The Untrained Artist

Can this be..

2009-05-07T18:44:00.001-04:00

I have a showing in 3 weeks and I'm looking at several pieces and wondering if I should add them or not. Why is this a dilemma? The showing is in a fairly rowdy bar (I never suggested it'd be a museum) and some pieces migh invite derision.

Why do I say that? Is there some bias in it. Yes. But hey, that's the way it is.

I think I'll paint a large Pabst can. Now that would work. And I love Pabst, too.

Abstract Inclinations..

2009-04-23T08:08:00.002-04:00

...is the name of my website. I encourage you to visit it, for self-serving reasons, of course, but also because I'd like any comments--good, bad, indifferent--as to the work itself. I am less concerned about the graphics work, because I do not believe that is my strength.

But regarding the paintings: please look, if you have a chance; please buy; please comment.

Thank you.

Why try..

2009-04-17T08:40:00.002-04:00

to paint a sunset when it has been painted thousands of times before? Probably because it is the sunset and it's inspiring or compelling, in millions of different ways.

The way I'd paint it: paint the background purple, then plash a lot of deep orange all over the canvas.

How would you paint it?

Art of the Deal

2009-04-11T06:37:00.004-04:00

This has nothing to do with The Donald's book years ago where he explains how he extricated himself from monstrous debt and partial backrupcy. God love him; he's The Donald, after all.

I'm thinking about the mythical deal that went down in Missippi at the crossroads, where Robert Johnson gave his soul to the Devil to learn to play the guitar. An average blues guitarist at best, one day Johnson leaves town and a year (or two) comes back and plays with a genius that belies his time away.

I picture Robert walking across a dusty and vacant crossroads. A slight summer Mississipi breeze stirs and Johnson feels a momentary coolness as the breeze skims the sweat on the back of his neck.

There's a tree nearby and a guitar sits under it, and yet no one is around. As Johnson approaches the sky darkens and rain is coming on soon. He proceeds nonetheless. And just as he reaches the tree a picks up the battered guitar, lightening strikes him, nearly kills him.

And like the Doctor in Musicophilia who was struck by lightening and went on to become a virtuoso pianist, Johnson went on the establish, to create, essentially, the Blues.

I'm not only imagining the lightening strike, but the look on Johnson's face just as the bolt hit--it's contortions, it's agony.

How would I paint that? How do you see it?

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny....

2009-04-07T08:06:00.003-04:00

...or does it? Or who the hell knows what that means? Cooked up by some reclusive, likely German philosopher trying to make a name for himself (no female would be frivolous enough to even conceive of such a thing.

I believe it means this: that the individual life lived duplicates/recapitulates the whole of life on the planet, or something like that.

Ask youself this question? Is it something worth talking about?

Nah.

Now I would like to talk about painting a tree: depending on the perspective you're after, do you start from the bottom or top?

Send along your ideas while you are recapitulating.

For six weeks now nothing..

2009-04-06T07:53:00.003-04:00

...has happened. No rain and yet very little sun. The few individuals walking the streets are all wearing hats, an odd thing. There's a new trend here that is clear at work. It feels sinister; it feels odd.

At night an odd sound rushes through my house--the sound of wind whipping around a corner. I've grown used to it and have learned to sleep quite well. It' white noise, that's it.

This morning my computer was broke and I had to paint something, because what else is there to do except watch the bland landscape, and all those hats. Jesus, when did that get to be a trend. I feel both alienated and comfortable--but these images, these hatted men and women, I can't get out of my head.

I pick up my brush and what do I paint....?

There is a new kid in town...

2009-03-30T08:26:00.002-04:00

and, like Oscar Wao, he's different, clearly different. And new, all of which makes for a strange new chemistry in the neighborhood. He's an outsider but with an insider's insticts, and that makes him less vulnerable to repudiation from the neighbors. He's 12, and this isn't the first time he has been the outsider.

He's athletic and reaonably good looking--not the best looking kid his age, but definitely not the worst. You can already sense that the girls will be attracted to him because of his great confidence.

Fast forward 60 years. He never left that particular neighborhood, though he traveled extensively. He always returned. At the age of 72 he developed lung cancer and died quickly.

Everyone in town knew of him; few knew him.

But this kid, this man led a special, unique life.

What kind of life do you think he led, and how would his obituary read. More crucially, how would his obituary look?

Picture this..

2009-03-28T07:06:00.003-04:00

a supposed trailer park, just off a busy urban four lane road. It's set way back from the main road and a small sign says R & R mobile living. You turn in. It's curious, this trailer park still left while all around it Wendys, Arbys, and Walmarts sprout like weeds. The road back to the custom homes is winding and it is farther in than you thought.

