New Paintings, The Thinking Maps

Air Guitar

I read the first few essays in Dave Hickeys Air Guitar today, and he really struck a chord with me that previous readings had not.

When Hickey writes about the small stores that serve as places where people exchange things they love for money, but really they exchange these beloved things for the privilege of talking about them with other interested parties, it seemed true. I feel like that may be true. I have a prejudice against the idea of money. I much prefer things to money, and I prefer ideas to things. In my Utopia I would not live in a futuristic jungle with a treetop house made from biodegradable plastic sheets that capture solar power, my Utopia would be having a situation where I would not have to worry about this primate body and could live in a world purely made up of ideas and images. Maybe with my entire personality existing on a tiny computer chip, that had access to all the information available anywhere to that point: I would exist as the tiniest physical presence and roam the most massive world available, economy at its best. Just thinking about things at my leisure. I guess that is what the internet is like, but unfortunately I have to be in a human body. I think eventually they will make technology that allows people to become machines, and that the people who remain people will be left behind while the machine people spread through the Universe like dandelion seeds.

Wow, that took a turn I did not see the previous paragraph taking.

I have had different escapist fantasies my whole life. The two most recurring are one where I bike across country on a ten speed bicycle with a back pack and one of those little one person tents. The other is finding some independent income and then going off the grid living in a Winnebago, parking it at truck stops, state parks, Wal Marts, and Casinos.

A close third is a house boat, but I am not sure if I would get sea sick or not so this never gets that far as a fantasy.

Palettes

This is the palette I used:




To make this painting:


This is the first oil painting I made in a new attempt to make paintings in one sitting. I am planning on making another painting tomorrow, a landscape.

Fell Asleep on the Subway

I fell asleep on the subway.

It was on the R train going from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and it is a kinda long ride as subway rides go, maybe 20 minutes.

When I woke up I didn't know where I was for a second: weirdly shaped, brightly lit underground chamber. My mind flashed to thoughts of being buried alive like the characters on CSI or Bones. It was a short lived feeling, because the trains are labeled so you can see where you are going and I remembered pretty quickly.

So I closed down Pearl Paint getting two small canvases to make oil paintings. Pearl closes at 7pm, and I am always hustling to get there before the class I teach at night starts at 830. Luckily the school has a library for me to spend the hour in between the time when Pearl Paint closes and my class begins.

Forum Gallery:
Forum Gallery was a big deal to me when I was learning to paint. They basically showed the strongest group of realist painters in America.

I used to love Forum Gallery, because they showed Scott Prior (who I briefly worked for in the late 90s) and Gregory Gillespie. Now Gregory has passed on and Scott doesn't show there anymore. So I lost my personal connection to the place, but I guess they still show Jane Lund who I met a few times when I worked in Northampton Mass. Anyways I think I may go and see what they have up on the walls this Saturday.

I am really into Corot

This past week I have been really into Corot, the French 19th century painter.

I especially like his landscpaes, the way he painted trees is the best, because it is a complete illusion and it is also a simplification that reads more clearly than if you tried to copy the image of the tree literally.
Here are some links to Corot.

Click here (wiki)

Click here (the met, you have type Corot into the search box)

Click here

What is this blog about?

This blog is mostly about art. Which includes but is not limited to drawing, painting, sculpture, video, music, book arts, zines, photography, coins, and animation.

The post I am most proud of is an interview with Kevin Hooyman.

It is also about stuff that happens to me, whatever, things that are interesting enough to remember at the end of the day. Usually they are vaguely art related, like something I did with other art people.

It is also a way for me to make a few bucks, you may notice some links on my posts that are not art related, well, I am just trying to get by.

I have some pretty interesting stuff to write about, because I have recently moved to NYC, and I work for a prominent artist and install shows at a big Chelsea gallery. It is exciting to me.

Journally Kind of Entry, Grenada, War, Painting

Things are going pretty good here, I saw a few of my friends from Iowa last night, and got to hand out with Laur in the city. The show I helped install at Postmasters went off without a hitch, and looked super.

I guess having seen my friends from school made me a little nostalgic, and I started thinking about the four months I lived in Grenada after I got back from being in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

People who come back from war have problems adjusting back to normal life, and I was not any different. I had a lot of symptoms of PTSD, but they have faded over time. Initially I could not fall asleep at night, because I felt that someone should be on guard duty. So my sleeping habits were pretty crazy, and then later in Iowa when I lived by myself in a studio apartment while I was finishing my masters degree I would stay awake for three days at a time, until I finally went to the VA hospital and the doctors there gave me some good sleeping pills.

