Cicadas.

Periodically I reflect on the lackluster name of this blog, Process, and wonder if the title is still accurate. Some days I wish I had been a little more witty in my titling, maybe addressing some kind of word play with a specific nod to philosophical influences or something a little more obviously Zen, but having passed our 10-year anniversary rather quietly last fall, I’m happy to report Process is still on the mark. 

I’ve privately archived posts the majority of posts from 2005-2008. I left an art review and an essay about John Baldessari for old time’s sake. 

State of the Union. 

It’s 2016. Near, mid-February to be non-exact. The show at Marcia Wood Gallery comes down this week. Three reviews, all good. The Atlanta crowd was gracious.

I’ve been in Nashville past my expiration date, as noted by the recent letter I have received from the DMV. I have the option to have a new picture taken in which I will appear 5 years older, or to keep the last picture where I look like Aileeen Wuornos. I must have been wearing a scoop neck top at the time, because I look like I could be naked, only Aileeen Wuornos naked. It's not a look that works on me. 

The studio and the concept thereof, have shifted in the last year or two. Nothing to cause alarm. I am a periodic cicada. I produce work in prolific cycles. By accepting this, I've experienced a great freedom. As I write this, I’m building stretchers and have the beginnings of my next solo conceptualized and gestating in the room I call the paint studio. The idea came while driving one of the two loaner cars I had while my car was being repaired due to rodent damage. In other areas of my home/studio, I’m working on a Repair Project involving textiles and labor, and in the office/edit suite I am playing around with “new casualist" video art, (to co-op a phrase from Sharon Butler).

But that’s not all, gentle reader. Once I let myself leave the cult of painting, even more flow happened. I’ve been interviewing female artists and those in the arts for a series of micro-documentaries I’m producing—and writing, the thing I have the most trouble defining, figures in all this work prominently, if only for the sake of language. I’m voraciously reading like it’s  1988/89/90.

I wrote a ton of poetry in 1988/89/90, which in my mind, is one long year. There is a valid explanation. As a day job, I waited tables on a train car and travelled. I took poetry classes at the University of Chicago Graham School, and I broke my leg and wore a cast up to my pelvis for almost a year. Actually, the cast went through 3 phases becoming shorter with each cast. The actual casting sitch was about 6 months with crutches and and your basic gimpness lasting for the remainder of the year. I’m not sure if the above order is even correct. It was a long year and lot happened. Merlot and caffeine were involved. Chicago. 

Like everyone just discovering themselves, I got hooked on the Beat generation. After doing a few poetry readings, my poetry teacher invited me over to her place in Hyde Park for tea. She told me I should be submitting my work to publications like the Paris Review. I never did. I don’t know why. Most of my poems were about food. My day job was as a waitress. Later, a flood came along and I saw my writing folder floating in the basement. There was a red millipede or two. I let it all go. Only one poem survived and in the interim I had chronicled the better parts of my first marriage in a zine. My ex asked me not to write about him after the divorce. Or maybe I was afraid writing would beat painting, like paper trumps rock. When you’re in a cult, you get like that. Everyone is competing for your attention and in some weird way you champion the underdog until it’s no longer the underdog and you let it work itself out. The same happened with abstraction and representation, painting and video, video and writing, writing and painting. Cicadas, all of it.

****

Feb 9, 2016

What I do when I should be looking for work*

Nashville

* more on this later

Sharon Butler in town as part of NCAP's Insight? Outta Site! forum

Sharon Butler is in town this week as part of the Nashville Cultural Arts Project's (NCAP) spring 2012 Insight? Outta Site! forum. The talk was fantastic and I would have tweeted it but my rapt attention was on the dialogue. Sharon talked about her own experience with regard to how community affects the work (residencies, blogging, teaching); the significance and meaning of scale in her own work and others; the importance of writing as an alternative conceptual practice; self-motivation; the studio; the gallery system(s); DIY and taking responsibility for your career; and what I believe to be a core concept, at least with regard to my own work- how adapting one's practice (I'm on the fence about using the word, practice nowadays, but it flows grammatically) to situations in flux, not only enriches one's art and life, but also shapes the content and form of the work. There was also an amorphous thread on commodification which is always funny to me because seriously, just because a paintings hangs on a wall and fits in box, does not mean that it's some sort of direct to DVD cash cow. Ah, youth. The house was packed and the discussion lively.

