Freya

Quiet Place In The Country (1970)

Martial Raysse

En attendant....Martial Raysse by mypalazograssi

Merlin Carpenter

I saw this painting online in the past couple of days.  I wondered what kind of a presence it might have if I was in the same room with it.  I pondered this because it seemed so one note, so obvious.  Not too far from the sort of petulant thing that seems to be popular at art fairs.  I wondered if I was missing something.  I never expected to see it since Merlin Carpenter is an artist who is shown more in Europe.  Then this morning I walked into  LA MOCA ( Museum Of Contemporary Art Los Angeles ) and there it was in the recent acquisitions.  It really does look like a lot more of a painting in person.  It's really well painted.  Seeing it in a gallery changed the nature of the text, it seemed like a lot less of a one liner and more just a sampling of something obnoxious that someone else said.  Not that that is something one might not conclude from a reproduction but just that way it was painted made it more convincing when standing right in front of it.

Recent Paintings And Drawings

This is a kind of painting I wanted to make where I could explore form and space and colour.  Although I think I left colour aside to a large degree even when it does appear I was still more concerned with the form and the blocking in of space with the grid lines.  I thought the crisscrossing of lines might be a good way of filling in space and creating a good optical effect. I practiced and explored it a bit but began to feel like I was getting locked into something that was just not close enough to what I wanted.  I think it shows they never really came together.  It just didn't feel right, but they are quite recent and I do like where the basic inspiration was coming from.  It makes me think of Keith Richards talking about other musicians trying to play his music and really struggling not understanding that he uses open G tuning. I think about that a bit just finding something that fits right and feels right and then you can really make something great.

Assemblage

There are certain things you only see on a screen.  I feel like a detonator is one of those things for me.  That's not the particular reason I assembled the above but it's something I thought about while I was making them.  Also how film and T.V. acclimatize you to certain things and that in turn plays a role in your acceptance of those things.  I grew up on Reagan era action films and I still like them but I do wonder how much they shape views towards military action.

Mental Physiognomy

Physiognomy (from the Gk. physis meaning 'nature' and gnomon meaning 'judge' or 'interpreter') is the assessment of a person's character or personality from his outer appearance, especially the face. The term physiognomy can also refer to the general appearance of a person, object or terrain, without reference to its implied characteristics

The Legend of Bigfoot.

Dore Ashton's wonderful essay The Physiognomy of the Mind

Phillip Guston  at The Los Angeles County Museum 

Various Small Paintings

Here are some paintings I made over the course of the last six months.  My main goal was just to have little more flexibility in terms of exploring ideas and different ways of painting them.  I find that I often get frustrated by getting bogged down on idea that not only may not be working in of itself but even if it was is also exclusionary to the other elements I hope my work will have or that I feel I should be pursuing. It's just easy to go down a path that does not seem to be the right one.  I go back and forth between various methods and approaches of painting.  I think there is an editing process that just has to happen.  I don't think I can just consciously decide I will paint one way or the other.  Nearly all of these are ideas and fragments for paintings I was thinking about on a larger scale.