I talk with my hands

It's funny when the wide Internet ocean washes up two similar pieces of information in one week, but that's what I found on my shore. First, the always delightful Brain Pickings people posted a curious article about erotic Surrealist hand signaling.

Like so much about Surrealism, it seems laughable in its juvenile naughtiness. It's mostly crude jokes appended to the signs of the ASL alphabet.

But when you see two things about gestures, you need to take notice. And so, when I finished laughing at A Glossary of Gestures for Critical Discussion, I knew I had to share these...

The Critical Whirl. ‘I’ve read too much Marx and I can’t get my words out’

Circle hand clockwise in a small but rapid motion towards the audience. Accelerate and repeat until idea unpacked.

Though these are just silly coincidences on the web, they call to mind a few things...first I think about the way gestures and speaking are related. I've been reading a good deal about the origins of language over the last few years in hopes of putting together a class, and I've been fascinated by some of the ideas I've encountered.

Closely related is the way that gesture clarifies communication - I have heard stories about when the telephone was new and how people couldn't quite communicate through it clearly, lacking facial expressions and gestures. Even now, we have to supplement emails and postings with punctuation and hints about the emotional tenor of our messages ;-)

Finally, I was thinking about Andrew Solomon's doorstop of a book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, with its detailed discussion of deaf culture. These are, of course, not about that, but they do imply the limits of speech and the need for us to have recourse to communication by other means....Solomon poses an interesting question about ablism in his book, suggesting that deafness is not - as it is so often figured - a handicap of 'deficiency' as a form of 'horizontal' identity, a term he invented to describe the kinds of communities we join that are not passed down to us through genetics, heredity, or tradition. From time to we all need to join other communities, and these sites talking about gesture codes play on that need in a small way...

Sudden changes

It's a strange feeling when you have a number of paintings going over a period of weeks and then, all of a sudden, you have a number of paintings nearly done all at once. That's what happened this week - all at once it seems five paintings are in the final phases and I am just tidying up...Here is a picture of new one (which takes a phrase from Roland Barthes: "It is the act of writing that subjugates pictorial gestures so that to paint is never anything but to inscribe")

I am still messing around with solids for the Impossible Books, too, and here are some other pyramids...these are made from equilateral triangles and fit together very differently than the ones made with right triangles...I am still getting the hang of reconciling what I think a solid should do in space and what it actually does. Definitely I was not wired for sculpture...

Impossible book models

With my sister, Mary Beth Brown, I am working on some models for a show in February at Philadelphia Sculpture Gym called Impossible Books. Early on, we decided that 'impossible' books were text books and have tried to deal with that problem...I'll flesh out that idea in writing in the weeks ahead, but here are some photos of the first of what I hope will be two or three models...

Each unit is part of a text about principles that guide the study of American History in a freshman class...

...they will nest in a structure within which they can be rotated and considered on various levels...

We're thinking of 3D printing the pyramids and cutting the framework from wood...just wrapping my head around the geometry is a bit of a trick right now...

Anonymous Shiva Linga Paintings at Arcadia University Gallery

Installation view of "Anonymous Shiva Linga Paintings"

I have been trying to get out to Arcadia University Art Gallery for a few weeks. As everyone in Center City Philadelphia knows, it's a trek...but it's worth it.

This is especially true this month, as the gallery has mounted an unusual exhibit of meditative works from India, Anonymous Shiva Linga Paintings.

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism describes linga as a "mark" or "sign" but also as the "name of the pillar shaped form of the god Shiva." Because Shiva is as a generative force, the pillar-shaped form he takes is described as kind of 'phallic symbol.' Evidently, Shiva is worshipped in this form as the result of a curse put on him the brahmin Bhrgu. But it's interesting to dig around a little on this and to learn that the linga and its cousin, the shalagram are forms of 'aniconic' images; symbols that are intended to represent deities. The way the linga is discussed in the literature I encountered suggests it is primarily a sculptural form, but in this exhibit, various forms of ovals play the part.

