Replete, Repeat:
Composites, Iterations, and Non Sequiturs
This is a monthly newsletter about my current artwork, ideas, influences, past projects, and upcoming exhibitions, often with some personal content thrown in. I will also include announcements when prints or originals are up for sale.
Okay. First of all, welcome new subscribers! And thank you for attending my open studio weekend, which was exciting and overwhelming and a whole lot of fun. Also, I have updated my PRINT STORE: some stuff is new, some stuff has sold out, and some stuff (such as my original paintings) you should email me about privately if you'd like to buy them. I've also got some shows coming up in the new year, but the details aren't solid yet.
Aside from all of that, I’ve been busy planning out a whole lot of new artwork:
"Paradigms", a new generation of single-category subjects (a continuation of my previous series of “Composites” from 2017 - 2018).
"Contrasts", which will be made up of contrasting landscapes. My "Composite Landscape" experiments taught me a lot, and one of the lessons I learned is that it's very difficult to convey the fact that one is looking at multiple landscapes (a goal which I have decided is important to me) if those landscapes are similar. It's the differences that make this legible.
"Iterations", or single-subject paintings, which represent movement, multiple perspectives, and change over time.
“Rivers”, the last of my composite landscapes. References include Cascadilla and Enfield Creeks in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and the upper reaches of the Urubamba River in the Peruvian Andes.
I’m pleased with the result, but I decided I’d like it to be more evident that I am depicting a combination of different landscapes. I think it’s visible in this painting, but the title doesn’t say anything about what I’m really doing here.
Inkwork for “Shells” (four perspectives of the fist-sized shell of a sea snail that I found many years ago, when I was too ignorant to know not to take uninhabited shells from the ocean.
Additionally, I’ve been almost consumed with planning out a series I'm calling Non Sequiturs. These are paintings based on an unrelated list of words, which I have randomized into subject pairs. The list comes from a book called Six Nonlectures, and the series will be named…well, Six Non Sequiturs.
This little book was written by the great American poet Edward Estlin Cummings (or ee cummings, as he is more commonly known), and is composed of a hodgepodge of prose and poetry (his own and others’) from which he creates a kind of self-portrait. It starts off semiautobiographical and (like many semiautobiographies) devolves into a personal treasury of collected wisdom, beliefs, and ideas. Reading it was a little like sitting at the feet of the lampshade-headed, tipsy loudmouth of the monthly literary salon who holds forth from a fireside armchair while the waiters glance nervously at the wildly gesticulating cocktail. Cummings was quite prolific, and over the course of his life wrote two autobiographical novels, four plays, a handful of essays, and something like 2,900 poems (he was also a painter, but his artwork was—and I say this lovingly—garbage). Cummings’ writing, however, is magnificent. His passionate, bubbling mannerisms and crackpot playfulness do not obfuscate the baldness with which he confronts dark subjects such as death, war, suicide, and cultural discrimination. Like all artists, he has access to a great deal of profound and intuitive wisdom, and like all artists, he often struggles with how to express it. Six Nonlectures fluctuates between nonsense and truth, heavy-handedness and effortless lucidity, awkwardness and confidence.
I don't mean any of this as an insult; the reader is enchanted (at least, I was)—although I have to admit that ee cummings' folksy-Baroque mannerisms are really better suited to a poem than an essay. Nevertheless, the Nonlectures are altogether brilliant, absorbing, and delivered with a great deal of gimcrack charm. It was an easy read, and I read it several times: first straight through and then piecemeal, isolating passages, phrases, and words to create my list.
Underpainting detail from “Moscow Trilobite”, one of my experiments with randomly paired subjects.
Using randomized subject pairs to make narrative paintings feels a little like divination, which is awkward because I don’t exactly believe in divination.
Rather than divination, I believe in determinism.
I don't see determinism and free will as mutually exclusive (blind as we are to the happenings of the future, how could our choices come into conflict with them, however preordained? They are not preordained by us). Determinism gives us a world filled with meaning, in which every small thing is significant and important. Precious.
I suppose an indeterminist might see all this as preposterous hubris, but what other honest choice is there? Human beings generate meaning; it is what our minds were designed to do, and the use of symbolic language is the one characteristic that sets us apart from all the other animals. Combining the (seemingly) unrelated only reveals underlying relationships. Using randomness (and if you’ve been following along, you know I believe in no such thing) can therefore be a wonderful tool for storytelling, meditation, insight, wisdom, and inspiration.
Scientists (with the possible exception of quantum physicists) tend to believe that everything that happens in the world is explicable: the inability of human knowledge to explain everything is merely a feature of its limitations. Six Nonlectures contains a fair amount of slander against science as the agent of evil, but we have to remember that Cummings was from the Age of Behaviorism (whose practitioners did not believe in the existence of thought, or anything else that could not be quantified). Nevertheless, although not all of us like to admit it, both science and art are driven by beauty—the elegant solution, the transcendent experience, the emergent property.
hatred bounces
sleep is the mother of courage
an intelligent person fights for lost causes,realizing that others are merely effects
think twice before you think
knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination
- ee cummings, Six Nonlectures, p. 70.
It’s a little bit tragic that such a delightful human being never found out that science and art share a soul.