Fuck It

Well I might be entering a time of transition, professionally speaking.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could see the trajectory of our own lives, objectively, from above or from some great perspective? Wouldn't it be nice if we could know what everything, every event, in our lives really meant? Then there would be no guessing. When something momentous or unusual happened you could just look at the timeline of your own life and understand the significance immediately. 
If this fantasy were true, then I would know what it all means... this time of challenges.

Warning: I'm going to ruminate in this post. I'm going to postulate and second-guess myself. I'm going to wonder what it all means, and it might make you feel uncomfortable. If you're the kind of person who feels creepy and voyeuristic when you read the personal ramblings and doubts of another person, then you can stop reading after the next sentence.

I'm no longer certain that big sculpture is the right avenue for my creative output, and I'm thinking that painting or smaller-scale sculpture might be a better vehicle for the the artistic ideas I seem to be having these days.

There. That pretty much sums it up. If you would rather not be voyeur to the tortured machinations that led me to that thesis sentence, you can stop now.

Goodbye.




































Oh, you're still here. Hello.

The last several proposals I've submitted to various festivals for funding consideration have been rejected. That hurts. They say that one has to have a thick skin to be an artist, or be freelance. My skin might not be thick enough. 

Here's the thing: I really believed in those proposals.

Or, at least I think I did.

My proposals are all too good for the festival scene, too meaningful, too personal. Or... I'm out-of-touch and my ideas all suck and my heart wasn't really in them anyway. I'm not sure. 

They say that as an artist you're supposed to build the kind of work that you want to see in the world. The proposals I've submitted are all works of art that I would absolutely love to see in the world. The world would be better with them in it. They are thought-provoking, challenging, beautiful, and they all have something to say. And yet, the people who hand out the money, the curators, don't seem to agree. 

Meanwhile... I sort of just want to paint. 

It's ironic; years ago I fleetingly thought about painting but wrote the idea off completely, thinking to myself: "I'm an object maker, not an image maker." But now I just want to make images. And the truth is that ideas for images are coming to me much faster these days than ideas for sculptures. 

And maybe... just maybe... those ideas that I've had for big sculptures would work just as well at a smaller scale, tailored more for the gallery world. I've just recently sold Big Mother, the third sculpture I've ever sold in my life. And the gallerist who sold it wants more stuff like it. 

So, fuck it. I think I'm going to change my focus for a while. It feels like a bit of a shame in a way, because I'm such a good metal fabricator, such a good builder of big interactive sculpture. And I really love building on a large scale. But, you know, when you need other people's money to build your vision, you're not really free. My dad always said: "Be your own boss." And I suppose that, compared to many folks out there in the working world, I am relatively close to being my own boss. But big sculptures require big budgets, and as long as I'm asking someone else to believe in my vision to fund my work, they have all the power.

On some level, I've just never gotten over the fact that ENDGAME wasn't funded. Interestingly, people close to me have confided in me that they didn't think it was such a strong proposal, or that it was too easy to understand and as such too easy to move past. But I just simply disagree. I think it is an extremely strong image, at least in part because it defies easy categorization, easy understanding. I think the common perception is that it's an environmentalist piece, and I guess that is one of various possible interpretations. But that's not even the most meaningful interpretation to me. To me the piece is about the futility of violence, the short-sightedness of aggression, the (sometimes surprisingly) reciprocal nature of all interpersonal (inter-species?) interactions, and karma. If ENDGAME was passed over because the curators felt it was a too-simple environmentalist piece, I think they missed the point. If it was passed over because it was deemed too dark, well then what can I say? That's the kind of work I want to see in the world. Maybe I should have given it a less ominous title. With the exception of The Flybrary and perhaps one or two other pieces, I think ENDGAME would have been the strongest piece out in the desert this year. Christina has recently pushed me to consider building it on a gallery scale and I might just do that. (Here, with ENDGAME, we can see one of my earlier points nicely illustrated; either my ideas are just too challenging, too personal, too weighty... or they suck. Or perhaps they're just not right for the festival world. Hard to know.)

Well now I will get a little meta, and devote the last part of this blog post to writing about this blog post. 
Why would I write all this? Why would I share these doubts, these thoughts, these uncertainties in such a public way? What could I hope to gain? Why not just leave it at that first sentence.. the one in red? 
On a certain level, I don't really know. 
Maybe I'm hoping for some feedback, confirming or debating some theory proposed herein.
Maybe it's a kind of catharsis by confession. 
Maybe I'm just creating a record for myself (although I could certainly just write a journal entry if that were my intention.)
Or maybe I imagine that this blog is, in and of itself, an art piece. And I'm painting a self-portrait with words. A self-portrait in a time of doubt, a time of transition. An emotional selfie, just like Amanda Palmer talks about in that old quote* about Nick Cave. *The quote is about half-way down that page
And, interestingly, my ideas for paintings are all much more in the 'emotional selfie' category than anything I've ever built out of metal. Maybe I'm onto something here...