The paintings are riveting. Arrayed on three walls of the gallery are about thirty five pictures, all vertical in orientation (like portraits), none larger than twenty by sixteen inches. Each is hung on an invisible horizon that encircles the gallery, so they are all about level with the head of a person of average height.  Framed under glass, the paintings dimly reflect your face as you look at them. The majority of the paintings are broodingly dark, like cartoon holes. Some of these seems to be eclipsing rings and busts or color that shimmer and peek out from behind the dark forms. A few paintings are built on vibrant colors, which seem shocking in this context. An ovoid burst of Pepto-Bismo pink appears to raise cerulean eyebrows in a 1994 picture described as being from Sanganer and New Delhi. In another, a dark rose lozenge is criss crossed by pale blue gray droplets of paint. One senses that everything is planned; in some pictures the central form has straighter sides than in others, giving it a different gesture or attitude. In a few, as in a 1987 picture from Jaipur, it wears a necklace of three dots. Occasionally, a tiny dot appears within the form below the center, like a kind of painterly belly button.

Anonymous tantric painting, Shiva Linga, 1972, Jaipur unspecified paint on found paper 13.75 x 9.25″ 

All are painted on rather fragile and forlorn looking scraps of paper. Writing appears to be struggling to pass from the back of some sheets and into plain (if backward) view on the display side. Here and there, it looks like conservators have tried to patch thin areas of the paper. Effulgent mists of red, blue or yellow paint (or is it ink? India has a long tradition of watercolor painting...) drift lightly across surfaces. Sometimes little holes of have been worn through by painting and one gets the impression that they may have been been created by intense gaze.

Looking at the paintings slowly and in succession, one understands their meditative function. It's hard to imagine the abundance of them in the gallery is anything like the way they would be used in the world (in fact, the gallery notes mention that "When complete, the paintings are pinned or pasted to the wall at home to foster private meditation, eventually to be replaced by another fresher example"). On the cold and quiet winter day I visited the gallery, it was easy to pretend this was a space outside of the art world's usual hustle and bustle of make-believe commerce, but it wasn't so far outside of that as to preclude feeling a little strange looking at ostensibly sacred objects in an avowedly secular context.


The crossroad of the sacred and the secular becomes an important aspect of the exhibit. Being very spare and abstract, the paintings seems entirely different from western devotional art. They appear to appeal to the kind of general spiritualism that has replaced organized religion in contemporary life...despite being firmly rooted in a specific set of religious texts and imaging conventions. Gallery notes observe "an uncanny affinity" between these works and "examples of 20th century abstract art from Europe and the U.S. (works by Paul Klee and Agnes Martin are frequently cited as examples)". Those of us who have sat through secular sermons that 'justify' non-western art in terms of western modernist aesthetics will, I hope, be forgiven for rolling our eyes.

The idea of anonymity in today's art world, saturated by celebrity as it is, is strange enough. The idea that a work of art could be a useful object, one that focuses attention, limits distraction, and encourages meditation sounds revolutionary. Walking through the show, I was, more than once, put in the mind of Philadelphia painter Quentin Morris, whose Buddhist sympathies inform his monochromatic paintings and drawings. In the gallery notes, we read of the French poet Franck Andre Jamme, "who has played an instrumental role in introducing these works to western audiences." Jamme has an interesting story, and was apparently entrusted with access to the paintings after considerable hardship. It feels strange to have such easy access to them given how well-concealed they were - until relatively recently - in the religious communities from which they originate.

So how far would you go to see something really great? The magnetic pull of New York is inescapable in Philadelphia (and this exhibit came to us through NY's Feature Gallery), but people seldom talk about going to Baltimore, DC, or Chicago to see great work...let alone visiting the West Coast or traveling abroad. There are whole art worlds in these cities in the shadows of their respective megamuseums. What are these artists doing and thinking?

I'm not of the economic strata that can plan my travel around exhibits in London or elsewhere  (even Baltimore...), but I worry that we are getting a little local in our art viewing...that a diet of a few galleries interrupted from time to time for an art fair is good enough and that when we come face to face with something strange and wonderful, we'll see it only through what we already know. With the collapse of the art criticism world, I cannot count on reading about shows in other cities as easily as I once could, and that's terrible. If those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, what happens to those who don't know what's going on around them?

Speeding along

So for the last large pictures, I made up this crazily complex system of masking and stenciling. It was a great acceleration over the first iteration of this idea earlier this fall (where I masked each value of each hue in sequence), but it still seemed to take forever (really, it took six weeks to make the paintings...)

This time, it seem to have figured it out smoothly enough that I can rip through this process. Here are some pictures of another new canvas, where I was able to get two colors on in one day. Hopefully done soon...stay tuned!

