For the past week I have been rebuilding my studio,
Two weeks before that I was on a plane to Nashville, I was sitting there looking out the window at the scape below and thought about what I was doing in New York. I thought I had to get out of there, move to the country, work on a bigger scale, a landscape scale, away from people, using natural materials, get a quarry or something, move some rocks around like did in college or something, yeah thats the ticket. Then that night I cracked open this Richter book I'd found in my hall for first time in months, and the first line I read, "Contact with like-minded painters - nothing comes from Isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through. Shutting myself away in the country, for instance, would do nothing for me. One depends on one's surroundings."
So I thought I would rethink my evacuation. Then this one conversation stuck out in my mind, my 'like-minded painter' friend said something a couple months ago, he said something like, 'I see your work, your working the canvas to its limits, really going at it, going with it, it's unstretched and your whole process is revolved around this specific layout, but it the end, after you consider it finished, you stretch it and then try to sell it." It did seem somewhat antithetical to me as well.
So in rebuilding the studio, the effort is going to gear toward me being true to the work, the work being true to the space, and me using the space to articulate the art of working. The new studio will allow for a 100 foot roll of canvas to be worked on the table, on the ground, hanging vertically, with no defined limits except for the six foot width of the roll itself. I realized that I didn't have to live in the middle of nowhere to work at the scale I wanted to and am intrigued/anxious to see what this new space allows.
Pictures coming soon
and in the words of Sasha Grey: "why do you think great artists of our time have always said youth is wasted on the young? I don’t want to be an old a person in regret and think I should have done this but I was off being lazy. There are enough mistakes we make as human beings anyway, so let the mistakes be real mistakes not chosen mistakes." and thats coming from a 21 year-old. I love it.
So I moved; a year ago. It's the Hummer SUV of my last apartment. Bigger, bulkier, with 1/2 the gas mileage. Anyway, after not writing on this thing for almost two years, I thought I should check out the last post to see where should pick up again. To see how I write things down(pretty badly I see), but oddly enough the post was about rebuilding the studio to accommodate a particular project. To recapitulate, I was taking 90' roll of canvas in a particular setup(shown below) to explore marks and material effects on the vertical/horizontal, the floor/table that would goes though series of events as it sort of finished itself. If it sounds flimsy, it's because it never really happened, I got 7' into after a month of solid work, then the program changed...over and over again. This 'little' project kept going for about 18 months off and on. What I find humerous, but defeating, was that after all that time, I did the one thing which the parameters laid out sought to avoid. I turned it into a figure, I cropped it, then I stretched it... but at least I sold it. Here was the result, minus the blocks.
