dreams and nightmares

writing the dream, 2010

nightmare, 2010

dreaming of flowers newly forming, 2010

white flower, 2010

paint off

front steps with paint scraped off to reveal red concrete

deconstructed painting, 2010, canvas with several layers of paint scraped off

big and small

I finally had a good amount of time in the studio this weekend- many hours, relatively uninterrupted. I had in my mind the idea of big works vs. small, and the idea of painterliness.
the big vs. small was triggered by having seen Mary Addison Hackett's terrific show at the Kristi Engle Gallery ( for some reason I'am not able to link right now) and also Mark Dutcher's FaceBook thread about painterliness.
This is part of Mark's quote: "it is hard to make a small painterly painting (is) because usually when someone tries to make a small gestural painting, it comes across as either being a shrunken down version of the large work"

Mary Addison said in her talk on Sunday that she doesn't work small and yet in the past year she has done gorgeous small works.  Gorgeous. at least her blog is linked here even if I can't link the kristi engle site and MAH website.



I have been working small for a while and love it, love working big and small simultaneously and bouncing between the two. i work with brush, pallet knife (spelling?) and fingers. I am showing somewhat older work in this post because the photos that I took were too blurry! also it has been a week since i started this post. wow, it is harder than I thought to do this. I think I need to spend less time commenting on other people's facebook pages and more time on this. or maybe just paint!!!!

cordon sanitaire 2009, oil on canvas 48x48 inches

tantrum, 2010 oil on masonite 7x5 inches

red one, 2010 oil on panel 6x6 inches

a no good rotten day

Today I made the painful choice to forgo time in the studio in order to take care of some business. I really hope it was worth it. Because now it is dinner time, and I feel... lonely. Which is a surprise. I didn't think that loneliness would be the end result of 8 hours of mind-numbing busy work, but it was, and maybe it shouldn't be a surprise. Painting does many things for me,  serves many purposes, but I have also made the point that the paintings themselves become -- um... well ones to hang around with, studio mates of a sort.  And I missed hanging out with my mates today. I will wait until Friday for my next studio day, and hope nothing will get in the way of that.

pale view of ordinary things, 2010

  

first post: gesture? really?

The problem with starting a blog is wishing you had started it six months ago. Or even six weeks ago. I already feel hopelessly behind.  But this is my start. I have started.

The title. Well, Mary Addison Hackett, a really terrific painter, already has a blog with the word process in it, so I can't use "process" because that would be derivative (or actually, copying) even though I love the idea of process.  Gesture will have to do because gesture has a meaning for both art and psychoanalysis, my two fields of work and interest.


gesture: quick drawing that capture energy and movement of a pose
gestural: vigorous application of paint and expressive brushwork
spontaneous gesture (Donald Winnicott): the baby's true self gesture toward something needed (thanks to Robert Stolorow for this succinct definition)