Third Residency: Long Reflections

“My name’s not here, there’s been a mistake! How could this be?” These thoughts made me anxiously search the 600 Beacon Street building, in semi-darkness the evening before my third residency. I was desperate to find my critique space.

Physical exhibition space is important. The critique space would designate where I spent my time for ten days and with whom. I wanted to think about the space and plan out how to display the work as I find it challenging to curate my own work. I was apprehensive about hanging and exhibiting scrolls, oil paintings and digital prints. After searching all the floors four more times, I never did find my name. I was so sure a mistake had been made; I grabbed a sheet of paper and lettered my name on it, serifs and all and attached it to an open blank wall.

Officially, the January 2008 residency began the next morning. I was sitting with members of Group Three perusing the residency schedule when someone exclaimed, “Hey, look, you’re in the basement!” “My God,” I thought, “The basement? There’s my name!” It never even occurred to me to look down there. Appalled, and at the same time relieved, I hurried over to 600 Beacon Street and tore my name down from someone else’s space. Chagrined and uneasy, I dragged my portfolio down to lowest recesses of the 600 Beacon Street building. Residencies are such an emotional roller coaster ride.

There were three other disappointed and upset students in that space, in addition to myself. It was dark, dirty, and windowless. A harsh cold fluorescent light when turned off left the four of us in complete darkness. The worst part was we were isolated from the rest of the other students. We made a group decision to make this space work. We voiced our objections to the space and suggested possible solutions. We threw ourselves into making that space work. I felt grateful to be part of this fantastic critique group.
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Third Residency: Artist Statement

Painting the landscape acts as a reference point and provides visual freedom to create new space. New space serves as a metaphor for personal experience and allows for the exploration of the divinity in nature. Imagery is informed by Romanticism and encompass transcendental abstraction. Digital prints, oil paintings and ink brush paintings are three distinct and related bodies of work I created the past six months.

Large Format Digital Prints: The Wreck of Ah Tar
By viewing mythology as a rich source of image making, I created a series of digital prints using a two-dimensional symmetrical glyph composed of twelve equilateral triangles. This form was built three dimensionally out of balsa wood and arranged in still life compositions. The still lifes were digitally photographed and altered.

24"x36" Digital Print

The architectural forms were wrecked, destroyed and damaged. This symbolizes the ‘wrecking’ of the feminine principle, environmental and holistic processes. These images originate from the dualism of creation and destruction. They express levels of intensity in the experience of destruction.

Oil Paintings: Gaia

The autumn trees and broken light of the deep woods visually influence me. Living in a New England woodland environment, images of densely woodland areas came out in the painting. Stylistically, I pushed broken form to its most extreme. Interestingly, the more the forms were broken down, larger patterns emerged. These patterns act as unifying forces and imply infinite order. What is underneath an image is usually pure geometric form that is unseen, yet felt.

detail

Ink brush Paintings: Scrolls & Panels
Ink brush painting improved the gesture of my brush stroke. This is critical to the expressive nature of ink brush painting and Abstract Expressionism. Ink brush painting also put me in direct contact with Taoist philosophy and ancient Chinese painting traditions. The large rice paper panels called Categories of Line were created with traditional and nontraditional brushwork, although the abstract imagery follows the handling of space found in a traditional scroll.

I transformed the traditional scroll in to a modern one by creating a small scroll on cash register receipt paper. It is called One a Day. This scroll documents six months of daily paintings and poems. The Quicktime movie is posted here and on YouTube. It was made of one months worth of images and set to instrumental piano music.

Happy Holidays

"Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace to people of good will."
Luke 2:13, 14
Edward Burne-Jones: "Sixth Day Angels"

Qimin as Mentor

Ah, a fantastic mentor meeting...Qimin was able to offer me deep insight, guidance and advise about my work this semester. I am so excited how the study of brush painting has influenced my oil painting. Brush painting has subtly changed my painting stroke and so has experimenting with indirect painting, Thank you, Tony. The brush painting, oil and digital work do relate to each other, even though I sometimes have difficultly seeing how.