My coin collecting has died down a little, because I am trying to be less frivolous with my spending, and making art is expensive. When I go to Pearl Paint I can spend between 10 and 150 dollars. So I have been cutting back on the coins, and books too. But I am planning on buying at least three books soon, one on Luc Tuymans, one on Giorgio Morandi, and if I can find a good book on Corot I would like one on him also.

I am getting back into image making in a way that I have not really been since undergrad, I am feeling strongly about it, and I am making better drawings and paintings. I have started to figure out that I need to work in a marathon session to start a painting or drawing, and then I can come back to it in smaller work sessions, but the first one should be at least 8 hours.

Think I may go get a sandwich, and then clean up the backyard a little, and then I am going to paint.

Bird Drawings

Long Day

I just had a long day, it was a good day too though. I fell off a ladder, that was the low point. But the artwork that is worth more than my yearly salary was securely on the hanging bar when I fell, that was the high point. As I was falling I was wondering if I would have to pay them back for the art, or if their insurance would cover it, haha.

I got up a little bit late, and had to drive to the next train station to catch my train. When I got to the city I could not get into the place where I was going. So I walked around, and went over to Printed Matter and picked up a pretty cool comic book called: The Drips, it is by a guy I previously blogged about, Taylor McKimens, and another book: Your Brick Shrapnel Hit My Face, by Noel Troll Freibert, and it has a really great fold out cover, the main thing I can tell it is about is a very sexual frog cartoon.

One thing I have been learning since I moved to NYC is how to write, and how to think in terms of ideas other people will find interesting, and also you get first hand insight into what is successful and what are the best people making right now. Knowing what the best people are making at any given moment is incredibly useful, because you are part of the most contemporary conversation possible, and the things you make naturally respond to relevant social and cultural topics.

But I have been reconsidering my ban on narrative cartoons, I have been drawing cartoons for a while, but have refused to make them into a story type narrative. That may be over now, I have been thinking of ways to best make an interesting story using the Bird.

I like the way The Drips uses paintings to tell the story. Plus you can see the perforated edges of the paper where it was ripped from a pad in some cases, or the edges of nicer paper, and there are scratches and dents in the things, but it all fits in well with the aesthetic. I think that may be a good way for me to work, because I like to draw my cartoons on notebooks I keep in my front pocket so the edges are usually a little crumpled.

I have 3 more bird drawings. I will go downstairs and scan them after I get done up here writing this.

Worked on it a little more

I realized I had given Laur too big of a chin, and repainted it. So this should be the final alla prima portrait of Laur.

Did odd chores today

I worked as a security guard for a little while when I got to New York, I liked the job, but the guy who scheduled me to work moved to Baltimore, and someone I did not know started to schedule me. If you have never worked in security then you probably would not know that it is a really low profit business, and the big companies that have started to dominate the market, largely because insurance is too expensive for small companies, have really minimal management. So for every hundred or two hundred guys you have out working as a security guard you probably have one scheduler who works out of an office and one guy who works as a supervisor and drives around to the different sites and checks up on you. So when you get a new person in a management position things are going to be going crazy for the first six months, and I did not need to headache of dealing with this new guy who screwed me over on the first time he scheduled me to work.

So, anyways, today I turned in my uniform this afternoon, they had sent me a collection letter saying that if I did not turn it in I would have to pay 250 to a collection agency.

After my scheduler moved to Baltimore and the new guy started working, he did not know me at all, and the first place he sent me was a parking garage in a bad neighborhood that was undergoing partial reconstruction. I was covered in dust, and had people yelling at me about how traffic was not moving fast enough. It was an eleven hour shift and I was wrung out by the end of the day. The new guy had told me I was going to an office building, and I inferred from that I was going to be inside. That was the last day I worked as a security guard. I finished the day, but I lost interest in the job after I realized I could not trust the new guy.

I have been thinking about what makes painting interesting to me. I have spent a lot of time wondering about narrative, because I never seem to be good at making a narrative painting, but I am really good at making a striking image. So, where should I locate myself in contemporary representational painting? I used to be really interested in Gerhard Richter, and I really like the blurry black and white photo paintings. I also liked Gregory Gillespie's paintings. So I have started to think about Giorgio Morandi and Luc Tuymans, I asked someone really knowledgeable about these two painters and they said that both of them paint alla prima, which means they make the whole painting in one sitting. That appeals to me. I think I am going to buy a few books of both of their paintings, and start knocking out some killer one day paintings. It is a challenge to finish a painting in one day, and if the painting stinks you can just wipe it off and start over the next day, and all you lose is one day not the two months. I sometimes spend months making a painting that often as not, is not that great.

