The Brooklyn days

The Brooklyn Days is Now an Archive

2009-11-03T18:28:00.003-05:00

Check out my new business in Philadelphia, Practical Bodywork! I'm writing about health and related issues on the Practical Bodywork Blog. I'm also still posting occasionally on Pretty Lady. Cheers!

Lisa Adams: Now, Shamelessly Gorgeous

2008-08-31T12:38:00.004-04:00

Lisa Adams, 'The Future of Paradise Past,' oil on panel, 32"x 78", 2008

I first encountered the work of Lisa Adams in 2004, when a curator tapped her for the "Carpetbag and Cozyspace" exhibition at my gallery, Healing Arts. Her work at that time bore little resemblance to what you see above; it was diminutive, cryptic, and engagingly bizarre. She combined odd text phrases with enigmatic and vaguely hostile foreground images, superimposed upon lusciously painted backgrounds. Her artist's statement declared that she was addressing different states of consciousness with each of the elements in the painting--intellectual, emotional, spiritual. I was all over that, of course, and included her work in another exhibition, "Visual Poetry."

Now, four years later, she is still playing metaphysical games with her imagery, but she has left aside the text and the odd objects in favor of the exuberantly pretty--vines, birds, flowers. The pictures pack a hefty consciousness wallop. They have precisely the same effect, to my mind, as extended contemplation of a Zen koan; the intellectual tangles of the sharply painted vines are superimposed upon backgrounds of moody, open sky, encouraging you to let go of your own circular thinking and access the raw emotion underlying those thoughts, eventually releasing even the emotions. Ultimately, the process is one of liberation. Her painterly technique is formidable, all of it rigorously directed toward the goal of taking your mind off technical concerns. The painting is so successful that you forget you are looking at a painting.

For all its universal import, Lisa's work is deeply and specifically personal. She says:

I try in my work to embody my own sense of what it is to be alive, to encapsulate the difficulties in being human, experiencing all the itinerant shadings of joy, sadness, rage and despair, the things I am sometimes afraid to look straight in the face. Most of my paintings ask difficult questions both of me and of the viewer. These questions comprise a larger aesthetic that infuses my interest in spiritualism, pathos and the strangely complicated and enigmatic discourse between human beings.

This, in my view, is what great art does. It moves from the specific to the universal, speaking a visual language which defies intellectual analysis. Looking at painting is an experience. When the medium seamlessly conveys its content, without intermediary translation, that experience is a transcendent one.

Lisa's upcoming solo show will take place at the Lawrence Asher Gallery in Los Angeles from January 10--February 14, 2009. Highly recommended!

Status update; Yari Ostovany, Brian Dettmer, Edwina White

2008-05-27T19:48:00.004-04:00

As you can see from the sidebar, I now have prints available of selected works from the New York series and the Implicate Order series. The Implicate Order series seems to be winding to its natural conclusion; I've updated my website with favorites (both mine and other people's) and am looking for an appropriate venue to show them. Heart II has sold to some favorite collectors in California. Ring and Blue Orchid are safely home from Pittsburgh, thanks to Jean McClung of Urban Bytes and and Jill Larson of Fe Gallery, who crashed in my living room over Memorial Day weekend and drank me under the table. We had a blast. Thanks, gals!

My next series, I think, will be more expansive, more abstract and less rigid; right now I've been washing a lot of brushes, taking long random bike rides, and sitting on the window seat of the fire escape, fussing over my miniature garden. It feels like I'm being horribly lazy, but I've come to understand that this phase of the process is necessary. If I try to force it I just wreck a lot of canvas. The last two big pieces from 'The Implicate Order' are currently facing toward the wall in the studio, after I hit the wall with them and decided to organize the practical details of my life for awhile.

Last week an old studio mate of mine, Yari Ostovany, found me on LinkedIn. Upon perusing his website, I was thrilled to discover that not only is he producing some gorgeous work, but that we've followed parallel creative paths. He is also dealing directly with mystical and spiritual sensibilities, with series titles like 'Numinous' and 'Koans' and 'Conference of the Birds.'

'The Poet (II)' oil on canvas, 20"x 16" by Yari Ostovany

'Numinous Nr. 10', oil on canvas, 26"x 27" by Yari Ostovany

Yari's work, when I knew him in the early 90's, was surrealistic and expertly rendered; he, like I, was subjected to intense institutional abuse at the San Francisco Art Institute because we both thought it was important to actually learn to paint. The prevailing SFAI aesthetic was 'a piece of the floor,' which dominated not only the painting department but the film and photography departments as well. In the long run it has only added richness, depth and subtlety to the work, as frustrating as it was to be immersed in an entire art community that seemed philosophically opposed to the creation of images.

Finally, I saw a show recently at Kinz, Tillou and Feigen which rocked. The book sculptures by Brian Dettmer needed no fancy statements, or even titles, to blow you out of the water. What he does is obvious; he excavates old books with a scalpel, to wondrous effect.

Pictures don't do these sculptures justice. The layers and layers of images and text have been painstakingly cut to reveal a jungle of free but precise associations, and the outer surfaces of the books have been filed, sanded and shellacked until some of them resemble stones, or other natural landforms.

The other artist in the show, Edwina White, also works with old paper; her whimsical figurative images were economical and enchanting.

Art is looking up.

Value

2008-04-30T22:42:00.002-04:00

This is the kind of patron that gives me a reason to get up in the morning.

My art education is lacking. Yet I come from a long line of artists, myself. Some were quite good. Not even approaching Pretty Lady's level, but then, I have a sneaking suspicion that very few are. When I look at her artwork I have a powerful sense that I'm seeing paintings that the art world is overlooking, and should not be.

These are works of far greater merit, I believe, than she's getting credit for. They move people. It's not just me; I read some fascinating comments about this on her blog. You look at her paintings and things can happen to you, deep down inside of you. I've only felt that before in museums. World-class museums like the Art Institute of Chicago, wondrous place of early art memories for me.

So I want one. There are paintings on her blog that I return to, over and over, falling into them, and I want one.

I doubt I can afford one. Maybe later. Maybe, if I keep on taking care of business here, straightening things out, paying off those old business debts till there's nothing left and we can finally use our bits of money to enjoy ourselves. Walter is all for it; his European love of culture shines happily upon my plans.
...

So. This precious piece of real art will find a home on a wall in my happy room, my home office, close to me. For now I'll just sit here looking at it in front of me, falling into it. Touching it in its protective sleeve. Happily thinking up frames, and where to put it.

I'm overwhelmed.

It's not about money. It's not about fame, Art World Parties, hipness, fashion, or status. It's about being seen, really seen, both for what is there on the wall and what you had to go through to put it there.

Thank you.

The Tenuous Universe

2008-04-25T19:36:00.003-04:00

Last week I attended the E32 art series, hosted by Linda Griggs, despite some deep forebodings, based upon past unfortunate experiences with arts groups that met at cafés on the Lower East Side. I am very pleased to report that the past unfortunate experiences were NOT repeated; on the contrary, it is my sober conclusion that this event was far superior, in both content and attitude, to the Armory Fair. At least, I had a lot more fun there.

I was particularly struck by the paintings of Barbara Friedman, which at first sight appeared to be mere blurred photo-depictions, but upon deeper inspection, proved at once more painterly and more metaphysical. The physical world is indeed an illusion, resolving momentarily out of linear time, then sliding away again.

'Ferris Wheel,' Barbara Friedman, 36"x 27", 2006

A salient feature of her style is the bright, almost fluorescent underpainting, which is allowed to glow through the image at key points, intimating the existence of an otherworldly light penetrating into this one.

'The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis, 45"x 60", 2005

They manage to be romantic, melancholic and downright creepy, all at the same time.

'Yellow Splashes,' 36"x 84", 2006

Barbara says that she usually starts out with a specific image in mind, but often her original plan is completely obliterated by the time she is finished. Her work has been compared to Richter, of course, but has a warmth and depth that Richter's lacks.

Then this week, as if my cup weren't already overflowing, I discovered the work of Judith Simonian, through my critique group. Lo! Another rich, vivid, metaphysical painter.

'Twin Boats,' 36"x 48",acrylic, mixed media, collage on canvas, Judith Simonian

Judy told me that she envied people who had had a formal art education in painting technique; I countered that no painting technique was taught at my school, and that her work did not seem to be suffering for the lack of it. I have not been to her studio, but spent a good half an hour on her website.

'Crossing II,' 2007, 42"x 62", mixed media/collage and acrylic on canvas

Again, it seems to me that her work evokes a radiant but fractured world, where physical events and objects are continuously obliterated by light and color, transcending the passage of time.

'Twin Plateaux,' mixed media/collage and acrylic on canvas, 44"x 82"

But maybe that's just what I'm bringing to it. ;-)

The Two Percent

2008-04-19T13:38:00.002-04:00

I meant to post about the art fairs, really I did, but spring is here. To those of you who do not live in a climate with honest-to-God seasons, I don't expect you to fathom the importance of this. I have been out biking round and round the park, the cemetary and various cute little neighborhoods, soaking in the blooming trees and the sunshine like someone with bipolar disorder in a manic phase.

So I am pleased to announce that David Behringer has taken it upon himself to parse the NYC art scene, and particularly the Chelsea scene, into something manageable for people who do not spend 10-20 hours a week reading art reviews. It's called The Two Percent. Because:

On any given day, no more than 2% of contemporary art galleries are even worth entering. With over 300 galleries in Chelsea, each with frequently rotating shows, finding that 2% is an arguably impossible effort… until now.

I don't know if this guy's taste is all he claims it to be, except that he liked the Pulse art fair, too. So I'm taking a chance on him. Let us know what you think.

Why I am Still a Painter

2008-03-27T21:58:00.004-04:00

I was about to write a standard defensive post about why I continue to pursue the hidebound, retro, unfashionable art of painting, even though painting has been declared officially Dead, lo these twenty or thirty years, even though major contemporary art institutions seem to be sharing in this perspective, and even though it seems to be automatically assumed by the Art World Intelligentsia that a painter cannot possibly also be intelligent, progressive, and a unique original thinker.

Then I went to the Pulse Art Fair today, and changed my mind. Go see the Pulse Art Fair. It's wonderful. I will post about it when I'm not between seeing the Pulse Art Fair and throwing a birthday party for my honey. :-)

So, the reason I am still a painter has nothing to do with repeating an archaic Form, in a mechanical manner, the way the vast majority of persons who sell paintings at plein-air art fairs in places like Canton, Texas or Holton, Kansas do. It has to do with needing a complex and subtle language in which to communicate complex, subtle ideas; it has to do with using a medium that communicates kinesthetically and emotionally as well as visually; it has to do with the pragmatism inherent in using a language that has already been invented, and helping it proceed in its evolution, instead of having to invent an entirely new one, and explain it as I go along.

Also, as difficult and expensive as it is to find the space for a painting studio anywhere in the world, the difficulty and expense is nowhere near that of a welding shop, a film studio or a print shop.

(All images--screenprint, pencil and watercolor on paper, product of recent class at Lower East Side Print Shop. Now I must obtain a print shop residency so I can pursue this line of thought.)

REAL Art Reality TV

2008-03-24T19:13:00.001-04:00

Just in case any of you missed Joanne Mattera's brilliant brainstorm over at Ed's:

. “Pimp my Rep”—a show in which the art is really about the curators. Oh, wait, it’s been done. The Whitney Biennial.

. “The Big Lie”—a show in which the contestants vie for top gallery representation, except (and here’s the fun part) what they don’t know is that 80% of the female contestants will be weeded out, even as they vie for one of the coveted slots. Extra points for extra penises.

. “Inverse Proportion”—top dealers judge potential gallery assistants on such talents as length of leg to length of skirt, trophy realness and their froid factor. The winners will receive a job in one of New York City’s top galleries, with a salary offer in inverse proportion to the amount of condescension the contestants have shown through the competition.

. “Studio Visit”—we show up at the studios of artists around town and try to guess what the rent increase will be at the end of the current lease period. Immunity on the next challenge if you can correctly identify the ground-floor spaces that will be taken over by Starbucks, Pottery Barn or Banana Republic.

. “Space’d”—tourists and artists alike will enter a gallery and remark “Nice Space” to an unsuspecting dealer who is paying $40,000 a month in rent. The dealer will be secretly wired to record his/her blood pressure. First visitor to push it past the “apoplexy” level wins. Bonus points if their kids can leave handprints on the art.

. “Hold My Slides”—producers troll galleries for the largest boxes of unlooked-at artists slides and CDs. Artists will serve as judges. Everyone loses.

Discoveries

2008-03-21T19:34:00.003-04:00

'Fleurs de Marronniers,' Loren MacIver, 1963

Thanks to Sharon Butler of Two Coats of Paint, I have discovered another role model:

There are indications that [Loren] MacIver was neither gormless nor self-abnegating when it came to her career. She certainly recognized that being a woman could affect it negatively. When she was in her late teens, she adopted a moniker that obscured her gender. MacIver scholar Jenni Schlossman discovered in the census records that MacIver was born “Mary Newman,” but changed “Mary” to “Loren,” and adopted MacIver, which is a variation on her mother’s maiden name, McIvers. Yet at bottom, her anti-theoretical stance appears to have been resolute and genuine. It seems to have set her apart and enhanced her persona as an outsider, a naïf in the edgy territory of Abstract Expressionist histrionics, loftiness, and, arguably, pretension. During the forties, her work was acclaimed for its honest exploration of domestic subject matter and its frank, unapologetically female viewpoint, but in the late fifties and sixties, her paintings lost much of their currency to Abstract Expressionism and later to Minimalism. Nevertheless, MacIver, unlike contemporaries such as Louise Nevelson and Lee Krasner, had no urge to drain her work of content customarily considered “female,” and refused to do so simply to be taken seriously in a decidedly masculine arena.

'La Bonne Table,' Loren MacIver, 1963

Like Sharon, I can't quite believe I never heard of MacIver before now. If I've seen any of her works in person I don't recall it; it's hard to tell from the photos what the paint quality, brushwork and luminosity really is, but I suspect it's fabulous.

Chalk up another one for the 'amended' art history books. Sigh.

'Studio,' Loren MacIver, 1983

Also, this week J. and I caught a performance of Bride at PS 122, which was a cut above most of the theatre and diverse 'performance' work we've been looking at, or for, this season. (We got a membership to one of those theatre-goers discount clubs, so life has been lively lately. :-)) The Lone Wolf Tribe, directed by Kevin Augustine, does a spang-up job of integrating puppetry, post-apocalyptic set design, live music, acting, and dance in a way that greatly transcends both the sum of its parts, and the conceit of assembling those parts in the first place.

One of my biggest chronic complaints about 'integrative' art is that it so often congratulates itself for having the audacity to combine such things as dance, theatre, puppetry and woodwind quartets, without paying much attention either to the artistic quality of each element on its own, or the way in which these elements work together to form a cohesive whole. This production leaped masterfully over this pitfall, living up to its stated intent of creating a 'visceral, gut-wrenching' piece of theatre. Although I found the ultimate conceptual thrust of the piece a little annoyingly predictable, having spent a few too many years in the Bay Area among the Burning Man crowd, the music alone made up for it. Highly recommended.

Magic

2008-03-16T22:26:00.003-04:00

'Confusion,' oil on linen, 36"x 48", 2008
by Stephanie Lee Jackson

I think this one's finished. Maybe it's a little rigid, particularly up top in the cloud shape, but it's at that precarious level of balance where one slash could totally alter it, and maybe I'm not feeling so brave.

The reason I love painting is because it's magic. When you reach a certain point, suddenly a canvas becomes infinitely more than the sum of its parts. It's more than an image, more than a color, more than some grease on a piece of cloth. It starts to radiate an independent, complex energy of its own. I try to stop painting on a canvas when, in my judgment, the whole thing is radiating cohesively, with no 'dead zones.'

For me there's an infinite difference between a brush mark that is obvious, in a redundant way, and one that is necessary. A necessary brush mark gives you unexpected and incredibly efficient information about direction, light, energy, touch, form, and even emotion; a redundant one just delineates a form. Rembrandt's and Vermeer's brush marks are all necessary.

Sometimes I have to re-work mine a whole lot to avoid obviousness, sometimes they work as soon as I put them down. Sometimes they work but I don't trust them, and end up reworking them too much.

Is this sort of thing interesting to anyone other than other painters? Are other painters even interested?

I re-shot this painting this evening, so I'm re-posting the image in the hopes that it's a little better.

Anonymity in Art Criticism

2008-03-10T14:06:00.002-04:00

Without linking any links or naming any names, let me just say that two things have become clear; 1) quite a number of people seem to agree with me about the state of the Art World today in general, and the state of the Whitney Biennial in particular; and 2) most of those people prefer to remain publically anonymous, or at least publically circumspect, about their opinions.

I don't actually have a problem with that.

One of the biggest fictions that the Art World tries to maintain is that it fosters an egalitarian playing field; that anybody's perspective counts just as much as anybody else's. Therefore we have people seriously stating that my cavalier dismissal of most of the art in this year's Whitney Biennial is mean and wrong and hurtful, because those artists and curators and the people who support them are just as vulnerable as I am.

Hello?

Look, people. The fact is, artists have to eat. The fact is, we are bombarded with information about how many billions of dollars flow through the Art Market every year, at the same time as the vast majority of us are working two jobs, in debt, and worried about sinking into an impoverished old age without health insurance. In concrete terms, the Art World is the opposite of egalitarian. It is a pyramid scheme that depends for its very existence on the economic and aesthetic disempowerment of hundreds of thousands of contenders.

The fact is, there are a very few people in the Art World who hold the money strings, and pissing those people off can get you a one-way ticket to lifelong destitution. These people don't bother countering criticism with criticism; that would be to 'provoke controversy,' which in this modern Art World is synonymous with both artistic validity and big, big bucks.

What they do is just ignore you. Or else they use the word 'decorative.' Damn you to hell, too.

So I do not blame an artist for not wanting to make waves, by stating a decisive opinion about the doings of these economic manipulators of culture. A lot of visual artists are visual artists, in part, because they're not hugely articulate; the validity of their opinion is nothing if it is inelegantly expressed.

I speak up because I have to. I think my life might be easier if I could be more tactful, diplomatic and equivocal about stating my opinions; certainly I'd burn fewer bridges.

But the price for keeping my mouth closed has always seemed too high. Because I care passionately, not about Art in an unconditional, monolithic sense, but about the things that great art has the potential to communicate--inspiration, complexity, profundity, joy, despair, transcendence. I live for that thrill of humility and awe that can be triggered by a chorus by Arvo Pärt, an installation by Lee Bontecou, a ballet by Balanchine or a poem by Stevens.

And playing the political game of circumspection and relativism, for me, would mean selling out my entire reason for being an artist.

More Junk in the Hallway

2008-03-05T20:51:00.002-05:00

I am very sorry to report that this years' Whitney Biennial is an extension of the last one, only perhaps a teensy little bit lamer and more half-assed.

O was with me; looking at the expression on my face, she declared, "I think you're taking this a little bit too personally."

It was true, I was taking it personally. There seemed to be no curatorial vision or thematic direction for this exhibition at all, except perhaps for Tim Hawkinson and Gordon Matta-Clark Redux, Half-Baked and Ripped-Off. The vast majority of sculptures and installation-type thingies did not read as finished works of art at all; they came across as sketches and machettes for the sorts of ideas that get fooled around with for awhile, then discarded as not being sufficiently compelling. There was a lot of raw lumber, badly crafted and gracelessly arranged; a lot of garbagey goop suspended in plaster, concrete or resin; a lot of bare lightbulbs purposelessly attached to random structures; and a lot of construction materials just leaning around.

There was also Robert Bechtle. God knows why.

However. Here are the artists whose installations were a little bit better than contemptibly forgettable:

Matthew Brannon. Very nice letterpress prints with random, poetic textual snippets, giving the work a whimsically contemplative texture. White noise generators in the corners muted the assaultive noises from outside video installations, allowing you to calm down and actually focus on the work. Enigmatic wall sculptures of ordinary objects were, well, enigmatic. But cute.

Ellen Harvey. Her installation, "Museum of Failure: Collection of Impossible Subjects and Invisible Self-Portrait in my Studio" was a bit klunky, but it began to engage your perceptions in an interesting way, with levels and windows and ornate frames and mirrors and real lights vs. painted lights. She's an okay painter, not a great one, but competent enough not to look like a total dork when relying on painting to integrate with a larger installation. Check out her website; she used to paint tiny oil landscapes on graffiti-covered walls in NYC. Which is something I might have done. Except that tiny oil landscapes bore me.

(But I promised myself to be more positive. Positive! Cheery smile!)

Mika Rottenberg. Seriously hilarious and well-executed installation involving a sort of a shed/goat run, containing several videos of women with The Longest Hair In The World (the hair is real--she advertised on the Internet for them) milking their hair into buckets, and waving the hair at donkeys and goats. Feminist Fairy Tales, mmm-mmm.

Jedediah Caesar. Impressive big ol' lump of multicolored, porous resin, which looked like a gigantic block of drips from a hundred thousand multicolored candles; smelled like it, too. Also a wall of resin tiles full of random garbage. This actually worked, unlike most of the other garbage in the show; I'd tile my bathroom with it. My High Art outdoor bathroom in my avant-garde architect-designed house in the Andes.

Near misses:

Phoebe Washburn. Her installation for this Biennial appears to have been a bit of a departure from her earlier work; instead of creating tidal poetry with raw trash, she has created what ought to be a set for a comic surrealist film. More raw lumber (unfortunately) creates a towering framework for a 'soda factory' involving drawers full of colored golf balls, buckets of chrysanthemums, tanks of colored water, sprouting bulbs, and lots of hand towels. The title is something long and amusing which I've forgotten.

(In fact, a lot of artists in this show seemed to have appended long, strange titles to inscrutable works, sometimes two or three titles per work. Presumably to deepen the mystery. As if we cared.)

Charles Long. Sculptures intended to resemble encrusted birdshit. It is a testament to how uninspiring this exhibition was as a whole that I actually paid attention to these.

Rita Ackerman. Human sized drawing-collages under Plexiglass. Meh.

Karen Kilimnick. Four small, bright, mediocre paintings on four large walls, with a chandelier in the center. The way these were installed began to charge the space in an interesting way; I filed this idea for future reference, to be used with some good paintings and an original chandelier-type sculpture.

There were a few other things that weren't entirely bankrupt, from an aesthetic, conceptual or structural perspective, but now that I look at my notes, not enough to be worth mentioning.

In fact, after viewing this exhibition, I thought, "I could curate a better Biennial than this." Tune in next time for my submissions; suggestions welcome, with extreme prejudice.

Gosh, What Beautiful Art!

2008-02-21T14:13:00.004-05:00

I just received a veritable packet in the mail, from the Smack Mellon studio program. Here is the stack of invitational postcards contained therein:

Man, how inspiring, and humbling at the same time. I just can't wait to see the shows. They're bound to be both aesthetically compelling and intellectually challenging, in ways I literally can't imagine.

The Feminine Mind

2008-02-15T19:04:00.005-05:00

'fifth seed,' collage and etching on wood
Susan Constanse and Stephanie Lee Jackson

People are still wringing their hands over the radically unequal representation of women in the blue-chip end of the Art World. All the possible, political explanations for this fact have been discussed ad nauseam; frankly, I'm not interested in them anymore.

On my last visit to MoMA, I caught the Martin Puryear retrospective, which most of my friends found to be staggeringly wonderful. I thought it was fine. It was playful, whimsical, relatively broad in scope, and the pieces were well-executed.

What struck me was the essential singularity of each piece. The sculptor would think, "I think I'll make a circular piece that hangs on the wall," and boom! he'd do it. There was no second-guessing about any of these sculptures; what you saw was what you got. "I think I'll make a horn shape that points this way." "This time the circle goes on the floor."

This show, in fact, was as relaxing as having a male roommate. There was no Subtext, nothing Implied, no shades of emotional complexity to unravel, just a nice, straightforward guy in the living room, drinking beer and messing with his tools.

I went through the show fairly quickly.

Suspended sculpture, Lee Bontecou

As I perused the rest of the museum, I found myself looking for works by women; I suppose I was in a Mood. What I found, when I found them, were works that tended to have a greater number of layers of complexity. Julie Mehretu's work, for example; and an enigmatic and unwieldy installation by Louise Bourgeois. Some of them I liked, some of them not so much. They took a lot of time to apprehend, and some of them were downright creepy.

Rather like some of my female roommates, in fact.

I have, in the past, made the case that women's brains actually work differently than men's. Not better or worse, just differently--in a more holistic, non-linear, relational way. This theory is borne out by recent brain scan studies on how men and women handle stress:

Increased corpus callosum in women—the connective tissue between the left and right side of the brain—was the first big discovery about how men and women's brains work differently. It was extremely controversial at first. The corpus callosum allows both sides of the brain to be in conversation. Her brain is, to much greater extent than his, multitasking due to all of this communication that goes on in different parts of the brain. There's a tendency for men to sort of stay focused, using one part of the brain. In a woman's brain, when the thinking part of the brain is in use, the feeling part is involved. In the middle of a crisis, men will go sit down and watch TV. And women are going, "How can you do that?" When a woman is using the right side of the brain doing recreational activity, the left side of the brain is still pumping her messages that there are important problems that have to be addressed.

Perhaps part of the reason that art by women still goes underrecognized, particularly in the Big Leagues, is that we still define Great Art from a masculine perspective--as a Monolith, as a Big Statement. Women tend not to make grandiose statements, so much as an intricate web of conjecture, which points to many levels of being, of consciousness, and relation. So much so that I don't think we can get to the top of the tree by faking a masculine attitude; we're simply not pushing with our whole minds when we do that.

Visual Art: Not Visual Any More

2008-01-15T12:31:00.000-05:00

How apropos. I must quote Franklin.

1. Taste is the ability to detect visual quality. People with taste are relatively rare. People with inclinations towards art and the mental capacity to wonder about it are quite a bit more common.
2. The art market grew to its present size thanks to the latter group, not the former. It has done so by flattering the latter group into thinking that it has progressive taste, not a lack of taste.

Apropos because the list of 2008 Creative Capital visual arts grantees arrived in my mailbox this morning. The title of the announcement was, "41 ideas whose time has come.'

Note that ideas. Not 'visions,' not 'artists.'

Creative Capital grants are the biggest grants available for artists working today, as far as I know. They not only provide grantees a whopping influx of cash, around $50,000, but they provided mentorship, promotion and visibility. A Creative Capital grant can and does make an artist's career.

And Creative Capital makes its first cut of visual arts grant applications without looking at any visuals.

This is disgusting. It is sheer, unmitigated, blithering arrogance, ignorance and stupidity. It is pseudo-elitism at its most banal and bourgeois. It is flattering the tasteless at the expense of people who became visual artists because they communicate, and express themselves, visually.

