("The Night it Fell from Tangles, of the Branches on the Shore"
oil on panel
32"x48"
sneak preview of one of the newest disasters--i.e. a fuzzy photo of work in progress--)
This is an excerpt of an email to Hugh Peaker, a composer friend who I only knew briefly way back in the Chapman Group. (I'll be putting up some things in my archives one day.) He somehow found my paintings on the internet after we haven't spoken in over a decade. He wanted to know about the Rural Disaster paintings and this gave me my first opportunity to sit down and write out how they came about and what they mean to me--here's a writing-as-I-think-of-it format, just as I wrote it to my friend, edited only a little bit for readability and brevity. Enjoy...
Me: My disaster series is really kicking along right now, and I'm painting at least two or three hours every day lately and loving it--I'll be putting up a few more photos on the website in the next week or two I suspect.
Hugh: Can you tell me more about what your thinking about with these works?
Me: Gladly. I relish the opportunity to put this down in words because I am still sorting out what they mean to me. First, I will cut and paste my most recent draft of what will become an artist's statement. This is from a few months ago:
Rural Disasters
My fascination with rural nighttime structure fires and car accidents undoubtedly derives in part from my experiences of childhood stargazing, small-town adolescent nightlife, and personal tragedy growing up in rural Vancouver Island. Yet my immediate attraction to an image is one best described in the language of the visible: the glow of flames on pickup trucks, the organic muteness of nocturnal evergreens, and the glare of the camera’s flash on wet roads, crumpled metal, and disturbed gravel. I tend to see them primarily as landscapes (with an obvious added human element), or in some cases, as still-lifes, and choose images that I find simply beautiful.
In rendering the found images in paint, I hope to preserve some of the vivid real-ness that photography provides while at the same time transforming them into paintings, which possess and exude a truthfulness exclusive to the medium. Thus certain areas of the painting meticulously and faithfully respond to the photograph, complete with signs of how the intrusion of a camera distorts, visually enhances, and becomes part of the incident depicted, while other areas exhibit their actuality through the opaque thickness of impasto, the transparency of thin glazes of oil, and the drags and scumbles of dry-brush.
These disasters are not my disasters—but somehow resonate within me, with any number of conscious and subconscious thoughts and feelings, from my outlook on the state of the world, to my everyday life, to a look back at my past. I don’t find it helpful to reflect too much on this while working; I believe that concentrating on the technical and pictorial aspects of painting, as opposed to the narrative aspects of the event depicted, helps me maintain an emotional distance, and keeps the paintings somehow neutral or open ended, allowing the viewer to interpret them without too much coercion on my part. Yet, occasionally, once I have dwelt upon an image for sometime, it reveals its inner grip on me, exhuming memories long buried in the littered backyard of my soul. My hope is that an occasional viewer will be similarly moved.
That hopefully gives you a rough idea, but I am working on a rewrite as we speak, trying to be clearer about some things without sounding too colloquial. I think I will also try writing a statement similar to the Flesh Paintings statement to see how that works out, basically a fast moving list of influences and possible interpretations.
To be completely frank, these paintings have zero theoretical foundations, apart, of course, from the foundations we take for granted: the inherent assumptions about space and visual meaning inherited from centuries of art history, science etc. In other words, maybe I should say that these paintings have no "original" or "new" theoretical foundations. Which is partly what I meant when I said in my first email that I have a very different view now, regarding the relationship of theory to painting. I'll tell you the story of how it came about, as I now remember it.
About five years ago, I met a photorealist painter that lived on my street who became my best friend (it's weird how these things work). It turns out he's a world class photorealist, although neither he nor I knew that at the time. He has since been accepted by the OK Harris Gallery in New York, one of the two or three best galleries in the world for that kind of work and now he sells everything he paints. Here's the introductory page on his blog that beautifully tells his story (a great read), and you can link to his website if interested.
