This is the new tool… a french easel scored on Craigslist. I have taken it out a few times, but this is the first time I have taken it out of town while on a trip. It worked pretty well — I assembled two groups of four panels like the one in the image, and managed to get six of the panels painted within three days. This shot was taken on a high ridge near Prineville, Oregon. Access provided by my brother-in-law’s 4X4 pickup.

No matter how big my studio has been, I have always wanted more space…

Seems as though I boiled off my head of steam. I had worked through all the “nice” panels with the 2″ deep cradles mounted to them, and started using small square panels to which I just screwed a block of wood so I could hold them in my clamp easel system. I had also gone past any notion of using source imagery, and the paintings all started to become cartoons — almost parodies of themselves. So I need to freshen this up a bit.

We took the weekend and went to the Methow Valley in north-central Washington.We stayed in the “Rolling Huts” near Mazama, which are somewhere between tent camping and staying in a cabin. No indoor plumbing, though showers are available in another building. There’s a privy proximate to the hut and a well water pump at the foot of the stairs. The wood-burning stove is supplemented by electric heat and there is supposedly wifi, though we couldn’t really get it to work. So there’s a weird mix of rustic and modern in these little huts.

We planned this trip a long time ago, in order to coincide with the Hot Air Balloon Festival. We stumbled upon this festival four years ago when our oldest was the age that our youngest is now, and we thought that the girls would have a lot of fun seeing the balloons inflate and take off. We were right, mostly. The sound and heat of the burners was a little bit scary for the toddler. There be dragons.

Part of the plan for the weekend was to get a lot of photos that I could use as the source for a group of paintings. We have two digital cameras. One is older but does white balance and macro nicely, so we have used it a lot as a studio camera. The other one is newer and has better optics, and mostly got used for family shots. Both are point-n-shoots, but of a decent quality level.

Well, the new one broke and the old one ran out of juice, so mostly we took photos with iPhones.

I’m stuck in computer limbo waiting for a new one (Yes, the computer broke, too. And the car. And the microwave. Don’t ask.) So it might be a few days to get the photos organized and processed, but here is the plan: I’m going to take all these photos of the Methow (even if they are low-quality), crop them to squares, and have them printed so that I can use them for source material. I’m also going to get ahead of the panel supply again, though I may not go back to the cradled system for the time being. Those are really time-consuming to build, and when most of the paintings I am making will likely be destroyed, it seems like a waste of time. Better to use simple panels and frames, I think. Also, no more drying gesso with a hair dryer so I can paint that morning. Granted, that urgency has its own charm, but I’d rather be a little more organized and build out ahead.

After a brief interlude, painting will resume, and there will be an organized group of Methow paintings. If all goes as planned. Which it never does. But, anyway…

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.

Grumpy, clumsy morning in the studio, and it shows. Just couldn’t get my head in the game this morning. Even cleaning brushes, which is usually really enjoyable for me, was a chore.

Readers — how do you get your head on straight for working when it’s not coming naturally?

For more about these little landscape paintings and why I am doing them, read this post.

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

If you’re reading this and you know me (and, let’s be honest — if you are reading this, you probably do), you know that I have rediscovered the bicycle. I used to commute by bike when I first moved to Seattle, and then a bad wreck and the circumstance of living mere blocks from work and entertainment meant that the bike started gathering dust more and more. Enter parenthood, etc. You get the picture.

But for the past six months or so, I’ve been riding to my day job pretty near every day, rain or shine. Some days, it’s the best part of my day. Every day, it’s a chance to get invigorated in the morning, and blow off steam on the way home. In general, it’s keeping me happier and healthier, and I even have lab results from my annual physical to prove it.

On the way home from work last night, I stopped at the downtown Seattle Public Library and picked up a book that I had put myself on the wait list for. My number finally came up and it was ready for pick-up: Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne. Yes, that David Byrne. I just cracked it this morning, and was so struck by his description of cycling in the introduction that I thought I would share it here:

“It sounds like some form of meditation, and in a way it is. Performing a familiar task, like driving a car or riding a bicycle, puts one into a zone that is not too deep or involving. The activity is repetitive, mechanical, and it distracts and occupies the conscious mind or at least part of it, in a way that is just engaging enough but not too much — it doesn’t cause you to be caught off guard. It facilitates a state of mind that allows some but not too much of the unconscious to bubble up.”

Now, that sounds pretty familiar. It sounds like riding, sure. But it also sounds like the way I work in the studio. To be more precise, it sounds like why I work in the studio.

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.

I don’t tend to be a believer in inherent aesthetics. It’s my supposition that we bring to an artistic encounter our own cultural biases, aesthetic training (informal or formal) and — ultimately — personal taste — that has been developed more or less deliberately throughout our lives. That is to say, nothing is beautiful in its own right — it only is beautiful if we decide it is so.

When Steven LaRose’s blog page loaded yesterday morning, I greeted it with a sharp inhalation and then let out a low four-letter word. More on this later, but the image to the right is of the painting I was reacting to: Glittering Generalities and Blazing Ubiquities.

I follow his blog pretty regularly, I have seen a lot of his work (just saw some in person at Snoose Junction here in Seattle recently), and generally have a high regard for what he does. Which isn’t to say that I like every painting he does… but I have an appreciation for his work and his process and his aesthetic. And, most of the time, I do like the paintings he makes.

But this painting was different for me — and I could immediately recognize that he had stepped over some threshold. When I clicked on the comments, it was evident that the body of folks who frequent Steve’s blog felt the same. I don’t think they are shining his shoes, either… I get the sense that this is genuine.

So here’s the question: among an admittedly self-selecting group that already appreciates his work, how is it that one painting could garner such a consensus in the comments? Is there something inherent about this painting that makes it special — something separate from the aesthetic experience we bring to it?

I really don’t want to believe that to be the truth, but I’m hard-pressed for an answer otherwise, shy of sheer coincidence.

You can read all the comments here.