Saturday night: art comes from many places

This weblog moves our email conversation to the web and makes it public. We have made a commitment to each other to some kind of regularity, and to exploring some issues about our art and art in general. This moves our conversation to a more self-conscious, intentional, and definitley public level. It's exciting.

Joanne, I will confess that I've spent the past few days watching more World Cup and Tour de France than I have painting or writing. I'm not really a sports nut at all, but besides the occasional baseball game I do really enjoy following the Tour every July, and the World Cup is particulary exciting, partly because it is an international event, but especially because of the spectacular play. Typically, I sit on the couch playing guitar while watching the coverage, and I feel very content. Tonight, as I write, my notebook is on my lap and the TV is on to coverage of today's time trials, so between typing I peek up to see what's happening; right at this moment Robbie McEwen has just launched down the ramp to begin his leg.

I went to an opening of a group show at the Richmond Art Center this afternoon called Microcosm. The curator's statement specifies that this show includes Artists who take inspiration from patterns of the natural world) (and I suspect that that link will eventually expire, since it isn't specific to the show, but it's okay for now). The reason I went is because Mel Prest is in the show, and I recently wrote an essay about her solo show this past April at Gregory Lind in San Franciso. It was the first time I'd met her, though we've emailed back and forth a several times the last few months. Openings are not good for really looking at the work, so it's a little unfair perhaps for me to say that the show was a little uneven, but it was good to see some of the work, to see Mel's paintings again, and to finally meet her.

Not that I'm a total slacker- since I have a commitment to making an HTML drawing everyday for my weblog, of course I'm drawing regularly; that commitment is a very good thing for me- something visual everyday. I can count on this. I have to make an image to show everyday. I have to enter and work within that certain mentality, that certain spatial psychology, a place beyond language, to make something that is only about looking, that comes out of the organic process of making an image.

Mel asked me something about writing about art, whether it's words or visuals first. For me it is absolutely the visual first, and language second. Language is the reification of seeing (although, seeing can be enough, and really need not be extended to the body of language). Seeing is the primary process, and language is the place of conscious cognition. Seeing is a visceral, emotional understanding, and language is a highly conscious, structured, intellectual kind of understanding. Seeing as an intelligence is underrated. Sometimes I think that language as an intelligence is overrated. Writing is hard work; it is a kind of carving, a shared forming of understanding.

I described to Mel writing as sculptural- that's why I use the word carving. Hacking and hewing, finding the right words, the right phrases, the right order of things for explication. Writing, using language is spatial; there is building an argument or an explanation, there is order, there is shape.

To talk as language as a kind of sculpture is for me the third case of referring to sculpture this week. I think shaping is on my mind. We have a plum tree in our front yard that is a little out of control. The previous owners didn't prune the tree well, so it hangs over the fence, is too tall, has too many thin branches hanging with plums filling the middle of the tree. For the past year I've been looking at that tree and telling myself that it has to be dealt with. Finally, I bought one of those pruning and sawing tools that extends up to about eighteen feet, and I've begun very carefully pruning away. I told my neighbor that it's a slow process, like sculpture; it's more than simply cutting and topping off branches. I want to carefully remove branches here and there so that in the end we have a tree with a better shape, a better system of branches and fruit, and something that will be easier to maintain in the future.

I was also talking with a co-worker about watching the World Cup games, and about understanding the play as a series of spatial strategies. Players shift and position themselves around the field, the ball is a focal point, and if one takes each series of plays moving the ball up and down the field there are little performances that seem something like sculpture to me. Watching the replay of a shot on goal, for example, there is a setup, a series of moves, a certain kind of form and beauty. That sequence of movements is just brief enough to mentally capture, and it's possible to see the shape of that play, almost like calligraphy. Likewise, in the Tour, in certain legs there are times when teams work to move a rider into position, and the beauty of this is how the riders work together and strategize to block other riders and move one rider into position. There is form to that, a sequence of shapes, a goal, and a very physical, emotional movement with its own intelligence.

So although I may not have painted much this past week, through writing, pruning a tree, and watching the Tour and the World Cup I am still exercising my visual muscles, thinking about form and compostion, shape and line and color. I truly do think of writing, of everyday life, of other media as informing my art. I like to think of it as all one thing, a very organic experience of life that informs my art. Art can be a career, but it is also a way of life. What does that mean? What is the place of art in life? What does the practice of art mean to the artist's inner life, and what is the place of one's inner life in art that is made for others to see? This is something I want to think more about, and if possible hear about from you.

In response to your last post: the collaboration you mention is with Douglas Witmer, an excellent painter from Philadelphia. I wrote an exhibition proposal to the University of Dayton, Ohio called Across the Borderline outlining a plan for Douglas and I to do a collaborative drawing installation. The proposal was approved and we are on for January 2007. Exactly what we will make will be worked out this summer. We will make separate drawings, draw on each other drawings, and install these across nearly sixty feet of wall space. The drawings will be regular drawings on paper, digital drawings, and combinations of the two.

Vaguely, what I have in mind are two individual drawing installations that move across the wall to merge into a larger joint collection of collaborative drawings. The title, Across the Borderline, has to do with our two different approaches, our geographical distance, and a kind of merging of two approaches and sensibilities in the middle, our work having literally and figuratively spanned some kind of distance. I am really looking forward to this because I like Douglas and I like his work, and there is nothing like a commitment to get the juices flowing.

We have a weblog for the project that has the proposal, the floorplan, and some beginnging thoughts, and we plan to build this weblog over time as documentation to our process, the work and the exhibit. Consider this post the offical announcement of our successful application and the weblog: Across the Borderline.

I'm going to end this post here, but I want to respond later to your mention in your previous post about our "shared geometric sensbility." I had a recent realization about my use of geometry: incidental or intentional? More to come.