The reason I start here is because when we first started going out for beer he would stare politely at me while I rambled on excitedly about the theory behind the paintings I had done with the Chapman Group, about philosophy and art history, and how science was influencing my art etc. etc. Turns out we could not have been more different in our approach to painting. He probably felt like shaking me and yelling "HELLO, WHERE ARE YOU IN THERE!!!!" He purposely, almost fanatically, avoided any knowledge of art history and theory. For him, it was all personal, very existential really, and had nothing to do with any trends or theories, or trying to think of the next new thing. (I hope this is accurate Neil!) It took months, but after many beers and talks and much more painting, I started to come around.
I used to need theory and ideas (mine or someone else's) in order to justify what I was doing. (I think I've got a real hangup about justifying to others what I do--I'm sure that's in the mix somewhere.) But I have now got to a place where the starting point and justification for my work is not ideas, but visual exhilaration (n. a feeling of happiness and excitement combined with a heightened sense of being alive). (By the way, thanks again for this opportunity to put this in words, as this is the first time I have phrased it that way.) I did not seek out photographs at all, still a bit suspicious of my new friend's method of "simply copying photos". I started painting sort of abstract expressionism after the flesh paintings--I'll probably be putting up an archive of those as well, and was still painting the odd landscape. I started painting the night paintings from my car somewhere in there as well.
Then one day I was in Vancouver with Neil on the day that a plane crashed at the airport in Toronto, and we were in a bar and saw a photo on TV. I remember thinking how much it looked like a landscape, with very little plane to see, just trees and smoke and some buildings. When I got home I looked it up and had the same impression.
Then one day I was in Vancouver with Neil on the day that a plane crashed at the airport in Toronto, and we were in a bar and saw a photo on TV. I remember thinking how much it looked like a landscape, with very little plane to see, just trees and smoke and some buildings. When I got home I looked it up and had the same impression.
I was still nowhere near considering painting it, but simply liked the image a lot, and did a google image search for plane crashes, and up came a website of the Alaska State Troopers, so I started clicking around.
I was so struck by a couple of the nighttime images of crashes and fires that I just had to possess them, and downloaded them to my computer for what purpose I did not know. Somewhere along the line, months later (my studio was in Jim's basement at Chapman street now) I was doing a large still life with stuff laying around, like a futon mattress and the wooden rafters and some rope, when it started to look like a stage for some event, so I thought of the photos I had back on my computer (I'm kind of making this up a bit now, as my memory of exactly how it happened is unclear) and painted a fire and some pickup trucks beside the rolled mattress. This eventually became "I Want to be a Shining Example", with the foreground trees painted over that part of the still life.
I kept this hidden from everybody, when it turned out I had basically just painted a photograph. I did a couple more fairly quickly, as I was very excited (and confused). Half of my excitement came from doing something that I felt was forbidden! painting directly from a photo!!! with absolutely no theory to back it up!!! But I couldn't help it. (I now know that that feeling of not being able to help it and not knowing why is a very important indicator of what I should be doing) I stopped after a while, and started berating myself. I remember getting mad at myself, and thinking seriously, "what the fuck are you thinking, just painting from photos!?" So I stopped then, for a long time, and somewhere in there painted those topological heads, which took months.
Until one day I was part of the two-day Fairfield Studio Tour, where I was showing mostly landscapes, with a few large abstract paintings, and the new heads. On the second day, I was looking for something to replace a large abstract that didn't get much response, when I found that old truck and fire one at the very back of my stack of paintings, and it kind of struck me. So I took it out and sprayed some varnish on it, which really helps consolidate the composition by bringing back the original shine and contrast the painting had when still wet. I really liked it, so I put it out, and people kept commenting on it. The one comment I remember, was someone saying how interesting it was that I was painting a fire in a rural setting, because they had seen paintings before of urban fires I guess, but never this.
That was the beginning of me starting to figure out where the paintings come from and why certain images strike such a strong chord. It seems obvious now in a way but at the time was a revelation.