Grad panels, a 'circle-of-life' thing...

Mark Tansey, Triumph Over Mastery

Early December: time to look at what the grad students are up to this year.

A few years back, I wrote a little bit about grad panels, and once again I am losing sleep over them. I am doing a lot fewer this year than most as I am out on leave, but I still need to join in for a few. Going this year is odd, since i haven't been in any grad students' studios. I am part of some gray facade of higher ed this year...the committee member no one really knows.

Add this to the fact that I cannot keep straight the rituals of various schools (is this the school where we ask the candidate to leave and wherein we have the real, substantive conversation in his/her absence, or is this the school where they stay and we are awkwardly keeping comments to ourselves for a few minutes?) and I am a mostly useless committee member.

Except for one thing: I am honest and I have no stake in anyone. 

I hate committees where people know the candidate and overlook obvious shortcomings of the work or the thesis. I fear ever being that teacher, one who has formed an attachment to a student that precludes clear-eyed evaluation of the work. 

I did three meetings in a week, and I've seen too much of that. When the work is good, it makes you play the downer, pointing out some way in which it could be better. When it's less than good, you are the one whose impatience at being a part of the conversation colors the whole meeting.

All of which leads me to ask, why do we do these panels this way? When I was in grad school, a students could select a panel of more-or-less total strangers (you know, the sort of people who might go see shows?) They didn't talk about the work as though you were going to revise anything; they talked about it as a thing that was done and sitting in front of them that needed to be figured out in 40 minutes. They didn't want to make better, they wanted to understand what it was. It was the best thing in the world - you saw how the work played to people who hadn't been listening to you figure it out for 15 weeks. They would never see you again. They told you it was great. Or that it wasn't great. Most of the time, they split the vote. 

As I get farther and farther in my teaching career, I get more and more clarity about what I can and cannot hope to do as a teacher. I see a lot of my colleagues trying to change lives. I hear a lot of conversations about teaching predicated on recalling 'that teacher' who changed your life. 

I have had great teachers. I have learned a lot, and I'm grateful to the many formal teachers I have had, and to the colleagues I learned from. But I can't get on board with the mystical, charismatic teaching ideal. What I see every time I sit down with students shows me that that's a bad idea. What I want to see is work.

Work in the studio..."What lies at the heart of everything is not fire"

After the making a litho this summer, I thought I would try rationalizing my application of color, moving from light to dark and doing a whole hue family at once...

The stencils get kind of intense....

...as the painting comes together, I have to start a punch list of revisions to be made. This is when the planning pays off...I know what I did and how to fix it...

Getting very close to finished here...I like the gradient space the word cloud sits in. A few more tweaks and we'll be done.

Found while preparing next semester's classes...

"'Words, those guardians of meaning, are not immortal, they are not invulnerable,' wrote Adamov in his notebook for 1938; 'some may survive, others are incurable'. When war came, he added: "Worn, threadbare, file do down, words have become the carcass of words, phantom words; everyone drearily chews and regurgitates the sound of them between their jaws.'" (21)

"We have histories of massacre and deception, but none of metaphor. We cannot accurately conceive what it must have been like to be the first to compare the color of the sea with the dark of wine or to see autumn in a man's face. Such figures are new mappings of the world, they reorganize our habitation in reality. When the pop song moans that there is no new way of saying that I am in love or that her eyes are full of stars, it touches one of the main nerves in Western literature." (23)

George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

Are Emoticons the Future of Language? | Off Book | PBS Digital Studios

Night Gallery All Paintings

A slow down

I've been hugely hung up by technical problems this last week (like the death of my computer and the concurrent disappearance of hundreds of photos and studio files that went down with the hard drive). These have also caused big workload shifts, so I am missing deadlines aplenty...

I have a few interesting things to share...first, I was taken by this conversation on The Takeaway about the way social media use affects student writing. My teaching career started only a few years before Facebook, but blogs were already a big deal. At the time I felt (and I still feel) that students are very good at writing about their feelings about a given topic, but not so much good at writing about that topic. I doubt social media can be blamed for that. And anyone who equates texting with writing is looney.

