Two and a Half Things

The 35 Rules Of Painting

2011-10-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

1. Don’t make it new.
2. Don’t make it old.
3. Avoid relevance or Don’t make it contemporary.
4. If possible, don’t make it.
5. Suspect all pretense toward the unconventional.
Painting is a tradition, an intricately conventional tradition, particularly for the artist concerned with innovation. Admitting that you are working within accepted convention or even keeping to the old genres can allow a painter to say something about a subject other than painting.
6. Consistency is not required- incoherence doesn’t preclude meaning.
It may even be a necessary condition.
7. Don’t confuse timidity, obscurity, or lack of clarity with subtlety.
8. Avoid ideas.
9. Eschew Politics.
I’m not suggesting art isn’t always political in one way or another. Rule #9 is really just a sub-rule of rule #15 (or is it rule#3?) but seems to require separate mention.
10. Relax.
11. You don’t deserve an audience or financial support.
12. Take what you can get.
13. Good painting takes a while- to do and to see.
The technical challenges involved in painting transitory subjects with a slow medium is a critical tension that distinguishes painting, particularly oil painting from other more immediate ways of generating images. The time required to build a painting can extend or dilate duration. A broader gathering of moments (than the daily streaming) held in stasis, drawn out by a painting (like the humid afternoon light around Mt saint Victoir) can fuse an awareness of time's passage with the bounty of spatial extension, captured and graded lightfast levelASTM II or higher.

I can see the stones
On the bottom fluctuate
Through the clear water.

-Masoaka Shiki (according to Kenneth Rexroth)

14. Time is one of the 3 DEVILS to contend with.
15. Don’t interpret your work, you have neither the right nor the ability.
16. Dwell with what you love.
Though intended broadly this rule is relevant to the anxiety of Influence. While derivative work is not good, progress is made by confronting influences not avoiding them.
17. Transmit joyful radiance.
You may have to sell your work- but don’t accept that it is defined or contained by the marketplace or institution that allow its production. If it’s any good it is a gift you are passing on. If you don’t believe me, you consign yourself to exhausting pitiable games, cleverness, spectacle, propaganda, or other tomfoolery.
18. A painting is a series of relationships.
Seeing a painting is seeing the painter seeing a subject. Those 3 (or 4 or...) nodes are not a closed circuit but part of shifting network of meaning and transmutation.
19. While a painting devoid of meaning may be impossible, an uninteresting painting is unfortunately easy.
20. The decorative is the most sensible and lively of principles.
21. Consider realism.
If you don’t grapple with representing some aspect of your experience what you are doing is not serious.
22. Within a composition, randomness is what’s outside knocking at the door, listen.
Paintings can be built from Randomness and Pattern but they are inclined to reside in the home of Presence and Absence.
22.b. Praise Shadows.
Paintings should depict emptiness, quiet, and absence. An impossible ink painting of a mountain emerging and vanishing into the mist, inhabited- but not discernibly, should be the new shifty, hermetic ideal. How can painting open up a new vernacular of absence and shadow? Regardless of your answer, paintings can easily distinguish themselves from screens of endlessly denser information ceaselessly asserting their presence, with the amazing-multiplying, ever-shrinking-fractal-pixels (that are ironically built on the bones, or bits and bites, of presence and absence.)

Shitting in the winter turnip field

The distant lights of the city.

-Masoaka Shiki (according to Kenneth Rexroth)

