For a long time, I’ve been so unhappy in the studio, and with my work. In fact, feeling miserable was the primary motivation for starting this blog a year or so ago. I wanted to do something that made me feel that I was at least a little bit connected to the outside world, that [...]
Archive for the ‘Thinking Things Through’ Category
Moving House
Posted in Thinking Things Through, Work in Progress, tagged working from life, fairfield porter, hopeful, connection on November 2, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Getting it Wrong
Posted in Thinking Things Through, Work in Progress, tagged fairfield porter, getting it wrong, hopeful, working from life on October 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
My painting is bad enough to warrant constant practice.
[...]
Immanence?*
Posted in Thinking Things Through, tagged cult, emerson, god, religion, the inscrutable meaning of life on August 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.
—Emerson, Self-Reliance
*defined by Webster’s Third New International Dictionary as: 1: the state or [...]
Poetry Project
Posted in Thinking Things Through, tagged anne truitt, doubt, poetry project, searching for a way forward on August 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I have embarked on a new project, and uncharacteristically, it is a kind of collaboration. While we were on our blissful rafting trip down the John Day river a month ago, our friend Jesse Lichtenstein, a writer and poet, asked if I would be interested in collaborating, sharing his poems and my paintings and seeing [...]
Confessions of an Egomaniac, Pt. 2
Posted in Thinking Things Through, tagged failure, happiness, success on June 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
. . . . . 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 [...]
A Side-Benefit of Procrastination
Posted in Thinking Things Through, tagged anne truitt, failure, fear, happiness on June 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Doubting Thomas
Posted in Thinking Things Through, Work in Progress, tagged "Lead Balloon", working material on March 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I am distinctly literal-minded — I really do have to see things to believe them, a tendency — or defect — that has left me disinclined to the theoretical and abstract. I prefer both philosophy and art with an empirical basis.
In my geology class at college — the next-to-last science class I ever took, sadly [...]
Working Methods
Posted in Thinking Things Through, tagged process, working from life on March 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Until recently, I have considered the one of the most important aspects of my work to be the contrast between the smoothly rendered body parts and the more expressionistic passages, what a friend described as “your combination of brushless articulation and gestural painting.” But the more I compare my experience painting in these different ways [...]
Contingency Plan
Posted in Thinking Things Through, tagged working from life on March 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
As of recently, I have found working from life to be vital and nourishing in a way I have not previously experienced in my studio practice. Standing there, looking at a plant and making marks in response to it, I am just so . . . happy . . . that it occurred to me [...]
Asymptotes
Posted in Thinking Things Through, Work in Progress, tagged "Indirection", anne truitt, finishing on January 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Some years ago I worked out a nice little metaphor for the path a painting follows toward completion: an asymptote, a curving line that forever approaches tangent with the x or y axis but never gets there. The concept of the asymptote is perhaps the only fragment that remains from my career in high school [...]