The talk was held at Zeitgeist Gallery with a potluck beforehand. My birthday was yesterday and while I might appear mature, I still regard cake and icing as the reason for the season, so yes, after a full day of class, I stopped at the store, picked up eggs and a cake mix, and whipped up a chocolate cake with kickass Nutella icing. I blasted the a/c in the car and the cake cooled on the floorboard on the drive over. Iced it on site. After the discussion several of us went to a local tapas bar. Made it back to the compound before midnight, and told the dog I do it all for him. I can see the potential headrush supermoms might get from balancing a full life. My usual MO is more along the lines of: "I mixed some yellow ochre today." (That's a you-had-to-be-there reference to the more mundane aspect of blogging a painter's life with reference to Sharon talking about opening up the content of Two Coats to what it includes today.)

Through NCAP, Sharon's doing studio visits today and tomorrow with artists in the community.

And now some more link love:
I'm still relatively new to the scene here which keeps me in a beginner's mind mode, but I'm starting to run into artists I know including Adrienne Outlaw who organized the talk, Dane Carder, a painter and photographer who runs Three-Squared and who tipped me off to some sort of underground coffee dealer in the hood, (new ideas about Studio Coffee Break percolating as I write), Lain York, and the staff of Zeitgeist who are possibly eating leftover chocolate cake for breakfast and Beth Foley who I met through Kit Reuther, who I met through an old friend when I first arrived. I also met several artists at the talk, including Sharon Louden who's been a visiting artist at Vanderbilt this semester, and I ran into a few people who had Chicago and LA ties. I love the art world. It was a great evening, topped only by the fact that I've got 4 shows happening between now and June. Fifty-one is the New iPad.

The Frog Story

Bullfrog #1

I think he's trying to communicate with me, and no, I did not kiss him. 

 Meanwhile on the other side...

Bullfrog #2

I'll be jumping around and backtracking, but the first line of reportage is an update on the pool and its inhabitants, which means that in order to tell you about that, I need to explain that a long time friend of mine from back in the UT painting days, OxBow, and then Chicago, came in town last Thursday for the night. Coincidentally, another friend of mine from Chicago asked if I would host a friend of hers who was in town doing the American Artisan Festival, and I said of course, since I consider hosting visitors in keeping with the spirit of my micro-residency. I sort of forgot they would overlap one night, but all was well. I had a clean house, the lawn was cut and of course, drum roll......... the pool was in full swing. 

Let me explain. About a week ago, I was giddy when I discovered that the snapper, who I now call Tyler Durden, was scrambling out of the water one day, checking out dry land, also known as the deep end of the pool. I was seriously mesmerized. I went to get my camera, but when I came back, he sensed me and quickly scrambled back in the water. The two bullfrogs, as you may recall, are masters of camouflage, so when I walk out, I don't see them at first, and by the time I spot them, they spot me, squawk, and jump back in the water. And thus, the status quo of life on the back 40 wetlands. Until today. 

I was showing Kate, my new hatmaker friend, the pool. (Here's Kate's facebook page called Strong Wear). We took pictures, of course. The lichen and moss are lush so we decided to climb down the shallow end, and low and behold Bullfrog #1 is sitting quietly off to the side. He does not jump when we descend, which is totally unusual. Bullfrog #2, also a master of disguises, goes undetected. He squawks and splashes into the water. Bullfrog #1 is still sitting, unfazed. Kate does this Laurie Anderson-like performance thing where she's moving closer to the Bullfrog #1, but in imperceptible increments. He does not move. She gets about 3 feet from him and starts taking his picture. He's just sitting there like no big deal. She wraps up the shoot, inches her way back up and then it's my turn to sneak down doing the same stealth performance routine. 

So here's the scene: Bullfrog #1 is on the far left side of the pool by the waterline, I am on the far right side. My plan is to descend to the waterline on the far right side and then do a crab walk over to the left side to cozy up to Bullfrog#1. I am about 1/3 of the way across when Bullfrog #2 jumps OUT of the water and lands maybe 3-4 feet from me. I am tripping. At this point I have both bullfrogs about equal distance on either side of me. Bullfrog #1 is more photogenic, so after a couple of shots of BF #2, I keep making my way toward BF #1.

