down to 30-35%. This means 60-70% of the total volume of commercial paint evaporates, which tends to lessen the overall quality.

If you have never painted, a gigantic difference between oil paint and acrylic paint is the drying time. With oil paint, I’ll spend anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour mixing a palette with the colors I think I’m going to need for a particular painting, and then use them for the rest of the day. Oil paint is made simply of pigment and oil (usually linseed oil), and it dries by oxidation, which can take a couple of days or much longer. This means you can squish it around for a long, long time—which painters call working wet-into-wet—and also that it blends with ease, lending itself beautifully to the painting of flesh, among other things. It also means that the color is the same when the paint is wet as when it is dry (which is not the case with acrylic paint, which tends to dry a bit darker; this can make it difficult when you want to match a color). Acrylics on the other hand dry extremely rapidly, because they dry by the evaporation of their water content, which happens exponentially quicker than the oxidation of oil. If I tried to mix a palette of acrylic paint the same way I do with oil paint, the paint would be drying on the palette before I even finished mixing, let alone ever getting to the painting. Due to this, it’s much more difficult to blend acrylic paint, or paint wet-into-wet. However, it’s also precisely for this rapid drying time that I’m giving acrylic a try. I cannot stand how long it’s taking me to finish these paintings, and so much of it is merely waiting for paint to dry—and then usually scraping it off or painting over it. With acrylic I could probably do in a day work that is currently taking me a month, and making me feel like an idiot. My hope is that it will rapidly speed my process, because right now I am so unbelievably slow that I am on the verge of driving myself insane, and perhaps even right out of the studio.

Anyway, I’m excited about the prospect of making faster paintings, and I’m also pleased that working with acrylics is basically non-toxic, as you simply use water to dilute it and to clean brushes, rather than a solvent. I use odorless mineral spirits for oil painting, which doesn’t make me feel ill the way turpentine does, but I’ve gotten really paranoid about my chronic exposure to it, even in the small amount I use, even with the window open & fan blowing etc., so anything that cuts down on my solvent exposure is a good thing. (Especially as I contemplate the possibility, the still completely vague, utterly terrifying, yet also strangely entrancing possibility of someday being pregnant . . . FUCK it scares me that I even wrote that. Let’s not talk about it.)

Finally, and maybe most apropos, I think that using acrylic for parts of the paintings is also conceptually appropriate to my fascination with the idea of hybrids, which are in a way a tug of war between my completely sappy romance with oil painting and the history of oil painting, and my desire to make paintings that reference and build on that but also find a way to innovate, to do something that hasn’t been done before in quite the same way, that don’t fall into that sticky trap of Old Master worship unredeemed by a grain of irreverence, by the recognition that we are in fact living in the 21st century, where painting is, for all its ardent fans, more or less irrelevant to our visual culture, outside of a tiny, snooty sub-section. Why should people care about static, unchanging, low-tech rectangular images, when you have utterly seductive, entrancing, ever-flickering high-def rectangular images on your television, movie screen, computer, iPhone?  It’s a losing battle—a lost battle, really—but I’ve always been a bit of a Luddite. I’ll still use oil paint for the bodies in the paintings, because that’s what it was invented for, but I’ll use acrylic for other parts of the painting, the invented parts, a combination of mediums which I hope has the potential to further emphasize the two halves of the hybrid, one part looking backwards and one part forwards. The future grafted onto the past, like apples onto rootstock. Which could be interesting. Hopefully.

Jack is Back

I got a new plant to replace the mysteriously blighted vine I was using as a model for this painting in its earlier incarnation. It is a kind of camellia that can grow into quite a large shrub or even a small tree, and which one sees in yards all over Portland. It has dark glossy leaves, and in the spring, an almost shocking profusion of bright yet plasticky flowers, a cheap n’ cheerful efflorescence, whose slight tackiness is exacerbated by the way they then fall to the ground in a thick, browning carpet, like litter left over after a parade.

