Category: Painter

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Art Drawing maine Painter Peace still life

Slowing Down

My wife a and I have been slowing down. After two years of chasing our tails we are starting to settle into what I can only assume will be our life going forward. To maintain the illusion that everything will calm down and we will catch up, feel less stressed, or find our pot of gold seems less an less plausible. However, the joys within that rushed an stressed schedule are becoming more intense. People talk about the ability to focus when you have that time to yourself, whatever the time may be. 

I’ve always found that I am more likely to find my peace through organization and through my work. I am not very good at organization, but it is a battle I like to fight. My work is always there, but what I’ve been realizing lately is that I haven’t been using it as a tool for my own self medication quite enough. When producing at the right time I feel that I am able to steady myself. One of the big steps in steadying myself is to ignore the outside voices; the voices telling you about marketing, success, the way to make it. I feel more steadfastly than ever before, even with my marginal bit of success, that no one ever makes it purely by following other peoples paths. Even if you do follow someone else’s path, success is only reached if you own that path and make it yours. I am not the people from Red Lemon Club, CreativeBoom  or Illustration Friday.  I am something else. I am me. You’re you too. 
I have lived my life creating work for galleries. There has always been that voice telling me I need to create illustrations, because I went to school for it and I am fairly good at it when given a project. The white elephant that I have chosen to ignore for so long is this; I spend so much time working, creating art, drawing and painting, but I do not spend this time creating illustrations. It is not a matter of discipline and I don’t want to feel guilty about it anymore. I simply want to follow a different path. I am a painter. That is the life I want to live and teach.  There is nothing to feel guilty about in that. 
I have been working more with my studio mates under the moniker, Freehand Armada. We have a small show of remixed still lives coming up. It has felt so good to focus on still lives. It has allowed me to enjoy my use of color and arrangement of shapes. It has helped me create that order out of the mathematical chaos that roger Allard talk about in The Blue Rider Journal. Here are a couple of my recent pieces. 

It’s nice to find the things that are slow. Life will always be hectic if you let. Drama begets drama. I can’t do it any more.  I have to she’d the things that don’t work an embrace what does. 
Peace
Mike
PS Courtney, it’s all for you. 

Categories
Art dreams inspiration motivation Painter Portland Maine Fine Artist rebirth success

A Clean Studio, Reading Japanese Fairy Tales, & Enjoying Your Successes

You always want to write yourself as a good character.  We always want to be the good guy, someone people empathize with.  I’ve been reading a book of Japanese fairy tales to my son the past couple days and it has me questioning the idea of good people.  We assume that if we are good people that people will treat us the way we should be treated, we will be addressed equivocally, our deeds will be remembered with satisfaction, but, as in these Japanese fairy tales, however, what if this just isn’t true?  What if it’s a misconception that people who are by and large good people are actually not doing enough, or what if without the awareness of their acts both good and bad they are not completely whole?

I struggle with this idea and many other smaller thoughts that may be my undoing, causing a lack in motivation, or may be conversely, my strength, providing my work, love, and character with that necessary depth to be whole.  Still, I struggle with empathy.  I get lost in the trappings of my work, the idea that I must keep working, solving my own life’s mysteries, creating because creating is what brings me energy and peace. I made a promise to myself that I would work hard enough to get to that elusive somewhere with my art.  I set the sights at where certain artists, like Jeff Soto and Barry McGee were showing and creating, determining that I needed to get there in order to be successful.  For about a dozen years I’ve labored at this.  I’ve created a formidable body of work, but no piece of which has brought me the stardom or notoriety that either of these heroes have attained.

Along the way I’ve married and had a beautiful son.  I’ve stopped cooking in restaurants and am now an adjunct faculty member, teaching art to people in their late teens and early twenties.  I have a comfortable studio and a comfortable home.  I can create comfortably every day of the week.

It doesn’t always make me happy though.  I long for so many things I can’t have.  I long for places where I’ve felt that I was more creative.  I long for better galleries, better artist friends, more stimulating conversation and a deeper and more whole understanding of what it is that I do.  If I could just have a deeper understanding of what it is that I am doing, maybe I could focus, feel good about the course that I am on, be validated, both in the creative work that I do and the qualities that I have to offer at my workplace.  But the truth of the matter is that beyond receiving a raise, or a newer
shinier teaching position with a tenure track and benefits, there is little validation that I can receive that will affect my life and the life of my family.

