It’s been a summer to remember. The beginning showed promise with the work, and just and things were getting heated up I went away on a long needed vacation to visit friends in California, (Howard Kutler and Damien Jay) and Hawaii (Alex Couwenberg and Andi Campognone). Hawaii, was something else, in fact I don’t understand why most of the worlds artists don’t live there. I could go on and on, but I’ll stop myself.
It’s taken me two weeks to get myself back up to speed from before I left. I attribute some of that to jet lag and some of it to the fact that after being in Hawaii, well you know. The schedule is finally coming together and working well, part of that it is possible that I could be asked to promotion at the dojo in September. The result is I’ve got to prepare myself. That means being more inflexible with my time among other things. It’s good for my painting time this way.
I’m not sure how long it’s going to take me to prepare these pieces, about 25, for the application of paint and image. I have found over time, I’m much better off preparing a large grouping of work then painting them together. Instead of building one, painting it then starting another, I find that I get some real flow this way. Thing is it can be nice to get some break up of the process, but what works isn’t always what’s the most comfortable.
Heading into the heat to join Mark Zimmermann for a gallery jaunt tonight. Always both inspiring and disappointing, sometimes at the same show.
I’ve set an ambitious goal of completing twenty pieces by Mid September. I find that when I’m working long days and putting in the hours I find those jewel like moments that key me into a better understanding of why and what I’m doing.
Although I’m heading out of town tomorrow to see friends, Howard in L.A. among others, Andi and Alex in Kona, and Damien on the return in Berkley, I think that the work will only benefit by the time constraint. I’ve been thinking so much lately that I want to get away from the image, but I know that to go completely abstract now would be a mistake. Well, I suspect it might be. I’m feeling more and more content with work before I get any image onto them. Just another struggle to deal with, chew on, and clear out.
Here are some of this weeks work. The making of them is slow compared to the painting and drawing, but it’s also some of the most gratifying. It’s sweaty get your hands dirty work and it agrees with me.
This is part of a new series of work. It’s not that far off from what I’ve been doing over the last several years. What I needed to find was a way to keep the work challenging. I had reached a place that the work was so easy to do that it felt almost formulaic. I tend to run when things get that easy and have at times changed my entire visual vocabulary to avoid it.
I’ve been getting lots of shit from my good friend Mark Zimmermann among others, that I was onto something important. Here I was seemingly walking away from work that had been well received. I had been experimenting and was in danger of completely changing up again. The bad part of doing that is that as an artist you seem inconsistent, with such wide swings of visual change. In my mind it’s clear as day why I go from one side of visual space to another. Mark wasn’t wrong when he said that I had to be consistent, but I still needed to find a way to keep myself challenged. I need to feel good about the work. Those experiments were a journey that allowed me back to this work. It feels familiar but with in the way a new place feels familiar.
By breaking out of single image, I’ve found my frustration threshold again. It takes a number of iterations to get to the final destination. So, after a couple of years of both not having a proper studio and searching for the challenge I’ve landed on my feet once again. These pieces seem to take much longer to make, but the reward is fully there. That makes it worth it.
Welcome back. The site was down while I was changing hosts from Yahoo to Hostmonster. Of course I had to rebuild the entire site, but that was overdue. So far, I’ve posted many available paintings with many more to be posted over the next couple of weeks. If you’d like to have larger files emailed to you for printing purposes send requests to xjam13@gmail.com.
