Posted without comment.

2010070301
oil on panel
6″ x 6″
2010
$200

Alan Wiseman, in The World Without Us, describes the primeval forest that once covered the better part of Europe, one last remaining chunk of which is the Bialowieza Puszcza in Poland. The beginning of the passage (in fact, the first line of the book), reads:

You may never have heard of the Bialowieza Puszcza. But if you were raised somewhere in the temperate swathe that crosses much of North America, Japan, Korea, Russia, several former Soviet republics, parts of China, Turkey, and Eastern and Western Europe—including the British Isles—something within you remembers it.

And further:

To enter it is to realize that most of us were bred to a pale copy of what nature intended. Seeing alders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here—gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah—should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what’s astonishing is how primally familiar it feels. And, on some cellular level, how complete.

I don’t doubt for a second that our ancestry leaves us somehow coded to feel at home in a certain landscape. But this is my heritage, Europe, and I am drawn to something else entirely.

There is no greater comfort for me than the endless expanse of the open prairie. I feel it in my bones when I am in the landscape. It feels like home. This draw has certainly been at the root of almost all the artwork I have done over the past, say, fifteen years. And it is part of what I am doing now. Perhaps my more recent ancestry — my grandparents and great-grandparents worked the land in Nebraska –  has re-coded my genes. Perhaps I have been tuned to a new frequency — that of the unbroken horizon.

Now that I have done a week of every-day landscape oil paintings, it’s worth noting a few things:

First, I feel really exposed doing this. I’ve never painted like this before in my life, and frankly, I’m not that good at it. There have been a couple of decent paintings this week. But there have also been paintings like yesterday’s. Yikes. However, I’ll keep posting as long as I keep painting them — this is, after all, my “digital open studio”. As tempting as it is to edit out the lousy ones, I just don’t think that would be right. Sorry, friends, you are going to have to watch me fail over and over again.

Failure is a good thing; it means I am taking risks.

This is something I have always wanted to do — paint literal landscapes. Oh, sure, I’ve done the odd sketch or watercolor here and there. But I have never applied a disciplined approach to representational landscape painting, and I don’t think I have really even tried any representational oil painting since college. I’ve always wanted a french easel, and I’ve always wanted to paint en plein air. It’s January, so this is not the time for that. But working alla prima is a refreshing break from the slow layering process of the other paintings I have been making over the past decade.

I have given myself permission to make these paintings. (And yes, it was me and my self-conscious awareness of a persona that made landscape paintings verbotten.) I’m taking these little paintings seriously in the respect that I know I have something to learn here. Like I said in an earlier post, I don’t know where this is headed, but I’ll enjoy the ride.

Oh, and the vocabulary! The words rolling around in my head while I work are like old friends come round for a visit: alla prima, scumble, glaze, impasto.

Until tomorrow’s failure,

Matthew

It’s been a slow year in the studio. I anicipated this, and in fact planned “Holding on to Nothing” to take place before my second daughter was born. Demands of a day job and assisting my wife with her small business being what they are, I knew that a baby on top of it all would make for scarce studio time. Sleep is lucky; studio time is golden.

Now it’s been over a year, and although the econopocalypse has increased demands both for aforementioned day job and small business, in a way things should let up soon.

I’m being a little disingenuous. The slow-down in the studio has only partly been a result of familial and economic circumstance. Perhaps more to the point, what I really need to do is spend more time understanding what I need to do next…. that is much more difficult than showing up in the studio to paint. When I had a commission, I knew what to do and I got that painting done neatly and efficiently. So I can paint… no problem. And I’m largely happy to do that.

But I have a sense that it’s time to grow into the next thing, and what that might be is still a little fuzzy. Which brings me back to time — or more importantly — time to think… and energy to think.

Here’s what I know: I want to make art that whispers in your ear and gently (but firmly) forces an awareness of the now. Art that makes you notice — not necessarily the art itself — but makes you notice your self, your senses, and your consciousness.

Here’s the other thing I know: that’s tough to develop, and even tougher to pull off, especially with a tired mind.

It takes so dang long to get to the point where I can start putting color on a panel, then the rest goes so fast… I’m a little farther along than his image, but here’s the first passes of color on the 42″ panel. The tag on the wall is the mass tone of the color I’ve mixed — it’s primarily pyrrole orange, modified by diarylide yellow and transparent yellow iron oxide.

6th and Pike in Seattle. I honestly can’t decide if this is masking for maintenance of expansion joints in the sidewalk, or if this is guerilla art. Either way, it made me hyper-aware of the rhythm of the breaks in the concrete.

I took Rob down to the Delridge Playfield yesterday to show him one of my favorite pieces of public art. These three stones arranged at the intersection of paths hold a lot of interest for me. See the darker stone in the distance?

It’s cast bronze.

Rob wasn’t so impressed.

But here’s the thing: this isn’t about amazing execution, this isn’t about grand statements. Hell, this probably passes under the radar for 95% of the people who walk past this park. Probably more than 95%. It’s stealth art. There’s not even a plaque that I can find to identify the artist who did it. Maybe it wasn’t even an artist. Maybe the Parks Department just hired a bronze foundry to cast a stone to fulfill some 1% for art requirement when they built the Community Center. I don’t know.

So why do I love it?

Because the surprise you get when you discover that it’s not a rock, especially if you’ve seen it a hundred times before, causes that momentary flash of insight and awareness. Because it is like a Zen koan. Because it forces, ever so briefly, a different point of view. Because it allows a moment of presence and awareness of the human experience that is currently yours. It causes you to look back at the other two stones and question their authenticity. It makes you awake.

That’s hard to do when people expect to be looking at art. If somebody walks into a gallery, they are expecting to have an art experience, and they have a frame of mind that is open and ready to have their perception adjusted. A person encountering this piece has no such expectation, so the surprise — the adjustment in perception — is that much greater.

MAN has a nice little series covering Doug Wheeler, one of the so-called “light +space” artists who kept making work, but didn’t follow the path to fame like Turrell and Irwin did:

Talking with Wheeler part one, two, three, and four.