It may not sound that exciting in prose form, but it was one of those special moments. 

I also sold the kayak today. Kate took it back to Chicago, from whence it came. Strange, huh? That kayak has seen Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, a few rivers, the Pacific Ocean, Lake Havasu, Mono Lake, and a few other lakes out west.  It has some good stories. So long and enjoy. 

Picture Theory: I'm also a sucker for the mundane.

Changeling (Shake-a-Pudding)

oil on linen/wood panel

We, not the royal 'we,' but the nuclear family, 'we,' had a plant that was over 100 years old. It was once in a conservatory at my grandmother's house. When NaNa came to live with us, the plant came too. At the time I recall my mom saying the plant was about 75 years old. It sat around in a large pot looking awkward and ancient. It was about 5 feet tall and spindly. Toward the end of my mother's life she neglected to water it. At one point she had been the president of her garden club. The plant always looked on the verge of death, but it usually pulled through. Finally though, it died. I was sad. For the plant, but also because my mother had let it die. Somehow she managed to save a clipping from it. A bail-out option I suppose. It sat in the Shake-a-Pudding cup for the last few years. No soil, just water. I finally repotted it. It's a nightblooming cereus. Supposedly it blooms once a year. I will care for it.

***

I once again stumbled upon this link- 1000 painters.  And once again, became overwhelmed at the copious amounts of fantastical painterly abstraction being produced today. And then thanks to my RSS feed, I came across a passage, well actually the whole post, from Henri Art Mag  that resonated with me as I continue to question my own motives more than occasionally. 

After 2 years of working small, unleashing my inner giant on large canvases felt right, though I went too far with the first one, so I backed it down and let gut instinct and inner apathy take over. I don't mean this to sound as negative and dysfunctional as it sounds. Nor when I refer to them as a Abject Abstractions am I trying to be clever and coin a sub-genre of Slacker Abstraction. It's merely a representation of how things were progressing and abject came to mind as being apropos. Indicative Abstraction might also be a useful term. Perhaps I am coining terms. 

In a recent review over at Temporary Art Review, the writer, Sarrita Hunn, makes some insightful connections to Vitamin P as a source for this type of abstract painting-which if you're an abstract painter with an internet connection it seems almost viral- and goes on to ask, "But then one must ask: Is ‘newness’ an inherently desirable trait?" She goes on to quote Barry Schwabsky for some possible answers.

Which leads me, or takes me back to the post at Henri Art Mag in which Mark Stone discusses what he's missing or not missing: "...the thing is not like the others. It may not be exemplary in the sense of the unique, it may not be “One of a Kind”, but it will be dissimilar, unfamiliar maybe. And for the moment I want to see and experience what isn’t if that makes any sense to any of you."

It does make sense which is why I keep struggling to mediate my imaginary battle with painting. New vs. Old. Old vs. New. Picture vs. Theory.

I'm still mulling over titles for these. All are 2011 and are of the 54" x 43" scale. 

Working titles include:

Card Game

Bridge 

and something having to do with a floating spirits or presence. Maybe that it's-

The Presences

Oh and a little self-promo- The Art in the Embassy Program catalog is online now as is the archive of the exhibition.  

And yes, the rumors are true, The Thack is back for a rare showing of 15 miniature paintings at the June 4th art crawl, Cummins Station, 6-9pm. And a few pieces by me as well. I hung it today and went back tonight to do lighting and sweep. Found some silver spray paint in an totally unrelated sentence and started a new painting. It's so past my bedtime. 

4.4.11 UPDATE : Oh wow. The subconscious rises. The painting in the Art in the Embassy exhibition was actually the first pool painting. I completely forgot about that. Fascinating. I should look through the archives to see what else was happening back then. No. Maybe not. It's easier than re-reading journals, but only because I think I'm the only one who knows what they say. Good times or not, it's still a document and conjures up the past. Maybe that's why painting persists. Enigmatic code embedded in a bunch of brushstrokes. No wonder many collectors don't want to know anything about the artist or what a painting means. No wonder painting sometimes strives to be meaningless.

