Strange Reporting
After more than 2 years of neglect I’m re-opening my Painting Lives! blog. My idea is to approach this in more of a diary form than full on exhibition reviews. It will be less formal and I intend to get less wound up about language and writing quality, instead focusing on a range of art and painting-related topics. These will include thoughts about conversations and studio visits, about art that I see and have seen and things I’m thinking about in the studio, without having to necessarily flesh out thoughts completely. My intent is to write 3 to 5 days a week. I’m hoping it will also make what has often been a bit of a grueling task, more fluid, more fun and help me stay sharp; in short, it will provide practice. I will continue to write reviews and post them on the Huffington Post and perhaps shortly other sites.
Studio wall with paintings in various states of completion.
It occurs to me that this is very much how I approach painting. To the best of my ability I take the breaks off and let myself be open to the vagaries of mood, feeling, letting what will happen on any given day. This has allowed me to become more productive than I’ve ever been, and to stay in connection to what it is I’m actually doing, until those days when magic takes place, parts come together and I feel myself more as a vehicle for the divine than the petty ego demands that can be so tiresome; (every painter I know has these kinds of ego thoughts. It’s called professionalism, and though it has its place it’s not what really MATTERS. I’m sure I’ll return to this topic later.)
Today I received a studio visit from one of my favorite painters, Michael Berryhill. Some studio visits bring confusion or re-visioning, while others bring clarity and a sharper awareness of what it is I’m actually about. This was one of the latter variety and I’m feeling extremely energized by it. Michael is one of the painters that I feel the most close to in terms of painterly concerns and practice and yet, being different people his particular way of looking at things was very refreshing. He spoke about his and my paintings as ‘Strange Reporting.’ I love this idea. It relates to how I described my work a few years ago as being paintings of things that you don’t quite know what they are. It’s an acknowledgement that the paintings are taken from, inspired by and about the world, about experience, things seen and felt. That the paintings should be somehow oblique, mysterious and indirect is also a reflection of that reality. I want to avoid anything that sounds like justification here because it’s unnecessary. The thing is, I often feel I’m chasing something, a memory, a feeling, a dream, an obsession, that resists explication. This may be the essence of why I, and I suspect many others, paint. ‘Strange Reporting’ strikes me as a beautiful and apt phrase for this experience. Thank you Michael!