So I am going to use oil paint and I am going to try and finish one painting tomorrow, and it is going to be based on an image, not constructed around a narrative. Hopefully it will be awesome. I know writing on this blog everyday, as a daily activity, has made it much easier for me to write, and I can write much longer posts in much shorter time than I could when I first started on it.

Oh, one more thing, I received the current issue of The Believer in the mail last week, and it came with a great DVD called the Perverts Guide to Cinema, and the DVD is worth the price of the magazine. The Perverts Guide to Cinema is a psychoanalytical tour of some of the best films ever in Western movies. The narrator gets into Freuds concept of the id, ego, and superego in a very interesting and complicated way.

Ego

I know Freudian psychoanalytic techniques are largely discredited and that Carl Jung seems more important now. I have never been that sure why, but I guess that Freud was so fixated on strange ideas that they become hard to handle in the context of everyday life and just getting along and being normal. That being said I think artists can benefit from thinking about how they maifest their personalities in the context of ego.

Which means recognizing that you have drives, the id, and that some are acceptable and some are not. Many artists are beloved who make art about their unacceptable drives, two quick ones are Robert Crumb and Francis Bacon. Lucian Freud, Sigmunds grandson, has painted his daughter nude stretched out on a velvetish looking couch.

The superego is what is socially acceptable or enforced, like laws, or religious rules, or just generally accepted behavior. It is at odds with your natural drives, the id, and how you negotiate the two ends up being your personality.

So how do you talk, write, and paint about your secret drives without becoming socially unacceptable? Should you make art that recognizes the secret feelings that everyone has (admit it), and then becomed beloved by strangers and ostracized by your family?

Giorgio Morandi and Luc Tuymans

Girogio Morandi

Luc Tuymans

I have been thinking about Giorgio Morandi for a few days now. It started when I was thinking about Luc Tuymans, because I read an interview with Luc Tuymans in Art Review (the British Magazine), and I was thinking that Luc Tuymans paintings are like a cross between Gerhard Richter and Giorgio Morandi. Sophisticated and slick sometimes, and clunky and awkward at times too, and using a muted palette.

Having been criticized over the time I have been painting for making images that seem old, I have become sensitive to using older or dead artists as sources to draw from, and have been spending years looking for cultural sources to look at, and things in my life to use as motivation. But I was happiest painting when I was thinking about other painting, and my mind was living with the medium, I was thinking in color and paint, the viscosity, the way an image almost could congeal by magic out of something that was walking a thin line between an image and a messy scribble. It was exciting. Having started painting alot again I am starting to feel that way again.

I was thinking about colors and getting so excited on my drive home from my class tonight I could barely contain myself.

I also think oil paint is alot more exciting than acrylic, because acrylics are too hard to rework after you put them down. They are great to use as a watercolor medium to tone pencil and ink drawings, but I do not think they work to make serious paintings. Serious drawings, yes, serious paintings, no.

Painting is a weird mute. It has to talk in symbols and feeling.

Luminous like the plexiglass storefront of a seven eleven when you drive by at midnight and nothing else is open.

What I did today

I slept pretty late, got up around noon. Elmer and Abby, my two dogs, were licking my face and making little complaining noises so that I would take them outside. I got up and was wearing some bright pink swim trunks and I put on an orange fleece jacket, and there are construction workers putting in the floor in the bathroom next to my bedroom. So I walked out in this kind of loud outfit, with my two fluffball dogs in tow, and I prepped the construction guys, saying that I was bringing dogs out of the room, and they got nervous and asked if they were pitbulls, I say no they are a labradoodle and a schnoodle, which calmed them down and then they wanted to see the dogs. I went downstairs, and took the dogs out.

Then I went to Mama Santini's for lunch with Billy, my brother in law. I had a slice of BBQ chicken pizza. The chicken chunks are so big you have to eat them with a fork at this place. A friend of Billy's met us there, and this guy was pretty funny, cracking jokes, and we all had a good time.

Then I came back home, and Laur had gotten back earlier than normal from the Veterinary hospital she works at, and I hung out with her for a little while. Then I went and bought her some Easter presents for tomorrow, the stores were crazy packed, it was borderline violent because there was no room to push the shopping carts and people were getting frustrated about it and sort of pushing through the crowd.

When I got home I put on some nicer clothes, a pair of Khaki pants and a button up shirt, so I could go into the city for an art opening at Eli Klein Gallery, in Soho. The art was good, it was about shifting cultural identity in China, and both the artists were Chinese. They had really fancy snacks and drinks, and I got to meet a couple of people who I wanted to meet.