They other notable item was a conversation on WHYY's Radio Times with poet Kenneth Goldsmith, whose book, Seven American Deaths and Distasters, is on my Christmas list (hint, hint). I am torn about what I think about the avant garde poet some call Kenny G. I enjoyed his book on Uncreative Writing, but when I heard him speak on the radio, he came across as more flippant than I would have hoped. It didn't help that from time to time he sounded like William Shatner...

...I will be back to this soon, and with photos. Thanks for your patience!

Playing by rules

One of the main objectives of this break was to find a way to use my own writing in my work. 

I still hate that idea.

But it's necessary, given one can't read enough to have endless material at one's fingertips, and there is a rather narrow spectrum of things that seem paintable to me in what I read. Also, it would be nice to read for pleasure from time to time, rather than to always feel like what I am doing needs to be used in the studio...

But I can't just sit down and write something for a painting. It seems there needs to be some kind of structure. Structure provides important guard rails for creativity and no one knows this better than the writers and artists of the Oulipo.

So I looked at my paintings for rules. One obvious rule in the signal flag paintings is that three letter words work well (I've known this for a while, but been unable to act on it). I thought it would be okay to allow six, nine, and twelve letter words, too, as those fit nicely. I decided to take the cue from the size of the canvas on which I wanted to work instead of letting the text dictate the scale. So I chose four-foot squares somewhat arbitrarily (as in, I had these stretchers and they weren't doing anyone any good without paintings on them...).

I mapped out a number of arrangements of flags, some with thirty blocks, some with more. I have settled on a thirty five-block arrangement, which means I need to come up with 105 characters in three-, six-, nine-, twelve-, or fifteen-letter words.

Easy right?

I've been posting about the progress of the first one, and here is a picture of it nearly complete:

It reads:

Before the end, you forget all the images and sounds placed before you Deceitful script surrounds you and cryptography begins.

I am starting the second one, and just composed the text:

The secret languages you use are sad and opaque metaphors camouflaging poetic worlds and revealing our tragic aestheticism.

I suppose it's predictable that they would be about language, but I found it a little funny that they are so consistent. Working on them is pleasantly maddening, like trying to solve a puzzle. I think I have a few more left in me, and I imagine these will go one for a little while yet. I keep coming up with fragments...

She alphabetized disasters

Our pictorial mentality mimics tragedy

The pictorial messenger

Ask our regretful god for energy

Adults cry out for the crappy symbol

Idiots see misplaced deceit

that I hope I can use...

Yet more progress

More progress...

Work in progress...

I started a new canvas in the studio the other day.

At four-feet square, it's large for me...

Underpainting is, always when I work large, a huge issue...

 

Fortunately, I'm finding ways to be efficient about the stencils... 

Now we're ready to start encoding the message...

Halloween

Not sure why, but I have been drawing skeletons for a few weeks now. I was definitely inspired by the charming catalog of the Puro Muerto show a few years back at the LA Public Library...I know I made more than a few small pictures of skeletons when I was in school, very much influenced by the images in European painting and printmaking...

Either way, Happy Halloween!

I think I know where this one came from...

This one was in a dream the other day...

I start things by copying. This couple was in the Puro Muerto book, but they inevitably turned into my glamous wife and me (below)

I still think copying is  agood way to learn something...or at least I hope it is becuase it's how I start every project...

Another iron enters the fire...

When I visited Matt Sepielli's studio recently, he told me about his upcoming project for Temporary Allegiance at Chicago's Gallery 400. He was kind enough to encourage me to check it out. 

I found a quote I'd like to work with, one attributed to Sinclair Lewis:

When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

I have found a good fabricator and starting making drawings...

Hopefully this will get done fast...I could use the thrill of finishing something...

Dying Languages

In June, 2005, Elizabeth Kolbert (writing in the The New Yorker) poignantly described an emerging crisis in world langauges. Focusing on Eyak, Kolbert called attention to the phenomenon fof language extinction adn described efforts being made to preserve languages that are being erased adn forgotten as populations migrate, assimilate, or disappear into the fog of mass communication.

