Friday, April 30, 2004

Painting 1 (Rudy, Grass and Fallen Leaves) Walkabout #13, 9.23.2002 (Rudy) Walkabout #16, 9.24.2002 (Rudy Foreshortened) Walkabout #15, 9.24.2002 Walkabout #14, 9.24.2002 Here is the first installment of my paintings. I'll start small and intimate. These were painted in the fall of 2002. That summer I asked a local horse farm owner if I could paint on his farm. He has beautiful 50 plus acres of open land, with a horse track and a pond flanked by willows and birches. It is situated by a public rail road walking trail, but once you step inside the gate it feels very private (although the owner lets anyone come in to walk around the track). It seemed like a perfect place to paint at first, but I soon found out that painting outdoors especially in open space like this farm was not as bucolic and peaceful as I had imagined. The sun mercilessly beats down on you. The wind flattens the easel and throws the freshly painted canvas on the ground, face down. The cumulus turns into a dark rain cloud in front of your eyes, and you're racing with thunder and rain to gather everything to take cover(no, not under locust trees which farmers used to plant as lightening poles). That summer, especially, was a hot one. I painted in the 110 degrees weather (in the sun) a few times, lasting about 20 minutes each session. But these adverse conditions really helped me loosen up. In the end I had paintings that were half finished, smeared, scratched, sprinkled with dirt, hurried and abbreviated. It was exactly what I needed in order to break out of the hard shell I had created for myself while grinding out in a cutthroat contemporary art market for a few years. But you wouldn't know from these little sketches that I was painting in such a wonderful open space. After all, I could paint my dog and a bit of grass and dirt and fallen leaves anywhere, right? Yes and no. Painting, slowly has been revealed to me, is not so much about conveying certain ideas, depicting visual scenes, or exploring formal aesthetic issues such as shape and color, as about being in a certain state of mind--dare I call it bliss--and, concocting from mixtures of pigments and oil to create a tiny universe, which, in turn, induces that similar bliss for those who come in contact with it. So the farm was a perfect place for me to find that bliss. My dog Rudy was always with me, always sleeping (as you can see) at my feet. He blended in perfectly among the fall leaves and deep green of tough farm weeds. Now, two years later, the farm is on the market, its owner moving further north, and Rudy is blind and deaf. But he still sleeps at my feet. And I'm still painting. 12:24:00 PM    comment []

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