That explains why the homes are hard to see from the main road.

You suddenly make your last turn and rather than see the expected slovenly trailer park, with lots of old Fords and Chevys parked everywhere and a general sense of blight, poor people living as best they can under the circumstances--rather than see this you see that a few trailers have screened the view of several magestic houses, unconventionally built, all ultra modern.

You are right at a point where you can take a u-turn and leave (because there is something spooky about this place; no visible people or cars).

Do you take the U-turn?

When you realize you are one the verge of something unfathomable or delightful, what do you do.

More importantly how do you feel and how do those feelings look? Can you visualize them?

If you expect...

2009-03-27T06:51:00.003-04:00

..the unexpected isn't the unexpected the expected? I saw this on a T-shirt the other day and thought it was clever and funny. I've designed a few t-shirts, but now, after seeing this one, I think I'll stick to text. A few ideas:

Lew's Tools
Am I Right?
Sobriety is overrated, especially at noon
This was not what I meant, and that wasn't what I didn't mean
Take this nob and shove it
Norton Refuses to Leave
if a/b is the product of 2x.06, will it rain today?

An on an on. Any of your own text would be a joy to read

Abstract Inclinations...

2009-03-26T07:49:00.003-04:00

..is my website. I am trying to get visitors to the site, which has not seen much activity. And I'm learning that marketing one is tough, brutal. Any suggestions please let me know.

Meanwhile I'm going to keep painting. Disjointedness is not an issue today. There are not issues, whatever that means.

So I'll load the ipod and start, one stroke at a time:

Playlist groups: Os Mutantes; Eagles of Death Metal; Crowded House; U2; Southern Culture on the Skids; and, possibly, the Rolling Stones, a group you never can miss with.

This is the time..

2009-03-25T08:05:00.002-04:00

...when you shake off winter and everything becomes a bit brighter, figuratively and literally. When Eliot said, "April is the cruellest month.." I don't know whether he was being sarcastic or not. And even though it's not April, things seem a bit disjointed.

It's that disjointedness, for me, right now, that I am trying to conceive visually. It's hard to do. Right now it's impossible to do. This feeling is momentary and will soon vanish (soon being the critical word) but in the meantime I'd like to get something out of it, a painting or two.

Anyone care to respond? What does disjointedness look like?

The notion that..

2009-03-23T08:18:00.003-04:00

...you can paint and NOT listen to music is astonishing. Well, to me it is. First, I have to listen to music most of the day, just to get through it. So it's not surprizing that I'd listen to music when I paint.

Obviously, the nature of the music varies, and it varies according to what I'm painting. But no matter the subject or the style, let me give you a group of artists who will always work, no matter the particular painting. I realize this is a diverse group...but so what?

Miles Davis
Rolling Stones
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Cowboy Junkies
Ryan Adams
Etta James
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Dinah Washington
John Lee Hooker/Van Morrison

There are many others, but these would be at the top of my list. I guess the ultimate point of this post is this: what kind of life would we have withou iPod?

What you see..

2009-03-22T09:31:00.002-04:00

...is not necessarily what you get. For example: I saw an on-screen version of Amazon's Kindle and like it and, perhaps sad to say, the idea of it. Or the practicality of it: just not enough room for that many more books in my modest garret. I ordered it and it was not what I saw (even given that what I saw was on screen). It was smaller than I thought, and that was a good thing. But I never really paid attention to the keyboard at the bottom that, sometimes, can be frustrating, especially if you hit the keys inadvertantly.

When it comes to painting what you see is rarely what you get. I had just completed a painting (see Incarceration) a while back, about a month, and it had this odd diagonal effect. A friend said: "I like the way you conveyed the rain." Only--I meant the image to have a steel bar, enclosed look.

But that's what's so great about, and the point of, abstract art. It's what it is to whomever is looking, and it's interpretations, like summer clouds, are virtually limitless...

While I'm waiting for..

2009-03-17T07:18:00.002-04:00

...any ideas to come flowing in, I wanted to talk about another early experience with abstract painting. I had a small, 11 x 17 canvas and I wanted to paint it all blue, with yellow streaks. It was going to be a sort of abstract sunset. And that's what I did.

I didn't mix the blue with water, just painted the canvas using the natural viscosity of the blue paint. Then, since I was going the streak yellow and thought I needed a lighter weight, for lack of a better word, paint I went to the paint store and bought a small can of yellow paint. And I streaked it and left it to dry.