Thus, Creative Capital is guilty of extreme bigotry and prejudice against the very people they purport to be supporting.

Visual art is a language of its own. It does not translate into English, particularly not the kind of postmodern bullshit that appears on press releases, artist's statements, museum catalogs and Creative Capital applications. It can transcend culture, religion, language and politics; it can heal the world, if given a chance.

I am really, really tired of arts organizations which are more interested in appearing important and progressive than they are in actually making that kind of a difference in the world--the kind of difference that would genuinely heal, genuinely communicate in a manner that transcends chatter, politics, social class and culture clash. I am disgusted and I am furious and I don't feel like being polite about it anymore.

Look, people. Ideas are easy to come by. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Ideas are good, bad and in between, but they don't mean jack without thorough follow-through and execution in the physical world. You don't fund ideas to get results; you fund people who are actually out there doing something, with or without your funding. You will not shut us up. You will remain banal and irrelevant, regardless of the press or the plaudits you receive, and those of us with actual taste will always know the difference.

The Vital Importance of Spirituality in Art

2008-01-12T16:34:00.001-05:00

'Heart II," oil on linen, 36"x 48", 2007-8

No, it's not hubris. It could save our culture.

This week Ed W. was discussing the latest, predictably overblown controversy on art and death threats:

It's almost become a punchline, the notion that any artwork exploring both sex and Islam will be met with a flurry of extreme reactions (death threats, riots, burned-down embassies...again?). The controversy in question this time involves the Iranian artist who goes by the name Sooreh Hera, whose photography of naked gay Muslim men wearing a mask said to depict the prophet Mohammed was pulled from an exhibition at the municipal museum in The Hague once it became clear to the museum director that that's what she was showing.

Ed, and most of the other artists on the thread, see this as a Freedom of Speech issue; just about everybody seemed to take it for granted that violent Muslim extremists need and deserve to be publically taunted, provoked, and confronted in a way that is bound to cause an extreme reaction. Failing to do so is labelled cowardice and censorship.

It never, ever seems to occur to anyone that there is more than one way to confront an extremist; still less that said extremist could be, in any way, worthy of attention or respect.

This attitude, in my opinion, could lead to the end of civilization as we know it. It is already leading to the trivialization, degeneracy, and near-total irrelevance of Fine Art, as it is viewed by the vast majority of people who are not intimately involved in the elitist, hubristic, self-involved Art World.

I've already written about the Art World's tendency to dismiss anything that remotely hints at a spiritual context, in a way that is much stronger even than 'that's not trendy right now.' I believe that this is one of the ways that the sense of an elite, exclusive club is maintained; it's a way of separating ourselves from the deluded masses out there, some of whom are fundamentalists ready to kill and be killed for their delusions. We, of course, are Above All That, and any artist who outspokenly says she's not is obviously Not One Of Us.

The fact is, it is human nature to be drawn toward the transcendent, in whatever context. When a concrete, workable religious tradition is absent, we channel this impulse into politics, or career, or environmentalism, or art. There's a reason that apparently sane people get sucked into cults and stripped of their money and sense of individual identity; the pull toward the spiritual is so strong that when it is ignored or suppressed, it is all the more vulnerable to manipulation.

Moreover, as Karen Armstrong elucidates in 'The Battle For God,' extremist fundamentalism is a relatively modern phenomenon, which arose as a natural response to the rapid and traumatic changes brought about by technological, political and social revolution. Religion not only provides a channel for our spiritual instincts, but a basis for stable society; when religious law and tradition is rapidly, obviously flouted by extremely disorienting and destabilizing change, the backlash is equally extreme.

Thus, in my opinion, whatever you may think of the fundamentalist mentality, the worst possible thing we can do to contront it is to use our media, our 'elitist' bully pulpit, and our creativity to deny the spiritual, and smack people in the face with puerile, shallow affirmations of secularism.

Ed says, "Perhaps part of the problem there, though, is the difference between cultures in the significance/taboo/sacrity of images. How do you visually discuss Allah, for example, when any image of him is forbidden and I suspect any proxy would be open to intense scrutiny."

Oh, please. We're visual artists. We don't have to be literal, transgressive, or confrontational in order to evoke a response; still less do we need to write a ream of unreadable text, in a language that our audience doesn't even speak, in order to communicate across cultures. We merely need to reach deep into our own hearts for what is universal.

We sell ourselves terribly short when we assume that shallow, literal, provocative statements about 'This is good, this is bad, this is what I like' are the best we can do as artists. We sell ourselves short when we allow the Art World Game to pigeonhole or ignore us entirely.

Music communicates across cultures; two people who agree on nothing politically will calm down and cease arguing when a mutual favorite song comes on the radio. You don't need to understand someone's language, religion, culture or tradition to listen to their music and respond to it on a visceral level. Art can communicate this way as well, if we shut up with the conceptual blather long enough to allow it.

As a parenthetical note--even though I am a die-hard Obama supporter, I think that Andrew Sullivan's article in the Atlantic about him was maudlin and over the top. But his point about Obama's face being a statement in and of itself is analogous to my beliefs about the transformative power of visual art:

The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Are we going to prove to the fundamentalist extremists of the world that we, as artists, are every bit as depraved, shallow, and soulless as they believe us to be, or are we going to work to create powerful images that speak to our common humanity?

collaboration update: also, Susan has a new blog!

Collaboration

2008-01-05T14:54:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year, everybody!

This year is going to be interesting. After getting completely enveloped in The Blogger Show, including chauffeuring the redoubtable John Morris to Pittsburgh in a snowstorm with a truck full of art, I'm beginning a collaboration with Susan Constanse of Digging Pitt, and her blog oranje.

We are both terrified.

I was drawn to Susan's work because it is a lot like mine--organic, layered, nuanced, subtle. Particularly in her line quality, she does what I do, only better, which may not necessarily be the best reason to collaborate, but will certainly be challenging. On some level, it seems that we resonate.

Susan Constanse, 'seed 1,' silverpoint on paper, 4" x 6"

We decided to start small, by mailing each other three 4" x 6" 'seeds,' which could be anything. Then we'll mess with them, and send them back.

Susan Constanse, 'seed 2,' collage on canvas

I once wrote, in a review of an exhibit by Alicia McCarthy, about the joys and pitfalls of collaboration:

Looking at it I was overwhelmed by longing, for such courage and such comfort, such lack of neurosis, that two people could share a studio and a gallery, drip all over each other's paintings, and not kill one another. It was like watching a litter of puppies, sleeping in a pile, knawing on one another's ears, never knowing loneliness. Most artists are way, way too uptight to work like that.

Neither Susan nor I have ever collaborated like this before; until now, visual art has been the one area of our lives over which we were able to execute complete control. Thus the reason for starting small, and long-distance.

Susan Constanse, 'seed 3,' mixed media on paper

I really love these first three that she's sent me, and it was a bit intimidating, coming up with adequate pieces to send in return. I won't post mine, or my alterations to hers, until she's received them; they went in the mail today.

I realize that although the essence of artmaking for me is spiritual, and spirituality for me is about connection, that I've always made art in virtual isolation. You spend a year or two in your studio, editing, tweaking, adjusting, and destroying the evidence, then you hang a show, and voilá! you finally invite other people in to see it.

This sort of collaboration makes you a lot more vulnerable. The other person gets to see all your false starts, failures and procrastinations. At the same time, the possibilities for really engaging and pushing things to a new level are legion. So, Susan, here's to becoming the artists we were meant to be!

P.S. For the first time in my life, I've been mentioned in an art review written in English, which was not written by a friend of mine. Hoo whee!

I Am Not Talented

2007-11-25T17:12:00.000-05:00

Just returned from a trip to Fort Worth, visiting my family, and incidentally my archive of Early Works, which lives in a storage unit down by the railroad tracks. The verdict is in: as a feckless young art student, I had No Talent. Yack. I mean it.

Mom and my aunt Prudence were splendid; they helped me haul the piles of cracked, crumbling, dusty, dirty, decaying artworks out of their tomb, unroll them, take vile snapshots with a digital camera for the Historical Record, and then pile them into a dumpster. I didn't throw away everything, just the extreme monstrosities that made me cringe in horror and shame. Actually I even saved one or two of those, as a reminder. They remind me, principally, to be kind.

Because I can't begin to describe how bad those student paintings were. Suffice it to say that I had no notion of color, composition, light, surface, paint quality, line quality, or conceptual content. My student work had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, except for a certain cheerful willingness to keep flinging paint around, in the absence of all external evidence that this process would lead somewhere fruitful.

Funnily enough, I don't find this revelation of my profound untalentedness to be the slightest bit depressing. Instead I feel an expansive sense of peace, liberation and connection. It's difficult to describe.

I'm not one of those PC egalitarians who thinks that talent is an elitist myth. It does exist, and I've seen it. There are people born with grace, skill, vision, and a discipline which expresses itself ceaselessly and without apparent effort; it is if they spent a thousand lifetimes in intensive practice and study, and were born into this body already possessing a mastery of medium and profundity of expression.

I repeat; I am not one of those people. I started off as a committed painter with nothing more than an overpowering sense that there were things I needed to learn through painting, and things I needed to express. I had only the vaguest idea what those things were; if I'd known, I wouldn't have needed to paint. I waged epic battles in defense of my right to be callow, immature and clueless. Anything I may have achieved in the way of worthwhile art has been done the hard way, through trial and error, discipline and practice, and sheer irrational pigheadedness.

Why does this give me such a sense of peace? Well, for starters, I'm no longer the slightest bit upset with all those faculties, arts organizations, committees, galleries and philanthropists who turned down my persistent applications. They were obviously people of taste who knew exactly what they were doing, and I commend them. I didn't need or deserve their help; any assistance from then would have only fed my unrealistically inflated notions of self.

Furthermore, I feel a warm sense of connection with the vast majority of humanity, also not born with the facility of a Mozart or a Barry McGee. Being perceived as 'gifted' sets you apart; it is isolating and chill. Much is expected of a talented person--success is regarded as automatic, and failure is received with exasperated contempt. Talented people are not judged by the standards of ordinary mortals. They are not expected to be kind, mature, ethical or friendly; if they are any of those things, it's a bonus.

When I expected myself to be talented, I also regarded myself with exasperated contempt, as a separate creature from the rest of humanity, where the usual standards did not apply. This was not a comfortable state of mind in which to exist.

Now I look back and think--well, I'm not talented. I just worked really hard. I worked to earn money, and practiced hard, and studied hard, and thought hard. I improved, really really slowly. I made a lot of messes and wasted a lot of time and money on dead ends, and picked out the one small thing I learned from that dead end and used it later on, to better effect. Now when I look around at how many people have paid good money to hang one of my paintings on their wall, and continue to enjoy it, and don't regret the money spent, I'm very proud of that. It was never a given that this would happen.

Now I look at my future, and think that I will continue doing this, without the burden of thinking that it has to be something special. If I create something beautiful, that will be a joy. If I don't, that's to be expected. I am not talented.

Goals

2007-11-08T13:39:00.001-05:00

I took a short studio moratorium while hanging the Blogger Show; it seems to be true that I can only flex my creative muscles in one or two directions at once, and hanging shows is like painting and sculpting using other people's artwork as your raw materials. It's a process I really enjoy, and know that I'm good at. Moreover, I've known many many artists who are not good at it at all, and thus I have no problem with unapologetically taking charge of the process. A bad hanging or lighting job can make a great piece look mediocre, and a mediocre piece look like garbage; a good hanging job, or just lots of clean white walls and good light, can make a mediocre piece look like it's in Chelsea. Oh, wait...

So, anyway, at the opening I had a good chat with Nancy Baker about the blatant sexism of the Art World at the highest levels, the levels where serious money changes hands. It is true, as Tracy Helgeson says, that there are tons of non-NYC galleries run by women, that show lots of women's work--largely work that is pretty, in a recognizable genre like landscape or still life, and breaks no new ground, artistically speaking. It is also true that women who paint like Nancy does have a very hard time selling work outside of NYC. Nancy told me that she has repeatedly been dumped by galleries, even when her work was selling well, and replaced by a good-looking young guy just out of art school. Big Money, and Chelsea dealers, seem to be interested in good-looking young men, and not much else.

This is the kind of thing that I prefer not to think about, for obvious reasons. But when I am forced to think of it, I don't expend much mental energy on getting angry. Instead, it forces me to consciously prioritize my life's goals--because, given that there are enormous obstacles in the way of my achieving even moderate worldly success, I haven't got any energy to waste. I need to remember what the ball is, and keep my eye on it.

So, in no particular order, here is my list of Lifelong Ambitions:

• Design a chapel, in collaboration with an architect (hopefully my brother-in-law, who is something of a genius) and a glassworker. It will be of stone, placed in a rural setting or on a large piece of forested property, with a stream bisecting it from back to front. It will include simple vaults, windows based on my mandala paintings, and lanterns suspended in arcs, parallel to the stream. (At least, these are my preliminary sketches.)

• Form connections with artists and other creative people (musicians, writers, dancers, performers, directors etc.) and work with them on collaborative projects that help extend our joint creative minds in genuinely new and effective ways.

• Have some influence on the way hospitals are designed and fitted out, to make then into genuinely healing environments, and not the nightmarish torture-zones that most of them currently are. (I can and will write an extensive treatise on this subject, soon.)

• Exhibit my work in serious professional galleries, where it gets the press and recognition that it deserves. (This may seem so obvious as to be tautological, but it needs to be stated.)

• Produce museum-quality work that extends the capacities of the human mind--perceptually, imaginatively, and spiritually.

• Create healing and meditative environments at every opportunity.

• Publish at least one book.

Maybe these goals are too general, but it's a working list. I am wary of setting my eye on specific targets that are all too easily shot down by forces beyond my control--i.e. 'I want a solo show at the Whitney by the time I'm thirty-five.' I am equally wary of putting too much weight on what might be called external factors--money, recognition, and fame. It has to be enough to for me to succeed on the terms where I have the most control, which are self-discipline, relationships, and the quality of the work itself.

My biggest enemy, and the biggest fear I have, is that despair over the world's indifference will make me lazy. It has done so many times in the past. My biggest challenge is to overcome my own negative tendencies.

Rufino Tamayo--Tres Personajes

2007-10-23T22:50:00.000-04:00

Well, some people have all the damn luck. If I had found a Tamayo in a dumpster, you bet I would have recognized it.

But one March morning four years ago, Elizabeth Gibson was on her way to get coffee, as usual, when she spotted a large and colorful abstract canvas nestled between two big garbage bags in front of the Alexandria, an apartment building on the northwest corner of Broadway and 72nd Street in Manhattan.
“I had a real debate with myself,” said Ms. Gibson, a writer and self-professed Dumpster diver. “I almost left it there because it was so big, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why are you taking this back to your crammed apartment?’”
But, she said, she felt she simply had to have the 38-by-51-inch painting, because “it had a strange power.”

I wondered why my blog traffic had suddenly spiked; evidently the New York Times ungenerously posted an inadequately tiny photo of the Stolen Masterpiece, and when a person Googles the name 'Tamayo,' looking for a bigger one, they get me. So I did a high-resolution scan of 'Tres Personajes' from the Tamayo anthology on my bookshelf, and here it is. We aim to please.

Rufino Tamayo, 'Tres Personajes,' oil on canvas, 1970

Over the last few days, I have been following a couple of debates about Quality in art--whether it is subjective, objective, or has any relation to morality whatsoever. Much has been said, which I shall not attempt to paraphrase or repeat. I will merely state that one aspect of Quality may include that nameless thing which causes a non-art-scenester to haul a large, odd, cumbersome object out of a trash pile and put it on her wall, because it has 'a strange power.' Not because it has a ream of text on the wall next to it, explaining the post-modern or political ramifications of its existence; not because a haughty individual with a gift of gab and many wealthy connections tells you it is Important; not because it enrages people, or cost a lot to produce, or critics wrote about it, or because hipsters are clustered in front of it, talking about themselves. Just for the energy in the object itself.

That's IT!

2007-10-22T14:49:00.000-04:00

'Divinity Lotus' by Agnes Pelton

Thank you, Jackadandy!

Why didn't I know about Agnes Pelton before this? Good grief! I went to an accredited (barely) Art School, and received an honor degree from a major university. Additionally, I studied Humanities in high school with the mad Hungarian pianist who demanded that all graduates of HIS school be classically, culturally literate. And I've combed the painting galleries of major museums in seven or eight major cities, exhaustively and repeatedly, looking for the Inspiriting Spark. I don't think I've been THAT lazy.

So why have I never heard of the Transcendental Painting Group? This is it! This is The Stuff!

The TPG manifesto stated that their purpose was "to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual." The manifesto included the statement that "the work does not concern itself with political, economic, or other social problems." Arranging exhibitions of transcendental work that would "serve to widen the horizon of art" became the focus of the TPG's activity.

One of the most significant accomplishments of the TPG was to bring the term transcendental to prominence within the semantic dialogue. The TPG's application of the term to their art advanced the meaning assumed by the terms abstraction or non-objective. The term transcendental allowed expansion of the ideas already behind each artist's work and established the concept of the sublime, a word that conveyed high spiritual and intellectual worth. Because a transcendental painting represented an ideal condition or one of expanded awareness and acceptance, the TPG believed that it held the potential to serve as a powerful icon for enlightened cultural values.

Difficult and perhaps seemingly obscure terms such as spiritual, transcendental, quality, or ideal were part of the transcendental dialogue. At the time, the group was aware of the difficulty involved in defining these terms and made a genuine effort to explain the TPG's ideals through lectures, newspaper articles, and the group's manifesto. These terms generated confusion, fear, or dismissal. For the TPG, spiritual was meant to convey something other than religious meaning--rather, something that was reached from a process of refining integrity, skill, knowledge, and experience into an artistic statement conveying openness and acceptance--and something that was ultimately inspiring for the human condition. The term transcendental was tied to quality, as was the concept of ideal, because no work lacking in quality could represent an ideal, and therefore could not approach the spiritual.

Well, THAT'S not very PC, is it. Silly question.

Agnes Pelton, according to the essays I found about her, spent the final thirty years of her life in the desert, painting spiritual energy through abstraction from nature. I could BE this woman.

'Mount of Flame,' Agnes Pelton

Wow, wow, wow. I suppose, for the sake of being My Own Artist, non-derivative, progressive etc., I should explain why I am NOT Agnes Pelton; the technician in me notes that she, like Georgia O'Keefe, seems to have labored under the Old Master paradigm of creating a flat-surfaced image with a homogeneous paint quality. The images, although abstract, are still vaguely illustrative, and thus can be engaged with on a literalistic level, as 'depiction.' Whereas I, schooled in the SFAI 'piece of the floor' aesthetic, am integrating a range of textures and surface refractivities into my paintings, to better convey the multidimensional aspects of transcendent experience.

But gosh, they're gorgeous. I want one. I want ten. Someone send me one, please. Woo hoo.

This almost makes up for my last few trips to Chelsea, which have been largely dispiriting. I will refrain from cataloguing the 'art' I viewed there, except to say that most of it was ugly and/or lame, boring, puerile, derivative, tepid, negative, and narcissistic. I am making a bigger effort to Reach Out, this year, but when you trudge through gallery after gallery of pure hubris, it kind of makes you question what you're aspiring to.

This is what I'm aspiring to. It's lovely to be reminded.

Layered intent

2007-09-06T23:10:00.000-04:00

Desert Cat has a burning question:

In the specific way that you employ these mandalas in your paintings, what do they represent? (I'm ruminating on that "Meditation" one in particular at the moment, but there seems to be a common theme to their use in many of your recent paintings.)

DC, for me the mandalas work on a number of levels simultaneously; each of these levels comes into play in each painting, and they are all equally important. In no particular order, they are:

1) A meditation practice, in and of themselves, in the process of drawing them. I am opening myself up to receive guidance about how to work, while working within the same stringent form.

2) A metaphor for an underlying holistic order, independent of space and time--what Bohm calls 'the implicate order'--which determines how the physical universe unfolds. Since mandalas are circular and symmetrical, they work rather like cut-paper snowflakes--one gesture can simultaneously create form in many different physical and temporal locations.

3) Chakras.

4) Celestial bodies.

5) Organic growth patterns.

Sometimes the lines of force both within and without the mandalas represent kinetic trajectories as well--orbits, currents and gravity.

Thus, these paintings can be read simultaneously as landscapes, mindscapes, microscapes, and metascapes.

And it is quite late, and you can perhaps tell that I just got in from Opening Night in Chelsea. The powers of deconstruction are upon me...

After the Fact

2007-09-06T12:33:00.000-04:00

Anonymous has a question, which Chris doesn't think I should answer. But being basically self-absorbed, and thrilled with the attention, I will answer it anyway:

I'm not an art person. I know nothing. I have neither the vocabulary nor the sensibility to discuss it. If anything, I like nice old historical portraits of individuals, where one knows just what one is seeing and whether it looks pleasing or ill. But 'Heart' affects me unlike anything I've ever seen before. How odd and bewitching! Please explain it to me if you can, what this painting is supposed to represent and elicit.

Well, Anon, please take all of the following with a huge handful of salt, because this painting (and just about all of the good ones) was created intuitively, without attempting to literally depict anything, either an object or an idea. Each new painting is a function of everything that went before, both a sum total of my experience with painting, and of life experience, and ideas floating loosely around in my mind.

With that said--it was based on a mandala I drew last year:

which is one of my favorites, being particularly baroque and organic. The painting, instead of just being a bigger, colored version of it, is a bit like being hit in the face. At least, that's how I feel when I stand in front of it.

Compositionally, it's a pretty simple assembly of three more or less circular forms, one ornate, one small, one dark and messy. Colorwise, it's also very simple, with the whites over gold and rose giving it a feeling of glowing from within; however, the broken sections of deeper rose in the mandala have the feeling of cuts or wounds.

The color of the small circle specifically gives me a tight feeling over the solar plexus; I didn't analyze it much farther than that.

Take the rest of this as metaphor, if you like; or don't take it at all.

Yoga philosophy postulates that our bodies have seven vortices, called chakras, at major nerve plexuses--root, genital, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown. Each chakra, when functioning properly, takes in information from the world around us and processes it, helping to build our world-view and sense of place in the world. However, most of us have 'blocks' in some of our chakras, which mean that we are 1) not taking in information through them, 2) projecting information out through them that we then read as coming from outside, or 3) defending against the miasma of clogged energy brought about by past traumas and fears.

This painting is not a literal illustration of a blocked heart chakra, the way Alex Grey might paint it, but rather an attempt to convey the feeling of having such a block; the muddiness obscuring something which you can intuit is whole, intricate and symmetrical, but which you cannot completely access.

Blue Orchid

2007-09-05T16:17:00.001-04:00

To Be Continued

2007-09-04T15:06:00.000-04:00

I can hear you out there, thinking, "Well, Brooklyn, is this it? Are you headed for the Blog Graveyard? Have you completely morphed into that irritating Lady caricature, and lost touch with that moody, acerbic Inner Self we have become somewhat pruriently attached to?"

Well, perhaps.

'Desert,' oil on linen, 48"x 36", 2007

The truth is, I have been: 1) dating somebody really great, who, instead of distracting me from my work with all sorts of useless drama, actually helps me focus; and 2) actually focussing.

'Ring,' oil on linen, 36"x 48", 2007.

Usually, I work on one painting at a time, and turn as many of the others toward the wall as possible, so that I am not distracted by them, nor am I painting 'relatively,' but focussing my whole attention on the one in front of me. The idea, for me, is to make certain that every painting stands on its own terms, as powerfully as possible. A few weeks ago I got out all the newest ones I'd done, eight or ten of them, and looked at them all together. And I realized that I was grossly overworking them.

They weren't terrible, but the word that came to mind was turgid. I was trying to pack my Whole Entire Essence into every one of them; I couldn't just put something down and leave it alone. Chris Rywalt visited about that time, and confirmed what I was thinking. He said, "you're not using your lines. Let your hands speak for themselves."

'Heart,' 48"x 36", oil on linen, 2007.

So, I decided to Let Go. Let go of trying to state my entire agenda with each painting, and just try one thing; one odd thing, one new thing, one gesture, one concept. Make paintings as postulates, not definitive statements.

'Current,' 36"x 48", oil on linen, 2007.

Within a few weeks, I had burned through all my available supplies, and reordered. I also took a few failed canvases off the stretchers, turned them over and painted on the back; when those failed, too, I stripped the stretchers again and recycled them. Lucio Pozo, one of my only good teachers, once told me, "Painters have to have an attitude."

'Meditation,' 48"x 36", oil on linen, 2007.

I also realized something else, which oddly helped me come to terms with certain perennial 'career issues,' which have paralyzed me in the past.

We've discussed, ad nauseam, the politics of the Art World. We know all the horrendous odds against getting one of the fifty grants or residencies you've applied for in the last ten years. We've discussed institutional sexism, ageism, cronyism, yadda yadda. But after getting into a rather high-pitched argument last week with a gentleman who turned out to be an art critic, I decided that for me, personally, there's something else going on.

Because my work is emphatically, overtly, primarily spiritual, both in process and content. 'Spiritual' is my 'schtick.' And 'spiritual,' in the Art World, whether it is religious or not, is not only not in style, not trendy, not P.C., but it renders you virtually invisible. It triggers an instantaneous dismissal which occurs below the level of conscious thought. Few art critics, dealers, curators or collectors will go so far as to say, like this fellow did, "I'm not interested in this 'spiritualism' junk." It just doesn't even register.

Having spent plenty of years among the self-styled Intellectual Elite, I am fairly certain that I know where this is coming from. It is a reaction against the perceived hegemony of Christian conservatism, the bigotry which frequently accompanies it, and the anti-scientific literalism of Bible Belt evangelists. The fact that this is a shallow, simplistic, unexamined dismissal of something that is not only integral to the society, culture and psychological makeup of the vast majority of human beings, but which at its root is the most anti-bigotry, pro peace-and-integration philosophy in existence, is never addressed. Spirituality is the ultimate taboo. When I mention it among a group of hip, progressive, cutting-edge radicals, the social effect is precisely the same as if I had mentioned mutual masturbation among transsexual lesbians at a Junior League meeting in South Texas.

'Bridge,' 36"x 48", oil on linen, 2007.

Strangely enough, this realization helped my state of mind immensely. This is probably because I'm emphatically a 'J' on the Meyers-Briggs personality scale; as long as I know what's going on, I'm okay. It is the paranoid feeling of, "You know, I feel like I'm invisible, but that's crazy, there's no reason I should be invisible, I'm confident and smart and articulate, I'm polite, I listen--why would people ignore me? They can't all be spiteful jerks!" that completely confounds me.

So what this means to me, right now, is that I have to make three times the noise and ten times the high-quality work in order to get the same amount of attention that a mediocre artist who pushes all the right P.C. buttons gets. What it means is that I have to work my butt off with no expectations.

