Like many human beings including young children, I use intuition to make pictorial decisions about composition and mark making. The results in this most recent work are outcomes I can live with. I say I can live with these decisions as if I am uncertain about the work's existence but in reality I feel good about this work. As Robert Motherwell explained about his art, his creative force was generated by an internal source related to the primal realm. For Motherwell, his artmaking experience was organic and authentic. I find myself aligned with his thinking. Intuitive artmaking is as natural and pure an art experience as I can generate.
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| Rhizome Abstraction acrylic on canvas, 38" x 23" |
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| detail |
Lately I just felt that my back was against the wall (Thank You Larry Poons). Literally against the wall. I had entered a make or break period where after nit-picking and tip-toeing, I just needed to become more aggressive with my process. Trusting the process, and trusting myself, I had to let my anxiety go. The affect of sublimation could be obtained. Once I found the "look" I needed, I moved forward and the event was profound and uplifting. Artmaking is so good for one's psyche. The experience can become euphoric.
Fundamentally, the marks within the composition can be read as shape, edge, polygon, color modulation or pathway signs. On a deeper level the elements form a shifting composition that reads as a map or a rhizome. Semiotics is the science of sign interpretation and perhaps the viewer might perceive something different. That is the beauty of abstract art, we naturally utilize our powers of signification to make associations with the work that are unique to our own subjectivities.
I am hooked on this developing process and can't let it go.
At the Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB) Institute last July in Boston, I was experimenting with a similar mark making approach. For now, I'm seeing new opportunities to expand on this process.
How does one express a feeling?
I had been channeling Motherwell, but now see possibilities into the beyond.
I'm going to be working with this process again in the studio at the TAB Institute this coming July!
Can't wait to get back to the studio!
Here are the experiments from last summer's TAB Institute!
