The Deluge

It is Spring, finally. The rains are here, and they do much to wash away the pollen that inundates the air and makes my nose feel like it is filled with tiny little goblins with tiny little feather dusters tickling the walls of my sinus cavities. I am hard at work finalizing touches on the last paintings for my show at Guardino Gallery, but the painting goes slowly and I am afraid I won't get all the work done in time, or the work won't be well received, or simply no one will show up at the opening. I am showing with two artists I like quite a bit, so it will be an interesting exhibition...but I am always attracted to the old stories, and I see no reason why I shouldn't do those stories as plainly and brilliantly as possible...I like things simply stated...The story of the Deluge, and the reek of promise...who knows if the final version will even work, but that is the stink of it, our need for hope. I was recently offered representation with a gallery in Memphis, a place I fled in 2008 to move to Portland where I thought rains and Doug Firs and hipsters would be kinder to my work...but what happened was that I planted a seed in Memphis and that seed bore fruit...you just never know who or how your art will make a connection with someone. I grew up there, and it is a lovely feeling to know that I still have something there calling me back.

The Great Pumpkin

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of the great pumpkin...He lives in the Netherlands, my friend, not the pumpkin currently on parade here in America...I did these ink drawings a couple weeks ago stemming from titles that came to me, things like "10 hastily reassembled heads chewing a pencil", "one hastily reassembled head with a crown of tongues"...I liked the idea of working from words laid down like a quick sketch, and seeing if the process toward realization would be the same, and if the character of the grotesque would change at all, would it be more direct, would it change, would it lose something in the telling...I am always struggling between the need of the work to speak on its own terms and how much I should interfere to tweak the results...This week I had been feeling the need to explore them in paint, but the paintings got stuck in orange and the orange completely took over...like the orange in these paintings became this bleeding gushing wound sucking in any attempt at rationalization, understanding...it's raw and ugly, and I am afraid that in order to explore this place of terror, the paintings have to fail. But the funny thing is I have been doing this kind of grotesque for years because I have seen the American experience for what it is, and this shift towards fascist expression doesn't surprise me one bit. We have been living it much longer than people like to admit, people are quick to forget the Bush years, and I don't think folks overseas should be surprised either...This isn't a nice place, not if you are poor...and who should the poor turn to if they won't organize to raise their voices? The big heads, the heads with a crown of tongues. The drawings were not well received by my friends in France, or by other people for that matter...they felt they were too forceful, and they ARE ugly and forceful, but that is the point of them...which got me thinking about the work that art is meant to do...whether it is flattery or something else...Of course we recognize beauty and love the feeling of opening up to that world...we are built for it...But there's another kind of work that art should do, like what Otto Dix did, which should draw out the ugly, bring it out to see...sometimes my work veers into that ugly place, that place of suffering and terror, but it isn't a place I'm drawn to...I just feel it bubbling in the background and I know I have to respond to it like I do anything else and ask, hey this is going on, what do you think of this?

PLAYING AT VAN GOGH DRESS-UP

Artists are notoriously sensitive and fickle and just prickly creatures...I recently had a falling out with an artist I admire because I decided I was going to play Van Gogh to his Gauguin...the whole thing is a case of obsession gone awry... I thought he had been trolling my work with the work he had been making, and I called him out for doing so...stupid, apparently I was very wrong, and got the part of asshole quite right...I was seeing connections in our work, but if you followed the thread of our respective postings you would see the connections, too. Sadly, sometimes my more manic phases get the best of me...always up and down. I feel sad that I lost a friend, a painter I admired, but I can see the humor in it, and hopefully Mr Paulus forgives me at some point. Alex is awesome, you can see his work here, they are quite good:
Alex Paulus' Terrific Paintings

Got some great news from the Gallery@the Jupiter this past week. I was given a two month show in October of this year. I have been sharing the newest paintings with the curator, and he has decided to accept my challenge to have my work taken more seriously. Along with the paintings I am working on for this Guardino Gallery show in April, the newest abstracts, and the dogs barking in the shadows, this is going to be a great show, but I have a lot of work ahead.

This thing on Twitter continues to evolve, these titles and notes read more like poetry...sometimes I want to make the drawings that fit them, like I did here with the 10 Hastily Reassembled Heads Chewing A Screwdriver, but mostly I think they work alone in your brain, which is kind of fascinating. If you Twitter, you can follow me here:
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