23. Don’t confuse the conventions of representation derived from photography with realism .
Photographers understand this better than painters. Painters that do engage with photographs as an artifact or independent language cannot do as much to liberate our imaginations and perceptions as a good photographer.
24. Do it with feeling.
25. Paintings collapse time and space in a certain way.
This is why the museum is never lonely. That is why a painter isn't lonely when they are painting- and is usually lonely when they are not.
26. Photography is the 2nd DEVIL.
Since the camera obscura, painting has been the occasionally disobedient servant of photography- although painters have not always recognized or admitted this. After the first projection it was inevitable that photographic ways of seeing would transform and contended with painting. Painters today are blinded by an ocean of constructed imagery, unable to shine dimly enough to contend with the phantasmagoria. Painters must revisit the shifting ground of organic sight. The sacccades of the eye can be serial notes in a song. The painting can draw lines and illuminate angles of the real that have not yet been articulated. The face of the world is manifold and cannot be swallowed whole. The infinite fabric of the sensible can guide the hand in limited but novel translation. Photography offers a range of interpretations but its mechanisms for collapsing distance, conjoining light, dark, and color onto one plane for immediate ocular consumption (never mind when that language is used to reconstruct motion and space in other media and dimensions…) must not be allowed to tyrannize our eyes or hands or understanding of what is.
27. Consider painting from life regularly.
Photographs can be convenient tools. I’ve heard some people also rely on memory or imagination. Painting from life regularly can keep the palette in tune. Whatever you do, don’t paint versions of photographs. Just because some Germans have managed to make painting photographs interesting does not mean it’s the only available vernacular. Also, please don’t paint cartoon characters or fantastic landscapes.
28. Color can convey emotion.
I’m not sure when this one got lost. Color is not an adequate subject (it never was) but subtle structures of novel feeling await awakening.
29. Don’t ask too much of a picture
30. TRUTH and BEAUTY may not be red herrings after all.
31. SINCERITY and AUTHENTICITY should raise suspicions, but remain virtues.
32. MYSTERY is always good, obscurity is unnecessary.
33. Avoid styles, with style.
34. If anything remains, anything that used to get you out of bed, cherish and mythologize the scraps, restock your own rag and bone shop.
35. The 3rd DEVIL sometimes says: Everything is special, nothing is enough.

ACTION PAINTING

2011-09-11T11:11:00.001-07:00

Missle Defense
This Painting is from 96- finally realized its vast potential.

Ultimate Missle Defense

Western

Breakout

Breakout 2

Breakout: The Next Level

Breakout Extreme

Beyond Breakout

Super Breakout

Throw-Till-U-Win

More Trees and Buildings

2011-09-11T10:18:00.001-07:00

View from 6th Street Roof

Highbridge Tower Through Cherries

Across The Road

Treetops and Lights

Swindler Cove, Baccharis and Goldenrod in Bloom

Paulownia Trunk

Cryptomeria

7th Street Rooftops

Park Paintings

2009-11-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

I've been painting these small landscapes in NYC Parks recently, mostly in my new neighborhood of Inwood.

"Henry Hudson Bridge" 2009, 24"x 12", oil on canvas

"Henry Hudson Bridge 2" 2009,16"x 20", oil on canvas

"Inwood Fields" 2009, 12"x 24", oil on canvas

"Isham Street" 2009, 12"x26", oil on canvas

"Sweetgum Branches, Doughboy Park" 2009, 24"x14", oil on canvas

Tower of Song (remix)

2008-12-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

That's Liam Parry's arm.

"Whosoever unceasingly strives upward... him can we save,"

2008-12-06T17:08:00.000-08:00

For

What

Then?

cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 164px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-1vb9wGuGms/STsm79Jv0jI/AAAAAAAAATg/68xycdT2pCU/s400/Jason+211.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5276854199864250930" />

Perfect Vessels

2008-12-06T16:42:00.000-08:00

"... Then history began to accelerate; whereas, in the past, man had lived continuously in the same setting, in a society that changed only very slowly, now the moment arrived when he suddenly began to feel history moving beneath his feet, like a rolling sidewalk; the status quo was in motion! All at once being comfortable with the status quo was the same thing as being comfortable with History on the move! Which meant that a person could be both progressive and conformist, conservative and a rebel, at the same time!

When Camus was attacked as a reactionary by Sartre and his bunch, he got off the famous remark about people who had "merely set down their armchair in the direction of History"; Camus was right, but he did not know that the precious chair was on wheels, and that for some time already everyone had been pushing it forward...

It was then that a certain number of Rimbaud's heirs grasped this extraordinary thing: today the only modernism worthy of the name is antimodern modernism."

Milan Kundera, from "Die Weltliteratur"
The New Yorker, Jan. 8, 2007

I made these small (16"x14"x3") sculptures in 2006. They are narrow paintings that open out of a carved piece of wood. A chunk of landscape on the go. All-terrain birds in flight. A vessel to carry memories into the big unknown. An armchair (or desktop) image of the rolling sidewalk.

