In the grueling hours I spend avoiding being in my studio (at least I'm honest about it) I've been getting a lot of reading done. Yesterday I got and finished Augusten Burrough's book Dry, which I found pretty interesting. I don't think I'm that dark, really. But this memoir about an alcoholic's descent and rise and descent along with several semi-disturbing side-stories did amount to light reading. I sometimes wonder if people who've been in car crashes still rubber-neck on the highways, desperate to get a glimpse and re-live the un-relivable. To put it a bit more how I mean it: I wonder if people who've had loved ones be in car crashes without them and wind up paralyzed stare at car crashes where other people were paralyzed and try to understand it better.

I've also been reading a biography called Young Stalin, which is interesting because I know almost nothing about Stalin except that he has a moustache and wore a lot of those Nehru-collared military jackets. At least in my mind he did. What little I know about the horrors of his time 'in office' I won't demean with trying to explain it. So it's this funny thing of discovering some things that nobody knew about a man everybody knows about but me.

I also applied to a show in a local art collective dealing with ideas of written communication. I entered these three pieces, and hopefully they will be accepted. Or at least the triptych - I'm dying to get rid of it.

(note: apparently this is a big as i can post images for now. I'll fix these when I figure out the frame system)

Uwe Niggemeier

In the course of transcribing some interviews to pick up some extra cash from my mom (who runs an art-friendly transcription company) I listened to an interview with Uwe Niggemeier, a photographer from Germany who specializes in industrial photography. The focus is on metalworking factories: steel mills, iron mills, coke plants, etc. The photographs are shot either black-and-white or color on large or medium format cameras, and then scanned into a computer and printed digitally. The depth of field and strange lighting are interesting. I have a personal preference for the more abstract images, the ones that maybe lean more toward the aesthetic than the documentary. The site is navigable in German and English, and the photos are organized by location or by type of factory.

A Personal Update

Much has changed, and little has really changed at all.

I'm back in Chicago, living alone this time. Still seeing many of the same people, still a florist, but with lots of changes. It's hard for me not to see myself as a tiny ant, and all these changes as so amazingly unimportant, although the past year has been completely unstable and confusing. I'm in a sort of practical state of mind these days. I have little patience for the standard (Chicago) cast of hustlers, drug dealers and prostitutes of one sort or another. I'm over the novelty of it and believe it or not I find it boring at this point. I don't think this is a sign of my continuing detachment as much as it is a sign of RE-attachment to something else. Something more pure, and more exciting anyway. I do admit to being relatively boring these days: working too much, cooking sometimes, drinking a little and fucking not at all. Painting never. But things are turning around. Balances are resetting themselves and life promises to be good, assuming we ever get nights that are above 40 degrees.

I'm trying to work in earnest on this film project, but I feel dwarfed by the idea of it. I often wish I was more passionate or less logical and could just do things. Because I know that if I tried to tackle it I could, it's purely a mental block. Fear of failure, or more likely fear of success. But I've been poking about in some source material. I can't decide if it's important that I translate (and make available) the German texts or just be able to understand them and use them for my own ends. I think the latter is the direction I'm leaning in. I found a cheap (or at least affordable) ticket to Germany that leaves from Philly, so I'm hoping to get to Bremen sometime this year and get a bit of research and taping done(?). It's a scary thing to try to bring an idea out of the ether and take responsibility for it- bring it to life. It's so much easier not to, and I hate myself for being so often so very lazy.

As far as paintings are concerned, the 'domestic' ideas I was talking about in the last post have morphed into something more about categorization in general. I'm fairly fascinated by the way everything human culture is is based on words and abstract ideas that can't be really COMPLETELY defined. Maybe that's why we all feel so lost and confused all the time - it's difficult to stand balanced on a shifting surface. But the domestic (or at least common) objects remain a source of interest because of the blindness that familiarity brings. I tried to define a deck of cards via organization of the cards based upon their characteristics and could come up with no solid results. I have also decided that days and various other demarcations of time are too relative to be considered real, and therefore do not exist in the way that we know them. I wonder how detached I can get before it gets really unhealthy.

the series continues

I have been working lately on a series of paintings dealing with ideas of domestication and containment. What I'm interested in is the way we categorize and contain things in order to be able to deal with them. House plants, various containers; I am attempting to find ways to use the most banal of objects, painted in extremely simple ways. I think of them almost as icons or symbols. References from which more information can (hopefully) be gleaned.

