Prologue
This month is an update of the past month’s activity and musings and the past year’s, two years’, project work. The structure of the website highlights the work under the top menu header MFA Thesis Project and Year One Archive.
This is the last post of this particular segment of my journey and I want to create a slightly different posting than previously. With the exception of an image related to my studio windows at the end of each of this year’s postings I have rarely included images in the blog posting. I’ve decided to include more visuals directly in this post along with hypertext links as connections to the thoughts bouncing around inside my head as I write. I suggest clicking on any links for a bit more inane insight to the depths or shallowness of my internal process.
And now our feature presentation…
The Month
The old English saying “April showers bring May flowers” is a reminder to have patience and persistence of hope even when surrounded by grey clouds and heavy rains; trusting that when the clouds and rains pass an abundance of beauty and sweet smells will take their place.
Try explaining that saying to a cat.
The reality the saying for me is, despite having the intellectual capacity to understand its meaning and origins and enough experience embedded in me to trust that, yes, the sun will shine and the flowers will bloom, I react more like a cat on a rainy day when facing a downpour or sustained drizzle. Pacing the studio in a lousy mood, yowling to those around me to turn the sun back on this instance, as if they could. Finally settling grumpily into a pile of blankets to sleep in self-generated warmth until that sun comes out again and I can bask in its heat while lounging on the studio steps under the blooming Oleander.
Despite intermittent rains and near frost, the past month has produced an abundance of fragrant blooms outside the greenhouse as well as within.
Mid-month saw the last submission of my MFA thesis report text. This involved spending the weeks prior thinking, reading [not just my draft], re-reading, writing [not just my paper] and re-writing with the goal of fleshing out the paper’s identity. This included the addition of technical elements as well as adding a Preface and a Postface, strengthening the relationship between the written and visual, and provide the reader a set ‘jug ears’ by which to more assuredly grasp hold. Before these additions had suggested to a colleague who was getting a bit lost in the draft of the text to imagine the words read by Abbott and Costello after having just sat through readings of Beckett and Stoppard; probably not the best help through the text.
My primary concern was the length the format imposed upon the paper. The word count is reasonable, however the page count is at a glance overwhelming. I have been trying to consciously write less and say more. A reader of the final paper who had no knowledge of my attempts to add some ‘nothingness’ into my practice, accurately identified the source of the lengthiness by saying I have filled so much of the paper with nothing. The reader did mean this in a positive way, and I accept the remark in an equally positive manner.
The paper’s length impacts the ability to produce an artist's book within a justifiable economic framework, something I’ve also been considering. I have come up with a solution which reduces the volume by half while adding a stronger connection between the text and the painting [Appendix], and within a format that ties together elements I’ve worked with over the past two years. Here is a photo of some studies of pages, none these have made the final cut.
The pages of the text I am most content with are those in the Postface because I feel they provide a clear and open inconclusive conclusion in alignment with my thesis statement and my practice; positions the further forward momentum of my research; and tie together the visual form and function of the text as I conceived it. Here are a few pages to give an idea of how things shaped up in the end.
I like this page from an earlier segment too.
Aside from the paper I spent the month in the studio completing the third movement of the Sonata. Sonata: Allegretto (Das Ding) Like the previous two movements the third developed at its own pace and in its own style within the structure I had established. True to the role of a third movement it achieved a fuller, and maybe even more conclusive state than the first two, at least when viewed as a painting prior to its fragmentation. As I worked I found myself aware of the elimination of an overall approach to composition with each layer of paint applied, similar to the second movement. A brief interruption of working on the painting occurred in early April with a weekend trip away from the studio, that distance, time spent looking, listening and doing nothing, along with communication on approaches to painting I had with Andrew Cooks precipitated a shift that I feel had positive results on the process in combination with a period of 14 hours where the paint, the brush, the paper on the wall became the pile of blankets I needed to self-generate some warmth on an otherwise cold and rainy weekend. Here is the third movement pre-fragmentation.
I had a hard time bringing myself to physically cut apart this movement. I needed two weeks until I broke out the X-acto knife. Before then I cut the painting apart digitally with my iPhone and formated those photos to include in the Appendix of the paper, and I considered a number of ways to not cut apart [completely] the painting and still maintain the integrity of the piece as the third movement. In the end I decided to file away those thoughts for future explorations and stick with the plan.
What helped me to follow through with my original intentions was work I had been doing the previous week in the studio making collages in my sketchbook and over-working a set of those digital cut-ups of the third movement I printed on Arches 300g hot press Grain Satiné watercolor paper at Andrew’s suggestion; and the timing of this review of the Lee Krasner exhibit at Robert Miller Gallery. In that time had come to realize by not cutting apart the painting I was exerting the control over it that I was aiming to negate with the whole piece. The painting physically fragmented still exists, it does its work, and can and will be worked and re-worked in a variety of iterations. This is Sonata on May 10, five months after its initial drawing on January 10, in its current, performable state.
The Year[s]
The main artery of the past two years has been this website, documenting the process as a form of self portraiture; here is where everything I’ve explored comes together. The past weeks has made me more conscious of the relationship of my practice to the ‘infinite loop’ of computer programming I mentioned in my presentation during the 2015 Winter Residency. For me this is an intentional looping, with each trip around a gathering of new and re-discovering of old information, and then applying it as needed. At times I might choose to interrupt the loop, but it is never done with the intention of ending the loop; just a pause to allow the processor to catch up before the process resumes. Those pauses can be any length, anywhere along the loop.
In a recent Skype Andrew Cooks reminded me of the conversation we had in the courtyard at Uferstudios outside ‘the box’ that first summer residency and Jean Marie Casbarian’s question she posed to everyone they met with that summer:
“Residency is over, you’re back in your studio, what’s the first thing you’re going to do?”
I’m not sure how I answered this; I’d like to think by saying “begin my loose-leaf Journal Pages” which by the time I left Berlin was what I intended to do as soon as I was back in my studio, and is what I did do. The work I’ve been doing the past ten days at my table in the studio feels very much the same as those Journal Pages, yet at the same time very different. While I will spend the next eight weeks preparing for the third summer residency of my MFA by making those artists books, gathering all that is here on this website onto CDs, preparing the reading logs for the workshops, figuring out the details on packing and transporting what I am bringing with me, and all those other little details, I’m not pressing the pause button just yet. I’ll also begin the first residency for the MPhil/PhD; infinitely loopy.
To be continued.