I’ve been having some trouble negotiating my criteria for making these tree-people paintings. I get really into the working from life part, in which my criteria is to represent the leaves and stems and negative spaces between them accurately. So I’m painting the leaves in reference to the measuring marks on the wall behind the plant, but then I forget to evaluate how the leafy part is melding/interacting with the legs below, to gauge how the two halves are going to come together to make a whole painting.  I want the painted leaves to have a certain fidelity to their real-world source, but I also want them to fit into the world of the painting, which means looking like they grew out of a pair of legs. I’m trying to shuttle between working loosely, and being quite precise, and if the world were perfect, and I were a perfect painter, I would do everything loosely first and then just bang in the precise bits right at the end, in just the right places. Unfortunately, what generally happens is that I spend no small amount of time getting something just so, and then decide it’s in utterly the wrong place, and obliterate it and do it again somewhere else.

Speaking of moving things around, and even obliterating layers of work, I discovered a new painter online recently—Alex Kanevsky— and I really like his paintings (with the caveat that I haven’t seem any in person, and you never can tell how you’re going to react to the actual physical object). I’m envious of his painterliness—how I wish I were not such a tight-ass—and I was particularly taken with his description of his process in this interview.

Vivianite: Your use of motion, light and color is truly stunning, how did you invent or learn your technique?

Alex Kanevsky: I didn’t really invent or learn it as a technique. I am a slow learner, so it developed over a long time. I am also fairly slow when it comes to actual painting. Slow but impatient. That can be a problem, but over time I figured out how to turn this contradiction into my own way of working. I can’t do slow and methodical accumulation painting: I get bored with careful, planned sort of activity. I also depend on freshness of perception, what zen-buddists call “beginner’s mind”. That is difficult to sustain over a long period. After a while you are just not a beginner. So I work fast, trying to hit the right note every time. That is nearly impossible, so I constantly fail. But I keep coming back to a painting. It accumulates layers, each one – more or lass a complete painting. Complete but failed. The layers are sort of like Swiss cheese – they have holes through which in right places you can see the previous layers. Eventually there are enough of “good holes” and also, because of all the repeated attempts, I manage to do a good top layer. And then I have a painting that has enough intensity in every passage to satisfy me. Then it is done.

I love this idea of the layers of a painting as swiss cheese, with holes in them that allow you to see through to previous stages. Interestingly, he also has a section on his website where he documents the successive stages of several paintings in progress (although the link is misdirecting right now). It’s cool to see how radically different each hit on a given painting is. When I get this blog redesigned I’m hoping to have a similar horizontally scrolling set-up to post my own works in progress, rather than this vertical column.

Some painting advice for the day (or year):

Vivianite: What would you say to an artist just starting out?

Alex Kanevsky: Build up your self esteem to the level that might seem unwarranted. This will help you ignore both positive and negative responses to your paintings. Both are usually misguided, since they come from the outside. Be your most severe and devastating critic, while never doubting that you are the best thing since sliced bread.

The moment something works well and is under control – is the time to give it up and try something else.

Put all your eggs in one basket. Precarious situations produce intense results.

Little-ease

I’ve been bearing down hard on this painting, trying to finish it. Which can result in a certain amount of progress, but usually backfires after a while by making me feel completely burnt out. I sit and stare at the painting, sit and stare, and cannot think of what to do to it. It’s utterly frustrating. I took the weekend off, but I’m not sure I’m feeling terribly inspired today, either.

I’ve been reading the dictionary again. Following are some new favorites:

Enchase — 1.  encase, enclose:  set (a diamond enchased in a gold ring) 2.  ornament, decorate as a: to cut or carve in relief:  engrave b: inlay (a table enchased with ivory) 3. obs:  to enclose solemnly:  enshrine

Bridewell — London house of correction established in the 16th century: house of correction, jail, prison.

Boatel — a waterside hotel equipped with docks to accommodate persons traveling by boat

Alchera — [native name in Australia]: dreamtime

Aliquant — being a part of a number or quantity but not dividing it without leaving a remainder (5 is an aliquant part of 16)

Aliquot — 1. contained an exact number of times in something else (5 is an aliquot part of 15); opposed to aliquant 2.  fractional

Aliter — otherwise

Little-ease — a place of confinement (as an extremely small prison cell) or confining device (as a pillory) making it impossible for a prisoner to have even ordinary comfort or freedom of movement

Litham — a strip of cloth wound round the head covering all but the eyes and worn by Tuaregs of the Sahara desert

Fielden — of or having to do with fields; rustic

Firefall — a tree whose fall is caused by the partial destruction of its roots in a ground fire

Really, Truly, Almost Finally Finished

One more pass over the body, and some finicky tinkering in the head-space.