'Singularity,' 16"x 12", oil on linen, 2007.

What this doesn't mean is that I will tweak my agenda to accomodate the prevalant cultural gestalt. Being a 'spiritual' artist is not only my vocation, for which I have jettisoned everything approaching security and social approval, but I sincerely believe that grounding in the transcendent is the only way to resolve the myriad miseries and conflicts of this world. I pursue and explore the path toward inner peace in the hope of extending it outward.

I was working on this one until twelve-thirty last night; it's not done yet, but I'm pretty thrilled with it so far.

'Blue Orchid,' 48"x 36", oil on linen, in progress, 2007.

For the young who want to

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don't have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want MFA's,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else's mannerisms,

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving that you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you're certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

--Marge Pearcy

Why The Current Art World Youth Obsession is Completely Asinine

2007-06-28T15:40:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to address this issue for quite some time; the reasons I haven't are 1) that I've been in the studio, producing work that dealers and collectors ought to be scratching each others' eyes out over, and will be someday, hopefully before I'm eighty; and 2) this is not a hugely influential blog, anyway. I'm shocked that I still have four or so readers who put up with my long silences, interspersed with bouts of random rambling.

But anyway. I've just happened across an awesome John Scalzi post: Whatever: On Teens, and the fact that their Writing Sucks.

Most teenage writers, for various reasons, aren't particularly good writers (I wasn't). I thought it was important to get that bit of news out of the way, because among other things, the fact that teenage writing sucks isn't a bad thing (that's point number 2), and because I think it's not a bad thing to be honest with teenagers about this stuff. They might not listen (I probably wouldn't have), but they deserve the truth nevertheless.

I recommend reading the entire article, as well as the comments. My contention is that the same thing is true of the vast majority of artwork produced by persons under thirty, and for the same reasons. It's just that the art world, as Franklin puts it in a legendary comment which is already making the rounds, has its reasons for denying this fact:

But for several reasons the current milieu of contemporary art is predicated on visual quality as a subordinate concern. There is heavy philosophical investment against the primacy of visual quality; people actually become angry if you suggest it. The market has to justify a lot of inferior work in order to function in the grandiose way that it does. This climate pushes superior work into the background. It doesn't celebrate greatness - it flatters inferior taste in a manner that lets it think of itself as superior taste. Taste and talent, particularly in high concentrations, remain rare.

The fact is, most artwork by Young Persons looks like most other artwork by Young Persons. There are the obsessive, flamboyantly colored Self Portraits; the boys do Self Portraits as Jesus Christ, and the Latina girls do themselves as the Virgin Mary. There are the Stream Of Consciousness Messes, with random words interspersed over random, layered images. There are the Experiments in Multi-Media Assemblage: see all of the last Whitney Biennial. There are the thin, outraged, obvious, literal Political Pieces, and the Aids Is Bad pieces. There is the graffiti. Have I missed anything?

(If I sound flip and bitter, it is because I myself have produced great piles of most of these things, in a decade where artists under thirty were mostly ignored. I will sell anyone the key to my storage space for thirty thousand dollars.)

As Scalzi says, it is not that this stuff is just bad, end of story. It is a necessary phase in the process of learning a craft. However, it still sucks. What makes a true artist with staying power is not youthful obstreperousness; it is commitment, perseverance, honesty, craft, depth of consideration, and perhaps a certain amount of talent.

And you do not, cannot see who has these things until you have been observing them for a couple of decades.

So let me say it as clearly as I can; anyone who fetishizes young artists merely for the sake of their youth is a fool. Moreover, they may be ruining the very artists they set out to invest in. Too much easily attained success for merely being a jackass creates monsters, not great artists. Look at the later careers of former child actors if you doubt me.

Healing

2007-06-28T14:08:00.000-04:00

I had a Bad Client Experience recently, which nevertheless led to some new insight.

It must be said that most of my clients adore me. They adore me so consistently that I don't realize how used to it I have become, and how integral a part of my working life it is. I work really hard, physically hard, and barely get by financially, but that relieved, grateful 'Thank you' that nearly every client breathes at the end of a session keeps me going. (Tips are even better.)

So when one client fidgeted during her session, particularly during the energy work, refused to look me in the eye, did not say thank you, bolted without paying, then emailed to say she was 'creeped out,' it was quite a shock. As I told her in my reply, some people just don't resonate. But it was a good thing for my self-confidence that the next six clients were adorers, old and new.

As I also said in my reply, I try to be respectful of people's boundaries, first and foremost. Over many years it has become clear to me that trying to 'fix' someone is not a healing activity. Mostly what I'm doing is simply being present, sensing currents, and allowing them to balance by themselves, if they so choose. I often worry that when it comes to 'energy work,' I'm completely deluded, and that nothing is actually happening--except for the consistent feedback I get from clients that a whole lot IS happening, and 95% of the time it seems to be for the good. And on the rare occasions that people fidget and completely reject it, I am never clear whether they're frustrated that I'm doing nothing, or that they're feeling something major which freaks them out.

But more and more I am convinced that it is the latter, and that it's not my fault. Because I've had my share of bad bodywork, and most bad bodywork won't kill you. It is usually safe to give your practitioner the benefit of the doubt through at least one session; not all healing procedures are comfortable at the time, and you need to be open to the process in order to derive any benefit from it. I've had my sciatic nerve stripped nearly raw, borne the brunt of projecting, incompetent neurotics, and suffered a lot of substandard rubdowns. But every time I've gotten at least minor relief, learned a thing or two (if only what techniques NEVER to use on a client), and occasionally experienced a wholly unanticipated miracle.

What I realized, after working on some regular and adoring clients, is that the healing process is a completely collaborative one between client and practitioner. For a client to get anything out of a session, they have to allow it. The longer I've been working with someone, the more they get out of a session, because they trust me; one long-term client mentioned that she now feels herself relax as soon as she gets to the top of my stairwell. It's like Pavlovian conditioning.

Thus I am fairly convinced that the bolter was not 'creeped out' because of bad bodywork, for the simple reason that she did not experience the bodywork. She blocked it. Which was certainly her prerogative, although it strikes me as rather foolish to book a session with someone who clearly advertises 'energy healing' and then get upset when you feel energy starting to move. I suspect that, despite the fact that she was a bodyworker herself, she'd never experienced anything similar, didn't trust it, and leaped to the conclusion that I was trying to impose some occult agenda on her.

This theory was borne out in her reply: "What a good nice response. Not what I'd expected."

I've worked on a number of people who blocked the work, both complete strangers and people I knew extremely well. What they all seem to have in common is a need for control at all costs, whether this control is of the direct or indirect variety. Much as they might pay lip service to the idea of 'love and trust and brotherhood,' fundamentally these people are unable to trust anything, whether it be a person, a situation, or God. They literally only feel safe when they're suffering.

This is one of the reasons I've decided never to give a bodywork session as a gift again. Having to make an appointment and pay for a session weeds out a lot of the resisters, because when you're paying for something, you're conscious of making an investment, and thus open to receiving a return on it. It also cuts down on the number of instances where people might suspect that I'm trying to 'get' something from them by 'fixing' them. Because when I look back, I see that a disproportionate number of sessions which went awry were of the 'gift or barter' variety. So not any more. I'll continue to offer gift certificates, because when someone else buys a friend a massage they don't want, the friend usually just doesn't show up. And I'm fine with that, so long as I've been paid. :-)

Before I embarked on actually learning to practice a healing therapy, I read oodles of books which said, in various ways, 'healing begins in the mind.' Now that I've been practicing for years, I understand firsthand how completely true this is. It is axiomatic that I can never 'heal' anyone. I can only assist them in healing themselves, if they so choose.

Also, healing is not always physical. I know many people who are mentally, emotionally and spiritually thriving, whose bodies should have died about ten times over from their various ailments. I also know people who are as physically strong as oxen, whose souls look like shriveled-up snakeskins. There is no judgment incurred when someone does everything they can, and still their body doesn't get better.

Finally, it should be noted that one does not heal oneself by willing it to happen. This misconception is the source of a lot of snappishness on the part of sick people who bark, in response to all well-meaning comments, 'I CAN'T JUST GET BETTER, YOU KNOW.' Of course they can't; that's not the point. You start to heal yourself by allowing the possibility of healing to dawn on you.

This can only occur when one respects oneself enough to 1) listen to the messages from their body without judging; 2) set appropriate boundaries and hold them; and 3) then, and only then, learn to trust that there is a larger force which promotes healing, whether you call this force God, or love, or medicine, or massage therapy. If your core belief is that the universe is a hostile entity which is out to crush you, your body sooner or later responds accordingly.

The wear and tear of Conceptual Art

2007-06-19T19:23:00.000-04:00

My friend RA, an astonishing photographer, has posted a harrowing tale of how he installed a camera obscura in an abandoned belfry in Pennsylvania last weekend. Check it out.

I have a friend named Susan. She's an architect, but really she's an artist. She will end up being a full time artist, maybe even one that gets remembered in the history books. But she's not an artist like me. She's the kind of artist whose work will either be totally unsaleable or will be going for millions. In the meantime, she'll get by on grants, fellowships and residencies while I hussle to sell my photos.
...

I said to Susan: "This feels like 12th century Christianity." She gave me a confused look and I thought maybe I had offended. I added, "terrible earthly toil, for a heavenly reward."

The Contemplation of Things Past

2007-06-03T13:37:00.000-04:00

That was quite a long silence indeed, wasn't it. The good news is that I have shaken off my year-long inability to face the monumental task of upgrading my website; the bad news is that I'm not posting any pictures of new work until it's done. Instead I am going to bore you with pictures of old work, work that only a mother could love.

Oftentimes I find that I can't decide what I truly think of a painting until I've lived with it for awhile. Some of the ones I'm thrilled with at first, don't hold up over the long haul; some that Other People seem to love, I can't stand to look at. Those are all out in the hallway with their faces toward the wall.

And some of them are the ones I painted for me, myself, and I, because I'm the only one who loves them. Those tend to end up hanging in my living room.

"Crater," 2006, oil and wax on linen

This one, I freely admit, is weird. It is the sort of painting that, at first glance, causes many artists to dismiss me as an incompetent, delusional twerp. Some of them change their minds when they look at my old portfolios and discover that ten years ago, I was painting things like this:

"Above the Laundromat," oil and wax on panel, 48"x 32", 1997
Private Collection

I'm not offended by this. I think there is a qualitative difference between a painting that sits as part of an exploratory trajectory, and a random daub presented on its own, isolated in its pretension. That's what irks me about 'artists' who paint one painting and then trumpet it all over town. "Look at me! I painted A Painting! Isn't it great? Are you going to give me a show now?" That's also why I avoid putting pieces in non-curated group exhibitions. Context is everything.

Anyway, from my perspective, I see the 'Laundromat' painting as a successful study in light, shadow, texture, composition and mood, and this 'Crater' painting as an insouciant experiment in radical streamlining of those same principles, which makes me happy enough to put it on my wall. Or rather, now that it's on my wall, it's making me happy.

What's making me happy about it are the colors, the texture, and the radical contrasts of line quality, value, and form. They're hard to see in a photo, no matter how close up:

With the layering of golds, pinks, whites and blues next to the dark earth shapes, every bit of it seems to vibrate and glow.

A lot of people see this as a 'volcanic eruption.' That, in my opinion, is ridiculous. Can't they see that it's pink? Volcanic eruptions are orange and red and black and gray. This is an eruption of pink light from the crater of my heart; the little silver thistle thing is the ghost of heart-chakra blockages past...

...and all bad poetry is sincere, too. I can't say the same for bad painting; some of it is tremendously insincere. But I don't see this as a bad painting. I see it as a necessary painting, which helped me get to the better paintings of present and future, and a piece of controlled chaos in my living room, where it creates a nice tension with the decorative formality of the Oriental rug.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Cheers!

Silence

2007-03-21T21:37:00.000-04:00

I have officially declined to participate in this years' Park Slope Studio Tour. I kept delaying about sending in the application, until finally I realized that I don't want a bunch of strangers trooping through my studio in May. In fact, I don't think I even want my friends trooping through my studio right now. Strange and mysterious things are beginning to happen, and they need to happen in silence and in solitude. I may post detail shots, but I'm not sure.

In other news--God bless Peter Schjeldahl.

...Ryman stays fresh and taut. Even out of date, his conscientious integrity ought to abash today’s hordes of careering youngsters, whose idea of the future of civilization reaches little beyond the next art fair. But to be shameable, under present conditions, may be an unaffordable moral luxury.
...
...Two other artists contribute negligible works with arbitrary political associations.

Is all of this a mite thin and forced? It is, along with almost everything else of recent vintage in an art world where frenetic production has outrun any substantial supply line of ideas. Nearly a century of experiments in abstraction have become a fund of handy tropes. What’s lost—while being barely preserved, with monkish zeal, by the likes of Ryman—is a sense of risk at the frontiers of convention.

About a year after I graduated from art school, I realized that I could either follow art fads, and hang out on the Scene, and critique and discuss and schmooze and opinionate--or I could try to make some art with integrity. I could not do both. At the time I thought that this was a temporary state of affairs; I figured I'd work for a few years, produce a solid body of work, get grounded in who I was and what I had to say, and then re-enter the Scene.

Come to find out, I think my Scene-aversion may be permanent. I don't just love Art because it's Art. I love really great art, and am supremely indifferent to the rest of it. Moreover, having to address the rest of it produces so much brain-chatter that I can't be still and listen to my inner voice, which is the one that makes the paintings.

However, I am very pleased to report that my bodywork practice is doing so well that I can now afford to be shameable, at least through the end of April. I raised my prices at the beginning of the year, and now I note that I am getting a lot more calls from Google hits to my website. It seems that people are more inclined to trust a person who charges more. I knew this was true in theory, but I was still gun-shy after experiencing a precipitate drop in business the last time I raised prices, when I was working in Williamsburg. That, I see now, was probably just due to the fact that artists are cheap.

I'm still here

2007-03-12T23:58:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the hiatus, there. First I was working on a Creative Capital Letter of Inquiry (thanks for the editorial assistance, You Know Who You Are), then I was taking stretcher bars apart, turning failed canvases over, re-stretching and re-priming them, scrubbing down and re-priming other failed canvases, and working on this one, which is in danger of being overworked and over-complex, but which can possibly still be saved.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever reach a point in my career where I don't wreck most of my paintings halfway through, and then drag them back from disaster by scraping and re-thinking and trying twelve different things until something works. I keep thinking that someday, I will just put it down, and it will be perfect, and I'll put the next one down, and the next.

But then I'd just be working on autopilot, and it wouldn't be fun anymore.

Look what I discovered about the proportions of a scorpion, as relative to a circle with the focal point moved exactly half of the distance from the center to the edge:

Nifty, huh? I know that scorpions are more or less proportioned like this, because I spent several months while living in Mexico, drawing and painting the scorpions that lived in my house. I was also dating a Scorpio at the time, and it was going badly.

But that's probably too much information.

Yes, I know, it's too busy. It's also too wet to continue messing with, this evening; also the hues are too homogenous. But I SEE it in my head, I swear. It WILL be better in the morning.

Okay, that thread was getting too damn long

2007-02-19T23:40:00.000-05:00

Pipe down, you guys, okay? Take your Gamblin war outside. I mean it. Life is too short.

First, an observation. The painting "Curtain" intrigued me, and I made it my desktop wallpaper for a while a couple of weeks ago. Although I certainly can see the curtain contained in the painting, with the yellow floor it resembled to me the edge of a forest, suspended in a dusk sky. It would take a long time to explain this, but certain cirrus cloud formations sometimes (to me) look like broad swaths of deserts with snowcapped peaks. It's merely a matter of perspective shifting, the orange sky is the sand, and the clouds are the mountains reflecting in the distance. It takes effort to see the sky in this way, but while I sound utterly insane it is possible to see this given the correct meteorological conditions and an open mind. Even with the removal of the orange floor (sky) it still looks like a fantastical yet spooky treeline, to me. I guess a lifetime spent looking at and traveling along treelines will do that to a man.

Actually, I intended the 'orange floor' to give you the feeling of light, just light, flowing up under and behind the curtain, blocked by the dark heavy line at the bottom, glowing through the top. So I guess it's not a complete failure, if you're getting 'sky' from it.

I look at treelines, too; in fact I have spent my life staring at all things organic, and growing things, and moving around with them as though I could get inside and become them, with the result that now any random mark I make tends to follow some sort of organic pattern, more or less. I'm still not hugely happy with the painting, but after slapping a 'brown-pink' glaze over the bottom yesterday, which somewhat intensifies the glow, I've come to the conclusion that it is what it is, and trying to make it something else will only make it worse. I'm glad you like it.

Ok, for the questions. I have driven past an art school once or twice in my life, and that is the sum of my training. That said, why is it necessary to use canvas, as opposed to other materials to paint on? I understand the material itself is resilient, but isn't it possible to paint on some other surface and achieve the results you want? Aside from black velvet Elvii (is there a plural for Elvis?) prominently displayed at the finer east Texas trucking establishments, I cannot recall anyone using alternate materials for the backing of their work. Is there a reason?

In the course of my career, I have painted on:
canvas
burlap
plywood
construction palettes
scraps fetched out of dumpsters
masonite
lids of tin cans
muslin
bedsheets
lauan (high-quality plywood veneer)
linen
various other types of fabric, including silk, velvet and prints
walls of buildings
dead flowers

Each of these materials takes paint in entirely different ways; it's like a completely different activity, with a whole different set of results. Therefore, once you get good at something and like the results, it's difficult to switch to something else. Perhaps a major reason that most painters paint on canvas, then, is that we're creatures of habit, and basically lazy.

However, I can also tell you that burlap, muslin and bedsheets are for shit; they disintegrate within short order, and the burlap has too loose a weave to hold any detail at all. You have to prime them all, of course, but even under an acrylic primer that could survive nuclear war, they still rot.

Metal is good, except that the paint peels off it. Glass and plastic have the same problem. I know a few people who paint on aluminum.

Wood is great, except that it's heavy. I once made a piece on a construction palette that weighed about forty pounds; it was a nice piece, but schlepping it around was a real pain, and it was impossible to hang on a normal wall. It ended up being a sort of standing sculpture. You don't want your entire oeuvre to be like that; life is difficult enough.

Also, when you paint on a rigid surface like wood, the painting is much easier to damage and much harder to fix. You whump a canvas painting into the corner of a table, it gives. You do the same with a piece on plywood, you get a nice lovely triangular scratch, and the paint color that matches is back in Mexico.

The benefit of wood is that you can use rigid materials like encaustic (wax paint), oil sticks, and collage. It's also much easier to get a perfectly smooth surface.

Cotton duck canvas is the preferred student-grade medium, being cheap and durable. I hate the stuff. It's ugly, and the machine-woven texture is a cliché on the order of a Thomas Kinkade print-on-canvas, pretending to be a real painting. During the many years I used it, I put on so many coats of gesso by hand that the texture was completely eradicated, replaced by a subtle texture made by the marks of my hands. That texture became the basis of the vibratory energy in the painting.

Now I use linen, and a whole lot less gesso. A piece of linen is a gorgeous thing, all by itself; it is organic, irregular, rich and poetic. You put one stroke of paint on it, it already looks like a Degas. So that is what I'm sticking with. Even though it's $150 a roll.

My second stultifying question is style. Dig if you will the picture that does not fall into any of the known "schools" or is an amalgamation of two or perhaps more styles - does this negate the piece because it was not strictly Impressionistic or combined Realism with Surrealism? In addition, if the artist is completely ignorant of both of these schools and yet paints within the confines of a few varying styles does that automatically render his burgeoning masterpiece into a festering piece of shite?

Painting in a non-named style, in this day and age, does not 'negate' the piece, unless you mean 'disqualifying it from a plein-air kitsch art fair,' which is a GOOD thing, in the context to which I (and the other artists reading this blog, hopefully) aspire. If you are painting in a recognized style, such as Impressionism or Surrealism, in this day and age, you are not considered an 'artist' by anyone who writes for, or reads, Art in America, Art Forum, the New York Times, or anything in the art blogosphere. You are considered a commercial craftsperson, if you are considered at all.

You see, the one required quality of anything regarded seriously by the avant garde art world is newness. (Do not even get me started on Jeff Koons. Just don't.) The nastiest, most dismissive thing ever repeatedly, snottily said to a struggling art student during critique is, "That's been done." (Or, "that's kitsch," which comes almost to the same thing.) You may, of course, borrow from the vocabulary of recognized styles out of the past, but if you're just making an Impressionistic painting, welcome to Hotel Rooms, Inc.

If the artist is ignorant of style, period, he is termed an 'outsider artist,' ignored while alive, and lionized after he dies, penniless, in a mental institution. See Henry Darger.

I wonder if the lack of training or knowledge would provide the painter a unique, fresh perspective or merely damn the fledgling artist to a life of noisome craft shows and loving renditions of the King?

Yes.

Clean up

2007-02-14T17:25:00.000-05:00

It's a lot less fun, and excrutiatingly painful at times, to go back and finish a second-rate painting after knocking out a first-rate one. But here is where I'm leaving 'Curtain,' at least for the moment:

It could be better. But at this point I don't think that fussing will make it so. The main point of the painting, as I conceived it, is the tension and the contrast between the crusty stuff and the glowy stuff:

Which is more or less what everything is about, really.

I know what the title of my next show will be. Fanfare please:

The Implicate Order

"In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders..."

--David Bohm, 1980

"I don't know how you'd paint that."
--my brother, 2007

I could go on and on, at the moment, about how Bohm's theories of the implicate order integrate nicely with what Ken Wilber calls the 'perennial philosophy,' exemplified by Eastern mysticism--that space and time are illusory, the nature of mind is unbroken unity, and that the world as we see it is a projection of a filtered mind.

But since, in general, I despise artists who yammer incessantly instead of creating, I shall get back to work, painting the scarcely conceiveable.

I will say, however, that for me, the implicate order=God.

Prep work

2007-02-10T18:51:00.000-05:00

I helped the family clear out my aunt's house after the memorial service--probably one of the most emotionally draining tasks there is. I would have preferred to just leave everything as it was for, like, a year or so, but there were a lot of practical issues to be considered.

So it's done, and I'm back in New York with an inherited fur coat, some flamboyant jewelry, and a Kate Spade handbag. My aunt had excellent taste. Her last letter to me said "Keep New York going for me;" I think she would like to know that some of her more exotic items--the silver choker shaped like a tiger, for example--were swanning around the hippest places in The City. I'll endeavor to do them credit.

Meanwhile, the best recipe for pensive moods and emotional discombobulation is prep work. Luckily, I was overdue for a lot of it.

I am very proud to report that I have graduated, in my own estimation, after twenty years, to 'professional grade' paint. Behold, three hundred dollars' worth:

When I was a very lowly student, I bought my paint at the hardware store. There was this brand called 'Pictor' which was about ninety-nine cents a tube. The colors were irregular, the consistency varied at random from oily-puddle to stuck-stiff, and you could see the specks of pigment that hadn't been properly integrated.

I did this on purpose, partly because I had no money, but mostly because I didn't want to feel that my supplies were inordinately precious. It was important to me to be able to experiment, and if this involved using eighteen tubes of ultramarine blue on a failed canvas that went directly into the dumpster, so be it.

And let me tell you, nearly ALL of those canvases went into the dumpster.

Over the years, I upgraded my paint quality at regular intervals, partly according to my finances, but mostly according to my own assessment of my skills. I used Utrecht and Winton for years--moderately priced, decent quality, comes in huge tubes. I could splash it around, then scrape it off and throw it away without wincing. Since moving to New York I've largely been using Georgian, because Pearl had a sale on it right as I was stocking up. And I splurged on Williamsburg when someone gave me a gift certificate to Jerry's.

But man, after trying my first tube of Gamblin, I knew there was no going back. It's not just paint. It's sort of like the difference between fois gras and Braunsweiger, or truffles and a Hershey bar. Dense, smooth, sensuous, pure--yum.

Then I was out of beeswax medium. I make my own, from a recipe in that invaluable tome, Formulas for Painters. I recommend that every painter own a copy; for some reason I ended up with two. I think I accidentally swiped one from Nancy in Mexico. Oops.

My beeswax medium is a paste, similar to Dorland's, but golden and slightly grainy, rather than white and bland. I get the beeswax in blocks at the co-op, whack them up, melt them down, and mix the wax with Damar varnish and turpentine.

Isn't the color pretty?

Chris, I owe you an apology. They DO actually, now, make eco-sensitive Damar varnish, with 'isoparaffinic mineral oils' and 'natural orange terpines' in place of oil of turpentine. When I actually looked at the label on the Damar varnish that made up sixty percent of my usual recipe, it said "Danger! Combustible. Harmful or fatal if swallowed. May be harmful by breathing vapors. Overexposure may result in nausea, headache, confusion or instability."

Well, that explains it.

So my new medium smells like honey and oranges. Whoopee. I also remembered to start melting some Damar resin crystals in odorless mineral spirits, so that I don't have to spring for the pre-made varnish next time. I always forget until I need it now, not in the six weeks or so it takes to dissolve. These two jars are now on the windowsill, to be shaken every morning at breakfast. Look, there are buggies in the resin!

In my home, nothing ever goes to waste. Clothing goes from 'good' to 'massage work' to 'studio work' to 'paint rag'; by the time a piece of clothing leaves my hands, it is an unrecognizable grayish lump. Tin cans are recycled into paint mixing vessels; glass jars and squeeze bottles are for various mediums. I don't even buy Baggies or Saran wrap; I just rinse and re-use the grocery bags. I don't buy Tupperware because take-out Chinese food now comes in fairly sturdy plastic containers, which can be re-used for over a year before they disintegrate.

Something deep in my farm-wife soul rejoices in this.

In Memoriam

2007-01-31T11:28:00.000-05:00

I just discovered that at the same time I finished the painting below, my aunt, Betty Speer Burke, whom I was on my way to visit this weekend, passed on. I believe her love, grace and energy contributed to the beauty of this painting. I will miss her.

Cathedral

2007-01-30T23:04:00.000-05:00

While waiting for the other one to dry enough so that I could finish it, I think I almost accidentally finished this one. Now I'm on my last tube of white, scraping the dregs of the wax medium, ditto the gesso can, almost out of yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red dark, payne's gray--all the expensive colors, in fact.

Now is the time when the hordes of adoring slaves who work for free descend upon me, wash my brushes, feed the cat, go to the grocery store, pay the bills, go to Pearl and pick up the paint, stretch the new canvases, cook my dinner, and give me a massage.

Okay? Slaves?

Maybe those fumes are affecting me worse than I realized...

I'm going to this, probably

2007-01-30T17:28:00.000-05:00

Hey, I have access to a 25% discount to hear Laurie Anderson, Nellie McKay, Joan Osborne and Suzanne Vega sing with the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM on Thursday, February 1. Does anyone else want to go? Email me ASAP if so.

