DirtyBloodMachine » Art

Inner Need, Internal Desire

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:51:53 +0000

Perhaps what I wrote earlier was misleading. This was not my intention: I have wanted to offer thoughtful and generally accurate guides, but pinning down messy, complex states with a line of language has always seemed for me to be a daunting and futile task.

I feel now that I should stress a point: There is an Inner Need, a reoccurring Internal Desire, and it has torn against my insides to be freed, to course through my body and become manifest into a formed expression in the world. The tearing of this Inner Need has caused a sort of psychic torment. I’ve experienced an unbalanced force of pressure between my inner and outer realities, such that the inner pressure calls for an outer event of suitable expression to balance the difference and alleviate the torment. Some outer expression is called for, is seemingly necessitated, by this Internal Desire.

But what type of expressive manifestations are an appropriate remedy? This is not an easy problem, and finding fulfilling, or even adequate, solutions to it has consumed much of my energy. I did not start with an appreciation for an art form. Not really. I didn’t enjoy looking at paintings or photographs, or listening to music, or watching movies or reading books, so much that I said to myself, “hey that’s neat. I think I like that. I’d like to try and learn that.” I started with this burning discomfort of Inner Need acting as a driving force, pushing me on a desperate hunt to find a suitable form of expression, for the purpose of offsetting a consuming sensation of inexplicable pressure.

Maybe painting wasn’t the perfect choice. It was very frustrating for me, and I struggled with it, at times quite dramatically, throughout the entire duration of my practice. But, I didn’t know what else to do. I tried using different media. I tried using psychotropic substances. I tried engaging in various life experiences. I might have tried drilling a hole in my head if I thought it would have helped. As it happened, I did what I could to try and get through it, usually on a day-to-day or very short-term basis. I developed an art practice, both disciplined and experimental, with experiential and philosophical aspects (of a type), a certain habitual regime of intoxicant use, and fell into an uneasy balancing act with wave-like states of passion, anxiety, inspiration, frustration, relentless determination and insatiable desire.

I feel this explanation is closer to the heart of the matter, and that it would be misleading to speak of my process as an intellectual sport or an obsession I had with trying to determine meaning or something that operated in a predominately rational or coherent way. I believe that all these other elements have a place, and that I have operated by a form of logic, but that these must be understood from the perspective of this Inner Need, Internal Desire.

One and All

admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:26:19 +0000

Everything is connected. Interconnectivity, by a variety of means and modes, is ubiquitous.

Maybe the World and an Individual is similar to a Text and a Reader, and the acts of Living or Reading, and the production of meaning and the ways of understanding, are dependent on various frames of reference, cultural conventions, the individual reader’s experience…Maybe it is like a detective assembling a solution from clues that can be assembled in an infinite number of ways, that can yield an infinite number of solutions—like the diversity of beings that can originate from the different organizations of a set of DNA/chromosomes—and, with each of these different solutions having a unique bearing on the meaning of the World/Text and the understanding of the Individual/Reader. The particular way a life is lived or one reads has consequences on the appearance/perception of the World/Text and the subjectivity, identity of the Individual/Reader.

Opening up to various methods of living/reading respects and utilizes the endless potentiality that exists virtually everywhere. Just beyond the Actual, behind every mundane and superficial perception of what is Real lies the Virtual bubbling with numerous unrealized possibilities. Some sources may tell us this isn’t true. Institutional control and the cultivation of consumers by capitalist enterprises, requires a reasonably stable ideology of the status quo and enforces the pressure of a reductive movement of homogenization. The Individual/Reader, however, may yet have unlimited opportunities to slip out from under this wave of homogenization and enter into a polymorphous production of rhizomatic play. Question habits, tastes; approach situations/look at things differently. Be, Exist, Differently.

These or parallel ideas emerged from and ran through (although in a rather vague and intuitive way) my art practice and process of painting. I liked the flat, two-dimensional surface that painting uses because this surface limitation can throw into relief the unlimited possibility of graphic marks that can be executed upon it. The surface holds a potential for a boundless array of articulations. I tried to vary my approach, do away with plans and pre-conceived notions, make shapes or use colors that I thought were “ugly,” question my tastes, aesthetic notions, open up my methods to allow for the unexpected, etc. I found that certain elements would continually occur. I was happy to discover these elements and allow them to appear, feeling that they indicated a more important or deeper level in my psychic disposition than the more superficial media or questionable (commercial, corporate) culturally derived sources. (A way to clean up, wash off a layer of filth). I made many free associations, let forms grow, then intuitively covered up areas, allowing only traces to remain and suggest new structures, on which new tissues of markings could be added…

To uncover processes of painting through which sensations of difference can become manifest, and thereby enter into consciousness.

Underneath the distinctions, beyond where the categories fall apart and leak out all their contents, an undifferentiated All churns in messy, seething flux. And, though our way of life, and maybe our sanity, may depend on the mediation and/or denial of it, it is still out there, all around us, pulsing wildly and absurdly, despite our actions and discourse.

