Spring Cleaning in the Studio

http://youtu.be/tfJEmmWbA7I


Talking about cleaning up in the studio. I think cleaning up is a ritual that is not unlike cleaning the cobwebbs from the brain and getting ready to to focus on a new body of work.

I work in series and for Collage some of the old material finds its way into the new. It is my way of seeking continuity through the titles of my work. This series "If I had a boat" has been with me for 12 years and maybe a bit more. I have moved the series from ragboard to collaging directly on canvas as a way to not have to glaze work.

I will be putting up more video as I progress both on the series and overcoming my block about using this space that I have created for collage work.
April 27th Carrboro NC

The Stylistics

A Paul Wonner painting

The thoughts have been coming fast and furious, old thoughts, new thoughts, all jumbled up tonight, all though they seemed pretty untangled earlier today, so what is up? I guess the largest thought of the day was the dipping into the tradition of making art, painting in particular.

  If there is anything that seems to be prevalent in painting now, It would seem to me to be that we are free to do anything we want to do. Ones style is what ever one wants as we beg, borrow, appropriate, inform, excavate, the past.

  There use to be a number of reasons to stay with one horse to develop a style and focus down hard......Commercial galleries and your collectors could bank on your evenness and product being a brand. There are probably lesser reasons like craftsmanship and gestural or muscular memory as you honed your edge. I am sure that one could find a number of other reasons as well, many exploring a terrain and finding that they are satisfied with exactly where they are at.

  I have of course forgotten the main reason that schools and the MFA factory would have, that of presenting your argument in a zip locked and starched fashion, that again can be honed and handled like a smart chisel slicing past arguments into fine shavings. Your place in time will be recorded for future use and measured and reported on like a weather report.

  Yet in the world of everything that can be presented, omeleted criss-crossed, socialized and shared, is there any real need for long term argument as to what art should be about or what should be left out or what is relevant and who it might be for and how long it should hang around?

  I am not complaining here. In fact I like the state of the union and where we are at in the tradition of art. It leaves one free of all the bombast. I can search on my own for beauty and slice the sublime for my drink of choice and hope that there are some sharees like myself who will take a minute and notice some of what I notice and that it is not a matter of argument or sensory ego, just a craft that is as old as the hills that have shaped the human drama and watched as we raised our arms to the sky, reaching out to the stars and then tried to scratch an association into the sand or upon the walls.

  So now All Aboard the art train, we can explore the human zoo. I am sure that there will be a lot of the same old clubiness and politics but there really should not be any complaints from any quarter from now on as to who can make and disseminate the medium or the message. We have gone global and bubblely and anyone in the crowd might be one of yours or they may not.

"Red Dress" Oil on primed paper  14X17 inches

The hand and the chair were what caught my eye about four years ago. This is a B&W photo from some forgotten magazine. I tore out the ad as I often will and put it in acetate where it floats around the studio, getting lost for periods of time and then refound. The drawings from it have morphed and the red dress came from my collages named "His Magnificent Ego" and "Her Majestic Ego" More photos to come.

I started on this one and I realize that I am telling or maybe showing the story backwards that is alright as you will be able to start seeing the progress as I bring this project to resolution, or the alternative ....drag it all out to the skeet range PULL!

So none of these were making my day so I going to take them apart and have fun.

The above photo is one of the five or so canvasses that were going nowhere.

So after two years of messing with the five that did not make it, I decided that I needed to finish this whole thing up as I was moving beyond where the old drawngs were, so I dragged all five of the canvasses outside and started a sort of deconstruction or a freeing up.

Working gesturally is hard to do larger than 1. you can see with your eye and 2. you can reach with your arm (and hand). This is where painting and dance collide. Making smaller work seems to be easier and I think that trying to make exspansive gestural work has always had inherent problems. Remember that a gesture is the conveyence of an emotion using a part of your body.

The Red Dress

The Red Dress started as a drawing of a seated figure from a chair or clothing advertisement. It was a black and white photo but I liked the pose and used it for a lot of drawings. I did a series of charcoals and then using the the same pose did some small gestural works 8X10 inches in guache using the same pose. One of the works was chosen as a commissioned painting 48X42 and I started five or six canvases because to make a larger work of a smaller gestural work is just asking for trouble.

Above is one of the smaller drawing/paintings on rag board and on top is the finished commission