Curtain

2007-01-29T00:27:00.000-05:00

I dunno, I think I'm kind of liking this one, despite some problems, and despite the fact that this is proving to be yet another color palette which is impossible to photograph.

What I'm not liking is the fact that whenever I get working at what I think should be my standard level of productivity, the fumes in my studio (due mainly to the Damar in the beeswax medium, since I use odorless mineral spirits for thinning) become rapidly overwhelming.

I am now sitting in my studio in the middle of winter in New York City, during a snowstorm, with the window open and a fan set to 'max extract.'

This would not be such a concern if I did not also sleep in my studio. It's not that the studio is in the bedroom, it's that the loft-bed is in the studio because there was nowhere else to put it.

And despite the fan, the central heating circulation, and the HEPA filter running 24/7, I don't think this is good for me. I'm waking up with a scratchy throat and going through the day with a headache.

Most younger artists, I have noticed, think that safety and health precautions are for wimps. They live in industrial neighborhoods, sand without a respirator, weld without protective clothing, and use the kind of paint thinner that, well, peels paint. Without gloves. I know, because I used to be one of these artists.

I'm not anymore, but at the moment, there's just no help for it. Life is about doing what you need to do, above all, and if that proves hazardous, then so be it.

For the time being

2007-01-25T21:26:00.000-05:00

I do believe this one is done.

Now I think I'll turn it toward the wall and do the next three as fast as possible. Thinking too much may be counterproductive at the moment.

Many Rants

2007-01-18T14:57:00.000-05:00

So I've been out and about a bit lately, going to art exhibits that don't involve Chelsea. Chris Rywalt and J.T. Kirkland have pretty much summed up the reasons I'm determinedly avoiding Chelsea at the moment, and possibly forever. I'll quote you some of the best bits:

What I found in the gallery, however, was three paintings and an installation consisting of a pile of cardboard boxes. In the corner of the boxes sat some unfortunate performer in too-tight shorts and a homemade papier-mâché Batman mask playing with an old kiddie electronic keyboard and occasionally singing along very badly....

As usual, Anthony fell into the fine artist trap of being unable to competently reproduce cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob, and ultimately his message was hopelessly shallow: Corporations use the same techniques to sell porn that they use to sell movies for kids! Sex sells! Won't someone think of the children?
I tried to give the show some slack, I really did. Then I noticed that there were three small LCD screens set crudely into some of the stacked boxes, and one of them was showing footage of the World Trade Center on September 11th. That did it for me: This show was not deserving of any goodwill. It simply sucked.

I've been visiting Chelsea almost every week day for the past 3 weeks during lunchtime. On each visit I get to see about 10 shows, sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on if anything catches my eye. Today's visit was the last straw though. Art sucks. Let me re-phrase, the contemporary art in Chelsea sucks. It all looks the same. It all looks bad.

...Last night an artist stopped by my show and we got to talking about artist statements and how he struggles with them. He told me about a gallery in Brooklyn that he was talking to and that they thought an artist statement was critical. They said that galleries use them to determine which packages should be looked at.
I told this artist that any gallery that looked at a statement before the images was not a gallery for me and I felt it shouldn't be for any other artist. If a gallery can't determine for itself if they want to look at the images, well, the art world is in more trouble than I thought.

And then, the mother of all art rants, courtesy of J.T., which I recommend that anyone who genuinely cares about the state of art in the world today go read:

...many will confuse the questions with conceptual sophistication or radical sentiment. It is only the former, if even that. Triple Candie's strategy is an attempt to purchase credibility using the tokens accepted as currency, in every sense, in the contemporary art world: the raising of questions. It's no more radical than a Kyoto office worker paying for his soba noodles with yen. To think otherwise indicates a kind of blindness that I find hard to explain except that careers are riding on it. I'm reminded of the Upton Sinclair quote that has become a favorite of Al Gore's: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

There you go.

The study of art, I believe, is a lot like the study of ethics. Something that is clear to people with a cohesive set of spiritual beliefs, and utterly unclear to those without, is that you cannot have an internally consistent set of ethics without a conceptual grounding in something transcendent--i.e. a belief in God, Spirit, or some other over-arching, non-relative force.

The current art world is lacking this transcendent standard, in a big way. The standard has become, simply, egotism. It's all about how well you can leverage and amplify your tics, strangenesses, stupid ideas, arcane rhetoric, Sisyphean processes, and personal connections into some monstrosity that approximates a theory in form, but is utterly hollow at the core. To quote my friends above, it sucks.

For me, the question "what is Great Art?" is easy to answer. Great art is charged. As in, a charged particle or a field, a cohesive interactive force which influences and reacts with the space around it. Bad art is inert. It's as simple as that.

Look, HERE:

This, obviously, is "The Milkmaid," by Jan Vermeer.

I'd like you, just for a moment, to forget this is a wickedly well-drafted painting of a woman pouring milk. I'd like you to forget that it was painted by a then-obscure, now-famous Dutchman in the seventeenth century. I'd like you to forget that this painting is so famous that it's now a cliché. Those things are NOT IMPORTANT.

What I'd like you to do is observe the WALL behind her head.

Let me help you.

Is this 'empty space'? Is it even 'negative space'? Is it a depiction of a white wall? Is it a bunch of dirty, oily stuff, stuck to an ancient piece of cloth?

Is it just sitting there, or is it DOING SOMETHING?

From my perspective, and from the perspective of the vast canon of art historians who have finally agreed that this painting is Great, it is not just sitting there. It is blowing you ACROSS THE ROOM. The contrasts are simultaneously subtle and dramatic, the forms are familiar and strange, the tension is both frictive and harmonious. It is not just the depiction of light, of form, of space, it is the energetic whammification of the EXISTENCE of light, form, and space.

I don't know how to be any clearer than that.

Here, we have what may be my favorite painting of all time. I sat in front of it in Mexico City for about twenty minutes, despite the fact that I only had one day to see the whole of Mexico City, due to the fact that Mexico City is mind-bogglingly unsafe, and my host was a lunatic.

This is "La gran galaxia," by Rufino Tamayo. Tamayo is a painter who barely registers on the radar in the enlightened old art world in Europe and the USA, but the Mexicans in their superior taste and wisdom have devoted a major museum entirely to him.

This painting, like the Vermeer, is not about a figure of a person in a landscape. That's only the excuse. The painting is about the fact that being a human in an awesome mysterious universe is, well, mysterious and awesome.

It also packs an energetic punch that leaves you gasping on the floor.

Stars. Blue. Black. Whack.

Yes?

Snarl.

This is where I'm coming from. These are the principles which inform the work I do. Not idle, made-up 'questions,' not precious, pretentious references, not the desire to be Special and Different and Strange. My work comes from the deep spiritual need to create an intensely, strangely, deeply, darkly beautiful object which is simultaneously simple and complex, evocative and mysterious, resonant and ambiguous, which knocks you across the room.

This is not quite done:

From my perspective, it's now falling apart mostly at the mid-to-lower left quadrant, in the background. It's too fiddly, too chaotic. It needs to be simpler, more direct, more assertive.

But by and large, it's not half bad. You should see it in person.

Thinking and feeling

2007-01-12T11:39:00.000-05:00

Sayeth Chris:

I feel torn between these two ends. Painting from feeling and painting from thinking.

Of course the two are not mutually exclusive. Are they? Are they for me?

Replyeth Dandy:

I'm finding that in addition to the "ass in studio", brush-in-hand work, I also have mental visions that, damn it, really ARE the thing, too! In times past I would have dismissed them, not given them credance as "the real stuff", because they seem to come from my brain instead of my hand. But you know what? I think I've actually just gotten a shorter route from my creative center to my awareness such that sometimes my hand can be left out of the circuit, at least for a moment.

What I find is that it's a constant process of bouncing back and forth between the two, and bootstrapping myself along, basing each new piece on everything I've learned before.

Because let's face it, if you attack a canvas with sheer emotion and no skill, you're going to get a mud pie. A deeply felt mud pie, but a mud pie nonetheless.

However, if you approach painting from a purely cerebral place, the results will be academic and lifeless; they also won't push the boundaries of painting, whether that painting be good, bad or indifferent. A purely academic painting, in this day and age, in my humble opinion, isn't 'art' at all. It's a technical exercise.

I spent a lot of years doing paintings which I now consider to have been technical exercises. One of my primary concerns was painting light; it was important to me that I not merely depict luminosity, but that the actual object have a presence that was as close to radiance as possible.

'Paris Bridge,' oil on panel, 1998

I got that down. People started buying the paintings. I could probably have landed myself a decent dealer at that point, if I had stayed in San Francisco and continued cranking them out in the same vein.

So what did I do but move to Mexico and commence making mud pies. I didn't know at all where I was going with them; something in me just needed to push the envelope.

What I found, eventually, after generating a huge pile of bulky, problematic, strange paintings, was that all that technical work informed my ability to express myself more abstractly. I understood the principles of form, composition, color, medium and brushwork (or palette-knife-and-handwork; some days I never even pick up an actual brush) well enough to create an abstract painting which contained those same qualities of radiance and organic movement which the realistic ones depicted.

Also, I find that now when I get a mental vision of something abstract, I have the technical chops to manifest it effectively. This is still not easy and sometimes takes months of scraping down and re-working. But the technical principles remain the same, and there is still no compromising.

For example, with this one I'm working on now--part of what I'm doing is creating a tension of color, energy and texture between the intricate mandala form in the center, and the ferocious energy of the rest of the painting, as though they were coming from two different levels of reality. One of the most important things is not to paint the 'smooth' part in a flat, predictable way; I have to keep the brushwork interesting, and the color built up by layers of glazes so that it has depth, as though you were looking into a pool.

Using beeswax medium and a palette knife for the background, and stand-oil medium and brushes for the mandala further emphasizes the contrast.

As you can see, this one still has quite a ways to go. Just because something is abstract, doesn't mean it's random; I am constantly making decisions about balance, hue, contrast and color, so that the whole thing eventually projects the vibration that I'm experiencing.

The good news is that the break seems to have made a New Artist of me. I'm having no problem motivating myself to spend the vast majority of every day in the studio. Let's just hope the money holds out.

Ahhh. Fumes.

2007-01-08T23:56:00.000-05:00

Eight hours into the first and second and, in some places, third layers of paint on the Stravinsky painting.

Funny thing--I listened to "Apollon Musagete" once through while working, then turned the music off and talked with my sister for about four hours, with the music playing in my head. Then, about 11 PM, WQXR started playing the piece that had been running in my head for eight hours. Nice recording, with the Amsterdam Symphony. Not something that WQXR usually plays, either.

Picking up the pieces

2007-01-07T20:16:00.000-05:00

For the last six months, I've had a primed, stained, compositionally-drawn canvas depicting a falling dragon, leaning against the wall. I have not been able to bring myself to finish the painting; the more I took it out and looked at it, the more I didn't want to paint that painting anymore. It seemed illustrative, redundant, too much like a painting I've already painted and don't have an interest in doing again.

So it sat there.

Also sitting there were some mandalas based on a moth which was obligingly posing on the door in Maine.

Also, in my head there started growing this image, in shades of yellow, gold, rose and ochre, which seemed to be based on Stravinsky's Apollon Musagete.

I've wanted to do something with 'Apollon Musagete' ever since seeing a film of Edward Villella dancing Balanchine's Apollo, back in high school, when I was still doing ballet training six days a week, despite the growing suspicion that it was literally, physically impossible for people with feet like mine to become professional ballet dancers. I've since looked everywhere a librarian can think to look, for a copy of that film; I believe it is mouldering away in a closet somewhere, on a black and white 16mm reel. I've resigned myself to never seeing it again.

Edward Villella actually is a god. I can't describe the film any better than that.

I took a master class from Edward Villella, once. Despite the fact that it IS literally, physically impossible for people with feet like mine to become professional ballet dancers, Edward Villella did not completely ignore my presence in his classroom. He came up to me, looked into my eyes, held out his arm, and said, "Circles."

While in art school, I seriously considered building a huge machine that whirled circular stained-glass windows around, in order to capture the brilliance, the movement of that music. My sculpture professor at the time completely failed to understand why I'd want to bother with that. Now I understand that either you're kinesthetic, or you're not, and people who aren't don't even perceive the energy of movement as a potential for expression.

But it's a lot simpler to simply create lines which imply movement, and colors which contain the brilliance.

So here I am, in the new year, branching out into near-total abstraction. I've been futzing around, of course--cleaning the studio, de-cluttering the top of the microwave, ordering stretcher bars, replacing all the light bulbs, going to yoga classes, attending science lectures and literary readings and live music performances, working on clients, making financial plans, but eventually I'm going to have to put some paint down.

You know how it is, after you've taken a break for awhile; the first stroke is always the hardest.

2006-12-14T14:46:00.000-05:00

Drawings #2 and 3 on the Cantus.

As a painting, I'm thinking the bottom part would become almost like bars of a prison, very high-contrast, while the rest of it is rather like a waterfall.

Cracks are where the light gets in. or falls out, or where the souls come from. This one made me think of Kaballah.

The drought is broken

2006-12-13T22:11:00.000-05:00

So I found that collaborator after all.

The above drawing was done while listening to Arvo Pärt's 'Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten' on a repeat loop. It's a sketch, merely; it only barely suggests the sense I have of an infinite number of cascading stars, drifting gracefully and impersonally into a humming abyss.

Cantus: a personal threnody; an ultimate closing chord; a mystical, threshold experience.

The piece is only five minutes long; I probably played it about twenty times in the course of making the sketch. I found that I couldn't turn the music off and polish the drawing. Without the music I didn't know what to focus on, or where to go next. The sounds were directly informing the movement and the weight of the lines.

To get it really right will require color, of course, and probably quite a large canvas.

The tentative plan, for now, is to make a lot more sketches from the same piece, and a lot more sketches from other pieces. Then pick some of them and make paintings. But this plan is subject to change at any moment.

The thing that feels like a breakthrough to me is not that I finally made a new drawing after months of not picking up a pencil; that's just detritus. What is almost impossible to articulate (but I will try) is that while working this way, I seem to be able to access an infinite inner space, as though the membrane between me and the universe had melted away and revealed the whole of Reality within my heart.

Which would be the definition, more or less, of 'mystical experience.' As hokey as that sounds.

Perhaps the reason this appears to me to be a breakthrough, why I feel that it is the right way to work right now, is that taking away any literal representation, any 'signifier', and doing a fairly abstract drawing that nevertheless is a direct response to an experience, allows me to work freely but not randomly. What has prevented me from becoming an abstract painter hitherto has been that threat of randomness; that lack of any anchor whatsoever between meaningful communication and untethered ego-indulgence.

I have, almost, worked this way before. 'Passage' was done mostly on a repeat loop to the final track of Rachel's 'The Sea and the Bells,' 'His Eyes.'

A dear friend of mine (hi Jake!) made a video for me, incorporating moving images of my paintings with relevant pieces of music, but I think to really get it right I'm going to have to operate the camera myself; so much of it is kinesthetic, about a specific movement relating to a specific shape, sound and color.

Another concern of mine is that this way of working not become a 'schtick.' Rebecca suggested that I take commissions to visually represent people's favorite pieces of music; although it's a good moneymaking idea, this would absolutely not work for me. I pick these pieces of music because they resonate with me and my style. Doing cheery little depictions of the latest Britney Spears hit would not only be agony, but probably impossible.

So don't even ask.

The Definition of Success

2006-12-09T22:25:00.000-05:00

This week, along with the start of the Holiday Whirlwind, which has, in fact, included gingerbread houses, I had a wonderful visit from Rebecca Sullivan of Ember, and her boyfriend Paul. It's one of the virtues of living in New York, that even if you met someone more than five years ago, and hardly remember what they look like, they come visit you eventually. As long as they don't rip the sinks off the wall, or smoke indoors, they're welcome.

And now I have somewhere to stay, if I ever go to Wales.

It always amazes me when artists of any genre show no interest in, or knowledge of, other art forms. For me, every kind of art informs and enriches all the others. Not only do I find it fully possible to dance about architecture, I don't even understand why this might be construed as difficult. I'm not a musician, and I like it that way; music provides at least one source of pure inspiration and enjoyment, informing my work in the most direct way. I do not and cannot paint when I don't have music playing; sometimes I'll wake up with a start and realize that I have been staring at a canvas for 45 minutes without moving, simply because the CD ended.

I'm not one of those people who can literally hear colors and see music, but each set of vibrations appears to me to instruct all the others. Thus, at times I will put a piece of music on 'repeat' until I get the corresponding painting right, or make a painting about a poem. I am still looking for the right musician to collaborate with--once I met a cellist who would compose a piece, send it to a painter who would paint a painting about it, he would compose another piece about that, etc. This sounded like my ideal life. But he was a flake, so I'm looking for another cellist, with staying power this time.

And, now that I notice it, I have an occasional habit of accosting talented musicians in random night clubs, and befriending them, or at least introducing myself, buying a CD, and getting on their mailing lists. And even more occasionally, they end up crashing in my living room. What a privilege.

So while Rebecca was here, I subjected her to my favorite tracks off the CDs of all the other talented musicians I've harassed in the last few years, and she listened not only politely, but intently. I noticed that she seemed to be apprehending a new song as rapidly and comprehensively as I myself apprehend a new painting; she grasped all of the important elements before it was half over. It didn't matter whether she 'liked' it or not; she was just taking it in. And we talked about the creative process, and synesthesia, and she, like most of my other creative friends, promised to buy a painting of mine as soon as she could afford it. She looked at the paintings as intently as I listen to her music; she said, seriously, "You're a real artist."

Which took me aback.

I haven't been thinking of myself as an 'artist,' lately. Having fought so long and so hard to be one, I have realized that the fight was killing me, and decided to stop. Lately I have been taking one day at a time, and focussing literally on whether the floor is clean, and what the light is like, and--god help us--politics. And, if I am to be truly confessional, trying to figure out what to do with the voice that has been growing increasingly hard to ignore, over the last six months or so, the one that's making that keening sound, having to do with, horrors! nesting, and loneliness, and biological clocks.

Because the fact of the matter is, that at the point I hit that last nightmarish breakup, the nesting alarm was ringing full-tilt. I was taking bike rides through Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, and my limbic brain was screaming, "That one! That cozy, solid brick house with the Greek trim, the French windows, the front garden with roses and cobblestones! Mine! Now!"

Then the breakup pretty much took care of that. You don't 'nest' when you're in psychic intensive care. You exist, precariously; you make some art. You do your job and keep putting one foot in front of the other. In a way, it was something of a relief; it's not comfortable to be compulsively coveting other people's houses, all the freakin' time, particularly when the basic starter home in your area costs upwards of $1.2 mil. It's purely an unnecessary mental stress factor.

Now, I do not believe in trying to force things. I refuse to do the personal ad thing anymore. I refuse to sign up for some horrible new thing called 'speed dating.' I will not hang out at clubs, or go to singles parties, or let my friends try to set me up. I refuse, refuse, refuse. I will not do any more 'relationship-finding' activities that constitute, basically, job interviews. It goes against my spiritual philosophy, my practical experience, and my innate sense of decency and propriety. It's yukky and disgusting, and it doesn't work.

No, instead I'm practicing that mental and spiritual acrobatic trick called 'letting go, and letting God.' I'm the first to confess that I'm not doing it very well. I mope, I hide, I leave parties and shows and openings early, instead of brightly getting on out there and Meeting New People. I do whatever I feel like doing in the moment, carefully ditching anything that feels like an agenda.

Because trying to force it got me where I was before, and there's nothing worse than that, and I will NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

So instead I try to see things in a larger perspective--that this is just one of those things that all people struggle with, that it's a process of 'tempering,' that I don't know how it will turn out, but it's a necessary strand in whatever lacy web my entire life is weaving. And that, on some level, in some way, someday, I will perhaps get some decent art out of it.

Which brings me to a recent Adam Gopnik essay about Jerry Shore, which I found profoundly touching, in its illustration of how a life can be a success, can be a work of art, despite all apparent external failure.

...Work suddenly became very hard to find, and his search for it was not helped by his drinking and depression. Friends say that he lost confidence, as can happen quickly to a man caught up in a confidence game.
Yet this was the moment when he gave himself over to a project that he may have begun sometime earlier, in the late seventies. He travelled through Manhattan and Queens, making large-scale, exquisitely printed color photographs of some of the most aesthetically unpersuasive streets in New York City. For the next ten years, until his death, he pursued this project, with a focus and self-discipline made all the more moving by his ever more distressed circumstances.

I have been thinking, lately, about how art and life cannot really be distinguished from one another. Thus, discussions about whether or not madness and depression are a help or a hindrance to the artist seem beside the point. Our circumstances--mental, spiritual, physical and emotional--are our palette. What each of us do with our given palette is unique, mysterious, and not subject to any lasting critical standards but our own internal ones.

The project, which seems to have begun as a kind of surcease from his commercial work—a way of recapturing some of the concerns and obsessions that had led him to New York and to art in the first place—soon became a substitute. It was all he did; given the number of images he left behind, he must have been out with his camera, hunting scenes and taking pictures, nearly every day until he died.

Jerry Shore died at fifty-nine, in a 'well of alcohol and isolation.' He only sold one photo during his lifetime. Yet in those photos, and in their preservation by a collector, in their tender observation by a sensitive writer, his life is shown to be a complete success; an articulated, honest, loving vision.

So I try not to judge myself for 'failing' at anything, whether it be art, relationships, finances, or All Three At Once, the way it has appeared to be for the last--oh, since I moved to New York, pretty much. I try not to judge anyone else, either. Instead I look for the Jerry Shore in me, and in everyone--the beautiful, unique, irreplaceable perspective that this person brings to the world, whether it's a way of prattling artlessly in a way which sets strangers at ease, a habit of noticing, a way of phrasing, a grace. These things count; in the long run, they're the only things which do.

If you look for failure, you'll always find it. When you look for success, you can usually find that, too.

Whoa.

2006-12-01T23:58:00.000-05:00

I've just discovered that I am now listed on Wikipedia as an anecdotal biographer of "Mission School" artists.

I think my website upgrade has just been moved to the 'high priority' file.

Being there

2006-11-20T18:19:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking lately about how very lucky I am to have the job I do.

This weekend, one of my best regular clients hired me to drive out to Long Island and give her mother a massage. She paid for gas and travel time, plus a long session, and told her mother that my fee was $50. I wasn't entirely comfortable with this, but my client is like that, and presumably her mother knows her fairly well. Also I really enjoyed the excuse to get out of the city for a few hours.

When I arrived, I honestly believed that my client had put far too much faith in me. Her mother cannot be younger than seventy; she was in so much back pain that she could scarcely walk, sit or lie down. It was quite a job getting her onto the table at all, and she certainly wasn't about to lie on her stomach.

I know from long experience that very old people are the hardest to treat. Problems that have been developing for decades do not respond readily to an hour and a half treatment, particularly a subtle one; older bodies, as well as older minds, are much less responsive, and less resilient. As I stood there, planning out a strategy for how to address the severe back pain of a person whose back was almost inaccessible to me, physically and otherwise, I felt like the biggest fraud on the planet.

About ten minutes after I'd started work, she said calmly, "That seems to be taking the pain away."

At the end of the session she got up and said, "Wow, I haven't felt this good in...I can't tell how long. I don't have any pain. Just kind of the memory of pain. I have to remember how to walk!"

The daughter called me up later and said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you. My mother actually went to a party this evening."

After awhile, maybe a day or two, it dawned on me--I'm a success. I set out to help people heal, and I'm actually doing it. Wow. I hadn't noticed.

The reason I'm lucky, though, is that in my job, people are almost always present with me. They show up and tell me the truth. They're not making nice, defending, trying to prove something, trying to manipulate, extract, put up a smokescreen, or otherwise imposing an agenda on the interaction. They just tell me, "I hurt here. This is the story. This is what's going on."

Since they're present, telling me the truth, any communication we have is genuine, whether or not I'm able to do them any good. This is both a necessary part of the healing process, and something that is rare, in most ordinary social interactions. Not only do most people have a false self on, while charging through their lives; they're constantly telegraphing both an agenda (get this thing, make you think this, change this person's mind), and the woundedness underlying the agenda, without acknowledging either one. If you call them on it--if you say, "I perceive that you're trying to achieve this thing in the physical world. I perceive that you're doing this in order to avoid or work out some pain," they respond as if attacked. Properly so; that type of perception is almost indecent in its presumption of intimacy.

So of course, I don't do this. It's rude. But it means that it is almost completely impossible to genuinely communicate with most people, most of the time.

Since the vast majority of my human contact these days is with clients, family, or close friends, I forget how rough it can be, out in the social world. It's quite shocking, actually, running into an old acquaintance and having them hoosh me with "career this, politics that, oh I must run here do this schmooze this person fix that problem oh could you drop me off here I'm sick and tired NO I don't need a back rub."

Yikes. I'm just not used to it.

Moreover, since I'm spending the vast majority of my time listening, absorbing, assisting, paying attention, working to make sense, working to remain grounded and peaceful and supportive, I can't really tolerate much craziness from actual 'friends' anymore. I need to be listened to, all the way through, as well. My friends aren't my clients. I can't sit there and absorb the shrapnel, in my 'time off.' For me, friendship is no longer about dovetailing agendas. If people can't be as present as a person who is lying silently on a table, they're not friendship material any longer.

It's important for me and my clients to understand that I cannot 'fix' anything, ever. I have noticed that the number of astonishing occurences in my healing practice has sharply increased, once I started telling people, "I can't fix this problem. I'm not going to try. We're just going to find out what's there, what's going on, and see what feels good for a bit." Healing happens when you let go and allow it to happen. Trying gets in the way.

The same thing is true, I think, of art. The art is back there; I just have to allow it through. Messing around with 'career' concerns creates big whopping huge creative blocks. Which is, perhaps, why I haven't been making any art for the last couple of months. I'm fine with that; it feels like I'm re-calibrating my art-sensors. When I start allowing it again, I think it will be real.

The Season

2006-11-06T13:15:00.000-05:00

So part of my autumn resolution was to make a point of experiencing more of the Really Good Stuff, the stuff that I moved to NYC to be a part of, which does NOT include community art exhibitions of amateurish kitsch, third-tier gallery openings, non-profit schmooze-a-thons, and 'curator talks' about the Obvious and the Inaccessible. Dropping all of these things really freed up my schedule. Enough so that last Saturday evening, I got to see Meredith Monk at BAM.

I ended up going by myself, even though I've been socializing a lot more with real live humans these days, because Meredith Monk occupies that esoteric space between the avante-garde and the canonized, which, in practice, meant that my friends who might have been interested could not afford it, and those who could afford it would not have been interested.