I was reminded of this sad story when I saw images of remarkable paintings by Moroccan-born artist Hamid Kachmar, on view at Boston University's Sherman Gallery. Here's a passage from the gallery's description of the show:

In Reviving the Ancient Tifinagh Script, Kachmar renders the ancient Amazigh script, Tifinagh, into textual and visual compositions that represent a struggle for identity, cultural survival, and self-conception. For centuries, the Tifinagh script has been politically suppressed; painted out of Amazigh people’s collective consciousness. For Hamid and many other cultural activists of his generation, Tifinagh represents not just the ancient script of a still widely spoken indigenous language, but also a symbol of the struggle for cultural survival.

a painting by Hamid Kachmar

Black Flag - Richard Dawkins

It occurred to me the other day that I needed to make a black flag. I had been messing around with text from Beowulf, but it was hard to get it right...very difficult text chosen for rather sad reasons. I went back to a favorite passage (by Richard Dawkins, used in James Gleick's remarkable book, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood) and made this...I think I am going to be making a large canvas this way soon...

The text reads:

What lies at the heart of everything is not fire, not warm breath, not a spark of life, it is information, words, instructions. 

I have been planning to make a large, shaped panel version of this, but it is beginning to look like that's not going to happen on this sabbatical. I have run into long delays getting the panels made. I will have to re-direct.

 I suppose one of the lessons of this is not to put too many eggs in one basket...

Review: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

I have a slim bookshelf of plague fiction. It's an unsettling corner of my library, one that shines a light on human self-interest and indifference. Of course there's Camus' Plague and Saragamo's Blindness.  The Flame Alphabet shares a lot with these books - like them, it is full of things from the world we know. Telephones and copper wires. Cars, houses, trees, and children. But it also contains things that are not of this world - mysterious illnesses that stem from children's speech, holes in the woods that carry sermons to lonely worshippers.

As a work of largely experimental fiction (it's encouraging and a little hard to believe how many mainstream outlets blurbed the book), The Flame Alphabet suffers from a certain almost autistic emotional coolness. I found this much more readable than Marcus' earlier book, The Age of Wire and String, in part because the author does an astonishing job capturing the confusing, destructive love of parenting. Characters labor in ignorance long after you know what's causing their illness, and when ignorance no longer serves, they turn to denial for comfort.

For me, the passages in which the book treats language as a real thing are most engaging. For much of the second part of the book, we see minute descriptions of the act and effects of writing. These are captivating, and one begins to see the world slightly differently. The proliferation of signs and messages in the semiosphere takes on a quality of menace. William S. Burroughs described language as a virus and Marcus carries that idea to an extreme point, giving readers a world in which symbiosis is no longer the routine and where overexposure has catastrophic consequences.

What do we get from reading plague literature? From Camus, I got a strange reassurance of the agency and fundamental goodness of mankind. From Saragamo, I got horror - a sense of how we are ultimately wired to take advantage of any situation. From Marcus, I get a sense of the destructive power of love, of our unwillingness to leave a toxic situation long after it has begun to kill us. I could wish for an ending to the book, and for the resolution of many of its open questions about the motivations and outcomes of characters' actions, but I am satisfied with what I got: a thoughtful consideration of language, an allegory of parental misery, and a chance to ask myself, in a disaster like the plague described here, who which one of these characters would I be? 

New quote to paint....

“The wonderful thing about language is it promotes its own oblivion…My eyes follow the line on the paper, and from the moment I am caught up in their meaning, I lose sight of them. The paper, the letters on it, my eye and the body are there only as the minimum setting of some invisible operation. Expression fades before what is expressed and this is why its mediating role may pass unnoticed.”

Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Written on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art

Cut-ups getting structured...

One of the main things I wanted to work on during my sabbatical was find a way to use writing I had generated myself in my work. I've been fascinated by the use of others' writing, but I feel like it sometimes slows me down and I need to have some other material I can work on more quickly. Over the last few years, I have been working on small paper maquettes of signs. These seemed to provide the best opportunity for me to do my own writing, and I have chosen to work in a cut-up method to generate the short passages I'm using. A few of these are coming together all at once; here are some pictures of the first...

One of scores of collages I've made since early summer...

...I've been tinkering with the lettering and scale, and had the pieces cut out on the laser cutter at Tyler's Digital Fabrication Studio

The stand for ths sign is nearly done and needs to be painted, then the letters will be attached...

Another Broadside

Translators | Traitors

I am starting to worry about this class I will teach next semester in translation. So I was excited to see a couple of reflections on the problem of translation by Daniel Mendelsohn and Dana Stevens in The New York Time Sunday Book Review.

Mendelsohn has a few interesting and not immediately apparent examples that stress the importance of accuracy, but he really wanted to emphasize tone.

