Why I Have To Keep Trying To Paint

- An interesting conversation I had with Christina about Black Lives Matter versus Blue Lives Matter. 

- The new Alex Garland movie MEN, which I just saw... and can't stop thinking about and want to see again.

- Nihilism, and the antidote to it. 

- My difficulties finding a good pair of shoes, and my gripes with the shoe industry in general. 

- My theory about the aesthetic and structural organization of things, what I’ll call the “Nails and Spice Theory.” 

- The work I've been doing on Fledgling in preparation for it's sale and permanent placement.

These widely disparate topics are just some of the subjects I’ve considered blogging about recently. But I’m not going to write about any of them today. Instead I will return to an old topic - creativity, originality, and art production, but I’ll write about it in a new way… by going in-depth into a single particular piece of art that I’ve been wanting to make for a while, but have so far failed to complete. 

But first, a very brief digression onto the question: why would someone write a blog? Why do I write a blog? In short, I think the answer is that I’m trying to have a conversation. I guess it might be a strange SORT of conversation… but then again, I have picked up friends and acquaintances from many different places and many different times, and this is one way that I can communicate with all of them (you). But doesn't it seem, in this conversation, that I do all the talking? Well that’s one of the points that I want to make: I love it when my posts prompt people to write me back and start a different, perhaps more traditional, sort of conversation. So, thanks everyone who writes back, I appreciate it! 

I think I am also, however, having a conversation with myself. And probably another conversation with my future self. And possibly yet another conversation with future Kodiak. I imagine it might be quite interesting for him to read this when he’s a little older. But then… Who knows! Maybe he’ll just roll his eyes! Anyway, it’s nice to have a record of these years as they fly past. I hope you enjoy reading them.

So… On to the topic at hand. 

About four or five years ago while living in Berlin, an image flashed into my head. For me, this image was so strong, so personal, and so richly full of meaning* that I knew I wanted to bring it into reality. But then I thought… “I am a sculptor, and this is just an image.“ So I tried to figure out how to make this as a sculpture - possibly as a low relief sculpture - but I just kept coming back to the realization that it would work best as an image. So, I decided to learn to paint. 

And thus commenced a period of a few years in which I taught myself to oil paint. But, as anyone who reads this blog closely knows (and I think there might be at least one or two of you!), oil painting has proven to be quite the challenge for me. Not because I’m terrible at it… because frankly I don’t think I’m terrible at it… 

An example of me not sucking at painting. But... you see those light spots in the dark background near the bottom, and the reflection above and to the right of her head? Keep reading below to discover what those are and why they are a problem...

... but for other harder to pin down reasons that have something to do with perfectionism, and some legitimate technical challenges which are shown in the above image and which I'll fully explain in a moment. And so in the period of two years or so in which I was painting actively, I turned out a miserably small number of paintings. About five. 

The image that flashed into my head in Berlin cannot be counted among those five. I actually built a masonite “canvas“ for the image, I penciled the image, and I began to paint it. But my progress was so painful, so slow, and so beset by technical problems, that I did not get very far. 

This is about as far as I got with it.

I have not given up on the image. I would like one day to bring it into reality, but I can't help wondering whether oil paint is necessarily the best medium in which to accomplish the task.

Sometimes I find myself thinking: "Isn't the idea, the concept, the most important part? Have I not therefore already done the biggest part of the work?" Well, YES. And NO. Anyone can have an idea. We've all met those people who are all ideas, and no execution. And so this is one of the punchlines - the thesis statements - the conclusions that I've come to. A work of art (or any endeavor really) is idea and execution. And only when both are good can the work be considered successful, or impactful. 

I am fairly proficient at Adobe Photoshop, the image editing software. My methodology for making a painting involves the creation of a Photoshop mockup, which I then print and which I then paint. Here is the Photoshop mockup for the "Berlin image" which started it all...

This is what you might call a 'Photo-Illustration' and many people choose photo-illustration as their artistic medium. This particular Photoshop mockup is not refined enough to be considered a presentable artwork (there is no coherence to the shadows, many of the edges are rough, etc... all things I intended to fix at the painting stage) but it raises the possibility that, with a bit more time spent in Photoshop, it could be made presentable and then printed. And then that print, rather than the painting I'd always imagined, would be the artwork.

But would that be good enough?

I guess the answer depends on who you're talking to. 

A professional photo-illustrator would probably say "Yes, of course! It looks like a finished artwork to me." 

An oil painter would say "No that's just a print."

What might a member of the public say.. someone who is relatively unconcerned about art technique? Such a person would probably focus more on the subject matter - the imagery - and therefore in this case the idea would be the most important thing, and the work could be considered impactful.

But, what would I say? I guess this is the important question that I must answer.

And what I would say, I suppose, is: "Hmm... I think it would've been better as an oil painting." And, further: a photo-illustration is by definition a sort of collage of images, and each of those images was made by a camera, not by a hand holding a brush or a pencil. And in my personal hierarchical ranking of originality, there is no surpassing a hand-made piece of art. Because, in the making of it, the artist unconsciously put something of himself, of his psychology, into it. And in the process, it becomes something that could only be made by that one person. If you don't believe me, look at the work of Bacon, or Ingres, or Currin.

So, it seems, I have to keep trying.

"Well just get on with it! Just keep painting! What's the big deal?" I hear you saying... I hear my few painter friends saying... I hear myself saying. 

For the moment, I can't. 

I have no more studio - I converted my studio back into a living space. 

My head isn't in it right now - I am deep into the move to Sweden and all that that entails. 

And what about those mysterious "technical challenges" I referred to earlier? I had a major problem with my paint drying in a really terrible way, which I finally attributed to the extreme dryness here in Taos. 

In these three images, you can see what I am talking about. Whenever the paint went on even remotely thickly, the top surface dried almost immediately while the paint underneath was still wet, causing this crinkly "orange-peel" effect which catches the light in a totally unacceptable way. These light-catching areas can be seen in the finished painting near the top of this post.

I communicated with the paint manufacturer but he said he'd never seen that before and was of no help. The next time I really try painting will be in Sweden. There is better humidity there, and I will try a different brand of paint. 

But beyond the lack of a studio and the problems with paint, the biggest impediment is in my head. I just have to get over it and get back to painting. 

Because you see, here's the thing: I have ideas. I have ideas for images. But like I said earlier, an idea is not enough. An artwork is an idea, and execution. And so it's quite frustrating to have these ideas, but not be able to execute them. When we get to Sweden, I'm going to have to start painting again. 

OK, enough. 

I probably lost all but a few of you. 

Until next time, when I promise to be less self-indulgent and more focused on actual events, real things that are happening. And there's plenty of those.

Cheers

* As to the meaning of the image: that's not really the topic of the post. And don't you think that I would be doing YOU a disservice if I explained what I thought it meant? Don't you think it's more interesting to let you come up with your own interpretation? In any case, I can think of three distinct meanings for the image, one of which is the most important to me, but all of which are valid. And I'm sure there are others.