It was at the Harvey Theatre at BAM, which was appropriate, and which I discovered at the very last second, after finishing an outcall at 7 PM, racing downtown, parking in the miraculous free parking space right outside the main theatre, which I had psychically reserved for myself, and pounding up the steps at 7:23, to see a sign on the closed 'Will Call' window: "'Impermanence' is one block away."

I'm frankly somewhat suprised that there aren't more photos of the BAM Harvey Theatre on the web, because it is so neat. It comes by its post-apocalyptic aesthetic honestly; it was a genuine movie theatre which was genuinely abandoned for twenty years, and when they converted it, they left it the walls as they were, crumbling plaster, rust, water-stains, and all. "Artists attracted to the esthetics of fading grandeur," like me, just love it.

So anyway. About Meredith. I'll spare myself the literal description, and just quote the review:

Impermanence uses music, video, movement, and text to create a celebratory and moving meditation on life. Each section of the work, announced cabaret-style by a spoken title (Last Song; Liminal; Seeds; Particular Dance; Disequilibrium Song, Mieke’s Melody #5), provides a non-narrative look at the different facets of impermanence and the joy and wonder of being. Accompanied by voice, piano, clarinet, breath, bicycle tire and other inventive instrumentation, the many scenes -- a montage of video portraits of extreme close-ups of diverse faces; a playful dance of energy unbound; voices rising from the dark singing a song of beginning and opening; an elegant dance of small gestures, performers balancing on chairs, seemingly floating in space -- create a collage of emotion, image, and sound that gently transport us on a journey that is haunting and mysterious, but at its core, essentially human.

During the first half of the performance, I was on the fence. It was subtle. I couldn't decide if I was bored or not. Some of the sound was sublime, some was silly. The imagery was evocative, if you were in that frame of mind, or tedious, if you weren't. The dance wasn't meaningless and self-indulgent, but since none of the members of the ensemble were exactly spring chickens, it didn't blow you out of your seat. In fact, I could have done most of it, over thirty-five and partially crippled as I am.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. At least I didn't go home in a state of profound depression, trapped in my earthbound corpus, like I do after catching Mark Morris or the NYCB.

But during the intermission, as I scanned the immensely long list of prestigious awards that Meredith Monk has won, and the expensive German-published CDs for sale, I felt just the teensiest bit nonplussed.

I didn't leave, though, like the people sitting next to me did. And I'm glad.

Because it got better. The last piece was the best of all; it hit that sweet spot, the spot where I go off into a trance, and my astral body starts rotating, and seeing stained glass, and choreographing things in real time. And the interesting thing was, when the first member of the ensemble crept out, lay down on the floor, and started rolling, I was rolling right there with him. It was right. It made sense. There was some comprehensive wave which instructed, 'roll here, this way, now' and we all did.

This is the kind of thing that kinesthetic people understand, and other people don't.

So after the show I did go downstairs and pick up a CD, still buzzing on that last piece. They didn't have any recordings of it, but the one I got sounded just like it; I glean from this that if you've heard one Meredith Monk CD, you may not have heard them all, but you can recognize all the rest of it. She's like Philip Glass in that respect.

Anyway, I no longer begrudge her that MacArthur Fellowship.

Some improvement

2006-10-24T14:57:00.000-04:00

Okay, so after nine days of vegetarian/almost vegan diet, no caffeine, no alcohol, and a whole lot of yoga, my left ankle is definitely not as sore. It is still stiff and locked up when I get up in the morning, but it has stopped seizing up when I am sitting down for more than a few minutes. My midriff is smaller and flatter, my shoulders aren't so knotted up, and I generally feel more balanced.

I still seem to need a minimum of nine hours' sleep, though. Darn.

My Old School

2006-10-22T13:44:00.000-04:00

I have conclusively decided that fruit-and-vegetable fasts are primarily designed for people who grew up on junk food, and thus need remedial nutritional therapy. This would not be me. On Day Five I broke into the oatmeal, brown rice, and Indian curried lentils, and my body profoundly thanks me.

In my state of relative purity, I managed to go party-hopping last night and only consume half a glass of wine and one chunk of low-sugar cake, despite the bottle of Maker's Mark sitting right there, where I was almost tempted to grab it a number of times. Particularly as this was a Pretentious Art Party where I knew almost no-one, and almost no-one had conventional social skills.

Actually, that's not fair. More than half the people I talked to had average-to-decent social skills, which was why we were able to stay longer than the forty-five minutes allotted. We stayed at Sono Osato's studio in Dumbo until the pizza arrived, then quietly decamped before my willpower and Oriane's energy gave way completely.

Sono's studio

Early on in the evening, I committed the atrocious mistake of trying to engage in serious conversation with an untested stranger. In a moment of rash optimism, when he asked me what my work was about, I told him.

"Transpersonal spirituality," I said.

"Is that like, person to person?" he asked.

Oh, no. I was already in too deep to retreat; I went through a haphazard schpiel about the evolution of moral reasoning, the convergence of spiritual traditions in the esoteric experience, and the nature of mysticism, knowing that I was speaking to a wall. He listened, uncomprehendingly, and fled as soon as he decently could. I should have asked him about his work, first--when he told me he had a studio upstairs, I'd jumped to the conclusion that he was a Serious Artist. Turns out he paints watercolor landscapes.

This is why, as I get older, I socialize less and less, with fewer and fewer expectations. My life feels like a long, hopeless quest to find people who not only understand what I'm talking about, but have the wherewithal to push back. I don't want to be a snob. I really, really don't. But this sort of thing is unutterably draining.

Which is why I never quite manage to completely give up on Sono.

studio wall--nifty little sculptures

It is possible that Sono Osato may be one of the great under-recognized artists of our generation. It is also possible that she is a determined maker of mud-pies with a gift for spouting academic blarney. She is a good teacher, however; or at least, she was the right teacher for the Interdisciplinary Sculpture class I took at the San Francisco Art Institute, sometime back in the dark ages.

That class is looked upon by most of the participants, I think, as one of the major transformative experiences in our lives. It triggered a creative frenzy that, for at least one of us, ended in a mental institution--but I think that girl was headed in that direction, regardless. The basic lesson that Sono hammered home was, "Get in touch with your Real Self. Stop imitating whatever the Establishment has told you that Art should be. Do something authentic."

I remember this one guy, Gunther, a big blond German guy, came to the class making these completely underwhelming, Picasso-esque plywood sculptures. After being subjected to the first of Sono's authenticity rants, he came to the revelation that Gunther was all about crows. He started making whimsically subversive crow sculptures and scattering them around campus, with a puckish glint in his blue German eye. His final exam project was the one I remember best; a giant chair, set up on the roof overlooking the city, with a crow sitting on the back of it. When you sat down in it, the crow started telling you a bedtime story in German. It was vaguely creepy and wholly enjoyable.

Another guy, for the final critique, took us to the studio he'd somehow managed to garner, inside a defunct Chinese factory in the middle of North Beach. The factory was one of those urban buildings that is so strange, your eye doesn't even register that it's there; though it towered over the neighboring Victorian row houses, I would swear to never having seen it before, or since. We entered through a small graffiti-covered door in an alley, and went on an underground journey through myriad unlit rooms, full of enigmatic junk and inscrutable architectural configurations. The 'studio' itself was more of the same; you got the impression, when entering, that a gnome-like man had been engaged in frantically piling up twisted refuse in mad configurations until, hearing our footsteps, he had precipitately fled.

The whole critique was so strange that, even at the time, I was sure that later I'd think I'd dreamed it.

Sono Osato--black paintings, exploded crate

As much as I liked Sono, I came to notice that she seemed to have something of an oppositional personality. Or perhaps it was just me; when I'd run into her around town, at openings or in the library, it seemed that I could not say anything right. At least once, I experimented with paraphrasing the statement that had just come out of her mouth; when the next thing she said was "No, but..." I stopped trying to connect. She's smart, she's interesting, she's talented and disciplined, and we just don't resonate.

And indeed, the hyper-intellectualism and cerebral nature of much of her art and rhetoric brings up some of my core Issues. These ubiquitous tarred canvases, for instance--once she said, "They're about so many ideas and patterns converging at once that they fill up the entire space, and it becomes black." (Or something to that effect.) This seems to me to be both literalistically illustrative and not particularly useful or enlightening; I greatly prefer her sculptures. Strange and conceptually impenetrable as they are, at least they're fun to look at.

So really, I forgot that Sono existed for a number of years. Then, about three years after moving to New York, it occurred to me to Google her, like it occurs to me to Google just about everyone I've ever known, eventually. I discovered that she was living one neighborhood away, and sent her a cheery little email, saying, hi! we're neighbors!

I didn't hear back. I figured that her spam filter had eaten it, or that she's the kind of person who never ever reads email, or that she gets so many emails from former students that she just Can't Deal, or that she didn't remember who I was at all. Ah, well. I went back to forgetting that she existed.

Last summer, I was at Oriane's opening, the person standing next to Oriane looked vaguely familiar. "You look vaguely familiar," I said.

"My name is Sono," she replied.

"Oh, I was in your class," I said. "You look beautiful."

And indeed, she does look beautiful. "My thirties were rough," she confessed. In her forties, she seems a lot more relaxed, open, chatty and giggly. At the opening we got along with little to no oppositionality, after she asked, warily, "Are you still making art?" and I replied, "Absolutely." I can appreciate the fact that having a lot of poseur students clamoring round you must be wearying.

I gave her and Oriane a lift home, and in the car Sono started talking about former students. "And then I got an email from one of them that I haven't replied to, yet. This person was sort of...weird."

Moment On The Horns Of Social Awkwardness.

"That was me," I said, cheerfully.

"Oh! I thought you were someone else..." she replied.

"I'm weird, but I'm harmless," I laughed, and dropped it.

In fact, I always got the feeling that I, my actual being, must press some sort of button for Sono. It is obviously something beyond my control, and possibly beyond her ability to process. Maybe it's my blonde WASPy-ness; maybe I represent the Oppressor Class. Maybe it's my goofy theatricality of manner. Maybe I remind her of her mother, or a grade-school teacher from hell, or her father's mistress, or some other embodiment of Absolute Evil. Or maybe she just thought I was a pretentious, no-talent schmuck, and wanted no association with that at all. I can respect that.

But, after running into her at the opening, I figured that whatever-it-was had gone 'poof,' and that, with some mutual maturity and establishment of good boundaries, we could hang out in the same community. I invited her to my salon; she said she had other plans, but promised to keep in touch.

This week, Oriane asked, "Are you going to Sono's party?"

Ordinarily I am ethically and personally opposed to showing up at the parties of people who definitely have my contact information, and definitely have not included me on the invitation list. But Oriane assured me that it was the 'bring friends' type of party, and I need to get out more, and I'm harmless, right?

Unfortunately the awkwardness, whatever it is, is back. When your hostess makes a point of avoiding any conversation with you at all, beyond less than the bare minimum of platitudes, that's awkward. I wasn't aggressively thrown out, and large numbers of the other guests were perfectly friendly, which is a huge anomaly in the art scene, so it wasn't a wasted evening.

But jeez. I so know how Ed Winkleman feels, about wasting one's time trying to connect with people who just see you as part of the problem. Whatever that problem might happen to be.

Hee, hee

2006-10-18T17:26:00.000-04:00

By now, of course you have all read of the incident involving the Picasso painting, the casino magnate, and the elbow through the canvas. Amusing, but not so amusing as it might have been if all the parties involved had not behaved with class, integrity and style.

The part I liked best, though, was Nora Ephron's description of it on her blog:

Steve Wynn launched into a long story about the painting -- he told us that it was a painting of Picasso's mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, that it was extremely erotic, and that if you looked at it carefully (which I did, for the first time, although I'd seen it before at the Bellagio) you could see that the head of Marie-Therese was divided in two sections and that one of them was a penis.

This was not a good moment for me vis a vis the painting. In fact, I would have to say that it made me pretty much think I wouldn't pay five dollars for it.

Further noted was the fact that the art restorer says that it will take 'six to eight weeks' to make the damage go away.

Let me just say that when somebody at BWAC dropped my painting, "Thistle," on a nail while hanging it, and didn't tell me, and just hung it there with a gimongous nail hole right through the center of it, it didn't take me six to eight weeks to restore it. It took me about six hours; I cut a square of canvas to cover the hole, gesso'd it, lay the painting face down with a book on top of the patch for five hours and forty-five minutes, then I re-painted the center of the thistle head. Of course, to be fair, this option is not available to an art restorer.

Which is why art gets so much more expensive after the artist is dead.

Type O meltdown

2006-10-17T11:16:00.000-04:00

I don't think that people with my blood type are meant to go on fruit/vegetable fasts. It feels like a cellular thing. My system just does not want undiluted acidity in the morning, and unrelieved cellulose in the afternoons. It wants cellulose and protein in the morning, carbs mid-day, and the acid fruit stuff after dinner.

But I am not giving up yet, particularly since I cannot be said to have fully begun. Already had a lapse yesterday evening, as some clients of mine swooped down upon me and took me out to dinner at Coco Roco. Which turned out not to be the greasy-spoon Cuban joint I'd always assumed it was, but a really nice place with a rotisserie grill and a heck of a wine list. I limited myself to plantains, black beans and rice, but I had to have a glass of that wine. It was worth it.

The clients in question were a girl from Missisippi and her aunt Faye; they seem to have adopted me as a protegé. I really never thought I'd hear from the girl from Mississippi again, after she came to me last month, in a state of crisis. She'd just moved to Brooklyn, had no job, had left her entire life and family in the South, and was interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in food culture. I gave her a massage and some what-to-do-when-you-move-to-Brooklyn advice that I wish someone had given me, four years ago. I do this for a lot of people, now. They're the sorts of people who only get a massage when they're in crisis, because they can't afford it at any other time.

When I got an email from her, thanking me for the massage and apologizing for melting down, I had to think a minute before I remembered who she was. I replied that I hadn't noticed that she'd melted down, particularly--all in a day's work, in my profession.

So this weekend she called to make an appointment for her aunt, who is visiting, recovering from malaria and a recent divorce. Her aunt and I got along like a house on fire. Since the aunt had a sore knee I schlepped my table over to their place, which was stuffed full of gorgeous antique furniture, poorly arranged. Before and after the session I held forth on my notions of how to rearrange the furniture to greatest advantage; after I left, they told me, they were both hit by a whirlwind of furniture-rearrangement energy, and transformed the apartment.

Both of them said that their massages from me had been benchmark events in their lives to date. They referred to it as 'before The Massage' and 'after The Massage.' They were making serious plans for how many of their relatives they could induce to come to New York, get a massage from me, and have their lives similarly transformed.

And I sat there, smiling and feeling woozy.

Wish me fortitude.

2006-10-15T23:19:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year again--the pre-holiday systemic cleanse, otherwise known as Spa Week.

Last year I did this after an entire summer of vain fantasizing about winning a week at a chichi spa upstate in the NYC Public Library raffle. Oh, to do yoga every day, sit in saunas, get massaged, eat healthy gourmet meals, generally be peaceful and serene. Then I realized--hey, I can do this myself.

This year I have a Focus. I want to get my system clear enough so that my left ankle stops locking up, and lose enough weight and get strong enough so that I can, maybe, one day, run all the way around Prospect Park, or take flamenco lessons, or both. This is ambitious. More than one chiropractor has flatly stated that I would be wise to hang up my running shoes forever. I didn't even mention flamenco.

But in order to follow the directions that Caroline so kindly sent me, after she coincidentally called to tell me about the healing diet she's on, I need a motivating force. A strong one.

Because this is the diet:

Hi Baby!!

Here's the cleanse/detox info.

the idea is to eliminate sugar, salt, dairy, refined foods, proteins, grains-- anything you might be allergic to. You eat foods that demand little energy for digestion, allowing the body extra energy to cleanse.

So in the morning, from when you get up til 12, eat acid fruits with nothing else. As much as you want, but wait 2 hours after eating the fruit to eat again.

Acid Fruits:

acerola cherry
sour apple
cranberry
currant
gooseberry
grapefruit
sour grape
kumquat
lemon
lime
loganberry
orange
sour peach
pineapple
sour plum
pomegranate
strawberry
tangerine
tomato

Peak digestion time is from 12pm-8pm. Eat non-starch/green veggies. Again, as much as you want, but wait 5 hours before eating again, and don't eat anything after 8pm. Herbal tea is ok after 8. You can eat the veggies with fat (olive oil, flaxseed oil, or Udos oil) and/or mild starch (see below), OR eat them with tomato and lemon.

Non-Starch/Green Veggies:

artichoke
asparagus
bamboo shoots
bell pepper
beet greens
bok choy
broccoli
brussels sprouts
cabbage
cauliflower
celery
chive
cilantro
collards
chard
cucumber
dandelion
eggplant
endive
escarole
garlic
green beans
kale
kohlrabi
leek
lettuce
mushroom
okra
onion
parsley
fresh peas
radish
radicchio
spinach
sprouts
squash (not banana or hubbard)
swill chard (? what's that?)
turnip greens
zucchini

Mild starch: (eat with non-starch green veggies, oil... wait 5 hours to eat again)

beets
caladium root
carrots
jicama
parsnip
rutabaga
salsify
turnip

You can have black strap molasses, maple syrup (grade B is less refined so it's better), and raw honey.

Substitute Braggs amino acids for salt.

Take 4 tbls. of flaxseed oil a day

You can use braggs apple cider vinegar in your salad dressings

Dont eat black pepper- use paprika or cayenne

Eat garlic and ginger

Let me know how it's going!

I love you!

Yargh. This sort of thing is easy for Caroline. I think she's a natural ascetic. She probably spent a former lifetime as Agnes of God, or something. Me, I'm a naturally self-indulgent mesomorph. I broke my Mastercleanse fast with a steak taco, forget the carrrot juice. I get cranky when subsisting on rabbit food.

But I am also cranky when I sleep to much because my body seems to require it, when I hobble out of bed every morning, when my brain is foggy and I can't seem to get motivated. So I will see if I can give it a jump-start.

Oriane has agreed to attend the Russian-Turkish Baths with me, later in the week. I will try to make it to yoga every day; I will get herb tea at the Tea Lounge, and work on my stack of Improving Literature. I will scrub my apartment with a toothbrush.

I may be blogging a lot; I may be bitching, whining, reminiscing, or hallucinating. I need your psychic support. Do not abandon me in this time of trial.

The Burning Man Riff

2006-10-13T01:43:00.000-04:00

Jack the Dandy shares my pre-Burning-Man sentiments:

Serena, I look forward to someday reading that extended riff. :) The art does sound spectacular, and that is the attraction. Otherwise, I already live in the desert, know its difficulties, and don't need to share them with thousands of other people.

Because I live here I don't see the desert as exotic or a tourist destination, I see it as my neighborhood, so I feel kind of out of place when I hear descriptions of the wonders of Burning Man. It's like, pardon the comparison, but the frat boys go to Tijuana to let loose. That doesn't mean there aren't many worthwhile things in Tijuana. But there's a little of a neo-hippy "go to this exotic locale to let loose" similarity in basic geographic imposition suggested in events like Burning Man, I think, no matter how queer or revolutionary or artistically redeeming.

At least, that's the kind of sensation I feel when I think about it. I should go some day, I guess. *shrug*

Oh, I SO know where you're coming from.

The friend of mine who dragged me to Burning Man, bless her heart, came back from her first Burning Man sojourn on a high. "You HAVE to go next year," she said. "We can do the Barbie-cue!"

(I have this very bad habit of not stating my vociferous objections to my friends' brilliant ideas for collaborative art projects up front. I don't want to be a wet blanket, squelch their creativity, be unsupportive, yah duh yah duh. I appreciate that they are where they're at, and that they have their Issues, which will not go away if I dismiss them out of hand. So I let the notion of making a gigantic Barbie doll and burning her in effigy, with much screaming and rending of garments, in order to symbolize our freedom from oppressive, patriarchal notions of female body image, just sort of hover there, unmolested.)

But right away, you have my first impression of the nature of Burning man. "Neo-hippy, go to an exotic locale to let loose like frat boys in Tijuana." Uh-huh. The more my friend raved about how friendly everybody was, about all the neat art projects, about community and consciousness-raising, free drugs and Critical Tits, the more I smiled on the outside and balked on the inside.

"All the women rode bicycles topless around the playa, then the men made us cocktails," she said. My friend is the sort of person who LIKES getting attention from strange men who ply her with alcohol when she's half naked. I'm not, so much.

But there I was, in the late summer of 2000, staying with this friend, rootless, and with a not-quite-ex-boyfriend who was panting to go. Also my other best friend, who loved loved loved playing dress-up, to the point where she would try my patience by staying about three hours longer in the cut-rate consignment fashion outlet than I could stand, which is hard to do. Also, my other best friend's fiancé, who had a jillion friends who were Burning Man regulars, and had a cooking rotation and huge communal tent all constructed and ready to go. I had no excuse. I was trapped.

But at least I have some experience with wilderness survival. While my two friends spent weeks trolling every vintage outlet, fabric store and costume shop in the city, pulling all-nighters making sexy and bizarre outfits for themselves, I phlegmatically dredged out the camping equipment, not forgetting essentials like insulite pads, zero-degree down sleeping bags, and sunscreen. I made sure I had comfortable shoes and plenty of layers. I planned meals and packed coolers. On the last day before we left, I found some high-quality body paint at a costume store in Berkeley, and decided I was ready.

My friends said, "Don't worry, the weather will be fine. It always is."

Hello? THERE IS A REASON THAT NOTHING GROWS ON THE PLAYA AT BURNING MAN. Wherever nature creates a perfectly flat, dry basin of nothing but fine, powdery dust, nature is harsh. That's nature.

So I don't know how much you know about the set-up at Burning Man. It's a very well-organized temporary city, arranged in a circle that is open at the top, with 'streets' marked out and named. There is no money exchanged between people, and no barter--everyone brings things to give away for free, and somehow it all works out.

And it DOES work out. When we arrived and found our camp, we pitched tents and started costuming ourselves. Some naked guys came over and explained that we should prepare to have our minds blown. We replied, "We're artists. This sort of thing is our normal state of consciousness."

It was true. I kept looking around and thinking, 'wow, somebody actually went and manifested that.' There were at least two dragons--real dragons, huge gorgeous fire-breathing dragons, with scales and fangs and waving tails, which seated eight to twelve people. They didn't fly, but that was the only minor flaw. There was a huge sculpture that was a flaming metal ball on the end of a chain, attached to a tall pole, rotating so that the flaming ball wound up to the top of the pole, then curved out into an arc, and wound itself back up again, over and over. There was a giant fluorescent tie-dyed wind sock that you could walk (or dance) through, accompanied by colored lights and trance music. There were huge flowers like tree-houses, that you climbed up into and sat on shag carpeting inside, drinking free cocktails. There were giant tents as good as those of any nomadic desert tribe.

And all this is a description of roughly one percent of what's there.

The playa is the perfect backdrop for all this. It's impossible to take a bad photo there; even the hundreds of bicycles everywhere look like exotic, semi-living sculptures. It's the perfect flatness, the strong light, the uncompromising starkness. I sure wish my previous laptop hadn't been stolen with all of Pierre's photos on it, or I'd show you.

So anyway, my body paint was the perfect thing, both for my talents and my temperament. I installed myself comfortably in a big tent and started painting faces, backs and breasts. I didn't give people 'personas,' like Spider Man or anything; I just did fanciful, abstract curls and patterns and shapes, wandering wherever they would. After doing several, then holding conversations with people I'd painted, I realized that I seemed to be following energetic patterns in their faces, because the paint had a way of exaggerating their natural facial expressions as they talked. It was beautiful, simple and low-impact.

I also had the perfect excuse for getting out of Critical Tits. I painted about eight pairs of breasts, but oops! didn't get around to doing my own. The tits I painted were the Best In Show. Everyone got compliments.

While I was having such fun, though, my high-expectation friends seemed to be running aground. They had a long list of places and times that Exciting Events were supposed to be happening, and became increasingly stressed about what they might be missing. (The 'Menstrual March?' The 'Pseudo-Prom?' I ask you.) Worse, a major wind and dust storm blew up, and leaving the tent became inadvisable. I didn't mind at all; I just kept painting, happily ensconced.

I don't remember how long the wind blew; it might have been one day, might have been three. At any rate, by the time it cleared up, most of us had tent fever. My girlfriends in particular wanted to go Out; they hadn't shown off a tenth of the fancy outfits they'd created, much less seen enough of the fabulous art. So one evening, before the burn, we got gussied up, mounted our bikes, and went clubbing.

That was the evening we climbed the flower-houses, and encountered the bikes with the neon fish, and other things too surreal to recall. At one point we were crossing the open playa to the other side of the circle, and the belowmentioned fifteen-foot-high fantasy vehicle pulled up, lit from top to bottom in rainbow neon, bearing a large band. They launched into jazz or blues or rock n' roll, I forget what, we all boogied for five minutes or five hours, it was hard to tell, then they drove off again.

All in all, it was way more fun than I'd ever thought it could be.

But toward midnight, it began to rain, lightly. Some of us decided to press back to camp; some others decided to duck into a tent and wait it out, taking little sitting-up naps. Some of us got lost. The rain didn't stop; neither did it pour. It just got colder, and damper, and muddier.

The dust on the playa, as I have mentioned, is very, very fine. When it gets wet it makes very dense mud. Dense, heavy, sticky mud. Mud that sticks to bicycle wheels and shoes.

First your bicycle wheels start spraying mud when you pedal. Then they get slow and hard to push. Then they stop turning altogether. Then you get off and push your bicycle; the mud sticks to your feet, until your feet are roughly the size, weight and shape of large bowling balls.

Then your bike becomes too heavy to push, pick up, or carry.

It was like trench warfare. One by one, my companions disappeared into the darkness, as though picked off by snipers. At last, I was trudging alone through the blackness, wet to the skin, dragging my thousand-pound bicycle, quietly declaring, "fuck. fuck. fuck." Blaming my vain girlfriends who wanted to go all the way to the other side of town to show off their sexy outfits.

I was rescued by two consecutive strangers, who carried my bike a few blocks, until finally ditching it a short way from camp. When I returned I found that I was the first to make it back; my resentment was somewhat mitigated as, snuggled in my zero degree down bag on top of my insulite pad, I listened to my fellow campers draggle in and attempt to get comfortable among their frou-frou accessories. They all had rough nights.

So those were the highs and the lows, inextricably intertwined. I did not take any drugs; they weren't necessary, for one thing, and for another you would have to be suicidal to even consider putting toxic substances into your body in that environment. People rallied in the morning, and we saw more great art, and only one person had a nervous breakdown. I enjoyed it, but swore never to go again unless I am really cozy with a person with a camper.