Tone is everything. A novel in which characters say “I daresay” is galaxies apart from one in which characters say “I kinda think.” Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” is notorious for its elaborate diction and inscrutable syntax — a murky Greek that nicely suggests the moral and political murkiness that is the play’s subject. When David R. Slavitt chose to pepper his 1997 translation of this titanic masterpiece with phrases like “learning curve,” “stress-related” and “Watch what you say, mister,” he was not only cheapening the diction but hamstringing the play’s larger meanings. Clytemnestra is not Joan Crawford.

Interesting point, but I am tempted to agree with Stevens, who says that translation is how, "succeeding generations and cultures to reinterpret and reshape [stories] as their own." This is the classic confrontation: for whom is the translation written? For the author, or for the reader? Certainly authors have a stake in how their works are represented when they are carried over from one tongue to another (and that's where I find myself in sympathy with Mendelsohn's criteria of accuracy), but the skillful translator knows the language and idioms of the target language and how to carry the sense of the text across in such a way that readers can access it. 

While translation has been a powerful metaphor around which I organize my own work, I fear it risks being a gimmick when you're dealing with artists who are not all that sure of what they are saying and not all that fluent in any one specific means of expression (I simply cannot use the phrase 'visual language,' which I grow to despise more every day). I wonder if thinking about translation is missing the point - possibly we should be thinking about bilingualism, or about processes of editing and publication. 

But still something inheres to the idea of translation that makes it seem like a good way to understand the process of making something. It makes intuitive sense to some people to see an idea as 'translated' between head and hand. 

Drawing Beowulf

Everything is too large, 2013, gouache on paper, 30 x 22 inches.

The first of at least two drawings based on a passage from Beowulf. Stay tuned for more...

The Elephant in the Studio - Defining Terms

It is winter of 2000 and I am colder than I think I have ever been. I am in a graduate seminar with more than a dozen other students in a bright room overlooking Lake Michigan. I have avoided these seminars for most of the time I've been in school, but I let a friend talk me into this class and now I am regretting it. We have been asked to produce an artist's statement and I feel I cannot not say the one thing I want to say about my work - "I want my work to be more like prayer".

Inspired by Sol Lewitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art, I produce a statement called 'Eleven Lies and One Truth about my Work'. I make outrageous claims about the theory and context of my work, and slip in my one true statement. It is recognized immediately as the truth and I am called to explain.

In this installment of the Elephant in the Studio, I want to revisit that seminar and talk a little more about what I meant.

It's always helpful to figure out what I mean by starting with what I don't mean. First, it's significant I had chosen not to model my art making on anything like making art. At that moment, the notion of art as research was just beginning to appear, we were seeing a lot of work that engaged in practices of collecting and archiving, of interpreting collections. I was fascinated by Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum, but bored by my peers who collected drier lint, sloughs of their skin, and bits of clipped fingernails and called this act 'archving' or 'knowledge production'. I was okay with art being a way of knowing, but not in the dry and pedantic ways that I saw taking shape around me.

Another thing I didn't want was some open-ended process. Because the word has duel citizenship in art and religion, I will write about the idea of 'practice' at a future date, but as that notion was starting to take shape in the minds process-driven artists who felt that thinking about making things alleviated them from actually finishing anything. While certain aspects of my work coincide with certain aspects of this conversation, I wasn't headed there.

And it was pretty clear that making art in the romantic, self-expressive mode was not interesting. I have never thought of myself as having anything unique to express, I have always distrusted the fetishization of brushwork and other tropes of individuality. I have, in fact, long wanted to use my work as a vehicle for getting as far away from my tastes and instincts as I can get. 

This may be because I want to learn something from my work, but also because I recognize that doing it is not just something that I do for me. I may not have a large and eager audience for my work, but I expect it to have a place in the world. That place is earned not because I am anyone special, but because the work belongs in that context and in those conversations that happen in that place. 

And hear we begin to see some of the aspects of what I mean by 'like prayer' coming into focus. First some of the simpler interpretations.