"Swim," 2006. Mixed media on canvas. 

The New York Post: Blogging, like housework, is tough to catch up once you're behind.

5.13. 11 Blogger was down. My post was lost. I've recreated it from the last saved draft. Lesson learned. Note: Links to spaces are still there, but invisible. (?) Blogger is still having issues.


New York was fantastic. I stayed at an apartment in Williamsburg. I made french press coffee and logged a 3-mile run every morning. I mapped out an itinerary, but got distracted. I missed a few shows I wanted to see, and took in a few that I didn't know about. The opening was wonderful. I met a small slew of great people at the opening and continued meeting a small slew of people over the weekend. I also hooked up with a couple of folks I had been wanting to meet in person. The show was curated by Mery Lynn McCorkle and Luisa Caldwell.

Two of my recent watercolors are in the show:

"There is a Tree Outside My Window," 2011. watercolor and gouache on paper

"Let Me Go Home," 2011. watercolor and gouache on paper

Shaky-cam video of the opening. 

Roland Reiss

Marilla Palmer

Mery Lynn McCorkel

Luisa Caldwell

Norma Markley

David Kramer

Rebecca Graves

Everything's Coming up Roses. WG News + Art, Williamsburg,  50 – 52 Dobbin Street / Brooklyn, NY 11222
Gallery Hours: May 7 – May 28: Open Saturdays 12-4 or by appointment: (917) 304-6213 / (917) 656-6048 / (706) 528-2306 /

Part II. 

The rest of the trip, backtracking a little.
Thursday: 
MoMA in the afternoon/evening. I stared at this for a while. It's a beautiful watercolor in person.

George Grosz (American, 1893-1959. Born and died in Germany)

.a (recto): Circe .b (verso): Untitled

Liam Gillick, "The State Itself Becomes a Super Whatnot”

Adam Horovitz DJ in the sculpture garden that evening. Everyone was taking his picture. 

I shazamed most of the playlist, but had to sign up for the full version in the process, so missed a few. It was worth the app fee. 

Friday: 
Various elevations. Mostly Chelsea. I wanted to stick with seeing painting shows, but it didn't work out that way.

I ran the Williamsburg Bridge. I didn't see the ped entrance so I ran the bike entrance up. One false step and a cyclist would have flattened me without thinking twice. On the other side I discovered the pedway. Much safer.

Fell in love with the High Line. This is kind of a nice photograph for an iPhone, yes? I think so.

The High Line

Vadis Turner at Lyons Weir

 Juan Uslé at Cheim and Read

John Chamberlain at Gagosian on 24th

Jennifer Wynne Reeves at Ramis Barquet

Coffee at I Was Hoping It Wasn't a Mirage. 

I did all of that BEFORE the opening. Friday was a busy day.
Saturday:

Peter Fagundo and Doug Young at Sugar in Bushwick

Went to Bushwick and met Gwendolyn Skaggs of Sugar. Had a wonderful discussion with Gwendolyn about the various intersections of art and life. The art world is small. It helps when you move around the country I suppose, but the six degrees of separation thing is like 2 degrees max in the art world. I've been interested in the idea of domestic exhibition spaces since I began working with small paintings. (More on that later.) It was a great visit. The current show is "Working Together" with Peter Fagundo and Doug Young. 


Then up the street to Regina Rex. 

Forrest Myers, still from Two Million Colors and Their Opposite, 1981/2011

@Regina Rex

I don't know who did the sofa out of springs, but it was surprisingly comfortable place to watch the vid.

Guerra Paint. It's not just a paint store, it's an experience. My micro order arrive today. This is what I will be spending all my money on:

Sunday:
Met Sharon Butler of Two Coats at her studio, who after an all too brief studio visit whisked us away to the East Village. Sharon was a most excellent gallery guide and all-around great person to hang with on a Sunday afternoon. More great conversations about the various intersections of art and life. We also started a conversation on abstraction, but I don't think we finished it.

Sharon Butler at her studio.

Elizabeth Condon at Lesley Heller

Running into Mira Schor and Susan Bee

Ben Grasso at Thierry Goldberg Projects

Lynda Benglis at The New Museum

George Condo at The New Museum

Rafaella Chiara at frosch & portman