The KMASAGA SHOW 2008 is born out of the same desire as my paintings are, the desire to communicate in an expressive intuitive manner based in ones life/heart/soul. It is the same desire that drives me to silently ride my bike across the lonely expansive landscape or converse late into the night over a bottle of Jack Daniels with friends. But fundamentally, I see it is an organizational tool in the pursuit of my art/act of making, to be able to step back and see what is happening, what I am saying/feeling/making.
I quite often listen to a broad range of music while painting…hearing words, sounds, intonation of voices, and silence and patterns and how it all works together, like walking through the forest and hearing the singular note of a bird calling out in the silence and feeling it as a paint stroke on the canvas or the ghost rhythm of the waves one feels after spending hours on a boat…but these are felt moments in my life, not thoughts in my head…improvisional living/painting.
“Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or new ways to act. This invention cycle occurs most effectively when the practitioner has a thorough intuitive and/or technical understanding of the necessary skills and concerns within the improvised domain.”
Getting into the zone while painting is quite like achieving that zone in athletics, as in I am not thinking or naming/labeling as I am creating…I am just being. And it is this process that interests me, always brings me back to the studio when I look at a prior painting of my own and remember the purity of action that occurred to make it all happen. There is no right or wrong, no winning or losing, no frustration…just being.
“Philosophically, improvisation often focuses on bringing one's personal awareness "into the moment," and on developing a profound understanding for the action one is doing. This fusion of "awareness" and "understanding" brings the practitioner to the point where he or she can act with a range of options that best fit the situation, even if he or she has never experienced a similar situation. The study of the skills and techniques of improvisation can strongly influence one's competence in business, personal life, and/or in the arts.”
The moment I begin a painting is when I am building the actual frame for the board that I am to paint on…decision making is occurring on the size and shape, informing the view and my perspective…I start most paintings based in the landscape, on photos I have taken through the years from travels…sometimes from planes (plan view), others vistas in the distance (elevations) and then there is the ones from memory (interior elevations)…but they are all topographical views of my living, investigations that reveal and expose the raw act of living, as recorded by my act of mark making at the given moment. This is infused with the notion of "awareness" (sensory perception/experiencing/pure unnamed emotion) and "understanding" (observation/knowledge/analysis) and layered with an unspoken trust to let go of what it is to be, to open and converse with the painting, let it breathe and have a life of its own. Each mark/paint stroke is embedded with the moment of its creation, unfiltered life whether it is as delicate as the singular note of the bird in the forest or has the power/strength of the approaching tide…there is an honesty/authenticity in the mark. There are no words that ramble through my head during these moments of creating, just acute awareness…as I am mixing colors there is no I want this to be blue or green, but only the acts of reaching for tubes and mediums and brushes and the movement of paint and body and color and soul. Unlabled actions of being/awareness...
IN PROCESS I 36x12 oil on plaster
IN PROCESS II 30x48 oil on plaster
this is changing at this very moment in time....to evolve into the painting "PUSH", seen above)
IMPOTENT PLOT 30x48 oil on plaster
IMPOTENT PLOT DETAIL I
IMPOTENT PLOT DETAIL II
VIRDUROUS VISTAS 18x18 oil on plaster
MITOCHRONDITE 18x18 oil on plaster
CHINA BLUE SKIES 30x48 oil on plaster
CHINA BLUE SKIES DETAIL I
CHINA BLUE SKIES DETAIL II
CHINA BLUE SKIES DETAIL III
CHINA BLUE SKIES DETAIL IV
YELLOW SNOW 42x14 oil on plaster
ORANGE PUNCH 42x14 oil on plaster
FERTILITY 18x30 oil on plaster
PEACH LIGHTNING 36x15 oil on plaster
PEACH LIGHTNING IN PROGRESS
UTAH CANYON 36x18 oil on plaster
1 comment:
Does it feel different if you don't call it blue? I think if you had said *cornflower blue*, I would have cringed. While the sky is often that particular shade of blue, I can look at it without thinking it...but when I see it on a Crayola label, I have to put it back in the box. (Hope the dog feels better!)
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