A big part of what I am after is creating a space for structured reflection. Way too much of my life in the art world consists of judgement and too little time is available for deliberation. Consider how a typical studio class works - students are given an assignment or a chunk of time to do work, the work is put up and more or less immediately the conversation begins. I find that people are not looking at the things in front of them at these moments, but rather at the things that were nearly done or in-process over the last few weeks, or, more typically, at absent examples of works thought to be similar to the one under consideration (the most common and meaningless critical move in the post-canonical art world is to compare a work, favorably or unfavorably, to another work not in the room). Coming off years of being a critic, I wanted to transform my work in the studio into something else - something that had time for reflection and attention, where I could be less concerned with evaluation and more concerned with analysis. At the beginning of mass, there is a penitential prayer where we ask for forgiveness not only for thoughts and actions, but also 'what we have failed to to do'. Considering not only your acts but also the missed opportunities to help others is an inspiration to value decisions not only for what was done, but what was decided against.

The recitation of specific prayers formulated by others brings me to another point. I certainly don't agree with every position taken by the Church leadership, or with every word used in its rituals. But participating in these rituals week after week throughout your life puts you in a specific relationship to a text. One begins to consider the role of inflection and cadence in speaking, and the importance of metaphor in reading. I wanted my work to exist in relation to something in that same way - so I had to seek out texts that could withstand prolonged reflection and reward rigorous analysis. It has been suggested that some people read many books and find one meaning in all of them, while others read one book and find many meanings in it. If I wanted to get away from my own mind, what better way to get to another mind than through anothers' words?

Finally, prayer provided a way to structure one of the longest running problems I had with my work; what was it supposed to do in the world? I don't come from a family with a lot of history in the arts. I feel like the third generation in the John Adam's formulation of democracy, and for a long time that meant being anxious about what art - a career so mysterious to my father that he once likened it to an addiction -  did for the world. The problem of a life lived among books and ideas and its apparent (but falsely diametric) opposition to a life of active service is an important question in religions life. The tension between contemplative life and the active life is one that appears not to exist outside of the religious world. In fact, the religious world - which strives to be in but not of the world - is a site of alternative thinking to the consumerist art world, and prayer is a means of exploring and coming to terms with that alternative world. At the very least, it served to remind me that there was more to life than what was going on in seminar rooms high above a frozen city. 

I haven't talked about gratitide or grace, about the way that the universe can make you feel like you need to connect with something larger, about the need to be part of a tradition, or any of a dozen other impulses. Could I have figured out how to do these things and others that I have done to my work without using prayer as a model? Perhaps. In the next installment of this series, I'll talk about how this metaphor led me astray for a while and how I think I found my way.

From Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf"

I have been working on some drawings that come from Seamus Heaney's 2000 Beowulf.

It was like the misery felt by an old manwho has lived to see his son's bodyswing from the gallows. He begins to keen and weep for his boy; watching the ravengloat where he hangs: he can be of no help.The wisdom of age is worthless to him.Morning after morning, he wakes to remember that his child is gone; he hsa no interestin living on until another heir is born in the hall, now that his first-born has entered death's dominon forever.He gazes sorrowfully at his son's dwelling, the banquet hall bereft of all delight,the windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping, the warriors underground; what was is no more. No tunes fmor the harp, no cheer raised in the yard.Alone with his longing, he lies own on his bedand sings a lament; everything seems too large [...]

I'll post pictures soon...

Let's wrap this up

It seems like I've been working on this forever, but my notion of time is distorted by being still a little under the weather and by having worked on drawings for so long that the complexity of working on a larger scale was surprising. I need to keep sight of the notion that this is a kind of study for the paintings I am planning to make when I can get the large shaped panels cut. I learned (or more accurately, recalled) a lot from doing this, but I am no eager to get to work on more large pieces.

The patience that they require is different from the work I have been doing. I was in too much of a rush when I started this and thought I could work at the tame pace as I have been working. Fortunately, I got the hang of it a little more toward the end and could work without recklessly creating problems for myself. There is one spelling error I have not corrected, but I'm setting it aside for now...

This picture reads:

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world where the real thing was never said or done or even thought but only represented by a series of arbitrary signs

That line, originally written by Edith Wharton, appears in Miles Orville's wonderful book, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880 - 1940, and it seemed to so accurately describe the world I know when I first encountered it about a decade ago. I've wanted to make a painting of that text for some time now, and one of the larger panels will also have it. I am trying to figure out how to title it - usually I title paintings simply After Author's Name (text of quotation). But this one comes from one source via another...will have to come up with something...

I've also been away from Sabbatical Studio for about a week and a half and need to get back over there. There are some drawings near completion there, and I need to set it up for large work. Expect photos...