At least there's something I want to do, in addition to building big metal stuff. Imagine if I didn't even want to do anything! But... lucky me... I usually do want to make art. And small- to medium-sized sculptures are great fun, too. They've just never been very lucrative for me. But I imagine that if I set my mind to it, I could change that too. 

Maybe one of these days I will have another idea for a big festival sculpture that hits the right balance of optimism, meaning, and beauty. Maybe.

I think I'll need 6-12 months to churn out a group of paintings, learning how to paint along the way.

So, fuck it. 
Here I go. 

My too-small studio

Oh, and I finished my still-life painting today

Yeehaw

Gut Shoveler

It's been a slightly-longer-than-usual interval since my last post, and I suppose there are some reasons for that. Life somehow got complicated... and busy.

Speaking of busy, Burning Man was was a fuckload of work as usual. I want to say it was more work than normal... and maybe it was... but it's always so much work. Christina's piece was a wild success; many people I spoke with thought it was the strongest piece out there this year and I also believe that. Then, upon returning from the desert we promptly jumped into The Paseo, our own home-town art festival run by our friend J. Matthew Thomas. Christina and I both showed work - Christina showed Mitt Uthus and I showed With Open Arms - and that was even more work but also quite fun.

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The only kind of books I can ever finish are artist biographies. I think that, when I read these artist biographies, I'm hoping I might get some clue about how I should live. How did these people live? How should I live? What kinds of decisions should I make? Is it possible to be an artist, and also a person? Just like Fleabag*, I sometimes wish someone else would just tell me. *Season 2, episode 4

I've just finished a biography of Leonard Cohen, who I've always loved. His lyrics are beautiful mysteries. But... even though it may not really be part of the consensus myth around him, I believe he was damaged in some way. Until he got quite old, he could never commit to one woman, even when he had a family. He was always running. So I guess he was either damaged, or committed to his own freedom in some way that most people simply can't manage or understand. Like his lyrics, he was a bit of a mystery.

Caravaggio's most important intimate relationships were likely with prostitutes, both male and female, and he was a violent brawler and later in life also a murderer. Francis Bacon's personal life was only slightly less messy; he was a masochist who enjoyed being beaten by his lovers. And Alexander McQueen was not so different; his short life was marked violent relationships, drug abuse, and an early end by his own hand.

But these guys were all wild, raving geniuses! Artistically speaking, they are my heroes. They all managed, in different ways, to bring their own personal tragedy, their own personal pathos, into the world as potent art-mysteries that changed their respective fields forever. Their work, powered by the inner personal turmoil that is coded into it, is why their names will live on.

Is personal turmoil a prerequisite for artistic genius? Somehow I imagine I'm not the first person to ask that question, and I'm sure that much has already been written on the topic that far exceeds in insight and erudition anything I could muster. But I will say that it's probably no coincidence that the kind of art which speaks to me seems to often be produced by tortured souls.

Which brings me to my painting class. I just returned from Austin, Texas, where I took a one-week, one-on-one oil painting class. My teacher, Mark Carder, has established an intuitive and easy-to-follow set of protocols, approximately 95% of which he has generously made available for free through his Youtube channel. If you want to learn to paint, you could do much worse than to start watching Mark's videos. Over the course of 6 days in Austin, I took a painting from start to finish (well I almost finished; I will finish it this week.) 

Here is my source photo (teacher Mark liked it because it was "so different" from everybody else's still-life setups)

And here is the painting in its almost-finished state. This was about 21 hours of actual painting (not including drawing or color mixing). 

Probably the most interesting conversation I had with Mark during the week was about the ingredients that make up a great painting, and we agreed immediately that subject matter was paramount. Even paintings with mediocre technique can hit you hard if you resonate with the subject matter. Furthermore, the subject must not be too literal or obvious. In Mark's words, "if you look at a painting and within the first 15 seconds are able to say 'oh I get it, I know what this painting is about' then the painting is a failure." Just like Leonard Cohen's lyrics.

I'm maintaining a list of painting ideas - every time a new idea crops up I write it down. So now my task (in addition to the more mundane and laborious task of reconfiguring my tiny little office into a painting studio suitable for the winter) is to weed through that list and figure out which ideas are really worth bringing into the world. Hopefully I can exorcise my demons through oil paint.

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I've long resisted discussing on this blog what sort of music I listen to, because... I mean really, who cares. But I'm going to do it anyway, albeit briefly. On my recent road trip I couldn't stop listening to these two amazing songs by Made Out Of Babies: Gut Shoveler and Sugar. Certainly they will not be everyone's cup of tea, but they powered me across Texas.

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