It's raining today. I have to do my accounting. I'm a tad behind. Not much. Just a tad.
I'm thinking about hashing out my statement about the new work, here in public, on this blog. Rough draft, snippet form, just to get rolling. My Process Blog voice ironically seems to be more unguarded than my Word voice when I work solely on the laptop. When I write for the blog, I feel like I'm addressing an invisible audience of clones. I say things I'd probably leave out in a formal statement about the work. I can also meander here, maybe getting to the point a few posts later. But like painting, sometimes, it's the meandering that is the point.
I also put off writing about the work until the last possible minute. I like to be surprised about the work. Writing fills in the blanks and sometimes I'd rather they not be filled in by me.
Every so often, I do a true/ false thing with my statement, literally breaking each line down into list form and asking myself if that sentence is still true.
For instance,
1. As an artist, I have taken on the task of sorting and re-arranging information. [True]
2. My work investigates the desire to construct meaning out of chaos through the use of personal iconography and the language of painting. [True]
3. I am partial to abstraction because of its intrinsic inability to illustrate, and the ensuing challenge this presents. [In my heart of hearts I believe this is true, but it's not a black and white issue anymore]
4. information is missing, incomplete, or thwarted. [True]
5. Culling from the history of painting, I play with formal constructs by employing visual tropes such as drips, biomorphic shapes, hard edges, and Expressionistic gestures throughout the work. [True, though I noticed less hard edges and kitchen sink approaches within the last year]
6. By fusing together disparate elements, I’m able to create a mashup of events, a conglomerate universe in miniature. [True. Notice the foreshadowing with the use of the word, miniature. When I wrote this statement, I despised small paintings, wouldn't give them the time of day. Contempt prior to investigation, yes? I think so. This sentence deserves to be fleshed out.]
7. While architecture, technology and landscape have been prevalent themes throughout the recent work, I do not rely on themes as a primary source of motivation, but instead address issues as they arise. That said, there are remnants of my vocabulary in all of the work. [True. Core.]
8. The work reflects my response to, and filtration of, events, memories and moments that make up each day. [True. Responses may vary.]
9. Through processes such as automatic drawing, layering, and excavation, I am constantly negotiating boundaries between control versus loss of control. [True, but again, the idea of "loss of control" and "excavation" seem to be a foreshadowing of issues more prevalent in the recent work than I would have imagined at this writing.]
10. Ambiguity is intentional, and incongruity is evident as fragments of information compete with one another for attention. [True, though it depends on the painting for how competitive the environment on the canvas is. ]
11. Each mark reflects an ongoing dialogue, an open-ended exchange. [True]
12. I approach painting as a verb, rather than as a noun. [True, though the pools and flowers by default of their inherent function in the grammar world exist in the realm of the noun. Fortunately, my loophole is the word, approach. Verdict: still true.]
13. The emphasis is on the act of painting; the representations that remain are traces of the production. [True. The act of painting is not in service of the object defined. The object, if there is one, is the result of the act of painting.]
Okay, so as a basic statement, it still holds true, but the work has evolved to include specifics I still feel the need to address somewhere.
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