Recently, I’ve felt like maybe I’ve been the bad guy in my own story.  I’ve felt short with my family and with my work.  I went through a month long period where I was searching for new opportunities, new jobs, gallery shows, creative outlets of any kind.  I wanted to live life filled to the gills with my art again, but it never occurred to me until I was reading fairy tales to my child that maybe my cup was full and that’s why I’m having trouble pouring more into it.

I’ve created so much in the past two months and I am truly overwhelmed by the experience.  My work has grown, but I’m now at that stage where I need to let the soul grow into that space that the work has created.  Yesterday, I cleaned my studio again.  I consider it the rebirth, just in time for the winter, a season of rumination and creation.  Winter always provides me with that opportunity to go slow and reflect.  I hope it’s long and cold, because I will be inside filled with the warmth of my family’s love, the joy of my studies, and the satisfaction of my work.

Categories
Art Painter Passion Portland Maine Fine Artist Watercolor

The Fear that your Passion is Greater than Your Instructors Ability

Today was the first day of class for one of my sections of 2d design. Generally my 2d design class is filled with a number of non-art people. This is the nature of a community college, and I will say that most of the time, it is the complete privilege of teaching at a community college. I hae met some incredible people who are multifariously gifted and individual. 

On the first day of class I like to ask my students what their greatest fear about the class is. Often these answers focus around anxiety in drawing ability, shyness, inability to share, or the feeling that you might suck. Today, however, a student looked up and said, ” I am only scared that my teacher (that would be me) will not be as passionate about art as I am. This is a bold statement to make. I am not sure how most artists would take that attack. Do you laugh it off?  Do you question its truth?  These students have so much more youth and energy. Clearly they might have a bit more gusto, a bit more juice in the tank?  How arrogant a statement. Was it anything but passion for art that put me in the position of faculty to begin with?  I am not offended, but I am completely intrigued with what this student brings in and it calls to light something I haven’t thought about in ages. In order to be successful in the arts, I believe that you have to think that you are right. There is no one who can tell you otherwise. If they do your work fails. Pretty simple. It doesn’t really attest if you are actually right, but I think you need to be so confident in yourself that you think critics are ignoramuses rather than that your work is ill founded or poorly executed.

Here are a few suprematist coffee pots that I have been working on. I’m interested in the order of shapes necessary to communicate the object. I’ll keep you posted. 

In the meantime, thank you young lady for the reminder to remain passionate. We’ll see how this plays out. Maybe you are more passionate than I am, but for the next three months I will say, that you have to deal with me believing that I am right. 
Peace
-Mike
Categories
Art Maine Artist Painter Philosophy Sacred Geometry Truth

Sacred Geometry & Agnes Martin

Last week I substitute taught a class on minimalism for a friend of mine at Maine College of Art and I couldn’t be more grateful, as without her, I never would have stumbled across Agnes Martin’s Grid Paintings.  In a Charles Darwent article in the July, August issue of Modern Painters, Darwent says, “the artisanal slowness of Martin’s paintings – each canvas stretched and gessoed by the artist herself, its gridded lines worked out mathematically in her head and then drawn freehand onto the surface with a short ruler – calls for us to see them slowly.“

It was on a crazy morning that I reviewed this material for Angela’s class.  My wife was in need of a greasy breakfast and my son was not having it.  As Austin lost his kit and kaboodle, my dreams of understanding the nuances of a class on minimalism slipped away into an endless void, seemingly never to be found again.  But as Austin drifted off to sleep in the car and little wife ran into a bagel shop for a second go round at breakfast, I settled in to an article about a woman who worked during the fury that was the American Abstract Expressionist movement; a movement characterized by the testicular forces of Pollock and Rothko, a movement which could overshadow someone with something quiet to say.  I thought it sort of like trying to think with an infant screaming into your ear. While reading about her grid paintings I began to see the similarities between the origin of her quiet lines drawn with a small ruler, and my bic pen lines drawn with my square.  The measure is incredibly important, but really not important at all.  The patterns require a geometry, but where they fall apart oft becomes the most interesting part of the piece.  
A good friend visited me today in studio and showed me a video on sacred geometry and the number 9.  It is incredible how ordered the entire world is on a physical and theoretical level.  Still, when we consider our social interactions, cultural differences and general racial and caste warfare the order falls apart.  The micro view begets The Lord of the Flies while the macro view looks more like Huxley’s Brave New World.  We are wired for disorder but built on geometry.  Therein lies some of the meaning that I’ve been seeking for my sudden compulsion to paint patterns in the last year and a half.  That’s not all that I realized today, however.  As I was chatting with Melissa, it dawned on me, that when I was creating animal characters I was responding to people that I would see out and about town, combining features and personality traits, finding patterns within our human experience.  When I stopped working as much with the characters, I commenced creating patterns.  I began my own hermetic process, a holy endeavor, like a monk, holed away in my studio seeking a holy equation, but accepting that life is more about flaws and variances than exactitude.  That is my truth for today and will stand until a newer, shinier truth takes its place.

