I have no idea

Joanne asks, "Where do you think your own work will go with Bojagi? A series?"

I have no idea. There are three so far. I didn't expect to make these three. They just sort of tumbled out. Of course now more are swimming around in my head, but I am finally learning to stop chasing the image in my head and to start finding them while painting.

Maybe that sounds flaky, but I'm serious.

Forever, I have chased after images in my head, being so sure if I just executed the thing in my head that everything would be OK. But the thing in my head is actually so ill defined. And that has resulted in a lot failures and frustration. Over the years. Many.

The translation from head to paint is not an automatic process. Which I think led to me taking a big break from painting and becoming an elementary school teacher and sending my life off on another trajectory for a long time. And being a teacher, working with young kids, with an emphasis on process and repetition and development, may have taught me, myself, eventually, and hopefully finally, that it is through the making that I will find. I have to follow the paint.

Painting, or good painting, is not the result of a concept or strategy or process. It comes out of the body. I don't mean that one can't be working on a planned image. But paint is not imagination. It's a material that we can't hold in our heads.

So I'm not sure. I'm not going to chase them. But I am going to find something.

Someone wants me to make big paintings.



And in the same post Joanne asks, "And we're about to start a new month. What direction will your HTML drawings take?"

I have no idea. I will tonight, I hope. I don't have a plan. I rarely have plans for these things. I start out making and it turns into something. At the most my thought is to make to non-photobased images with HTML, but I don't know more than that. At this precise moment I feel like making more of these doesn't have a future. I will have to work through that.

One more thing about Jasper John's crosshatch paintings- in the 1977 catalogue the connection of this motif is drawn to Munch (who I've been looking at a lot lately- I can say more later):



Edvard Munch: Self Portrait: Between Clock and Bed, 1940-42; Oil on canvas, 149.5 x 120.5 cm; Munch Museum, Oslo



Jasper Johns (American, born 1930: Usuyuki, 1979-1981, Color screenprint on buff handmade laid paper, 50/85, 27 5/8 x 45 7/16”, Purchase: Gaines Challenge Fund 1982.19.2