Sweet lord, how happy it will make me to actually finish something. Even though—or especially because— it took almost a whole year. And is only 16″ x 12″.

Spring Fever

The weather for the past three days has been glorious, fast-forwarded to spring, and then on to summer:  sunny and hot, under clear, limpid skies. All the trees are ecstaticly flowering, and people have emerged onto their front porches, walking their dogs and babies, exposing white shins and elbows, everyone giddy with the sudden, almost blatantly sexual excitement of spring. After all, what are all those flowers up to, really, looking so innocently picturesque?

D and I drove out to Sauvie Island on Sunday in the hope of going to a farmer’s market we like, but were foiled — it doesn’t open till June. Instead we found a funny little park that was essentially the backyard of a now uninhabited house, perhaps historic. Being always afraid of getting into trouble (doesn’t this tendency seem downright unartistic? I worry about it, my desire to stay within bounds, and not piss people off. Ha! How’s that for an absurd negative feedback loop?) I was trepidatious at first, because it kind of seemed like we were trespassing. But there were a couple of those metal grills for barbecuing that you find in public parks, and a large party of Indians picnicking, the women arrayed in piquantly colored saris, like human-sized flowers. We ended up spreading a blanket in a very old orchard, the trees gnarled and covered in lichens, absolutely exploding into blossom and giving a perfect auditory illustration of Yeat’s “bee-loud glade”. As we read and drowsed, a plane moved languidly overhead, not seeming at all in a hurry or even moving with enough urgency to keep itself aloft. The sound of its engines followed it, almost visibly a beat or two behind, like a waterskier in the wake of a boat.

Unfortunately, the weather that makes for lovely lounging Sundays has turned my studio into an inferno. I don’t know what to do. The window faces southwest, and is heated relentlessly by the sun all afternoon. There is a temperature differential of about 20 degrees between my studio and the hallway, which always remains, maddeningly, quite cool.

I suppose I could put an air conditioner in, but because of the laterally sliding widow would have to block up the open space above the unit with plywood, thereby rendering the window unable to be opened at all. Which maybe isn’t such a bad thing, I suppose, because the other problem I’ve discovered about my new studio is the poor air quality outside. The building is in a seriously industrial area swarming with trucks, large & small, that pour continually up and down an access ramp which is exactly level with my window, about 100 feet or so away. Thus, when I open my window for some “fresh air” to ventilate my studio, I am often suffused with the smell of diesel fuel, which nauseates me in short order.

I talked to my dad this morning about various options — air conditioners, air-to-air heat exchangers — but when I told him about the diesel fumes, he was pretty adamant that I find another studio. Especially as a woman in my — ahem — childbearing years. I know he’s right, but I can’t bear the thought of having to pick up and find another studio again so soon after moving into this one.

Sigh.

I’m girding my loins.

Imbricate

Recently I’ve been enjoying paging through the dictionary, reading words at random, and I’ve started writing down the words that catch my attention for some reason. I have a particular predilection for words of latinate origin—which is no surprise, given all the years I studied Latin, although I couldn’t translate anything now if my life depended on it. This idle dictionarying also seems promising as a way to glean titles for paintings, always so difficult.

Recent favorites:

Turnsole:  Like heliotrope, a plant that follows the sun.

Lubber line:  a fixed line on a compass of a ship or airplane that is aligned with the longitudinal axis.

Rive:  tear apart, rend; split, cleave; divide into pieces, shatter; fracture.

Rostrum:  a stage for public speaking; the curved end of a ship’s prow, esp. the beak of a war galley; the bodily part or process suggesting a bird’s bill.

Loom:  the indistinct and exaggerated appearance of something seen on the horizon or through fog/darkness.

Imbricate:  to overlap; lying lapped over each other in regular order (like scales).

This last sometimes comes to mind when I’m looking at this painting, trying to figure out what to do next. I often turn the canvas upside down to see it in a different light, and the word imbricate sounds in my mind. I don’t know why, but I find it exciting, somehow redolent of possibilities.