You see, I grew up in a rural area with lots of trailers and trees and two-lane highways and cars (and witnessed a few car crashes) and I have very love/hate relationship with that part of the world/my life. So one of my first interpretations of what became my new series of paintings was that I was burning and smashing that part of my life, while at the same time finding beauty in it--or that maybe the beauty was the violence destroying of it. Much more recently, I was watching Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours where this Professor Levy guy (the subject of the Woody Allen character's documentary) says this:
"You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past."
I feel like this is a pretty close reading of what happens to me when I find these images--I fall in love with them! And by painting them I am trying to return to the past and refind that childhood wonder of nature and the night, and the mystery of life and death, and the adolescent experiences of bonfires at gravel pit parties, and long drives on narrow empty highways late at night. On the other hand I am wanting the experience of painting these things to help me undo memories of those times--destroy who I was, the things I did and experienced and saw, etc. A paradox.
Then as I have been going along many, many other things occur to me what these painting could also be "about."
Looking through some drafts of artists statements (more attempts to figure out what the paintings are "about") I found this fragment:
"I hope to transform them [the images] from what is simply a depiction of a scene into what, for myself at least, can become a threshold to a more poetic realm of (emotion and reflection. Mnemonic)"
and further ideas include these as "Maybe even a contemporary momento mori". (translates as reminders of death, actually "remember you must die". Momento mori paintings were often still-lifes (also called vanitas) with symbols of death and the fragility and shortness of life etc...ie...live each moment to the fullest because you never know when your time will come...)
Also, I often think when I find the photo and get that first rush of visual exhilaration, that these images are so beautiful that they deserve to be painted, and that by painting them I am saving them from oblivion. Your comment about the ecstatic awareness (which I'm not really familiar with) made me think of the fact that each photograph is a single frozen moment, a moment that, purely through the visual power it has over me, needs to be painted (Raymond would say "grounded into permanence"). It starts to enter the realm of the sacred at this point.
I am quite sure that the first thing people will think about with these paintings is the narrative, even though that is the least important thing to me. I do avoid, mostly through pure intuition and the "ick" factor, any images that I find melodramatic. These are certainly dramatic, but in my mind are simultaneously almost neutral or deadpan somehow. I think the titles do help place them there. "God Doesn't Always Have the Best Goddamn Plans Does He" sums up the detached feeling I have about the narrative aspect of the images, but a lot of what they are about and how to talk about them is still a mystery to me, and that mystery is I think the fuel that keeps me going.
And it's funny, because I love talking about art and theory. Ever since I went to art school. My degree was philosophy and art history for Christ's sake. But whether because of that or despite it, ignoring all that and going with my gut and my eye has become more important--important enough for me to drop all that theory stuff--which has come to seem to me like not much more than justification for the sake of art writers and academics and the art world. I guess also because I have no theory to hang my coat on, it makes me want the paintings to be that much better for what they are--just paintings. So I'm hoping when I finally show them to galleries that it will strike a strong chord with somebody.
Wow, that's the first time I have written that story down. Who knows, that is probably a draft for something, a blog posting maybe, and parts of it will probably end up in a final artist's statement. I'd be interested if you could tell me how that story I just told compares to the artist's statement I cut and paste at the beginning. I am a bit too close to the whole thing to see clearly. Does the statement at all get across what I really feel about the paintings, as I just related to you? I kind of think maybe it doesn't. I'll need to include that bit about "visual exhilaration" in my next statement. Speaking of which, I think this falls squarely into the realm of the bodily (the eye and the gut), and come to think of it reminds a bit of Merleau-Ponty's writing. I'll use the term "infinite richness of the mute meaning in the visual world" even if this isn't exactly him, but what I have taken from him--the idea that every visual moment is different, and infinitely rich in meaning, and that visual meaning is mute--a different kind of meaning than that which we mean when we usually talk about meaning--which usually means ideas, ie that which can be talked about. In other words, maybe the mystery I am talking about in regard to what my paintings are "about" is one that will never be solved, since they are primarily coming from a fascination with the visual, and the visual is mute.