Rounding the clubhouse turn on this one...

This panel started out as a test to see how the stencilling techniques would work. It has been pretty productive, and I feel like I am ready to move on to larger surfaces...

This stencil sets up the blues...I am very much thinking about the work I did at the Borowsky center as I move from light to dark and cool to warm through this painting...

While I was feeling a little cruddy over this week, I worked mostly at the home studio on this. But I also started a few new drawings and made plans for some larger pictures I can work on while I wait for the new panels to get cut. I stopped by the Crane for the first time in more than a week on Saturday and found it hard to leave after three hours. I was suffering from sweep-the-studio-syndrome, where one small task leads into another and another and another.

This week, we'll be moving some larger gear up to the Sabbatical Studio at Crane and paying another visit to the laser cutter at Tyler. There are a few things going on...

• three, six and nine letter poems
• re-visiting Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf
• more cut up language

I am trying to keep moving forward everyday on these things and whatever else crosses my mind, because I know there will be plenty of time to reflect later. This may not sound very strategic, and it's not. I have been practicing a kind strategy of try-to-do-it-all for the most part, and I am trying to find the energy to keep that up...

The Elephant in the Studio - Introduction

A cross stich made by my mother, Helen Brown, that hangs over the door of my studio

This story begins in the mid-1990's in the lower church of St. Patrick's off Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. I am in my late 20s, writing, painting, and trying to figure out how to complete the transition from adolescence to adulthood that higher education alone had not achieved.

In the pre-mass quiet, I try to clear my mind. This has always been my habit and from time to time, things come unbidden to mind and I am inclined to see them as important issues who have been waiting for a moment to speak up over the din of my day-to-day concerns.

On that morning, clear as a bell, the sentence, "I want my work to be more like prayer" came to mind.

At the time, I didn't know what it meant, if it was a realistic goal, or how I would achieve it. I just knew that it explained something - it clarified that I was unhappy with what I was doing and suggested a template for action that would be more satisfying.*

I didn't know it at the time, but this realization set in motion a number of changes that have led me to my current work. It provided rules against which I could measure an idea's value. It gave me a kind of purpose that painting didn't have before.

I have wanted to write about this for a long time, but have been reluctant to do so. For all of its professed openness, the art world is a rigidly secularized field and it welcomes discussions of spirituality more generously than attempts to talk about organized religion. 'Iconoclasm' remains one of its bywords, and I expect that merely mentioning prayer will cause some people to distrust anything that follows. Also, having taken on the mantel of research, art and design have put even more distance between themselves and their roots in religions expression. Modernism's great project was to free art from the political and religious functions that it fulfilled for centuries. I am not alone in wondering what it should do with its freedom.

So, to some degree it has seemed hazardous to bring up the subject, however much it haunts my thinking (and, I must admit, my teaching). But on my current sabbatical (a word with a religions past...), I feel compelled to engage it - and to invite others to talk about the ways they frame creative work in their own minds. For too long this has been the elephant in the studio, and now it's time to name it and start trying to figure it out.

So, over the next eight weeks (each Saturday), I will post essays on the subject of prayer and studio work. We'll look at the fashionable use of the word 'practice' to describe what we do in the studio, we'll talk about various forms and objectives of prayer, about the relation of physical objects to the spiritual world, and a few other topics. I invite comments and discussion on this, and hope that giving the subject some boundaries helps structure it and provides points of entry for others.

* Realizing that this may sound surprising to some people who know my work and who might think I've invented a new concern for myself, I want to point to my first attempt to deal with this issue, the 1998 exhibit Articles of Faith I organized for the Philadelphia Art Alliance. That was a confused and problematic exhibit - but I don't regret either of those aspects of it. Generating problems and looking for hidden connections between things are important tasks, and hopefully I have gotten a little better at them over time.

Getting tired of the shut-down brinksmanship...

Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na'vi real languages? - John McWhorter

Progress

Ideas come from working. As I work on this larger panel (it's 24 x 48 inches - not huge, but bigger than the drawings I've been making and more complex as it involves a lot of stenciling and dealing with transparent/translucent paint), I can see next moves for things like this that I hadn't imagined when I was working on the drawings. Part of me is kicking myself for not having started working on panels (or even on canvas) sooner, but I have learned a lot about planning these out by drawing them over and over.