New Paintings, The Thinking Maps

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.

Ji put up some new work

Ji, who is working with me in Brooklyn put some new paintings up on his website. He made them in Arizona at Anderson Ranch on a residency. You can see his website, click here.

Dan Attoe is a Man You Can Trust! Sublime Women, Easy Storms, and Cold Neon (or in the words of a poet: the good stuff)