Textural Process

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:12:21 +0000

In trying to make a piece of art that makes sense, the texture of the thing, its tactile presence is important, a necessary component. Also, the process. It is the process, I feel, that can give the thing meaning. Process, the methods and conditions by which the piece is wrought, packs a certain potential, energy into the piece which might be accessed later by a viewer.

I carry on a kind of desperate search for meaning and where it resides. I am fairly certain that it does not exist in anything intrinsically and this puts me into a fit or crises of uncertainty. My confusion over what is meaningful causes me to question conventions, morality, limits… I try to put these energies, the confusion, passion, anxiety, desperate yearning, into the making of the piece.

I try all different kinds of materials and utilize a mixed-media aesthetics. I use electronic parts, pieces of metal, try tar, various resins, glitter, weird, cheap paints, whatever I can get, and see what they will do together. I often use a small blowtorch, burning areas to sizzling char. All these to burden or overload the recurring illustrative impulse of making a pictorial representation of something.

I had started with drawing, feeling that there’s something fundamental, foundational in its practice. And, I was always attracted to drawing things, depicting characters engaged in circumstances. Coming of age in L.A. in the 80’s, meant being exposed to a range of new wave graphics, cartoons, and illustrations, including the work of Ralph Steadman, Robert Williams, Bill Sienkiewicz, Sue Coe, Enki Bilal, Antonio Lopez, and others. (I was also so impressed by an exhibition of German Expressionist paintings I saw at LACMA).

My early impulses were in this mode of expressionistic illustrations. I think my tendency was more illustrative, but that I didn’t trust it or feel comfortable with it. I did not want narrative or representational coherence. This seemed too easy and dishonest, wrong. The artists mentioned above pointed to ways illustrations might be folded and disintegrated into other approaches, in complex, confusing, organic, or expressionistic ways. I sought to break apart my illustrative inclinations in my deconstructive questioning and my experimental processes.

Thickening the surface with layers and texture can frustrate the representations and keep them from forming. It is this tension between symbolic, pictorial representation and abstract, expressionistic, textural surfaces, that interests me, and the confounding, really, of them both. The thick, mish-mash surface ontology is a kind of representation in itself, but it represents a different order, in a different way, pointing to a sludge-like, ambiguous mental state. Thick, unsophisticated, crude and oppressive textural process as confused, desperate thinking.

To make a piece heavily loaded with so much difference that it collapses somewhere in the middle, and fails in a startling, overblown way, seems an exciting prospect. Especially for one constantly tormented with thoughts that don’t seem to lead anywhere, or whose destination doesn’t seem nearly as important as the quality and experience of the actual thinking.

Steps

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:07:17 +0000

High school didn’t grab me, at least not in an academic way. Actually, I thought as a program of education the experience was a joke. My mind during this time drifted off, searching for more interesting, stimulating terrain, wanting to cut an alternative, creative path that was informed by my interests in music and intoxication. I realized after I had graduated that I needed to engage in a more serious study of art and should try some college. I began taking art classes at Art Center College of Design, while fulfilling my general education requirements at the local community college, College of the Canyons. After a couple of years I picked up an AA degree in Art, and acquired a little bit of insight, confidence, and technique through the half dozen life/figure drawing classes. In addition to drawing and painting I was very much into photography. My first job after high school was at a photo shop, and sometimes I’d acquire equipment in place of a paycheck. I set-up a darkroom in my parent’s laundry room and spent many, many hours in the dim red-amber light, bent over trays of chemicals, watchings images emerge burning on wet paper.

I was interested in exploring the modes of visual art as forms of cognition, and I engaged in various approaches of image making as ways of acquiring knowledge and understanding through a subjective experience of perception and thought, a type of thought that was both visually symbolic and visually textural or tactile. Because of this there was something very attractive and challenging about painting. It seemed multidirectional and unlimited in its potential.

This is the period when I ingested mushrooms for a sustained duration. Also of influence were the creative relationships I had with a few friends. We would get drunk, go on road trips, stay in weird motels, watch movies, listen to music, have stimulating conversations, experiment with intoxicated states, make art, eat, sleep, try to avoid responsibilities, and heave through life, dealing with ourselves and others, figuring out who we were and what we cared about. Sometimes I was euphoric, other times I was depressed, sometimes I was emotional, other times I was indifferent, but it was a great time, filled with ideas, impulses, influences, and insights. There was something very potent and special in these eclectic, subjective experiences, something that my art practice was deeply informed by. There was something about the feel and presence of this time that I wanted to capture in my subsequent artwork, something that would manifest itself in strange and murky atmospheres. If this time had been a space and my visual art an audio recording, than it was the particular sonic imprint, with the reverb and echo characteristic of that room, that was so important to the piece. And I would try to call it up in many later pieces, through a felt memory, and in the form of texture.

After a stimulating visit to San Francisco, I applied to the San Francisco Art Institute, was accepted into the school, and eventually packed up my car to move up there and engage in further study.