Then I came home and had a good conversation about what kinds of dreams we have, and was teased about wanting to make art that no one can like, and the less someone likes it the better it is.

The News You Can Use

First, the Labor:

Have you ever built shelving? It is exhausting, I recommend hiring someone else to do it. I built 5 sets of shelves today. One really heavy 109 pounder, and four lighter wire frame jobs.

Besides the labor, here is some exciting stuff:

Diana Cooper has an article about her in the upcoming Art in America, and the Architects Paper. Pretty cool stuff, because that was the show I interned on. Diana Cooper is a really exciting artist who makes super awesome sculptural installations that are like gigantic colorful drawings. I think her work is the best. She has a show up right now, Overdrive, at Postmasters.

I am making a new painting too, I fell back on some of the ways I used to make a painting before I went to grad school, and I think it might work out well for me, because frankly my acrylic painting has not been doing it for me, it has to happen so fast, and I am a chronic daydreamer, so I am using oil on this one.

There are also some rumors about Paintallica heading off to the WEST COAST??!!! (Paintallica is a performance and installation group founded by Dan Attoe, Jamie Boling, ME, Jesse Albrecht, Cece Cole, Greta Songe, Brandon Buckner, and other folks who happened to be there for the chaos!)

I made 3 drawings super fast

I was just snapping my fingers to a song by Dan Reeder and missing the beat pretty bad, and my wife called me a musical idiot. I made these drawings super fast.

Collaboration Nation Numero quatro

Collaboration number 4 from Jesse Albrecht, Dan Attoe, and me (Bill Donovan).

Sub Title

(That is a picture of me when I was a little less of a fat ass)

I have decided on a sub-title for the book about pictures: Picture Systems. I do not know what the main title will be, but I think this book is going to take at least five and maybe ten years to write so I have a lot of time.

I went for a long walk today and I was wondering about how much it costs to get the rights to reproduce a famous painting from a museum. Because I think it might be helpful if the book could have some examples from history, and use them to explain the systems as well as contemporary art. I think if it had both old and new art then it would be more accessible to a wider audience, and I like a lot of old painting.

I was thinking about color, and how it is taught in colleges. Basically they follow the Joseph Albers method using paper painted a flat color with gouache to make collages that demonstrate different principles of color interaction. I think while this is interesting, and probably helpful, it is also limited in its scope of application, by which I mean that most students will not put the pure concepts into a useful taxonomy to be used when making pictures. It is too distant. I think color should also be taught in a way that makes students approach their paintings with an ability to think in color, and think in relative color more importantly. They need to have a painting class that thinks about color more than any other topic. It could be called: pragmatic color and your studio practice. That is just a working title... haha

If you can get color and space integrated into your thinking then I think you can become a really excellent image maker. I think it helps to have an idea about composition, but that it is not nearly as important as color and space.

I was also trying to break down the three categories I listed yesterday: Space, Color, and Composition. To try and find out where non-literal representation pictures belong, like contour line drawings where there is information being displayed that is not a reproduction but an invention... That is where it starts to get tricky, but I think contour lines can be placed firmly into the category of space because they depict an edge in space, and if you use cross contour lines then you are depicting form which is a sub-category of space.

I think I may also have a bonus kind of chapter, based around all the best and most simple tricks used in picture making. I can think of a couple right off, like the fractured space of a cubist painting, and the sunsets in American luminist landscape painting. They are both pretty easy to describe, because they are formulaic, and you can pete and repeat them.

I have a copy of the new McSweeneys here too, I have not read that much of it yet because I have been feeling under the weather. It is three books, two little pocket sized books of short stories and a hardcover book that goes over intelligence reports on countries that are a threat to the US (I did not see that one coming, I thought it was going to be satirical, but it is literal).

The Book

I have been thinking some more about the content for a: How to Make Pictures book. My old ambition was to make the best How to Draw Book available, now I have changed that to making a book that comprehensively explains the major systems used in picture making.

I think they will be:
1. Space, with the sub-category of Form
2. Color
3. Composition

I am sick, and my body is achy, so that is all I am writing tonight. Just wanted to keep you in the know on my book project.

You can get a copy of my book that is filled with the drawings from my journals in Afghanistan, click here.

Buckminster Fuller and Optical Illusions

I do not know what this means, but I have been thinking about Buckminster Fuller and optical illusions all night. I do not think that they have that much to do with each other.

Here is the Buckminster Fuller wiki, click here.

Here is the best site for optical illusions ever, click here.