The big studio issues this week are structure and scale. Both start with “s.” Sesame Street would love this. Maybe today’s blog can be brought to you by the number 6- that being the number of hours I spent trying to figure out what I’m doing. I’m in a “use what you have” phase. As a result when I ran out of paper I decided to start working on these smaller canvases. But I’m not completely out of paper, just mostly out. Today I was fighting a desperate desire to return to the known and the large. These small canvases are so difficult for me to deal with. I denied myself the paper because somewhere there must be a lesson to learn about working on a small scale. (not to mention scale relationships in general)
I am very excited about building canvas structures, although, that wasn’t on the schedule for today. The “schedule” is really whatever I feel like but since I’m nearly out of matt medium (a word which here means glue) I focused on painting today. The woven canvas, pictured below, took up a lot of my time today. I did not bring my camera so you can’t see what it looks like with a cactus painted on it. My working process is heavily intuitive. I am suspicious of intention, suspicious of the conscious decisions I make. I find beauty is heavily influenced by familiarity; ugliness, unfamiliarity. How decisions are made in my work is critically important to me. This is an unresolved issue that motivates a lot of what I do in the studio. I am not interested in imitating or creating illusion in the classical sense. I am interested in materials and how they interact with each other to create certain results. Because of this I brush, pour, stamp, staple and continually search for ways to interact with the surface of my work. And this means that no one may ever see that cactus!
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