Quiescence

2006-10-07T19:27:00.000-04:00

This afternoon I made it to the Klimt exhibit at Neue Gallerie, barely--it took me an hour and a half to get there on the train, I stood in line for twenty minutes, paid $15 (at least it wasn't $50), and stayed 10 minutes. It wasn't that the show was bad--how can Klimt be bad?--but that it was crowded, small, and I had other pressing engagements. It's kind of amazing, really, that they can pack the place for only five paintings, three of which were basically unremarkable. At least, they were remarkable when they were painted, but after three generations of plein-air, art-fair copyists, not to mention wallpaper designers, have done their insidious work, they're not anymore.

Last week I went to the Picasso and American Art exhibit at the Whitney, and took a lot of notes for a diatribe which I then put off writing, because writing diatribes about Picasso is getting increasingly depressing. What I mainly noticed was that a lot of the show reminded me of going through Soho, where street artists are selling kitsch on West Broadway (I have done this myself; I WASN'T selling kitsch, which meant that I did quite badly) and noting the gargantuan difference between original creativity and 'making a painting.' It was truly disheartening to note how many artists copied Picasso; they weren't 'influenced' by him, they just flat-out copied him.

In the case of a few, like Roy Lichtenstein, the results were a mild improvement on Stupidity As Usual, because they had to actually think about things while laying out an image. Most of them, however, got much, much worse. The Jasper Johns was particularly cringe-inducing. He just superimposed a standard Picasso-face on a failed Jasper Johns canvas. You see this in the hallway at art school all...the...time, as though putting a decal on a bad painting will somehow make it a good one. Oh, the eternal optimism of youth.

I am developing increasing respect for, or at least peace with, Jackson Pollock. Of all the lame-ass paintings in this show, his were the only ones which were actually producing some perceptible standing waves. The waves were sort of muzzy and dull, perhaps a by-product of alcoholism and semi-nihilism, but they were at least there. The Picassos had none, and neither did any of the copyists.

Recently I was rereading 'Light Emerging,' and came across a passage I hadn't paid much attention to before. It discussed the creative process as a 'pulse,' which extends itself from our core to the farthest reaches of the universe, and then contracts back in again. Our works of art act as 'highly-polished mirrors of self-discernment,' and as the wave contracts, it brings what we have learned in the process with it. Thus the end result of the creative process is not the work of art itself, but the distilled essence of our souls.

Most of us like it a lot when we're in the expanding/expanded state of creativity, and want to stay there all the time; we experience the inevitable contraction, contemplation and stasis, after the completion of a project, as depression and lack of productivity. But this is when a lot of the important work gets done.

It's difficult to look at an artist like Picasso without thinking that the state of Picasso's soul must be a real mess. I certainly wouldn't want that crap in my soul. What I notice most, now, about standing in a room full of Picassos and wannabe-Picassos, is that there's no light in any of them. They're all muddy, cerebral and flat. It crossed my mind, 'this is what would be on the walls in Hell.'

I think that a whole lot of modern art is all about attempting to get the hellish junk out of our souls, and not taking it back in again, but foisting it desperately and uncontemplatively on the world around us. It's not an accident that most Chelsea-type artists are too overbooked in their 'careers' to take a break for re-charging, meditation, and introspection. The whole paradigm is churn, churn, churn, produce, produce, produce, impose your 'vision' on the world so indelibly that it cannot be ignored. Most Chelsea artists, as far as I can tell, aren't too concerned about the state of their souls.

All this makes me feel better about the fact that I seem to be in a stage of relative creative quiescence, at the moment. One of the things I decided, while on vacation, is that my primary focus needs to be my healing practice, right now. I'm not very creative when I'm worried about going bankrupt at any second. Making this decision seemed to trigger a wave of business without me even having to do anything; a whole bunch of clients pre-paid and pre-booked as soon as I got back.

In fact, the very notion of showing right now, or madly trying to promote my 'art career,' makes me feel sort of sick, so I'm not doing it. I applied for a couple of NYFA grants, not because I think I'll get them, but just as a gesture of commitment and completion; now I'm going out more, reading more, and taking every bit of pressure off my mind to 'produce.' It will happen when it happens.

Agoraphobia

2006-09-30T10:37:00.000-04:00

Agora II at McCarren Park Pool, September 29, 2006

co-written by Jake

I must say, we were hyped up about attending this performance. What with the reams of preparatory emails, the signed waivers, the dance lesson videos, and the required props, it was obvious that Agora II was going to be something special. The Event of the Season. Hoo-whee.

Jake, a veteran of Group Motion, came in from Philadelphia, not once but twice, the first performance having been rained out. We rehearsed our dance steps in the studio, decorated our props, and checked our watches. 'Player' tickets had to be there half an hour early. Since our 'mission' included the running of several laps around a larger-than-Olympic size pool, and the abovementioned dance steps, we figured that we shouldn't wear too much restrictive clothing. Like, say, a COAT.

McCarren Park Pool is one of the more special performance venues in NYC. Sitting on the pool ledge, watching the half-moon rise over the half-finished high-rise condos (look, all you greedy developers and invading yuppies, 'Park View' is a misnomer. A view of McCarren Park is not a 'Park View.' It is a 'view of a barren field covered with trash.' Get a life) I realized what it was--one never sees so much sky. McCarren Pool is huge. There are no buildings, or almost no buildings, crowded around it. It's neat.

Until you sit there in your t00-thin sweater and contemplate the fact that body heat radiates to the sky.

This performance was, in fact, just like Burning Man. It had the interactive, spontaneous, community-oriented thing going. It had the 'huge, flat space' locale. It had the 'large amount of chaotic activity going on simultaneously' concept behind it. Only this performance, this media-lauded performance by choreographer Noémie Lafrance, was unlike Burning Man in one crucial aspect: it was tepidly, arrogantly, crushingly lame. Burning Man Lite.

Yes, we had the surprise element of lots of oddly dressed strangers coming up and holding our hands. There were flocks of people on bicycles. There was post-modern music, there was nudity, there were attempts at striking visual tableaus involving long bolts of fabric, and screaming, and focused spotlights.

But at Burning Man, I'll have you know, the people on bicycles had huge neon fish sculptures attached to them, and the musicians were riding surrealistic, fifteen-foot-high fantasy vehicles, and the naked strangers had real conversations, and the participation was extended and genuine.

This performance even had the Burning Man factor of mild physical suffering. By the time it actually started, we had been sitting on a concrete ledge under a heat-sucking sky for a solid hour, and could not feel our fingers. By the time we finally got to start running laps, we had been shivering uncontrollably for forty minutes, and three laps around the pool was not sufficient to alleviate the chills. When the long-awaited participatory dance finale finally arrived, we were too numb to realize what was happening. Or maybe the cues were bad.

At any rate, it did not go on nearly long enough. Instead of being a vortex of dynamic group energy, rising and surging and going wild, it was more of a gestural indication of such. It was over in less than a minute. I kept dancing anyway, to the lame, five-piece semi-jazz band which touched off the 'after-party,' just to warm up. We went home as soon as I could bend my hands well enough to drive, though. Or rather, we went to Long Tan for chili-laden food and a shot of bourbon.

This is what happens, I am afraid, when Avante-Garde Choreographers spend much more of their time and energy negotiating NYC bureaucracies for the use of derelict WPA pool spaces, and setting up labyrinthine on-line instructions, and schmoozing every other performance group in Williamsburg, than in ACTUALLY CHOREOGRAPHING SOMETHING. The abundant raw materials of space and talent were just not used. I mean, come on, if you've got Streb in the mix, where on earth were the cool-ass circus acrobatics, on a high vertical structure that would have transcended the too-big pool plane, and allowed us to see what was going on? Where was the thirty-piece jam band of amazingly talented musicians that would have reverberated the entire space until the wee hours?

And if you're going to demand so much of your audience, you'd better be prepared to give something back. This performance was just patronizing. It was a pretense of interaction, an arrogant gesture, nothing more.

Woman, art, life

2006-09-26T18:12:00.000-04:00

Rachel Winborn, 'In Floor,' 1995, photo by Charles Morris

Rachel Winborn, performance artist, has a new website up. Please go look at it. It's beautiful, and fun; click on each room in the little house, watch the videos, read the stories. Pay particular attention to the wallpaper.

In order to get a genuine sense of what Rachel's work is about, you have to allow yourself to become immersed. She's not making a one-line 'statement' about Women and Art and Drudgery; though her work is labor-intensive and conceptual, it is an exploration, an illustrative process. One of my favorites is "Launder":

For Launder I made 1200 bars of old fashioned laundry soap and "tiled" the floor with them. I built a wood plank or "boardwalk" around the perimeter of the room for the viewer to experience the piece. In the beginning of the exhibition the walls were bare. Once a week, while the gallery was open I came in and "did laundry": scrubbing the clothes on the floor. Over a 7-week period I did laundry on six days, the seventh week/day I rested. During each performance I washed one set of clothes each for a man, a woman and a baby. The water in the wash tub was never changed; I only added one pail of fresh water to it per week. By the third week the gallery had a rancid smell due to the moldy water and tallow soap. Toward the end of the exhibition it was evident that the clothes first washed were brighter than the latter washed. The more I washed the worse the laundry came out. Hence, the work is never

And there you go. Perhaps the ending is a typo, but it works for me.

I've known Rachel for two or three years, now. She's the kind of person you can invite anywhere. Down-to-earth, generous, engaging, she can and will make cheerful conversation with anyone, even if she doesn't speak their language. She's the mother of a ten-year-old daughter, Ruby, and she and her husband are expecting their second child soon. She's nothing like the stereotype of a snotty, shallow, elitist 'performance artist'; her art is a natural outgrowth of her life.

In addition, Rachel knows what she's doing in the technical arena. There aren't too many things she doesn't know how to make or do, from carpentry, to sewing, to photography, to soapmaking. Thus, the installations she creates have an integrity to them which transcends the act of 'installing a bunch of found objects in a space.' Rachel gets the right stuff for the atmosphere she is creating, whether she finds it in an attic, or spends months making enough ceramic tiles to cover an entire room, grouting herself into the floor.

Most of her pieces involve a leisurely, almost ritualistic exploration of a simple action, such as knitting and unravelling a dress/blanket in bed, or shaking flour out of dresses. As such, she is essentially creating physical poetry in time and space. The most arresting aspects of her pieces are sometimes the smallest, most incidental detritus of the process; the amplified sounds of flour-laden dresses hitting the floor, the smell of rancid soap. Her work owes a lot to theatre and set design; she cannily uses all the tricks at her disposal to create an energetically charged space.

One thing you may note, as you browse through Rachel's virtual house, is that the dates on the pieces range from 1995 to the present. Some of them are more involved than others; some are merely gestures, while others required months of labor and preparation. But she's not mindlessly spewing out piece after piece after piece, performing every weekend, having the sort of frenetic 'art career' that is expected, almost demanded, of the Chelsea set.

I, for one, don't have a problem with that. To me, there's something hollow and brittle about art which is churned out at the expense of the artist having an actual life. Rachel's creative pace is authentic to the dictates of having a well-rounded life as an artist, wife and mother, not merely the life of a woman artist making art about wives and mothers.

Spiritual whammies

2006-09-13T12:06:00.000-04:00

This week, my last in Maine, I've been unabashedly a tourist. Monday I went down to the Fairmont Museum in Rockland, to see the Andrew Wyeths and incidentally some other stuff. I became disgusted all over again with whatever New Yorker critic it was who reviewed the Wyeth retrospective and some irritating conceptual guy in the same article. He spent three quarters of the article extolling the virtues of the conceptual guy, whose signature piece was eight full-size resin casts of himself, in various poses of auto-adoration, entitled, "Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie." I patiently endeavored to keep an open mind, until I got to the three petty, terse paragraphs tacked on to the end, which were equally dismissive of Wyeth and the hordes of people lined up around the block to see him.

Okay, so maybe Andrew Wyeth's work doesn't push the boundaries of what 'art' could be. Perhaps it is flat, boring, predictable and bland. Perhaps it does 'reproduce better than it looks in person.' Certainly most of the artists who paint pictures of boats and hills and buoys and figures and random Maine flotsam, who are NOT Andrew Wyeth, can be slotted into this category.

But in my HUMBLE opinion, Andrew Wyeth achieves 'mastery of technique and transcendence of subject matter,' which is my personal yardstick for artistic success. Yes, they're pictures of boats and landscapes and figures. The early ones in particular are virtually indistinguishable from anything at a random plein-air kitsch art fair. But the more Andrew Wyeth paints, the more the nervous, edgy, obsessive, piercing, penetrating, secretive nature of his soul peers through, and the more intense and even alarming becomes the result. That works for me.

I feel sorry for Jamie, however. The poor man is sixty this year, and from what I saw at the Wyeth Museum, he's still painting like a talented but confused twenty-five-year-old. He's stranded in the indecision between commitment, experimentation, fantasy and release. A few of the paintings were amazing; the rest of them were divided between competent studies and ambitious failures. I can identify with that.

For myself, I finally gave up all notion of this being a 'working vacation.' Instead I am re-connecting with my sense of wonder, and coming to terms with the fact that I'd lost it in the first place. After three weeks I am able to wake up and just be with the light. Walking to the herb patch to get chives every morning is a momentous experience, what with the billions of diamonds on the grass, and crouching forest and exultant fauna and teeming waters and whatnot. I recall this. Intellectually I've known that it is always there. I've just been numbly unable to access it for, oh, I don't know how long.

When I was about twenty-seven, I fell in love with a serious Zen Buddhist. Simultaneously I started working out a lot, and meditating, and eschewing most meat, dairy, alcohol, and other mind-fuzzing substances. Also I kept re-reading "Anne of Green Gables."

The upshot of all of this was, that colors gleamed, shadows deepened, light became crystalline, and I wandered around in a state of besotted, childlike amazement much of the time. Some of my friends at the time--well, a lot of them--found this annoying. Oh, they said it was great. But when the whammies started happening, one after another, a lot of them vanished.

I suspect that whenever a person makes a leap in consciousness, there is usually a corresponding toxic fallout. You have to cope with all the ways you've been lying to yourself before, all the habits you have that sabotage you, all the relationships which don't support you. Toxic fallout is not fun. Sometimes you find yourself vomiting copiously, sometimes your lover abandons you, sometimes you wind up homeless and half of your former friends say you make them 'uncomfortable.' Sometimes all of these things happen at once.

And when you commit to a lifetime of spiritual growth, sometimes, I think, these sorts of whammy episodes tend to happen at regular intervals. So much so that when you start apprehending the billions of diamonds again, something inside you cringes and waits for the other shoe to drop. Which obviates the diamonds and leaves you in a fearful, suspended limbo. And, incidentally, unable to artistically produce, since you're not taking in enough to feed it.

So the battery is beginning, just beginning to re-charge. I don't know how long it will take. It may take years. I think I have to work on being fine with that.

The world gets brighter

2006-09-08T10:10:00.000-04:00

Oh, man. Thank you, A.R. I went to see Rose the wondrous bodyworker again yesterday, courtesy of one of my best and oldest friends in the world, and Rose has given me a new right arm.

There was so much toxicity built up in the old one that by the time I went to bed yesterday evening I was cramping all over (it is not seemly to thwack yourself compulsively in the butt during a community dinner party), and had to keep climbing up and down the stairs in the middle of the night, as my system went into 'rapid flush' mode.

The amazing thing was that Rose did not go into the monster knots and whale on them, the way I would have done. She hooked onto the fascia in my shoulder and stretched them, one layer at a time. There was one point that I felt my arm getting longer and longer, and knew for a certainty that it could become infinitely long, that there was never going to come a point when it would go no further.

Oh man, I needed that.

This week I read a book which I now wish to recommend to everyone in the world. Our copy of Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found my Faith, by Martha Beck, seems to have vanished along with our erstwhile houseguest, so that I cannot quote the huge excerpts from it that I was intending to. However, if the houseguest DID take it, it could not have gone to a better place, so that's the last I will say about that, except that I hope to God she finishes it.

The reasons I'm tooting this book beyond all others are interlocked and legion. First of all, it's hilarious. Her writing style is reminiscent of that of yours truly, at my most puckish and urbane, and her material is, to say the least, flamboyant. Those Mormons--well, let's just say that if I had made up a religion, complete with elaborate rituals, at the age of six, and documented it thoroughly, it would have looked a lot like Mormonism. Weird-ass fundamentalism has got to be a natural developmental stage of the human psyche. But even at the age of six, I wouldn't have taken it nearly so seriously.

Anyway, if it was just funny, I wouldn't be bothering. What really impressed me was both her masterful descriptions of 'the peace that passeth all understanding,' that infinite joy that cannot be evoked in words, and her profoundly wise integration of justice and forgiveness.

There seems to be a pervasive notion in human culture, on all sides of political fences, that 'forgiveness' equals 'saying it's okay.' We see it in right-wing ideologies that equate 'compassion and understanding' with 'flopping over and playing dead while the criminal element tramples civilization.' We see it equally in left-wing ideologies that equate 'peace and forgiveness' with 'denying our wounds and playing dead while the patriarchy molests us and silences our voices.' Nobody seems very hip on forgiveness, unless they're ordering someone else to shut up and play nice.

This book makes it clear, in the most compelling way I've ever encountered, that true peace can only be attained through truth, justice, clarity, and then an understanding and compassion that encompasses both the abused and the abuser. You do not obtain peace, or even a lasting social stability, by sweeping ugliness under the carpet. Neither do you obtain justice by signing up for a lasting inner rage which obviates trust, compassion, and redemption.

I was going to go on and on, but this morning, in peace and clarity, I find myself completely unable to do so. You just have to read the book.

Happy birthday to me

2006-09-06T19:21:00.000-04:00

Got David G.'s invitation for the 63 openings in Chelsea tomorrow evening. David will be attempting 20 of them. I will be attempting none. I am still, blessedly, in Maine.

I'm-not-there-and-I-don't-care, doo-dah! Doo-dah!

No, I am still sitting by ponds and watching obese tadpoles try to figure out what to do with their new limbs. I am wandering around in forests, gazing intently at ridiculously pretty flora. Today I climbed a small mountain and stared out to sea for an hour. This is all urgent business. My calendar is full.

Last week I got my first massage in I don't know how long. The bodyworker is great, and nothing at all like me. She started at my sore ankle and commenced subtly unravelling fascia. It took her an hour and a half to work her way up to my right shoulder, which I thought was causing the trouble; that wasn't the trouble. Evidently the real trouble comes from protecting my sore heart. She barely got started on it. I booked another session for tomorrow.

I'm a little better at standing on my hands, and a lot better at standing on my head. I lost three pounds in two weeks, then just now the scale told me I'd gained it all back, but I'm choosing to ascribe this to PMS. Being around nature and good conversations makes me happy, so I naturally eat less.

This year, I think I will make no plans at all. I will not try to save the world. I will not engender any grand schemes. I'm still up in the air as to whether to apply for a NYFA grant, although I conceivably qualify in two different categories. I think that making plans at the moment is bad for me.

Small town, big city

2006-08-28T10:46:00.000-04:00

I seem to have hit a nerve with Chris:

I'm one of those people who says they're going to do things and then doesn't do them. It makes me feel really awful, too...

The trouble is, when I say the things I do, I'm totally sincere at that moment. But my state at any given time is mostly independent of anything else going on in my life -- I live most moments as if nothing led up to them and nothing will lead out of them. I basically don't have the brain power to spare on thinking of things as causal chains all the time. So when I'm talking to you, that's all I'm doing. Nothing else.

With that disconnect, it's easy to say things I don't mean or plan to follow up on. At the time I'm totally open, honest, and sincere. But when I step back into the flow of my life, some things get washed away...

So the next time someone doesn't do something they said they would, maybe consider going a bit easier on them. Because they may have hurt themselves more than they did you.

The Dandy, however, understands what I mean.

I am invariably shocked by people who don't do what they say they are going to do. Despite decades of exposure to this kind of behavior, I still don't get it. If I'm talking about doing it, either I will actually do it, or the consideration of doing it will be the journey in itself, with its own important (and measurable) results.

First of all, Chris, I think you're being too hard on yourself. From my admittedly limited experience of you, I have observed that when you say you're going to show up, you show up. When you say you're going to write something up, you write it up--in an inexpressibly lovely way, no less. You obviously have little experience with the true Art Flake. Which is fortunate for you, and I do not recommend acquiring such experience.

But the thing I noticed about both Chris's and Dandy's comments was that you guys know yourselves. Do you have any idea how rare that is, to meet people who don't spend a great deal of mental energy lying, to themselves and other people, about what kind of person they are?

One of the things I loved about living in a very small expatriate community in Mexico was that it was impossible to avoid getting to know everybody around you. I had friends from at least eleven countries, ranging in age from three to seventy-two. In that sort of situation, you not only have a much greater range of perspectives on the world to apprehend, you learn what you can realistically expect of people. And then you can roll with the punches.

For example, if Herbert suddenly explodes in a red-faced, violent rage about some trivial and irrational thing, you will not get terribly upset about it, because everybody knows that Herbert has anger issues, which are quite probably biologically based, and thus more cause for compassion than fear or censure. If Gretchen goes around telling everyone in town that Serena is an irresponsible thief who trashed her house, everyone in town goes around reassuring Serena that they all know what Gretchen is like, and nobody believes her. And everyone knows that Sophia is a rotten mother, but that it's probably not her fault because she still hasn't dealt with her own childhood abuse issues, and Sophia hooks up with a guy who grew up with a psychotic mother, and thus is the perfect person to take on a shell-shocked wife and her already-damaged daughter. To each their own complimentary dysfunction.

What I learned from living in such a community was that 1) you can't change people and 2) they're all perfect in their imperfections, and manage to muddle along somehow. It was particularly instructive to realize how difficult it is to intervene in an obviously screwed-up situation. I saw, firsthand, some of the most mind-bogglingly bad parenting styles imaginable, and even though the parents in question were relative intimates of mine, there was very little that could be done about it. I could drop a few suggestions, and provide a little clandestine love toward the neglected brats in question, but mainly the parental wound-infliction was inevitable. You saw that this kid had her life's work cut out for her, getting over that--and that, more or less, this is true for all of us.

The difficulty I had, in moving to the big city after this, was that you don't have the luxury of being able to observe people at close quarters over a long period of time, before deciding whether to put any effort into a friendship. There are just too many of them. By and large, you have to go on instinct. Or at least, I went on instinct the first three years I lived here, with very terrible results. Now I'm stepping back and re-considering my method of forming friendships. And until I have a group of friends whom I know I can rely on, collaboration is out of the question.

One of the mistakes I've made, I think, is in using a project as a short-cut to getting to know people. That's what they tell you in all the 'self-help' literature--volunteer! Volunteer! But I think what that means is 'volunteer to do something you have no personal stake in.' Because when I volunteer to do something art-related, I'm investing far too much of myself, too quickly. And thus I am placing my career trajectory repeatedly in the hands of Art Flakes. Shudder.

So it's not really a question of anyone having to change. Chris, you go right on ahead talking big and doing whatever you do; I won't abuse you for it. It's merely a question of me taking the time to learn what I can expect of someone, who I can work with, and who I need to avoid.

Ye of Little Faith

2006-08-22T13:33:00.000-04:00

Danny DOUBTED ME.

Wow...Sounds great. Sort of unbelievable to think that you actually made it. Like all the obstacles and such that kept coming up ...let alone the human part of being a human being and all those issues.

Well...congrats. I really hope you have a great time. You sound like an 8 year old totally ready to "play house" with a vengeance .....GO!!!

Danny, you have not known me long enough.

This sort of thing happens to me all the time. On my occasional visits back to San Francisco, while living in Mexico, I'd run into acquaintances and tell them what I was up to. They'd say, "Wow, you SAID you were moving to Mexico, and then you actually DID it." Like this was something extraordinary.

How unfortunate, not to mention an evil omen for society in general, that so often it IS extraordinary when a person does exactly what they say they're going to do. So often, talk is just blather. People throw propositions into the currents around them, simply to test the response. It's why I've declared an indefinite moratorium on collaborative projects--repeatedly I'd get involved in something, meet with other 'collaborators,' go home and assiduously do exactly what I'd said I would, then turn up at the next meeting to find that everybody else had just been talking. And were perfectly prepared to talk some more, as long as this was all that was expected of them.

But enough of carping. It is nearly impossible to carp when you wake up here:

and the view out the window looks like this:

My darling sister knows me extremely well; she saved all the fun jobs for me. After I got the kitchen clean I was in a dilemma as to which room to attack first--the garden room, which I am converting to a painting studio, the Zen bedroom above (which I am keeping in its Zen state for now, although it requires an almost inhuman restraint on my part. I like simplicity in theory, and I am a big fan of desert camping for its mind-cleansing effects, but in practice my taste tends more toward the baroque) or the Library Loft.

After about half a day of chaotic multi-tasking, the Library Loft won out, because it was the biggest mess and had the most latent potential. It's about half done, now--I got most of the useless junk semi-sorted and stashed somewhere else, the bookshelves arranged, the desk set up with Internet connection, and a theme and some artwork decided upon. Then I took a break to blog. Sitting at a cute little desk in a cute little loft with this view at my right elbow, I feel an overwhelming compulsion to start writing a Stephen King novel, or something.

About this issue of Obstacles, though. Danny, you have got it all wrong. According to the World View of Serena, obstacles are not obstacles as such; they are clues.

You see, I see life as a combination mystery novel and five-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. It is not something I have control over, but something I can possibly influence, by the choices I make in response to it. Additionally, I choose to believe that there is some inner guiding harmony that links it all together. I could very well be wrong about this, but believing that it's all just some random chaos that is out to crush me produces immobility and despair, and thus is not productive.

So, my process in getting myself a month's working vacation in Maine went something like this:

Clue: Feeling of overwhelming Big City burnout.

Clue: Massage practice falling off in summer, due to client base feeling same Big City burnout.

Clue: Sister moving into rambling farmhouse in Maine, requiring help decorating such, and also some company.

Hypothesis: Perhaps spending the month of August in Maine is the way to go.

Clue: Car requires several repairs before long road trip.

Clue: Laptop hard drive crashes; flaky repair service in Queens does not repair it before August 1.

Clue: Potential subletters for August 1 are all shameless flakes; one of them unilaterally re-scheduled an appointment, without consulting me, because he had a job interview in Brooklyn the next day, and didn't want to come all the way out here twice. (And he wants to LIVE here?) Another hemmed and havered for two weeks, and finally called me July 30 and said "Is the apartment still available?" Another said she loved it and would probably take it and disappeared.

Clue: Best friend calls from Wisconsin and says she'll be in New York from August 1-9.

Clue: Sister going to Austin on business from August 1-7.

Hypothesis #2: Perhaps I should postpone my trip until after the first week of August.

Clue: Responsible-seeming person asks to sublet my apartment from August 17-September 18. She is a biochemical engineering Ph.D. student from Cleveland; her boss, a surgeon, informed her that these were the dates she was to look for a job in New York. We talk on the phone for 45 minutes, and she's a go.