Or so I thought. A little while later, thinking that the paint was dry I turned it upright, as thought it yet another little master piece in my collection.

Later that day I found that not only had the yellow not dried it had bled down the canvas, so it looked like the sun was crying. That painting was ruined but did leave me with an idea for a new painting--the crying sun. More to come...

Keep those comments coming (I'm being slightly facetious) regarding the corporate art world.

More later on the crying sun...

The Untrained Artist: Snaring air...

2009-03-16T07:23:00.000-04:00

The Untrained Artist: Snaring air...

Snaring air...

2009-03-16T07:10:00.002-04:00

That's what painting is like to me: capturing air, as though it were a tangible thing, as though you could reach out and grab it, hold it, and manipulate it, like clay. But you can't do that. Which is another way of saying that it's very difficult for me to learn how to paint. And it' not the most compelling blog subject either. So for those of you who have either read this, or will read it, thank you.

Today--rather than going on and on about the airthing (which, believe me, I could) I'd like to ask a question, and hope that I get at least one response.

Has anyone tried to sell art to the corporate world--hotels, etc, and how did you go about it. I suspect it is not easy, and I have only a few "clues" as to how to get started.

Any suggestions...?

When I paint..

2009-03-13T09:10:00.003-04:00

I start out with absolutely now idea where I'm going. Do others do that? I'd welcome any comments. Do you have a more or less visual picture in your head? I realize that you can stray from the idea, but perhaps at least you have one.

I don't, and I'm not so sure that's a good idea. I just look at the canvas and start applyin paint and often the result is horrible. Early stuff was so bad I'd paint over and over on the canvas until the whole thing was a mess.

Then I went into this geometric thing: all circles and lines--using tape of course.

It was the painting equivalent of erasing the first sentence of a story or article you were going to write and so in the end you had nothing but erased out paper.

Soon enough I started......

Please visit here for a look at some of my later work.

Mr. Pollock

2009-03-09T13:25:00.002-04:00

I remeber the Life magazine clip of Jackon Pollock, shoes and paints paint covered--and how he had to stoop to slop an slap his paint against the canvas. It's an amazing video, because it is the footage of a genius--and how hard could that be, right?

So I started with red and just started splattering paint and nothing about it took on any form or meaning or certainly not shape. In fact, what I wanted was non-shape; now that, I had. Formless bright red against a white background.

It looked like an accident had happened.

And you know what: one had. And I was the author of it.

I started painting, if you want to call it that, with not the slightest idea in my head of where I was headed. Now, I know that Hemmingway once said he never knew from sentence to sentence where he was going and that the ending of a book always surprized him. That may or may not be true.

But here's a point to make: I am not Hemingway, nor Pollock...

More to come. In the meantime please take a moment to visit abstract inclinations.

Huh? A Studio?

2009-03-05T11:49:00.006-05:00

...so you get everything home and dump it on the floor, your carpeted floor, by the way. It's then you realize that you really have no where to paint (shoulda thought about that one) so you decide on, in my case, the garage. But the garage has no light, and isn't it true that the best painting is done in natural?

Anyway, since I don't know from light, I'm a garage painter. Now, as noted, I can't draw (exluding that human figure I've discussed, so I put down on one canvas, 18x24, a first layer of white acrylic paint, mixed slightly with water.

It does not spread so easily because the canvas surface is rougher than I'd expected. Doesn't matter; I keep adding coats of white paint, allowing only a few moments for each to dry, because it seems that these coats are drying easily.

Now: what to do next, in my dank and dark garage......

When you can't draw......

2009-03-03T15:37:00.002-05:00

...you paint. Or, more specifically, abstract painting is the only refuge for someone like me, who can't draw a lick, but like the idea of painting, and like the idea of being able to paint. There may be some analogy here that explains it better: like if you can't play the guitar you buy Guitar Hero.

No. That's not right. There's more to it, I think.

I read somewhere--and I don't know if this is true--but the English painter William Hogarth was not especially skilled at drawing. He knew color and tone and the way to get images to the canvas, but draw: not so well, allegedly.

On a good day I can produce a reasonable outline of the female form--but those days are, sadly, infrequent.

So a few years ago I went out (having wanted to paint in a long time, but wanting to paint like Jackson Pollock, so what did it matter that I could not draw an orange) and in a flurry of ignorance bought a back seat's worth of canvas and acrylic paint.

This blog is meant to describe the lessons of a striving, unknowing artist.

Because here's what happened when I got home...