Chromatic Scale

Some new work is developing, in a slow way; incubating quietly and playing close to the chest. I see it fleetingly, in a dream sometimes. Or it occupies my thoughts in the way I find my cat occupying a place on the rug at my feet, silently, although I hadn't even noticed she'd entered the room.

I was driving to an appointment this morning. I drove over the Delaware River and it seemed as though many impressions suddenly felt the force of the current below, and they ran together in my mind.

I had written last week about my work of the 1990s and currently, in the context of my show online; I alluded to the influence of Mughal painting, which I'd seen so much of around 1997, with many exhibitions displaying the work as part of a global commemoration of the anniversary of India's independence from Great Britain. At that time, my painting palette had been most influenced by the life I'd had living among woods and fields, then transplanted to the Pacific coast and the concrete, treeless streets of San Francisco. The Indian paintings I was seeing opened up another language of color for me. I was painting abstractly, always (as now) concerned about how to invest the work with intention. I  saw then how color could bring all my feelings together - it was revealed to me not in the narrative content of those works, but the ways in which the close harmonies and varying intensities seemed, to me, to speak of the range of human emotion and drives.

As I was listening to the news on the radio, driving over the Delaware River this morning, I was thinking how odd it is that the most basic, and even base, of human drives are now expressed in the world through the most technological of means, and then the outcome is broadcast all over the world through the internet, radio and television. But nothing really changes enough, when it comes to destructiveness, greed, and violence.

At the same time, the prior week I'd been into New York and had seen a few really wonderful painting shows: Thomas Nozkowski at Pace Gallery; a brilliant group show called "Painting Advanced" at Edward Thorp Gallery; Al Held at Cheim & Read; and Andrew Masullo at Mary Boone.

Well, I'm starting new work and thinking about color, and my use of it, and about how color is being used by my contemporaries in painting. There is a lot of very saturated color in contemporary abstract painting, brilliant and bold. For the kind of nuanced and sensitive calibrations of color I most enjoy, I was excited by the group show at Thorp and the Nozkowski at Pace - although the inventiveness of the imagery keeps me interested in Andrew Masullo's work too - the "Alphabet Paintings" by Al Held are in a class by themselves.

So, driving over the Delaware River and listening to the news, and ruminating on all the many currents flowing into my awareness, I was visualizing new work, in particular a few drawings I've made recently, without much color. I came back to the realization I had in the 90s, about how the stories didn't really matter to me in the Mughal paintings; it's the colors, the expression of nature and design, and the way that emotional range and the coexistence of noise and song, dissonance and harmony, rage and joy, make that kind of chromatic composition very meaningful to me. As much as I love, even prefer black and white photography, I think I can't, for now, express what I need to in painting through the use of black, white and grey alone. 

Still, maybe because when I am composing I am using value as my scaffold, I remain a big fan of black and white photography. Here are a few books I recently found at a favorite bookstore, Panoply in Lambertville, New Jersey. You can find just about anything you want there, and things you didn't even know you'd love to see.

Exoskeleton

Today I drove to Manhattan to deliver two pieces that will be exhibited with the Hullaballoo Collective (follow link to see my two works), at the Fountain Art Fair, located in the historical Armory on Lexington Avenue . We are excited that it is the 100th anniversary of the first Armory Fair! After long years of feeling isolated in my work, and having mostly an audience that exists only behind a computer screen, I am frankly thrilled to think that living breathing human beings will be respiring and perspiring in the same space that my collage and painting will occupy. People will be overstimulated and fatigued, but I look forward to seeing how my work holds up in that crush. I am very grateful to the Hullaballoo Collective for including my work and for all the work that various members have taken on to make it possible.

The lighting was fixed on the part of the wall where my two pieces are hanging, (above the chair in this shot), and before the show actually opened to the public. Thank you, Hullaballoos and Fountain.

 While awaiting the drop-off hour, I went to the Whitney to see the Jay de Feo survey. It was very moving to me in a number of ways. There are her ambitious oil paintings, but also many more personal and private works: drawings in mixed media, photos and photocollages, photograms, and objects. Here is a photo of a piece that was labeled "gelatin silver chemgram."

It touched me to learn that Jay de Feo had stopped painting for 4 years after disruptions in her personal life and her health, and then had returned to the Bay Area to teach; in a new and more secure phase of her life, she resumed her work, paintings informed by all the pursuits she had kept up in the intervening years, although she never did anything again as ambitious and strange as her "Rose."

After dropping off my work at the Armory, (near-missing a parking ticket), I went to Chelsea and managed to hear a good part of a panel about the work on exhibit at Cheim & Read currently, the "Alphabet Paintings" of Al Held. The paintings are monumental, stunningly so; but in their touch, they have a human trace. They are magnificent.

My online exhibition is underway, where I have twelve works on display now, with Galerie Cerulean at AbArtOnline. I can't help reflecting upon all that has unfolded in my life in the years that the exhibition covers, from 1999 to the present. Tonight, to have been among works, and also among artists, who tower over me, in a week that is a beehive of activity for the artworld, taking place in NY -- I moved to put myself in this proximity, and find myself feeling, sometimes, almost further away than when I lived in San Francisco.

For many months now - maybe nearing a year - I have been feeling a little like Rip Van Winkle, waking to find myself in a world different from what I knew when I went under the spell. But it's not just the surrounding world that feels changed; my inner world too, and the "container" through which I experience it, so that no aspect of life is untouched, and where I thought my feet were falling, suddenly the ground is different in quality, and the imprint of my presence too.

I have things on my mind I don't know how to say tonight. Maybe what I'm feeling is Spring, the lengthening days; or maybe it's the return of my embodiment. One feels a bit as in a dream sometimes, walking in the world insufficiently clothed. Just maybe what I'm feeling is an artistic breakthrough chipping at my fragile shell.