Conclusion: Trip to Maine conclusively scheduled for August 17-September 18.

Results: Got to spend lovely week with best friend; got car and computer comfortably overhauled; had plenty of time to clean and organize apartment; have apartment expenses covered for month; get to spend time in Maine in absence of summer tourists.

In addition: Ph.D. student gets housing to suit her needs; friend of sister's, visiting first week in September, in desperate need of bodywork; other, perhaps unknowable, benefits may arise from this concatenation of circumstances. Who can tell? It's a mystery.

Do you see, Danny, how perceiving something as an 'obstacle' is an unnecessary value judgment which merely increases one's stress? Whereas if you take the attitude that any seemingly unwelcome information may be a vital clue as to the direction of the upcoming path, everything works out?

Beliefs, I maintain, are merely tools. You can choose to believe something, act as if it were true, and observe the results. If the results are uniformly chaotic, chances are high that your chosen belief is a crappy tool. If the results are increasingly harmonious, the more you let go your judgments and follow the clues--well, that works for me. Of course, working hypotheses are subject to modification any time they cease to be effective. This is just good science.

Additionally, I'd like to speak to this business of guidance. One of the reasons that it so annoys me when people talk about 'what they're going to do' merely to observe its effect on others, is that this, to me, is a back-asswards way of making decisions. You cannot trust a person who is not operating from his or her core. A person who depends upon the approval of others in order to determine a direction is both unreliable and unhappy. I regard my own inner certainties and inner aversions as the biggest, most non-negotiable clues of all; any external input may affect the peripheral choices I make, but they won't affect the overall direction.

Thus, when I know that I am miserable in the city and I need a friggin' vacation, I will find a way to take that vacation. It might have involved, worst-case, availing myself of the unconscionable amount of credit that foolish industries persist in throwing at me; it might have involved curtailing my trip; it might have involved a precipitously permanent departure from the city, if nothing else transpired. But there was never any real danger that I wouldn't do it.

Somebody has to go see this for me

2006-08-16T00:53:00.000-04:00

My neighbor and giver-of-friendly-hugs-at-the-co-op, Miriam Eusebio, has directed a group of one-act plays that has gotten a great review. For three years I have been pestering Miriam to invite me to her plays, and now I can't go see this, because I am leaving town the day after tomorrow and have eight jillion things to accomplish.

So somebody please go see this and report back. From the review:

...This is admittedly not easy stuff to swallow, but "Faces…Voices" is moving precisely because it refuses to pity the victims, but instead admires them for their courage and fortitude in moving beyond potentially soul-destroying experiences — this small, out of the way show is well-worth seeking out.

Now that's the kind of thing that rocks. Living in the Bay Area for nine years, I am so over whining victim theatre--including screaming dancers, AIDS crisis rage plays, and spoken-word poets who sit on the stage in a fetal position and weep for ten minutes about the racists who done them wrong. Which is why I didn't put Miriam's play immediately on the calendar when she emailed me about it. But now I'm sorry I didn't. Rock on, M!

Garbage update

2006-08-13T17:25:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I confronted the garbage lady and asked her to move her garbage somewhere else. I explained the situation with many graphic gestures--making mountains with my hands to indicate the garbage heaped up everywhere, holding my nose to communicate the bad smell, flapping and buzzing in imitation of the hordes of flies, covering my heart with my hand and looking sorrowful, to accompany the statement, "This is my home, and the garbage is ugly." I repeated these gestures several times, and she looked at me intently and said, "Get out." I thought my communications were successful, since she immediately started moving the garbage. When I went down this morning, the courtyard was clean as a whistle.

Then when I went down in the afternoon, their were more piles of sorted and bagged-up recycleables, stashed behind the garbage cans, attracting flies and looking hideous. I had a client arriving in twenty minutes. I lost my temper and piled every extraneous bag onto the curb with the rest of the garbage.

I hope this gets the message across; I hope our building is not issued a sanitation ticket for improperly-bagged recycleables; I hope I don't experience an instant karmic backlash. But I'm practicing communicating the notion that 'kind person' does not equal 'pushover.' Such is the metaphor for codependency--having a front yard full of someone else's garbage.

Science catches up

2006-08-12T22:23:00.000-04:00

Well, not really.

I get a lot of clients who suffer from migraines. One of my instructors, an ex-Marine who was studying acupuncture, told us, "Ice on the feet. Ice on the feet for migraines." His theory was that sticking a migraine sufferer's feet in a bucket of ice water caused blood to rush down to warm them up, thus relieving vascular dilation in the head.

I've never actually tried it, but when my clients tell me they're starting a headache, I do go to their feet, with positive results. When I worked on Wall Street, the stupid chiropractor employing me spouted a lot of bile about massage therapists who worked on people's feet--"We're not podiatrists," he said. When the Russian girl came in, pale and terrified from the onset of one of her regular migraines, I went to her feet, anyway. After two minutes she said, "My headache is already gone."

Now the New York Times has this to say about migraines:

Though long believed to be primary vascular headaches, the result of constriction then expansion of blood vessels in the head, migraines are now recognized to stem from neural changes in the brain and the release of neuroinflammatory peptides that in turn constrict blood vessels. The headache often begins before these vessels dilate. The inflammatory peptides sensitize nerve fibers that then respond to innocuous stimuli, like blood vessel pulses, causing the pain of migraine.

...More common causes include stress (positive or negative), weather changes, estrogen withdrawal, fatigue and sleep disturbances (hence, perhaps, the association with alcohol, which can disrupt sleep), as well as overuse of over-the-counter pain medications.

In other words, they're psychosomatic.

"Psychosomatic" is a terribly misunderstood word. It does not mean "It's all in your head;" it just means it starts in your head. The mind is an astonishing thing; our thoughts quite literally affect our bodies. Thoughts stimulate the release of chemicals, like hormones and neurotransmitters, which then do their dirty work and lay us low.

The vast majority of the bodywork I do is intuitive, simple, and empirical. I don't give a name to what I'm doing; I just try things out and observe the results. What I have observed, in my clients with migraines, is that many of them don't seem to be grounded. They don't count on the earth to hold them up; they feel responsible for keeping everything in orbit. They also tend to be fond of generating ideas--they're intuitive, imaginative, and ambitious.

When I put my hands on someone, I can sometimes sense when their thoughts are running riot, just by feeling a subtle sort of buzzing sensation in my fingers when I'm touching their heads. I've tested this out by working on close friends who are ready and willing to give me feedback; once I was working on a friend who was in crisis, and her head would not stop buzzing. I put my hands on the soles of her feet, and 'grounded.' When I went back to her head, the buzzing seemed to have calmed down, and I finished the session in the usual way.

Later, without my asking, she volunteered the information: "When you touched my feet, I felt a sucking sensation, and I stopped obsessing and felt peaceful."

I had another regular client who suffered from frequent migraines; otherwise, he said, he was fine. The first time I worked on him, I discovered a massive keloid scar on his ankle. I asked him about it; "oh, yeah, I tore off my Achilles," he said. Seemingly he'd sort of forgotten. "So, it's no wonder you don't want to feel your feet," I told him. When I work on him regularly, his migraines seem to cease; when I don't, they come back. He doesn't seem to notice the connection until I ask him about it, though.

Oftentimes it's the simplest notions which screw us up. The idea that "the earth is holding us up" would seem to be a no-brainer, but it's shocking how many people do not believe this, on a subconscious level. I once worked on a woman who got up at 5 AM to run six miles, every day; then she did Buddhist chanting for two hours. She was one of the most psychologically messed-up people I've ever known. When I started on her, her body was knotted so bizarrely that she didn't have a muscle configuration that I recognized; I wondered if she was, in fact, an alien. I told her, "Sophia, the ground is holding you up."

She replied, "REALLY?" in a tone of genuine, non-sarcastic incredulity. She honestly did not believe it was true.

Recently I read an interview in the Sun with Marion Woodman, who says,

"All my life God has spoken to me through illness. My pattern is to go along and have a marvelous time until all of a sudden I'm pulled down by some malady. That's where the real psychological gravity is for me. Throughout my career I've seen people have similar experiences; not paying attention to their bodies and getting sick, sometimes even dying prematurely, or, at the very least, not living their lives as fully as they want. I've found that talk therapy is not the best way to help these people. In many instances, it is of little help at all. I decided early on that the body must somehow be involved in one's psychological healing, because the body can hold onto memories and images that are otherwise inaccessible. You can't get to them simply by talking about them."

I suspect this may be particularly true with highly intelligent people; they can use their minds to very effectively avoid dealing with problems, by rationalizing them away. Their bodies are the ones screaming at them, "That's all very well, but I'm going to COLLAPSE now, until you pay attention to what I have to tell you."

The body can be ridiculously, embarrassingly literal. People get migraines, in part, because they're thinking too much.

When I first became a bodyworker, I thought it could be a sneaky way to heal people without them realizing what I was doing. I thought I could just go in there, alter their energy patterns, and make them all better without ever having to directly confront them about their self-destructive habits and ideas. I know better now; I know that this delusion of mine is called 'co-dependency,' and that people have to take responsibility for their own healing, or they'll never get anywhere.

Now I don't try to 'heal' anything at all, and I'm a lot more blunt about confronting people with their shit. I tell them, "I can work on your neck from now until the cows come home, but it won't get better until you start telling the truth." They don't get as annoyed as I used to think they might; and I don't blame them if they don't get better as fast as I think they could. It works for all of us.

Hallelujah

2006-08-12T10:36:00.000-04:00

The copy of Photoshop that I had burned to a back-up disk a year and a half ago appears to have tranferred Photoshop functionality to my new hard drive, quietly and without complaint. As proof, here is the pumpkin I carved, the Halloween before last.

I rock.

Beer and Skyscrapers

2006-08-09T13:18:00.000-04:00

Just got this email, and thought I'd pass the message along:

As you may or may not know, Brooklyn Brewery owner Steve Hindy is a supporter of developer Bruce Ratner's infamous 22-acre Atlantic Yards project (the NBA arena plus 16 skyscrapers). A few months ago, the Brooklyn institution known as Freddy's stopped serving all Brooklyn Brewery products as a small but defiant stand against those who support this blatant display of greed and ethical and moral bankruptcy. (Yes, you too, Mr. Markowitz.) So, why not join 'em in boycotting Hindy's beers? It's not going to drive them out of business, but dontcha think it could be a bit of a PR predicament if Brooklyn stopped drinking Brooklyn?

Actually, I stopped drinking Brooklyn awhile back, ever since I heard that they use unfiltered Brooklyn tapwater to make it. I could be wrong about this, but somehow it just didn't taste the same after that. Sierra Nevada, Red Hook ESB, Magic Hat, Sixpoint, Sam Adams, and Guinness are all better beers. So yeah, boycott Brooklyn.

The Ratner plan really chaps my hide. I moved to Brooklyn to get away from chain malls and identical glass cubicles. Sidewalks, old brownstones, and quirky local businesses are a priceless resource; you can find a Marshall's anywhere. Yes, Old Navy provides jobs for the locals--minimum wage, dead-end, cookie-cutter jobs that hold people in a stable state of bland ignorance. Work at Old Navy, spend your paycheck at Old Navy, go home, repeat till you die. What a life.

UPDATE:

Painterdog gave me a link to an outstanding article by Jonathan Lethem, detailing some of the overwhelming objections to Frank Gehry's drawings for the Ratner project. The prose itself is a delight to read:

Any chance you want to take a harder look at your plans? When unveiling the latest, you explained the appearance of the spearhead tower, which you've named "Miss Brooklyn" (spurring the inevitable quip, We'll miss it, all right). You explained: "When we were studying Brooklyn, we happened upon a wedding, a real Brooklyn wedding. And we decided that 'Miss Brooklyn' was a bride. She's a bride with her flowing bridal veil—I really overdid it. If you had seen the bride, you would—I fell in love with her." Pardon me, but bleeechh. I don't know whether many great buildings have been founded on notions at once so metaphorically impoverished and so slickly patronizing. But somehow I doubt that any have.

August in New York

2006-08-09T10:49:00.000-04:00

is not the time for artists. Artists do not exist in New York in August. Perhaps this is why my hard drive decided to go belly up, just in time for August.

However, I am please to report that, 1) I have a new hard drive (if not any of the information off the old hard drive, including Photoshop...Chris...help....) and 2) I've found a subletter! I will be LEAVING this horrible city for ONE WHOLE MONTH! I will be in Maine from August 17 through September 18, and perhaps this will re-charge my art batteries.

Because I just can't get interested in art, at the moment. Email art newsletters keep arriving in my mailbox, and I keep deleting them unread. I have not yet re-bookmarked any art blogs on my new browser. My studio is in 'clean-out' mode. I look at my own paintings, and it's like I'm looking at a foreign country.

There is a lovely old black woman who goes through the garbage on our block. I don't know what country she's from, because I can't understand what she says, but she's not from here. She has an incandescent smile, and works very hard at her occupation of going through people's trash. So I smile at her, and say hello, and am careful to give her my bottles and my old clothes.

And now she has set up camp in our front yard, and is bringing all the garbage here, and going through it so that the bottles are always clinking, and leaving it in huge stinking piles bagged up everywhere. I more than suspect she's doing this because I was nice to her, and she felt that my yard was a safe place to sort her garbage. Now I have to go down and tell her to take it all away.

It's also like--I started getting hang-up phone calls from a 'restricted' number. I usually don't pick up the phone when the caller ID shows 'restricted,' because 98% of the time it is a telemarketer. But one day I whimsically decided to answer. It turned out to be some freak from the East Village who calls himself Tommy D. He said he'd gotten my number from someone who'd seen my open studio in October (I suspect I know who this was...Jim, you and I are going to have a little talk) and wanted me to be in an art exhibit. A one-day art exhibit in a community center in the East Village, on a Monday, in August. He wanted as many artists as possible; skits, body-painting, music, the works. He wanted to eventually do this once a month. But the guy at the community center was concerned about nail holes in the walls.

Oh, God.

I actually made an appointment to meet with him and see the space. Then I took note of the rock-like feeling in the pit of my stomach, and failed to show up for the appointment. He called both my phones and left hang-ups until I picked up. I explained to him that this wasn't the sort of project I was interested in, at the moment, and wished him luck.

There was a time, there were many times, when I did show up for the appointments. I would show up on the grounds of 'meeting new people,' 'getting involved,' 'getting exposure,' 'having fun.' And it was fun, many times.

But I have discovered over the years that when I put any energy at all into a project done by someone who demonstrates their flakiness, lack of professionalism and impracticality from the first second I meet them, I get drained. I end up doing far more than my fair share of the work, because I'm the only person who sees what really needs to be done. I don't meet the kinds of people who can either become real friends, or who can genuinely help my career, because those kinds of people give flakes a very wide berth. I can't afford another throw-away project, not even for one weekend in August when I have absolutely nothing else going on. I am far better off going to the beach.

And then, to top it off, I got a call from a regular client. One of the clients who claimed to experience a 'miracle' relief from knee pain after I worked on him. He's been complaining about the fact that his massage therapist of fifteen years has started cancelling on him a lot. She's getting older, she's having health problems, she has no insurance. So he's been coming to me quite often, and this has been keeping me in groceries.

Anyway, this client wanted to know if I could do a 'combination' massage. "Combination?" I asked. "Combination of what? I do what I do. I don't do anything else."

"Combination of therapeutic and....sensual," he said. "My other massage therapist does it."

I mean to say, hello? This guy knows me. Last week we chatted about the client who not only sort of creeped me out because he wanted his stomach rubbed for twenty minutes, but bounced a check on me and hasn't yet made good. He got all indignant and protective on my behalf. He's shown an interest in my art, claims to think I'm gifted, and obviously thinks I'm a miracle worker. He also repeatedly claims to think I look twenty-five, which makes my week.

And he just freakin' asked me to prostitute myself.

I told him, politely, that he needed to check the 'escort' ads at the back of the Village Voice, that I don't do that sort of thing, and that there will be no discussing it again. He said, "Okay, I'll get that taken care of," and came in for a regular session yesterday. I thought about refusing to see him again, but he hasn't actually misbehaved. I did tell him that he needs to get a girlfriend; I told him that was his prescription.

Because when you think about it, if this guy has been going to the same massage therapist twice a week for fifteen years, and getting jacked off every time, that's a relationship. A severely screwed-up relationship, but a relationship nevertheless. Except that now that she's getting old and sick and can't reliable jack him off every week, he's shopping around for a new one with no sense of responsibility to her. No wonder he has got intractable knots that move around like snakes and never go away, even when he comes in for two-hour sessions twice a week. He's trying to pay someone to make his issues go away, and not genuinely connecting with anyone, especially not himself.

This, to me, is empirical evidence for why Biblical law prohibits prostitution. It's not a 'victimless' crime; it damages the souls of both persons involved in the transaction. It turns one of our most potent motivations for seeking intimacy and connection into a disengaged economic exchange. It flushes precious life energy down the sink. And now, at the end, we have two old, lonely, sick people wandering around looking for some other source of help, instead of caring for and supporting one another.

The whole thing gave me some serious pause as to what I'm doing with all this, and where the line is, and if I'm really helping people by doing healing work on them, or just perpetuating something negative. As in, where is the line between 'attachment' as a hindrance, and 'connection' as a positive thing? Is it a good thing that I maintain a certain detachment from my clients, that most of them don't become personal friends, or am I contributing to the general soullessness and alienation of our culture? And what is the difference, really, between rubbing someone's feet and jerking them off? Is it just an arbitrary cultural taboo, or is there some greater significance to it?

Actually, I know the answers to these questions, or at least I thought I did. But every now and then you have to reconsider them.

Hands

2006-07-23T21:20:00.000-04:00

Today I saw my favorite client. I know I shouldn't have favorite clients, but I defy anyone to resist favoritism, with a client like Susan O. When she first called me, about a year and a half ago, she asked if I was 'taking on new clients.' At the end of each session, she re-books the next session, overtips, and urges me to let her know if I've raised my prices, yet. At Christmas she gave me a BAM gift certificate, with which I obtained a ticket to hear Ute Lemper with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. In my own mind I call her 'sweetie Sue.'

Sue is pregnant with her firstborn, due in two weeks; I consider it a rare privilege to have escorted her through the pregnancy. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, to think that people like Sue are populating the planet.

Anyway, while I was working on Sue, and meditating upon Sue having an easy delivery, and a healthy baby, I suddenly found myself watching my own hands while I worked. Usually I take my hands for granted, unless I have a cut or a hangnail; then I fret, and realize just how fragile is my livelihood. One moment of carelessness, one wrong move, and I could be out of a job, indefinitely to permanently. If I decide to learn glassworking, I may very well have to get a grant for it; one cannot be a massage therapist with cuts and burns covering one's hands.

I realized that I do a huge amount of thinking with my hands--as well as magic. Magic is as good a word as any, for what happens when I touch someone. I discovered it almost as soon as I started massage school. I'd lay my hands on someone's shoulders, and they'd exclaim, "oh, what are you DOING?" "Nothing, what?" "There's heat. Coming from your hands."

There's really no adequate scientific explanation for why this happens. What I noticed was that, after years of practicing meditation, if I lay my hands on someone and empty my mind, my palms heat up. When I receive bodywork from people, sometimes their hands heat up, sometimes they don't. Everybody's touch is different. There was one girl in my class, Jessica F., who put her hand on my lower back during one of the very first sessions. She put it exactly in the sore place, in the lightest, gentlest way, and said, "oh, it's swollen." There was something sort of silvery and magical about it. Intellectually, Jessica F. was not a giant, and was so lacking in self-confidence that she almost dropped out of massage school after a couple of months. I made it my business to make sure she didn't quit. We swapped bodywork a lot, and I came to trust her implicitly. If there was ever a person who should be touching people for a living, it was Jessica F. She was one of the proudest people I've ever seen, at graduation. I hope she's still massaging.

When I got my Reiki attunements, I asked my Reiki master about the heat thing. She said, "Every person is tuned into their own frequency of healing energy. The Reiki attunement is in addition to that." Her own hands were like a furnace. She was a blast--a little gnome-like woman, living in a semi-commercial one-room space in a converted Berkeley warehouse, with a hot plate, a clothes rack, some cushions, and spiritual books and paraphernalia strewn everywhere. Her conversation was a stream of consciousness anecdotes, punctuated with aphorisms from Gopi Krishna or the Course in Miracles, and the occasional blissed-out sigh. In any other century she would definitely have been burned as a witch. She embodied an archetype.

I have always sensed that the energy of the gesture in my hands is a large part of what I'm doing in my artwork. I will put down the paint with a brush or a palette knife, but most of the time I go over it directly with my hand, so that the entire surface of the canvas has been caressed, coaxed, smoothed, sometimes several times over, with the human touch, as though it arrived there directly from me, with no intermediary tools. My contemporary, Margaret Kilgallen, used to say that the touch of human hand was a huge part of her passion for making art; I found it odd that she would have to say so; it would seem so obvious. But it seems that we have gone, conceptually, a long way from valuing the manual touch of the artist, in most modern art. And I feel that this is a serious loss.

As I write this I'm listening to Rachels' Music for Egon Shiele-- the last track, "Second Family Portrait," with the insistently repetitive, almost pleading pathos of the violin, over the ponderous syncopation of the piano's rhythm. The touch of the violinist, the tiny shifts of emphasis within each note, are what create the music. The essence of the art is in the tiny, scruffy, inarticulable detail. Not the Concept, not the overarching Idea, but the gritty individual manifestation in time. A painting is like that; a massage is like that.

When I give a massage, it lasts at least seventy minutes. Not the idea of the massage, which might take ten minutes to explain, or to perform in the most perfunctory way. The actual manifestation of a massage is unique, personal, rhythmic, intuitive, tailored for the particular person in the particular moment, just like a conversation. For me it's a dance, with a passive audience of one, who is not watching but feeling the movement. The moment I make a false move, the audience knows it. But usually I don't falter.

A painting, for me, is a static object which encapsulates a piece of time, a set of gestures, like a frozen symphony. Oftentimes while I'm working I'll put a certain piece of music on a repeat loop, until the painting has arrived at the corresponding vibration, in my perceptions. Thus the painting is something completely different from a 'picture.' It may 'depict' something, but it is something far more than the sum of its parts. This one of the little thistle in the crater, for example--it's about sharpness and lightness and rosiness and deepness and bleakness and dryness and openness and explosions of clarity--and a picture of the painting contains little to none of that. So much is contained in the history of the actual object.

This touch is something we all feel, both when looking at art and in going through our normal lives, but we so seldom acknowledge that it exists, that it is perhaps the most important thing there is. There's almost no way to describe it. It's as though the thoughts of God are seeping through our palms.

I knew it!

2006-07-18T13:39:00.000-04:00

An article in Wired magazine puts its finger squarely on the thing I have been skwawking about since 3-D design class; some artists work by conceptual innovation, producing their best work while young (because that's when their brains are most agile). Others, LIKE ME, work through a process of long-term experimentation, maturation, coming to understand their medium, and produce their best work much later in life. Link to this wondrous article courtesy of The Intrepid Art Collector blog.

What [Galenson] has found is that genius – whether in art or architecture or even business – is not the sole province of 17-year-old Picassos and 22-year-old Andreessens. Instead, it comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people. “Conceptual innovators,” as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans. Then there’s a second character type, someone who’s just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group “experimental innovators.” Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. Galenson maintains that this duality – conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus – is the core of the creative process. And it applies to virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, from painters and poets to economists.

I think one of the main reasons I'm so sensitized to this issue, aside from the fact that my work process puts me squarely in the second category, is that, having been pegged as 'the smart girl' pretty much since preschool, it was assumed by everyone around me (parents, teachers, classmates, and even myself) that if I were going to be an artist at all, I MUST be one of the 'conceptual innovator' types. Being so 'smart' and articulate and clever and all. (Whatever that means, anyway.) And if I wasn't, if I mucked around and experimented and produced a pile of god-awful crap during school and beyond, I must be delusional. And thus was being pig-headed by sticking to this art thing, instead of decently trundling off to medical or law school like I was supposed to do.

This does not mean that I am announcing myself to the world as a 'genius.' But it confirms a feeling I've always had, deep in my core, that I was on a valid path, even if it didn't look that way to anyone else, or even to me, on my bad days.

Hey. Are we paying attention?

2006-07-16T21:37:00.000-04:00

Rarely do I discuss politics. I think I stopped believing in the power of politics to solve problems my freshman year in college, when I engaged in a heated hour-long debate with Marc Salomon on the West Mall. (He was a militant gay anarchic Marxist, or something like that, and I was a Young Republican, if you can believe it.) I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and the next week when I ran into him, I smiled and said hello. He acted like I didn't exist. It suddenly occurred to me that he was taking our political differences personally, and that he actually thought I was a sub-human for disagreeing with him. The fun stopped there, for me.

So I keep a weather ear cocked for the political situation, and I vote, and think about things, and listen. But I don't blog about politics, I don't get into political arguments, and I try not to get pessimistic and despairing.

But people, it's looking to me like WWIII is about to happen. I don't want to get into excrutiating detail, because I'm not a Middle East scholar, but look--Hezbollah is shooting Syrian missiles from Lebanon into Israel. Israel is hitting back. Hezbollah and Hamas are virtually the same--terrorists, that is--and Hamas is now the freakin' Palestinian Government. Iran is building nuclear weapons, and making long flowery speeches about how the U.S.'s support of Israel is bad, bad, bad. Our president is a fascist who has embroiled us in a sinkhole of an unwinnable war in Iraq, alienated most of our allies, plunged the country into abysmal debt and eroded our civil liberties.

To put it bluntly: the U.S. is in a weak position, with a belligerent, self-righteous and narrow-minded leader, who has a habit of making very bad tactical decisions. We've pissed a lot of people off; those people have pissed our allies off. Peace Through Strength is becoming less viable by the second.

When I defend myself, I am attacked.

--Course in Miracles, Lesson 135

A problem cannot be solved on the same level which it was created.

--Albert Einstein

When I read 'liberal' blogs, they're generally full of a lot of hand-wringing about how War Is Bad and our president is a fascist lunatic and people are suffering and dying and gay people can't get married and oh, oh, oh. When I read 'conservative' blogs, they're generally full of ex-Marines discussing weaponry and tactics, and making prayer requests for their sons who are shipping out on Tuesday, intermingled with anti-Islamic diatribes and anti-gay-marriage diatribes and oh, our president is a fascist lunatic.

Did I mention that our president is a fascist lunatic? And if everyone can agree on this one issue, why is he still our president?

But anyway, that's not my point. My point is that maybe we artists and literati need to be paying more attention, not because we can do much about it at this point, but just because we need to pay attention. Because maybe we're living in Interesting Times. Maybe 'political art' isn't going to be about making obvious statements about War being Bad in some slick gallery, but about actually binding up people's bleeding wounds in Central Park, or seriously stepping in front of a Syrian missile and getting blown to smithereens.

