March 2011

Things in common with abstract expressionist painters:
Action painting, intuitive, automatism, subconscious, child of psych/surrealism, arrogant, self righteous, drink a lot, size matters, well-read/educated

Differences:
No one had simplified painting all the way to its core: I believe Pollok "cracked it wide open" because the inherent nature of paint with no human articulation still maintains it's integrity as well as does the surface. He meanders all around it but drizzle on canvas is the most "pure". Once that happened the ping began to pong.

Technology/communication/isolation: Not only do I have access to all the images ever made, but I have access to billions of people. So the idea of a School in the sense of knowing the painters in my town making work with similar goals, or even being in a building with my classmates, is all but nonexistent. I can find commonalities with painters all over but there is an inherent disconnectedness. I can communicate without ever actually having contact with another human being.

New York City: It's magical. It breathes life into everything it touches. Something made in NYC is going to have a little something that things made anywhere else doesn't.

AbEx painters wanted to contribute to society through their painting. I paint for myself. I want to contribute to society through teaching. I’m much more personable and happy and amused by the world than the AbExists. I can use my paintings as a tool to relate through or talk about, to teach with, but I have many tools to communicate with.

Gray area: not sure if this is a different or commonality
They think the painting is an event? I think a painting is an artifact of the event. From what I can gather, the abstract expressionists hoped their paintings to be judged and discussed based on the activity of them painting. I definitely feel like I paint because of the activity of painting, however my actual process includes what the changing current state of the painting looks like. I am trying to reduce painting to JUST what I care about. But I’m not trying to reduce it necessarily to paint on canvas. I know it is paint on canvas, I have no need to make that point. I don’t want it to be anything else, what it looks like really is beside the point and entirely the point for me.

(Transcribed from sketchbook)
Things that are important:
Pigment- the way each one interacts in every scenario, spinal health, painting big & keeping moving & stretching, balance, unity, exploration, randomness, asking questions (namely ,“What happens when I do this?”), answering them, being honest, having fun, pushing through bad times, pushing both sides of continuums
Dark                                  Light
Cool                                 Warm
Dull                                  Bright
Rough                           Smooth
Fuzzy                               Crisp
Transparent                 Opaque
Small                      Big
Abstract                 Figurative
Thin                            Thick
2D                                 3D
“far”                                “near”
Water-based          Oil-based
Unexpected            Rational

Studying the relationship between the continuums and searching for new combinations, thinking, writing, gardening, justifying, challenging, keeping regular hours, being spontaneous, listening to old music, growing things, eating well, sunshine, love, being in new situations, seeing the other side of the coin, solitude.

Things that really resonated with me when reading Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" from Tradition of the New, originally in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22. Quotes in dark red.

“They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting.” I’m looking forward to next semester when there is no separation between areas of working and I can just paint. Just work on one thing. It’s been a long time since that.

Criticism must begin by recognizing in the painting the assumptions inherent in its mode of creation. Since the painter has become an actor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction—psychic state, concentration and relaxation of the will, passivity, alert waiting. He must become a connoisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked.
I like the idea of destroying this concept. I want to confuse the viewer from knowing the step by step process. It’s about the act FOR ME, but not for anyone else. Everyone else gets the artifact. They can try to gather as much as they can from it, using whichever set of vocabulary one chooses, but the language they choose should be based on their relationship to the artifact, not mine.

Painting could now be reduced to that equipment which the artist needed for an activity that would be an alternative to both utility and idleness. Guided by visual and somatic memories of painting he had seen or made—memories which he did his best to keep from intruding into his consciousness—he gesticulated upon the canvas and watched for what each novelty would declare him and his art to be.

There’s a thread of arrogance throughout art history that I get a kick out of an also relate to. I think abstract expressionism also takes this arrogance to the furthest extreme because it is so much about self. But it’s not like say Buddhism, which is for the greatest good of all, and involves humbling oneself to acknowledge a sameness between self and everything else. With AbEx and many artistic endeavors, but concentrated so heavily and uniquely within the New York School, there’s a sense of entitlement, that to somehow one’s self has the power to improve humanity by pulling everyone up a notch. This isn’t a nurturing or even helpful gesture, It’s just the seemingly obvious byproduct of being so great.

A School is the result of the linkage of practice with terminology—different paintings are affected by the same words. In the American vanguard the words, as we shall see, belong not to the art but to the individual artists. What they think in common is represented only by what they do separately.

First I just start, it doesn’t matter what time of media, or any variables because until there is something, nothing matters. Once I have some things down, it then becomes about balance. Sometimes I fill the whole surface before I start paying attention. For me painting is about relationships. Each variable is on a continuum. I am studying the relationship of those continuums and working to create new combinations for myself, just for the pleasure of watching them unfold and manipulating them back and forth to find the most aesthetically interesting composition.
I am like an AbEx painter because I when I paint in my abstract expressionistic way I nerd out thoroughly into the act of following that curiosity. Watching. Obsessing. Tweaking the variables oh so slightly.

Yet it is strange how many segregated individuals came to a dead stop within the past ten years and abandoned, even physically destroyed, the work they had been doing. A far-off watcher unable to realize that these events were taking place in silence might have assumed they were being directed by a single voice.
I live in an age of pluralism. Because we as humans have adapted our ability to multitask I feel at liberty to both be ea truly pure and honest abstract painter, but at other times allow myself to make work that takes an entirely different path, with a different agenda and set of working guidelines. But I feel like there is an undercurrent of residual energy. The social and political concerns of American abstract painters of the 40’s, social injustice, threat of nuclear destruction, increase in production, decrease in quality of products, population growth, the global economy, power in the hands of elite few, extreme levels of poverty nationally and globally, none of these things have been resolved. Some have seen efforts but ultimately it’s embarrassing how little progress we’ve made as a culture in 70 years. In a way, being given access to know how messed up the world is, parallels being continuously bombarded with the evidence of basic hopelessness of sustainable human life on
One thing that continues to be important about abstract expressionism is that there is a link to primitivism, and many ancient cultures, often a cuneiform quality. It’s risen to the surface many times throughout human culture, often in times of catastrophe or devastation or hopelessness Earth. There’s a certain desperation in common with artists working today and artists working then.

Paintings this week, used paper chips to build fields of color on one, edited out/ moved onto a new phase in a few others.