Being the one who makes the work, makes it hard to get enough distance to discern overall concepts. I am sure this upcoming residency in less than three weeks, will give me perspective.

I've had two fantastic mentors and am looking for a third. I wish Wolf Kahn or John Grillo would mentor me, I'm currently loving their work. If anybody has studied with Hans Hoffman or has a mentor suggestion, drop me a line...I'm listening and ready to take it to the next level, Yep!

Excerpts from Paper Four

Blessedly the Friday night angst is over and writing won. It seems I have picked up on an ancient conflict between the one who paints and the one who writes in China. The best of both is found in the genius scholar-painter archetype.

Writer's who could write about art but did not paint well were considered "at home with theories but at sea with the brush". And painters who could paint well but not write were considered "uncultured"...Ouch! Quite the insult! The solution is to tactfully ignore the conflict. Easier to do if you can paint equally as well as write.

This paper is my favorite so far and I have relied heavily on excellent writers (see reading list). An except from Taoism and Ink Brush Painting reads:

Direct Perception
The intention of the painter is to create an interpenetration and mutual influence of scenery and feeling. The feeling is the scene and looking at the scene leads one to experience direct perception. Direct perceptions are thoughts uncolored by dogma, belief systems and philosophy, even Taoist philosophy. Landscape painting is not considered an intellectual, technical or formal challenge and does not require metaphor or symbolic interpretation. When the mind perceives and experiences nature directly selfishness and emotional preoccupation fall away. A painting provides the viewer with inherent meaning that is obvious and immediate. Inner feelings are not explicit (or exploited), but extend throughout the painting to create a general mood. As the viewer makes a personal interpretation by bringing their feelings to the painting, the mood of the painting takes on personal qualities allowing the painting to carry depth of meaning for each viewer. This is why ink brush painting has a universal appeal.

In the October 2006 issue of Discover Magazine an article written by Kathryn Garfield discussed Vincent van Gogh’s famous spiral brush strokes and his ability to render natural forms that closely match the famous Kolmogorov statistical model of turbulence in fluid dynamics. "The problem of turbulence is considered the last unsolved mystery in classical physics". This article raised the question; did Van Gogh’s psychotic mind allow him to perceive existing natural patterns that are generally unseen? A scientific study found bumblebees that had never encountered real flowers favored Van Gogh’s Sunflowers over the floral works of other well-known artists. "Van Gogh owned a large collection of Japanese prints and was deeply influenced, by implication Zen Buddhist views of nature". Van Gogh painted visionary landscapes with the principles of Yin and Yang related to the conjoining of sun and moon, clouds and swirls in “Starry Night.” Heightened perception is a prerequisite for intuiting nature, being crazy is not.

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Indirect Painting

Frankly, everybody I'm in freak out mode. I've been so straight out working I haven't been able to make time to connect or contribute to my fellow scholars on Flickr.

There is making art or production, writing about art and teaching about art. These are all separate activities, people! Hello! They each require separate skills. How can one do them all well? Seems to me, somethings got to give.

I know, I know I've whined about this before, but I'm stressed out. I like to write about art and talk about art and teach art. These activities take my attention off production. Production is the key to it all...AGH! No, must produce, must paint, must push through the desire to rest and regroup. I want to paint and gain expertise in the indirect oil painting style that I was luckily enough to see a demonstration of. A new door of knowledge opens, and I have to do laundry and...

I have another paper due next week; a fantastic topic, too Taosim and Ink brush painting.... What to do? Stop world, I want all the "have to's" to stop. It's going to be a rough Friday night...Help!

Ink Brush Painting

I have been doing small ink brush paintings every day since the beginning of this residency. I took digital photos of some of the paintings. I put them into a Quicktime movie. I was surprised by the results. Posting this movie on the web doesn't show a lot of the paintings textures. But it's meditative and the music called Summer's Almost Gone, (which it is) by George Winston. Let me know what you think.