Etudes Et Essais #2, Fausse Peinture.
85% of the way done.
I didn’t intend for this work to be anything elaborate. I have started several pieces that have a figure in a space and a work of art on the wall. I like to think about who the person is and their relationship with the displayed artwork. I’m really getting into the depth of character Otto Dix is rendering with his work and want to see if I can play with that in the future. In this piece I was just thinking about a light/dark study.
I started off with a photo I found online. I wanted to practice with egg tempera and thought this would be a good work to use as a study.
I’ve been drawn to this one scene in this bad movie for 25 years because of the Twombly painting
I work on around 60 pieces at once, so I’m skipping from one to the other all day everyday. I started to add Indexing information to each piece. (More on why I am doing this here)
Brand: ELGIN acts as a brand identifier.
Series: ETUDES ET ESSAIS represents the series this work is a part of.
Warning Label: 假画 acts as a government advisory.
Gallery: OLAF-SCAR & NORGREN represents a fictional gallery.
ADDRESS: Represents the fictional street for that gallery.
Dates: Represent the approximate start/finish dates for this work.
In another start of a painting, I started to mess with sunlight hitting an interior wall from a window. I liked this and felt like I had to show the light falling across that Cy Twombly painting in the background.
As I moved forwards with this work, I first HAD to push beyond photorealism. When I was younger I painted a slew of photoreal studies and I can’t ever do that again. It makes me physically ill to think about directly copying from a photo now days. So I started to mess with the figure and space.
This brought me to about here. I like it. But it doesn’t feel right. (DAMN IT, it probably would have been okay to fine-tune this).
Filiger, Charles - The Recumbent Christ (1895)
While I was struggling with the colors of the interior, I came across this piece by Filiger and knew I wanted to push in this direction.
Modersohn-Becker, Paula - Girl's head in front of a window (1902)
I also wanted to push the quality of the mark making, color, and representational aspects towards this painting by Modersohn-Becker.
I hear noises all the time. Noise is part of the world and I felt like I had to indicate the daily life sounds. I found myself adding and removing sounds like ‘ssss’ to the picture. I know its weird. I just had to add it.
Eventually, this piece became an exercise in pushing color around and setting marks against one another. More and more, I’m finding that when a work starts to come together, painting begins to feel like placing a puzzle piece in the right spot. That doesn’t mean I won’t paint over it again. It’s more a momentary feeling of rightness (when the negative space, the color, and the direction of the marks suddenly begin to hum together).
I’m talking about very small things. It might be the separation between two colors: the edge of one side of a letter in the foreground and the marks or color sitting behind it. It’s about how those things relate. As a painting gets pushed closer to completion, those moments of rightness start appearing more often. Bit by bit, the whole work begins to turn into something that feels resolved.
But that process also means recognizing when I’ve overdone an area. Sometimes I can see that I’ve ruined a section by doing too much. When that happens, I might find myself obliterating marks and spaces I’ve become attached to. I form an emotional bond with the parts of a painting that are going right, which makes it difficult to destroy them. But often I have to wipe out a larger area in order to rebuild it.
What mattered to me in this piece were the moments of discovering something through the act of painting. In the past, I had used photos more directly as references. Here, I began with a photo, but I didn’t want the painting to simply follow it. I wanted to push every part of the image until it revealed something I hadn’t found yet. The figure, the composition, the color, and the conceptual structure all had to be tested.
While I’m working, I try to let the painting tell me where to go next. That process can feel like a fight. I’m fighting what I’ve already put down, even when I like parts of it. I have to be willing to destroy areas that are working in order to move the whole painting forward. The image may begin with something recognizable, but the actual work is in the rebuilding. I’m sitting at my desk holding this small, fragile panel, making something tightly engineered, while in my mind, when things are unfolding, it feels like I’m in the middle of a hard-fought battle.
Painting (Process/Technique):
This is an egg tempera painting. It was one of the first attempts of mine with this medium. I’m really liking the quality of the marks and color. From what I understand, I’m using the egg medium in an archival manner. I say this because I’m messing with the amount of pigment I’m adding at different times. I’m starting to find ways to add thicker transparent layers that are causing the colors to glow a little. I’m adding a video to try to illustrate what this looks like. I can’t capture it with my phone camera.
VIDEO
I feel like I learned a lot about color and the qualities of egg tempera here. I think I can still grow considerably and am looking forwards to outdoing this piece.
Conceptual:
I’m judging all of my work with how the pieces fit in with ‘concepts’. I am planning on pushing the ‘concept’ part of the art quite a bit in the future. This piece has nothing extraordinary about it.
Noises: I have the background noise part of it that I can’t explain very well yet. I have had words in a lot of my paintings and they usually represent turret spasms. These noises are just the never ending hiss of your inner ear or cars driving by. That ambient noise had to be in this piece for some reason.
Metadata: I described the meaning behind it before. I like it. Everything in our society has words sprayed across it. I feel like it adds a lot to the composition. .
Symbols: I left the symbology out of this. While I worked on this piece, I started to add symbols to everything else I’m working on, but I left this one alone.
Random Thoughts:
A few of the larger thoughts I had while working on Etudes Et Essais.
The word ‘Art’ is too broad of a term:
I have thoughts about artists written out and wrote a long piece about Saville. I like to think of painting as being a discovery process. I have worked from photo mediums a lot in the past. When I work I think there is a zombie process that your trying to get out of, and then there is the ‘artistic flow’ that occurs when your lucky. (I wrote a long piece on Jenny Saville and what bothers me about her work as a general representation on what I’m eluding to here).
Brice Marden:
Brice Marden is a weird guy.
I thought a lot about Marden, his practice and methods. While working on this piece I eventually focused on creating an image based on my interpretations of one of Mardens line paintings in the background.
I don’t get very much from so many of the abstract expressionist/color field painters. I think some of the work is mind blowingly beautiful.
I was listening to this well produced video where three very intelligent ladies were talking about a few pieces by Helen Frankenthaller, the video was entitled ‘how to talk about abstract art’, and while I was listening to it my mind was going ‘wtf are you all talking about, your making beautiful poetic word salad here critiquing a painting that is nothing but color dabs at a canvas’, ‘this is all insane’. I was wondering if my reaction was sexist or if this was just the best example of why this whole movement that generations of artists devoted themselves to is pretty much meaningless. I don’t think the Frankenthaller piece that evokes a French country side competes with a picture by Marie Cassat (find artist).
So I started to think about Brice Marden, who I had been doing some research on. I knew of his rigorous processes and system of rules. I feel like he has some beautiful paintings