...I'm just thinking out loud now...
"You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past."
I feel like this is a pretty close reading of what happens to me when I find these images--I fall in love with them! And by painting them I am trying to return to the past and refind that childhood wonder of nature and the night, and the mystery of life and death, and the adolescent experiences of bonfires at gravel pit parties, and long drives on narrow empty highways late at night. On the other hand I am wanting the experience of painting these things to help me undo memories of those times--destroy who I was, the things I did and experienced and saw, etc. A paradox.
Then as I have been going along many, many other things occur to me what these painting could also be "about."
Looking through some drafts of artists statements (more attempts to figure out what the paintings are "about") I found this fragment:
"I hope to transform them [the images] from what is simply a depiction of a scene into what, for myself at least, can become a threshold to a more poetic realm of (emotion and reflection. Mnemonic)"
and further ideas include these as "Maybe even a contemporary momento mori". (translates as reminders of death, actually "remember you must die". Momento mori paintings were often still-lifes (also called vanitas) with symbols of death and the fragility and shortness of life etc...ie...live each moment to the fullest because you never know when your time will come...)
Also, I often think when I find the photo and get that first rush of visual exhilaration, that these images are so beautiful that they deserve to be painted, and that by painting them I am saving them from oblivion. Your comment about the ecstatic awareness (which I'm not really familiar with) made me think of the fact that each photograph is a single frozen moment, a moment that, purely through the visual power it has over me, needs to be painted (Raymond would say "grounded into permanence"). It starts to enter the realm of the sacred at this point.
I am quite sure that the first thing people will think about with these paintings is the narrative, even though that is the least important thing to me. I do avoid, mostly through pure intuition and the "ick" factor, any images that I find melodramatic. These are certainly dramatic, but in my mind are simultaneously almost neutral or deadpan somehow. I think the titles do help place them there. "God Doesn't Always Have the Best Goddamn Plans Does He" sums up the detached feeling I have about the narrative aspect of the images, but a lot of what they are about and how to talk about them is still a mystery to me, and that mystery is I think the fuel that keeps me going.
And it's funny, because I love talking about art and theory. Ever since I went to art school. My degree was philosophy and art history for Christ's sake. But whether because of that or despite it, ignoring all that and going with my gut and my eye has become more important--important enough for me to drop all that theory stuff--which has come to seem to me like not much more than justification for the sake of art writers and academics and the art world. I guess also because I have no theory to hang my coat on, it makes me want the paintings to be that much better for what they are--just paintings. So I'm hoping when I finally show them to galleries that it will strike a strong chord with somebody.
Wow, that's the first time I have written that story down. Who knows, that is probably a draft for something, a blog posting maybe, and parts of it will probably end up in a final artist's statement. I'd be interested if you could tell me how that story I just told compares to the artist's statement I cut and paste at the beginning. I am a bit too close to the whole thing to see clearly. Does the statement at all get across what I really feel about the paintings, as I just related to you? I kind of think maybe it doesn't. I'll need to include that bit about "visual exhilaration" in my next statement. Speaking of which, I think this falls squarely into the realm of the bodily (the eye and the gut), and come to think of it reminds a bit of Merleau-Ponty's writing. I'll use the term "infinite richness of the mute meaning in the visual world" even if this isn't exactly him, but what I have taken from him--the idea that every visual moment is different, and infinitely rich in meaning, and that visual meaning is mute--a different kind of meaning than that which we mean when we usually talk about meaning--which usually means ideas, ie that which can be talked about. In other words, maybe the mystery I am talking about in regard to what my paintings are "about" is one that will never be solved, since they are primarily coming from a fascination with the visual, and the visual is mute.
...I'm just thinking out loud now...
So there you have it--a candid story of the beginnings of the Rural Disasters.
