Monomaniacally monochromatic (Pierre Soulages)

“Painting allows us to live in a more interesting way than we live our everyday lives. If painting doesn’t offer a way to dream and create emotions, then it’s not worth it. Painting isn’t just pretty or pleasant;

it is something that helps you to stand alone and face yourself.

For me, it’s important to experience this aesthetic shock, which sets in motion our imagination, our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts. - Pierre Soulages

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From the beginning, man went into completely dark caves to paint. They painted with black too. They could have painted with white because there were white stones all over the ground, but no, they chose to paint with black in the dark.

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All those terms—abstract, nonfigurative, et cetera—they’re just words, they’re labels, and labels are meant to be destroyed.

More here, here, here.

Witch Marks

Speaking of coded visual communication in public places, archeologists have discovered medieval-era graffiti in churches that includes

pentagrams and other “witch marks” meant to ward off evil.

These were “…as central to the everyday lives of the medieval commoner as the next meal, the next harvest and the next year.” - Matt Champion, historian, archeologist, author

Images courtesy of the Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey

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Portal 13 (2018). Shelter us from evil.

"Tell pitiful story" (Hoboglyphs)

I’ve been thinking lately about the notion of

codes in plain sight

…and today I’m especially enchanted with hoboglyphs, used in the 1920s to allow hobos to secretly communicate with each other. What messages do we overlook, walk over, drive past each day, unrecognized? Who is using public spaces to share information? What are they sharing, and to what end?

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Portal 11. Intercepted communique; author(s) unknown; meaning(s) undetermined; outcome(s) unrecorded.

Example of hoboglyphs, courtesy of Web Urbanist (more at the link):

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"Cognitive jolt." (Martha Bosler)

“What is art for? First of all, for the simultaneous complication and condensation of the burning questions we ask or should be asking. Second, for

a sensory or cognitive jolt.” - Martha Bosler

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Detail from a work in progress. In search of jolts; sensory, cognitive and otherwise.

Cedar, everywhere

I’ve been back from Japan a week but Kyoto is still in my heart. The textures, the juxtapositions, and most of all

the fragrance of cedar, everywhere.

Shitakusa

Among bonsai enthusiasts there is a concept of shitakusa, companion plants.

These provide a sense of scale and setting to the bonsai.

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Shitakusa, above. From a bonsai exhibition in Waimea earlier this year.

 

This concept has lately taken hold and is sending forth emissaries.

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Shitakusa (2018). Works in progress. Companions, as yet, to the unknown.

"It isn't 'outsider art', fuckers; it's art." (Jerry Saltz)

"Alfred Barr got in trouble at MOMA for putting [outsider artist John Kane]'s work in the museum. Barr essentially got fired for including outsider artist Moros Hirschfield in a show. This is how closed all of our museums still are.

It isn't "outsider art", fuckers; it's art. Just art. - Jerry Saltz

 

(God bless you, Mr. Saltz.)

 

Fragment (2018). I like my outsider art to be truly outside. On the ground. In the gutter. Degraded. Disrupted. Damaged.

Don't Shoot Me Down! Popup Show

I am so excited to have 2 new pieces in a really cool popup show at Shockboxx in Hermosa Beach, CA. It's called Don't Shoot Me Down, an artful dialogue about guns in American culture, and it's in affiliation with March for Our Lives and the Brady Campaign.

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Check it out

Sept 1: 6-9pm

Sept 2: 1-5pm

 

 

I'm also excited about the work I have in the show.

A million years ago, before I started making abstract paintings and embroideries, I was doing more traditional embroidery. Using a hoop and 'real' stitches and working from patterns (albeit patterns that I created, based on found vector objects.) I haven't known what to do with all of this old work but this was the perfect opportunity to put it to good use. So for this show, I have taken some of my older pieces and combined them with new abstract paintings:

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Baby Steps (2018) and Profits & Loss (2018). Soon to be appearing at the mighty Shockboxx!