Time to head to bed with a sketchbook, my journal, and a book of Von Humboldt essays.
Peace
-Mike
Categories
Cityscapes Discovery Family Day Found Objects New England Painter Portland Maine totems Whale

Family Day and a Significant Break in Walking

Saturdays, since I quit working in the restaurant industry and found myself married with child, have become family day.  I often find myself reluctantly leaving the house to go do something social when really I want to hole up reading or head to studio, but all in all I am a fan of family day.  Today we ventured out for a walk.  After leaving the house and taking a left turn, we walked all the way up the hill and down the Eastern Prom to the water.  We then turned left again and walked along a bit of the Back Bay Trail.  The Back Bay Trail features a free wall where folks are legally allowed to paint graffiti.  There was a fellow working as we passed today.  As we walked past I started thinking about how I’ve always wanted to do work in public.  The problem is that I’ve never wanted to leave that lasting mark on a space.

I have often wondered, however, if the act of subtraction within a landscape might work the same as addition in a landscape.  Both Leave a lasting mark.  No matter how we look at it, the environment that we see is the environment that is.  What I mean is this, we cannot exclude the detritus of society in favor of a bucolic sense of the pristine landscape.  Our landscape is just as much our trash as it is our carefully tended shrubberies, raised beds, and lawns.  If we are to remove that detritus with the cognitive desire for visual change cannot that act make just as much of a mark as adding ink or paint?

The discovery of such an object, Gascoygne contended, is accompanied by an emotional experience “of an aesthetic nature . . . as the finder discovers an unrealised significance in the object” (p. 170). A new boundary is formed around the object by the finder through removing it from its found environment and placing it in a new one, thus empowering the finder in the role of creating a new reality for the object.  – Paul M. Cacim
I would argue that a new reality is also created for the space which the object formerly occupied.
After my wife and I had passed the free wall, we needed to stop to feed our son.  As we were sitting on a short fence, I noticed a stray piece of driftwood.  It struck me that it would be a good piece of wood to take home to work on, possibly to make another totem.  Then it occurred to me that the object had its own beauty that didn’t need to be removed from its environment.  Perhaps the drawing which I would make would be stronger left annonymously right where the found object was.  I decided to draw one of my totemic whales on this piece of wood, sign it, and leave it.  It was, I think, the first time that I have ever detached myself from the collecting process.  The collecting process encumbers my ability to distribute work in a manner that allows the necessary level of anonymity required to be successful in street art forays.

I was very much pleased with this piece and surprisingly felt fine creating something that only really exists on this blog and on my instagram page.  I feel like this fleeting level of connection is more appropriate than the attachment that I usually endow these objects with.  The act was more about that space than a gallery space or an art store.  It was that object AND place AND moment that I was attracted to.  Rather than attempting to render that level of excitement in a setting by making a bang up piece, maybe it is better to create and leave that piece?

Also, I wonder, as this act settled with me throughout the day.  I was able to show my discovery by creating this work and leaving it where I found it.  The tiny cityscapes project that I have begun is much the same.  I am excited about my discoveries.  I feel like not many people are concerned with looking up as they walk or drive about a city.  Things can be hidden in plain sight just by placing them above our field of vision.  I have been obsessed with looking up at these splices of Portland.  The pieces that I’ve been creating have just been the equivalent of a view finder showing others how and where to look to see these segments of society which are right in front of us.

My work is getting very exciting for me again.  Between the things I am reading and the theories that are starting to grow on me and the family that is constantly rooting for me and providing me pause, I feel as though I am becoming a much more mature artist.  I feel like I am actually chasing my dreams again.
Peace
-Mike