This started with a painting of shelves of jars, inspired by a friends comments about putting parts of their lives in jars to save for later. Having moved home to the suburbs briefly, I am morbidly fascinated by the segmentation of items in a house, surrounded by (often, too many) rooms, manicured lawns, little gated communities that make up towns. Everything is broken down into smaller, more domesticated bits. I believe that this is a form of symbolic conquest, changing (or chaining) the natural and the chaotic to something solid, nameable and commonplace.

As usual, I am not sure if all of this gets across in the individual pieces. I think that they work as a whole, but I worry that shown apart they will not be understood. But I hate the idea of doing twenty pieces all the same size and insisting that they be displayed as parts of a whole. I like all my specifically-sized paintings. This is something that can be sorted out later, though. Right now, all the completed paintings can be counted on my fingers.

I will post images as soon as I have a few amassed. In reference to the earlier post, the teaching position has been not at all what I expected, although not necessarily in a negative way. Seeing the students work is inspiring in a way, although I do sense that they are working blindly at times. There is a lot of assignment completion going on, which is necessary and what they should be doing at this point (trying to get into college and all). But I haven't found a lot of motivation for my own work from them, other than the reminder that "I'm not inspired" is a lousy excuse. I do enjoy watching them learn. I feel that I often communicate this to them poorly, but it is deeply satisfying to explain something to someone that enables them to make better art. Whether it's a new color mixed, the right way to build up a cheekbone in clay, or simply which brush to use and how much paint to put on it. And I love pointing out art history references for them, which they are seriously lacking. I think I am making connections between things that either I forgot about or had not made before. It's interesting to go back into a familiar environment, but from the other side.

frustration

I am struggling to produce a coherent body of work. Either I lack the focus to complete an idea, or I am picking ideas that aren't interesting enough to focus on through to completion. I believe that I am forcing ideas. Maybe I don't need to be painting right now. I can't tell if the work I am producing is any good. It is certainly, at best, schizophrenic. I am trying to focus my energy on an idea. I know that I need to be drawing, but whenever I sit down to draw I am almost instantly bored, distracted, or just annoyed. I am hoping that the teaching job-- if it ever comes-- will be a good way to sort out thoughts and by steering others wind up on the right track myself.

All the themes that I come up with to work under wind up being constrictive. I know that I am not thinking properly, not "using the world" the right way, but I seem mentally unable to get any further than this. It all leads me to question why I feel the need to paint at all. I am chronically uninspired, or at best distracted.

I am unwilling to give up but seemingly unable to get past this.

i believe in nothing[s]

In preparation for a job interview tomorrow, I have been assembling a sort of mini-portfolio. I haven't looked at the work i did in Rome for probably two years and I was struck by how much better it is than the paintings I am currently making. The old paintings are basically about nothing, almost purely visual [at least in their conception]. The current paintings are trying to be about something, and I can't get myself interested enough. They seem almost shy, maybe even a little bit bored with themselves. I have never really wanted to "say something" with anything I make. Maybe by trying to force a statement I have watered down whatever the paint itself was saying before.

The current body of work has focused on memory- differences between the memory of something and the thing itself specifically. I try to choose recognizable images, remove them from the context of my memory of them, and bring them into an iconic state. Ideally, this points out the flaws in the ideas of image-making as story-telling and communication. I have to be honest and say that this has not worked out terribly well. I am unsure of how to make a painting about the idea that something is actually nothing, but have the product of that thought be a something.

In any case, the visual is my strength and I should not be forsaking it for a deeper meaning. At least, not one that I have to impose artificially. I have hung several of my better pieces from the past on my bedroom walls (there is nowhere to hang them in my work space) and I am hoping that by exposure to them I will be able to steer my thinking back into a better place. I do not think that all this has been a waste, these last few years of painting. I have been stripping down and stripping down, and now the time has come, i believe, to build up again. To thicken the application of paint and be comfortable making real nothings again.