Mini Hot! LA Popup Show

I'm very excited to be showing some of my Narrative Fragments for the first time at the Mini Hot! Popup Exhibition in LA from September 1-15 at Studio C Gallery, run by the inimitable Peggy Nichols. Hoping I can make it to the Aug 31 preview or the Sept 1 opening...

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"More than what it actually was." (Judy Linn)

"By taking a photograph and isolating things,

it could look like more than what it actually was.

We weren't really dreaming a future, we were dreaming a present." Judy Linn (re: photo sessions with Patti Smith in 1969)

 
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Fragment, 2018. Part of a larger story. Or not.

"It doesn't mean much." (Vija Celmins)

"It is hard to tell what part is really yourself and what the work means. My feeling is that it doesn't mean much. It is a sort of presence that comes out of human beings and you either go for it or you don't. Really I have been thinking

nothing means too much." - Vija Celmins

 

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Fragment (2018). Obsessed with scraps, with wreckage and ruin and chaos and accident. The pleasure of those things. The rightness.

Bonjour, Jeanne Tripier.

There's this:

"Jeanne Tripier (1869-1944) wrote texts and did drawings, embroidery and crochet work. She considered all her creations to be mediumistic revelations. In her writings she frequently inserted small compositions executed in black, purple or blue ink to which she occasionally added hair dye, nail varnish, sugar or medicines."

And this:

 

ET VOILA: HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

ps: I really want to go to this exhibition.

"An experience of dislocation." (Kara Walker)

"It is really important to me that, whatever work one is looking at, there be an experience of dislocation so that you're suddenly not sure of where you thought you were, and of who you thought you were.

Your belief system gets jarred for a moment standing in front of something stationary and quiet." - Kara Walker

 

Details from Extreme Tenderness (2018). 1000s of tiny stitches. Attempts to mend the unmendable. Nothing to do with Kara Walker, but then again a bit like my heart after viewing one of her extraordinary pieces.

"Disastrous." (Guillermo Kuitca)

"I'm not happy anymore with leaving all the paintings untitled. I know that a title anchors the work, and there is a lot of beauty in that. But the wrong title can also be disastrous. So

I'M WAITING FOR SOMETHING...MAGICAL." - GUILLERMO KUITCA

 

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As yet untitled and unfinished (2018). I'm obsessed with spackle right now. And X's. And titles.

"Not a pleasant task." (Mike Kelley)

"I really developed my writing skills strictly to fight the fact that I was always depicted as stupid. I didn't want to. I'm not a natural writer. I did it on purpose and it was not a pleasant task. I wasn't able to operate on the theoretical level that many of the other students and especially the faculty did. I knew what I was doing but I had a hard time convincing them, and now I can. I was overly sensitive to that but I realized that artists were usually considered the dupes of critics and

since there were no critics who were speaking for me, I had to write my own criticism."

- Mike Kelley

 

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IF/THEN (2018). Thinking about the pleasantness, or unpleasantness, of tasks. Of spells and rituals. Of desire and outcomes.

Hilo exhibition.

I am beyond thrilled to have 3 pieces accepted to the upcoming Women's Exhibition at the Hawaii MOCA / East Hawaii Cultural Center! This is especially gratifying because it's the first place I ever exhibited any of my work. It's a lovely space, in a lovely town, run by lovely people.

I'm especially excited to be showing one of my new larger (45" x 45") pieces (a first!)

Update - more pix from the opening

It's up till July 27 and well worth the trip to Hilo.

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Bits & pieces.

For some reason I've been obsessed with little fragments, bits and pieces, since I got back from LA a week ago. This started on the airplane ride home; I cut some jagged pieces off a larger scrap and made a couple of little things on the plane.

PS there was an older lady next to me who (no joke) said, "Oh, what are you making? Can I watch?" And then she watched. And then I think she got very confused.

And I've kept at it since getting home.

Not sure where these are headed...maybe together? maybe not? maybe just a counterbalance/palette cleanser to the large pieces I was working on in May?