Laying the groundwork for a small project. Mixed process in which I establish a general plan with papers, tapes and twine, and then ‘fire’ it. In this way, I both compose and improvise, responding to what remains of my plans. With this as a foundation, I will excavate and build over the ruins.
Art is Doing
Over this past summer, I spent a lot of time chiseling old mortar from bricks I had pulled from the sand of the Chippewa River. I was building a wall behind my studio. I spent hours a day chipping at these bricks and during that process it occurred to me that this act, this process and the bricks themselves, their history, their new life in my wall, the temporality of those who made them - and of myself - the fact that I had let them sit behind my house for years before realizing their use, that this had become among the most significant things I’d done in months… maybe years.
I wasn’t showing a wall. I wasn’t representing a wall or abstracting or computerizing a wall. I was making a wall. I was in the act of making a wall. Art had become a way showing something — a means. The ends I suppose were of the image, the content, the concept. Of course there’s the act of making the painting and all that means, and I’ve come to believe that unless I’m absolutely sure that what I’m painting justifies my painting it, that the act of painting, the act of doing this creative thing that holds that special significance, that unless I’m within that moment and in the act of living, I’m merely working toward an end. And that’s nowhere near good enough.
Allouez detail, 2007-2009 oil, ignited gunpowder, fire, papers on six conjoined canvases, 3’x9’ — see full painting here —