And my deeper point is that for me, making a gargantuan effort to regard the world from a transcendent perspective is very serious business. Because I genuinely don't believe that what's happening now, what will happen, and what's happened in the past can be 'solved' or 'fixed' at a political level. I don't have any delusions that anti-war protests, elections, or charging into the Middle East and saying "Why can't we all just get along?" is going to do any good. Neither do I think that weaponry and tactics are any of my business--I'll leave that in the capable hands of those who know about such things, and care.

Because, people, this is going to keep happening forever and ever Amen, until each and every one of us understands the notion that our neighbor IS ourself, that what goes around comes around, that Love may not be the Answer, but Hatred IS the Problem. I have no control over what my neighbor thinks; I have no control over what he does. I only have control over myself.

So my task is to eliminate hatred, in myself. That's it. That's all.

Now I understand

2006-07-15T20:17:00.000-04:00

those big-name artists who don't fabricate their own work. I could never relate to it at all. What's the point? It's no fun if you don't get your hands dirty.

But if I could hand this

to a technician and say, "Reproduce this in glass, taking out those messy, superfluous curlicues, streamlining the lines a little bit, and rendering it in deep blues and purples,

I would. The design isn't nearly as much fun to draw the second time around, much less building it in lead and glass.

Also, color is hard when you can't put down six layers of oil and wax medium with a palette knife, scrubbing and carving back into it until you get the hue and texture and luminosity exactly right. I understand, now, why stained glass windows are so primary and diffuse in their color designs; you have to do it that way to generate contrast, when you only have about six shades to work with.

But I don't want to do it that way. I want to have, say, some that are almost all blue, and some which are salmon pink with a few green details, and some that are gold and ochre, and some which are almost all white and beige.

Invention fails me on this one. Tune in tomorrow when I've slept on it.

Puppet show

2006-07-15T11:22:00.000-04:00

Some images from Dan's recent puppet show collaboration at Tabla Rasa:

Bits & Pieces

2006-07-14T21:53:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a good day. I had two outcalls, one to a regular client whom I like a lot, one to a new one whom I liked a lot. In fact, I'd be hard put to dislike any of my clients. Once you've had your hands on someone's body, and directly sensed the struggles, the pain, the stories, the constant overcoming, you tend to respect them. The new client was a young woman who had had rods implanted along her spine to correct her scoliosis, then removed ten years later; there was a scar the length of her entire spine, and she had no thoracic spinal curve to speak of. I mean, wow.

Then I went out to Coney island and indulged in a really disgustingly greasy Italian sausage with sauerkraut, and a Pepsi, and wandered along the beach, and watched the big distorted orange moon break free of the clouds, and soaked in the tacky flashing lights and the noise. For me, these days, this is High Life.

I like this new one best in the context of how it contrasts with the others around it:

In fact, when you get a whole lot of these together, they do something very different from what one does alone. The radical differences in the way each one is designed, coupled with the uniformity of structure, starts to be interesting.

It's very clear to me that whatever-this-is is still in its early stages, though. Danny said to do 100-200 for starters, and I think that's reasonable. I plan to break out the watercolors next, and start experimenting with stained-glass color schematas.

I have officially advertised to sublet my apartment for the month of August, and have someone officially interested. That working vacation may actually happen. I'm trying not to fetishize the notion too much; I'm still me, wherever I am. But rural Maine will be an awfully nice change of pace.

Lights in the floor

2006-07-12T21:38:00.000-04:00

Last night I dreamed I was learning how to make stained glass. I would render all my mandalas in glass, then embed them in the floor with lights underneath them. In fact I was making stained-glass light-boxes, for installing everywhere. I woke up with "We Two" by the Little River Band, circa 1983, running through my head.

Embedding stained-glass light boxes in a floor would be a difficult task, but not impossible.

This weekend, Danny told me very seriously that 'if you make art the center of your life, doors will open.' I took mild umbrage at this, since theoretically art HAS been the center of my life for the last eighteen years or so--and doors, such as they are, remain largely closed.

But upon taking a trip out to Red Hook to watch the boats, and thinking about it, I realized that committing to art, for me, has largely been about committing to the struggle of being an artist. I pick the hard tasks; I pick three impossibly hard tasks before breakfast. I pick impossible men. I pick impossible financial situations, albatross friendships, quixotic enterprises. I have not yet committed so deeply to the joy of making art.

Upon thinking farther, I realized that, wise as Danny is, he has it backwards. I cannot make art the center of my life; art as an end in itself is too flimsy, too temporal, too potentially trivial and ego-ridden. My center of narrative gravity must be spirituality. The art flows from that, not the other way around.

Do you remember that song, "We Two?" Sappy, sappy. The chorus:

Carousels and wishing wells were the things we loved
To fly away in a big balloon was what she talked of
Whoa...

Upon waking I wondered, 'why is that running through my head?' The stained glass idea is neat, a real gift, but "We Two?" Where did that come from? Actually I'm not missing my lost love; the persistent memories of all the times my ex-boyfriend screamed at me for bagging the groceries wrong, criticized everything about me, tried to manipulate, control and force me into a dysfunctional, stunted little box, have completely overridden the happy memories of 'wandering the streets' holding hands. There is no "We Two" in my head, anymore. It's just me.

More than that, "We Two" propounds a ridiculously childish notion of romance. Love is not about "carousels and wishing wells and big balloons," or unicorns and fields of daisies, either. It's about a force that motivates you to work through the hard stuff; it is the will toward growth and change.

All at once it came to me. If spirituality is not a person's center of narrative gravity, growing up is too terrifying to contemplate. Assuming personal responsibility in a world that you can't control is impossible, when you're not relying on anything besides yourself. Attaining maturity takes faith. This is why I stop working and become cranky, moody, and despairing when I stop meditating for a few days--I've stepped out of the flow. I'm disconnecting from the force that guides me, and connects me to the whole.

That's why my atheistic ex-boyfriend, and the emotionally damaged womanizer before that, and the assorted oddballs, perverts and narcissists before that, were all so controlling, compartmentalizing, and commitment-phobic. They were desperately trying to 'preserve the romance' by remaining children. They didn't want to risk tainting the wishing wells with a dose of sordid reality, so they shoved me in the happy-happy cupboard and commenced screwing around outside of it. They regarded any attempt of mine to integrate, to mature in the light of truth and intimacy, as a personal attack. We were operating from different paradigms of happiness.

Notice, here, that I'm not equating 'spirituality' with religion. That's the whip-hand that all the aggressive atheists and what-not hold over your head--that 'religion' equals rigidity, superstition, bigotry, and evangelism. Evangelism is particularly annoying because it's the equivalent of attempted thought control; the evangelist, with the most altruistic of motives, thinks he has a perfect right to get into your head and dictate what you think. A lot of my exes regarded my spiritual practice as though I were in a cult, no matter how much I quietly went about it without involving them; they seemed to think that I would spring out at them one day, pound them unconscious with an Old Testament and drag them off to Utah.

The irony of it is that true mystical spirituality is about coming to see that things are perfect, exactly as they are; it's about not trying to change or control anyone. Control is not a loving action; it's 'I love you BUT.' I love you BUT was what I heard from all those atheists, come to think.

This spiritual center of gravity hasn't made things any easier for me in the 'art world,' which is, in large part, ego-driven. At best, the notion of 'spirituality' is seen either as a Ghetto of Kitsch, or as a quirky, historical-context flavor-of-the-month, as in 'Serena's work references Buddhist mandala-making, within a contemporary, urban context.' Blah.

I think, though, that nearly all great artists are mystics in some sense of the word, even if only intuitively so. The sheer transformative energy of a great work of art cannot come about from mere ego motivation; it has to have the influence of the universe to bear upon it. It harnesses the force which moves mountains.

So anyway, 'lights in the floor' is a good metaphor for how I'm moving to structure my life, now. The light has to underlie and support every action I take, instead of being merely something high up on the wall that I'm looking at. I'm not sure I'll ever marshall the necessary resources to install a lighted glass floor in, say, the Whitney, but it's something to meditate on.

Dan's new project in Coney Island

2006-07-12T13:50:00.000-04:00

...Went to Coney Island to add some fish. I love night shots. They are so horrible and inaccurate and beautiful and more accurate than the real anyway. Was hoping to photograph in the full moon but it came up much later than I was willing to stay there for. Oh well. Another night when I stay up late, I will swing by.

A Write-up! It's a write-up!

2006-07-11T10:46:00.000-04:00

Chris Rywalt has written a much more interesting version of my salon/party on Sunday; he makes it sound all sort of elite and special. Please go read it.

Also, for lots of photos of Danny's work, check out most of my March archive.

Success

2006-07-10T15:18:00.000-04:00

Thanks to all who showed up last night and made the evening such a lovely one. Thanks to all who RSVP'd, whether or not you showed up. Shame on those who think that RSVPs are old-fashioned and unnecessary in these modern days; you will not be invited again. I have Standards.

Topics of conversation: Discipline and Commitment, Drawing, Process, Maker-Thinkers, Art Blogs, Anonymity, Cheese, Marinara Sauce, Good Wine. Among other things.

Cheers! The next one is tentatively scheduled for mid-September.

P.S. My phone is back on. Commence calling at (718)768-3236, since my cell phone is nearly out of minutes.

A finer Borges moment

2006-07-06T20:49:00.000-04:00

You will be safe
You will be asleep
Someone will have their hand
running through your hair

The world is full of images
Some of them will be transparent
Ghosts
that only catch on video frames

You will be cared for
You won't freeze

Too many casualties to keep track of
Someone will keep track of them
You will be safe in the dark
You will be warm at night
with the windows open

You will be loved
You are remembered

--from Rachel's 'Selenography'

I think the top 'mandala' may be a picture of one of my chakras, just after the breakup. The fact that I can draw it indicates to me that it's over and done with.

The bottom mandala looks kind of like a cross-section of an RNA mitochondrion, but it's been half my life or more since high-school physiology, so maybe not.

The two photos are the views out my front and back windows, about twenty minutes ago. I had one of those Moments where I was playing 'Selenography,' and it all sort of congealed, and I took notice.

All of life can be like that, if we just remember to pay attention.

Update on !(@#&( phone service

2006-07-06T15:38:00.000-04:00

Okay, so what happened was that Earthlink transferred my phone service to themselves as of July 1, and mailed the equipment needed to access said phone service to an address in Oakland, CA that I haven't inhabited since the year 2000. After they'd used up over an hour of my remaining cell phone minutes, putting me on hold, they earnestly declared that they'd have my calls forwarded to the cell phone in oh, twenty-four hours. They're overnighting me the equipment, probably by tomorrow, which means that it should be here by Saturday.

Which means that my client base has had a full week to call me, get a message saying that I'm 'unavailable,' decide that I'm out of town or dead, and find another massage therapist. Hoo-whee.

So if anybody is needing to call me, please dial (718)384-6773. I promise that I won't whine at you for very long, since I haven't got many cell phone minutes left.

Don't Fade Away (Featuring Sophie Jodoin)

2006-07-05T17:26:00.000-04:00

I've figured out why I've been in such a foul mood for the last few days.

Four years ago, in June, I moved to New York. When I arrived at my new apartment, at 9 PM on a Friday night, it had been trashed. The power, phone and TV cables were cut, the intercom was smashed, it was about 104 degrees indoors and smelled like cat pee and moth balls. The movers, meanwhile, failed to deliver my personal effects until two months after I arrived. My only friend in New York suddenly turned into a paranoid, passive-aggressive freak and stopped returning my phone calls. I spent the Fourth of July wandering the streets of Manhattan at random, watching the first post 9-11 fireworks among a crowd of strangers. I don't think I spoke to another human being the entire day.

Three years ago, on the Fourth, I was opening my new gallery. I was stressed, anxious and proud; there was a big party in the building, largely consisting of strangers with whom I had little in common.

Two years ago, on the Fourth, I was getting dumped. I was the biggest wreck I've ever been in my entire life.

One year ago, on the Fourth, I was in a period of prolonged, self-imposed isolation, re-examining every single habitual way I relate to other people. I spent the evening on my roof, watching the fireworks, and talking with my next-door neighbor.

Basically, the Fourth of July in New York City does not hold too many positive associations for me. It's not only hot but muggy; it feels simultaneously oppressive and isolating. Plus, once you've gotten into the habit of self-isolation, it's a difficult one to break, like most habits. I start assuming that something bad will happen if I, like, call someone.

Perhaps the fact that both my phone lines went inexplicably dead over the weekend has to do with physical reality manifesting out of my state of mind. Or maybe that's narcissistic.

Anyway, this has nothing at all to do with the work of Sophie Jodoin, which Painterdog has so generously encouraged us to look at. The images posted here are all from her series, "Don't Fade Away," 2000, which are not necessarily representative, but which touched me deeply, for perhaps obvious reasons.

Sophie's work is proof positive that you can still say something modern and individual with classical painting technique. Sophie does whole series of portraits where the figure is a tiny, isolated speck in the middle of a large canvas; she does other series which look like ancient masterpieces which have been through a shipwreck. The luminosity, the marrying of nail-on-the-head realism with textural abstraction and gestural freedom are unparalleled in anything else I've seen, and that includes Odd Nerdrum. (What's with those weird rants about Kitsch on the main page? Odd Nerdrum is not Kitsch in any sense of the word. He's way too strange.)

Her work is a perfect example of how technique at its best is merely a tool for fluidity of self-expression. These paintings are obviously modern; the moods, the subjects, the compositions only make sense in the context, both of a long history of painting, and of our uncertain and socially isolated era. They're not about saying "look at me; I can paint like Rembrandt!" as much as they're about taking what's transcendent about Rembrandt's technique and bringing it to apply on deeply personal subjects.

This is far, far different from what negative, snotty brats like John Currin are doing. After reading Peter Schjeldahl's review of the Currin retrospective at the Whitney, I expected to like it better than I did. But the aggregate effect of perusing a decade and a half of Currin's work in one fell swoop was, simply, icky. You got the feeling that this artist is a soulless, cynical creep who just applies his technique in the service of thumbing his nose at everybody--artists and regular people, past, present and future. He's all references and no center.

Sophie's work may be much subtler than Currin's, as well as much more sincere; sincerity may indeed be out of fashion. But the depth that comes of mining a simple subject with patience and commitment holds up, for me, much better than Currin's snarky pot-shots. It bespeaks both humility and maturity.

Grrrrr.

2006-07-03T16:59:00.000-04:00

Excuse me, folks. I am in a Mood. Just received a call from an alleged potential client. "Do you do Tantra?"

"NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT," I said.

"What do you do?"

I went into my schpiel about integrated Swedish, Shiatsu, Deep Tissue, Reflexology and energy work. Not wanting to waste my breath, really, because a client who is clueless enough to ask about Tantra before identifying himself is not a client I want.

"Do you do Reiki?" he persisted.

"Yes, that's energy work," I replied.

"Do you do Reiki and Tantra?"

"NO. Tantra is erotic. I am a THERAPEUTIC massage therapist. I do not do sex work. Do you UNDERSTAND that?"

"Well, sometimes people do Reiki and Tantra together."

You are an idiot. Please go away.

"Well, I've never heard of that, and anyway I don't do Tantra. I have to be defensive with new clients, because some people do not understand the difference between massage therapy and sex work."

"I'll call you tomorrow around eight o'clock."

Yeah, right, dude, I will be available for a pervert who calls me last-minute on a holiday.

"Okay, call me when you're ready to MAKE AN APPOINTMENT. Bye."

Grrrrr.

This weekend, both my cell phone and my land line decided to simultaneously, inexplicably stop working. Which meant that I couldn't call either phone company and say, "What the hell?" but had to email them, which never works.

This afternoon the cell phone just as inexplicably started working again. I called the land line company and they said they'd do a line test and call me back. I'm still waiting.

Of course, I will be switching phone companies as soon as the correct cable box comes, anyway.

I DO NOT WANT TO BE HERE. I do not want to be in town for another Fourth of July. I want to be at a lake, with people, with a barbeque. Town is hot and oppressive and isolated and I DO NOT WANT TO BE HERE.

Sorry.

I DID have a new client call me the day after his session last week, just to tell me that his foot stopped hurting. He said it had been hurting for months, and the session healed it. This was nice. Now if only he tells 50 people so that I can pay my bills.

I have decided that I don't like working in a series where the pieces are intended to be grouped together. It works much better for me to do a series of individual pieces and then group them if I so choose. This column was loosely based on the chakra system, and frankly I don't like it much. I was so concerned with how each piece would 'relate' to the one next to it while I was working that I didn't push them far enough; thus I don't like either how they stand alone or how they stand in a group.

I did discover a number of ideas that I'd like to work with, however. Having the 'center point' pushed all the way to the edge is fun. Organic spirals are fun. Straight lines are fun. Twisted lines are fun. Having the pieces in a group is fun, as long as I don't plan it that way beforehand.

And I don't like doing borders, either. Feels like I'm drawing a picture frame.

Grrrr.

Sunday Salon #1

2006-06-29T13:04:00.000-04:00

There will DEFINITELY be a potluck at Serena's apartment on Sunday, July 9 at 7 PM. You are all invited. The safety screening procedure (insisted upon by Oriane) is as follows: go to Serena's website, find her email address or phone #, and contact her to RSVP and get directions.

If this goes well, we may institute a monthly tradition. Bring wine, bread, cheese or dessert, and gripes or observations on the state of Art in general, and the Art World in particular. Also feel free to bring a small piece of Art that you would like to discuss.

WE ARE THE FREAKIN' 'ART WORLD'

2006-06-26T15:52:00.000-04:00

From the comments section, below:

I can paint but the art world around me tells me its not good enough or in vain with(for) the current aesthetic.

I have hard time right now dealing with people in the art world as my BS meter is getting more acute as I get older.

Welcome to the club.

This weekend, an artist friend and I did some halfhearted opening-hopping in Williamsburg. Critical velocity was not achieved. Quote from friend, "I don't want to stand around Pierogi waiting to get invited upstairs."

I, being the art world innocent that I am, didn't even know Pierogi had an upstairs. I will never be part of the 'in' crowd at Pierogi, since Pierogi only shows artwork that looks like lichen. I like lichen, but I don't paint like lichen. What is, is.

Then we wandered across to B & W. In B & W was a life-size white machette of a bathroom, made out of plastic, foam-core and Mylar. In the back room were some respirators painted white. In the courtyard was a white model house, set on white Styrofoam beams, surrounded by a forest of aluminum poles.

We decided that it must be one of those exhibitions where you have to read the text to understand what is going on, except that we didn't care enough to read the text. I glancingly noticed that one of my ex-boyfriend's friends was there; the ex-boyfriend of my ex-best-friend, in fact. We didn't acknowledge one another. He's a vacant, philandering twerp.

Then we went to that gallery that's in a garage; the one that made a name for itself by showing the sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth. The bad one. I forget the name. The garage gallery was showing about six paintings on plywood; they were round, they were silly, they looked like fake surrealistic clocks for your child's bedroom.

As we walked away, I told my friend, "I feel better about my own rate of productivity, now." I could have filled up that gallery three times in six weeks, at that rate.

Sunday the two of us went by P.S. 1. There were hundreds of people schmoozing on the patio, and dozens of people looking at the art. My favorite part of the art was the John Lurie exhibition; the paintings looked like bad five-year-old art at first, until you looked at the captions. My favorite was "Three dentists thinking about the same squirrel." It is not easy to precisely evoke the mentality of being five years old.

On the first floor and in the basement was a panoramic retrospective of 'body art.' I am sensitive; I skimmed a great deal of it. My friend declared, "I'd seen most of those actual pieces before." Both of us lived for extended periods of time in the Bay Area; "over it" does not quite cover how we feel about 'body art,' particularly the 'shocking' photos of people doing boring retro things like bondage, cutting and fisting. 'Body art' bores us silly. It precisely captures the mentality of being two years old, and focused with great fascination upon one's own ejecti. Living in the Bay Area, you get people doing 'body art' on your back patio, when you happen to live above Folsom Street.

Let's just say it doesn't speak to us. Or that it's speaking: it's going 'blah blah blah blah blah. Blah.'

For quite awhile now, I have had an inchoate sense that the 'art world' is not about art; it is about high school. Or rather, there are tiers of the 'art world' which precisely resemble high school, and that's fine for them. Not only do I not wish to engage with these tiers, I can't. We're not speaking the same language.

But then, I've never run into Anselm Kieffer at an 'art world scene' opening, so I don't feel too bad about it. Lee Bontecou fled the 'art world' several decades ago, and one piece of hers inspires me more than a whole museum full of tinned shit. My uber-hero, Isamu Noguchi, spent half of his later years in a quarry in rural Japan, and the other half in a courtyard in Queens.

People, friends, real artists all--the 'art world' has nothing to do with being an artist. Nothing. Let us tell ourselves this every morning until we truly understand it.

Now, who would like to come to Serena's apartment for dinner, weekend after next? Anyone with the taste and discrimination to read this blog is invited. We 'art world' outies must nourish and encourage one another.

Featuring Jeffrey Freedner

2006-06-23T14:03:00.000-04:00

Painterdog responded to my last post with a comment warning artists to rethink their positions, if they find themselves approaching 40 and still aren't making any money with their art. Being, of course, a self-absorbed artist who takes a heightened interest in people who take an interest in me :-), I checked out his website. And now I am dedicating this post to explaining why I think his art is pretty great.

"Rembrandt's Carcass," oil on canvas, 18"x 24"

As you can see, this guy has done his classical-tradition homework. This is often looked down upon, or completely dismissed, in today's 'hip' art scene; I think the assumption is that it is not an innovative response to the modern world, but rather a reiteration of anachronistic forms to generate a recognizable 'art product' that may look good on a suburban wall, but doesn't make a statement beyond that.

And indeed, artists who do this often make a better living than those who don't, and aren't represented by a Chelsea gallery; retro art is much easier to sell to the masses. Witness the number of tourists in Soho who gobble up pseudo-Picasso prints as fast as they buy photographs of the Statue of Liberty.

"Distant City," oil on board, 16"x 10"

Jeffrey, however, is not one of those artists. First of all, anachronistic copy-artists often ape a technique, rather than mastering it; they churn out stuff that sort of looks classical, but lacks the bang-on drawing, rich luminosity, or sophisticated, complex color composition of, say, a genuine Rembrandt or Bosch, which are two of the artists that Jeffrey's work brings to mind at first viewing.

But from what I can see of these paintings, it looks to me like Jeffrey has not only mastered drawing, luminosity, color composition and texture, he is using them to express a seamless, modern vision of his own. His figures may seem Bosch-esque, but they're neither literally depicted nor ripped-off from another artist. They feel directly observed, filtered through the lense of strong emotion and masterful technique, and conspire to create both a powerful visual image and a cohesive emotional affect.

And Jeffrey is doing this at a level of complexity that few painters can pull off. Look at "Rembrandt's Carcass." He has included at least eight different qualities of luminosity within the same painting, without making it feel completely chaotic; there is reflected incandescent light on the tile in the lower left, bright fluorescent searchlight in the center, sunset on the horizon, fire in the background, blue smoke picking up the searchlight, different qualities of interior light in the windows, and areas where all of these lights reflect in different ways off the figures and objects.

Folks, that is nothing to be sneezed at. I know at least one Chelsea painter who claims to 'do light well,' whose paintings sell in the five-digit range, who is incapable of this.

"Victim 2", oil on wood, 18"x 12"

Moreover, Jeffrey is using his technique to evoke emotions which may be timeless, but certainly aren't irrelevant to modern society. They're not just mindless, flat depictions of angst, either. In this painting, 'Victim 2,' the intense blue background provides a sense of simultaneous institutional displacement and a possible hope for transcendence; used to highlight an image of anonymous brutality, it is nevertheless purely beautiful in its essence.

My only complaint, in fact, is that the images on Jeffrey's website are only dated through 2002. Have you stopped painting, Jeffrey, or have you simply not updated your site?

I admit that many of these paintings would be difficult to live with, given the dark emotions which they express and the power with which they express it. It seems to require the power-politicking of a Chelsea dealer to convince collectors to purchase paintings like this, but it can certainly be done. I have visited the inside of one Park Avenue collector's house, which was full from basement to attic with angst-ridden, aggressive work by young artists that to me, would be much more difficult to look at every day than one of Jeffrey's paintings.

So anyway, Jeffrey, I don't know what to do about the fact that you seem to be producing gorgeous work that's having trouble finding its market. I can only say that it seems to me that you haven't been wasting your time.

Advice and Support

2006-06-22T13:20:00.000-04:00

The latest news in the mandala series is that now I have started on a seven-part 'totem' piece, which I will only post when I've finished all seven.

So for today, I have decided to comment on an issue which came up for me when reading Ed Winkleman's post, on the art world's alleged current obsession with youth. I have to admit that this issue has totally escaped me, since back when I WAS a callow young artist, I got slapped in the face enough times that I decided to go away and mature, and stop looking for gallery representation until I was a grown-up. Now I sort of think I AM a grown-up, and have peeped my nose into the gallery system once again, only to discover that I waited too long. Drat.

Be that as it may, the tangential issue which arose in my mind was the difference between offering advice to a young, struggling artist (or an old struggling artist) and actually supporting that artist. Advice without support may sometimes be wise, but it is not always helpful, and can frequently be counterproductive. Support, on the other hand, is NOT about taking responsibility for another person's career; it simply means taking some practical action on another person's behalf, if that action is easy for you, and if you genuinely believe the other person deserves it.

Advice, then, is saying "You should show your work to such-and-such gallery." Support is going to the dealer who is a personal friend of yours and saying, "So-and-so is talented and underrepresented, and I believe her work would fit nicely with your style." Because every artist knows that if you march into a gallery without an introduction and say, "Will you look at my work?" ninety-nine out of a hundred dealers will say, "Sorry, we're not taking submissions now." (I even had one gallerist follow this up with "It's a waste of time for me to look at your work," even though I had done my homework and attended every exhibition that this gallery had mounted for over a year.)

Advice is saying "You should show your work on the Upper East Side--that's your market." Support is actually showing up when your friend gets a show on the Upper East Side, bringing your wealthy Upper East Side relatives and mentioning it to the fifteen or twenty dealers you know personally.

Advice is critiquing someone's website or blog; support is linking to it and writing about the work. (Thank you, Chris.) Advice is saying, "your work would do well in X-Y-Z industry;" support is saying, "I have some personal connections in X-Y-Z industry. Would it be helpful for me to run your work by them?"

Advice is saying "You're a good artist and should be selling these;" support is actually buying them.

I know that all of this seems more than obvious. But what perhaps people don't always realize is that well-meaning advice can come across as more of a burden than a help. Sometimes the most supportive thing a friend can do is just sit and silently commiserate while you vent.