Receding Vessel
2008
12"x 7"x 8"

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Holiday Grotesques

2008-12-06T14:59:00.000-08:00

Groundhog Day

Valentine's Day

Easter

Earth Day

Independence Day

Halloween

Veteran's Day

Thanksgiving

Christmas

New Year's Eve

All paintings are 44"x 36", Oil on Canvas

Not at Home

2008-07-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

Here's a selection of landscape paintings and sketches done while travelling

Sanibel Island, Gouaches, 2008

Sanibel Island, pastel and ink on paper, 2002, 12"x 18"

"Fishing the Mississippi" 2002, pastel on paper, 12"x18"

"Roscoe Prarie" 2002, Nature Conservancy Preserve (you can see where they took down the barbed wire)

"Culvert, Martha's Vineyard" 1998, pastel on paper, 24"x 36"

Cherry Blossoms

2007-06-15T12:25:00.001-07:00

Every Spring I like to paint the Cherry Blossoms in Forest Lawn Cemetery

2005, 32"x24" oil on linen

2006, 24"x12" oil on canvas

2006, 16"x32" oil on canvas

2007 (After the "October Storm") 24"x28" oil on canvas

Buffalo Landscapes

2007-06-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

Here's a selection of landscapes painted around Buffalo, NY in the past few years. These first two were done in Chestnut Ridge Park. Painting these from life is a good excuse to hike into the woods and stay in one place for a while. Left: 2006, 84"x12" oil on canvas, Below: 2006, 12"x24" oil on canvas

"Lake Erie" 2006, 34"x50" oil on canvas

The view out my current studio window "Potomac Avenue"2006, 16"x9" oil on canvas

This painting of Silver Maples was the view outside my studio on Essex street.
2005, 17"x17" oil on board

I go to Forest Lawn Cemetery too early for the Cherry Blossoms "Cemetery Birches" 2005, 16"x16"

Westminister Presbyterian, 2006, oil pastel on paper

Forest Lawn Cemetery, 2006, oil pastel on paper

"Sycamore Truncks, Delaware Park" 2006, 13"x17" oil pastel on paper
"Maple with Lichen" 2003, 28"x14" oil on board

These last few pastels are from the yard or porch of 134 Mariner Street, around 2000-2001, 12"x18"

Portraits

2007-06-06T11:32:00.001-07:00

"Portrait of Joan" 2003, 36"x30" oil on linen

“After Joan” 2003, 53”x 37” oil on linen

"Katie and Diego" 2005, 48"x28" oil on canvas

"Self-Portrait" 2002, 48"x34" oil on canvas

"Self-Portrait Playing Parcheesi" 2005, 38"x12" oil on canvas

May 2007 Exhibition at Rochester Contemporary

2007-06-04T13:13:00.001-07:00

Katie and Diego

"Season 5" 2005, 51"x36" oil on linen

"Season 5.2" 2005, 51"x36" oil on canvas

The following groups of small (6"x4") Ipod paintings are painted on plaster casts of a carved wood form (2007)

Body For Ray

Vista (Inspired by Owen Harvey's "Votives")

Network

Enchanted Forest

Monumental Triptych

"Bowling Alley" 2007, 38"x22"x96" paint on wood(forest stewardship council certified),clay, mixed materials

"Outside" 2007, 44"x23" oil on canvas

Two and a Half Things

2007-06-04T12:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Paul said these sculptures seemed like they were about two and a half things.

"Whooping Crane Pencil Holder" 2003, 67”x 25”x 18” wood, oil paint, concrete, mixed materials

"Drawer" 2003, 14"x 16"x 6" wood, oil paint, iron

"Burning Shelf" (Inspired by the challenging, incompletely realized ceramic sculpture of John Barr) 2002, 23”x 11”x 6” wood, oil paint, plaster, mixed materials

"Water Closet" 13"x17"x 9" 2005 painted wood and ceramics

"Desk Fountain" 2004, 18"x14"x11" plastic, wood, ceramics, paint

“Born to Run” 2004, 76”x 35”x 22”wood, ceramic, paint, charcoal