Is it music? This plus a little history (of me) thrown in–

D:\artstatements\isitmusic_plusalittlehistorythrownin.txt

12:29 PM 1/4/2008

Is it music? This plus a little history (of me) thrown in–

Years ago when I was in HS, I was deeply involved in music; both classical and jazz. It didn’t take long for me to realize that i didn’t have the talent to push on and be a professional musician. I struggled to learn the instruments and had a very hard time reading the music from a page. i am a professional music listener, however.

I began my college study as an engineer. But I found engineering and mathematics boring. Carl (?????), can’t remember Carl’s last name — (he had a superb 1950 chopped mercury car though) — he was my house mate living upstairs. He was studying advertising (outdoor bill board and signage – he was going to take over the family business back in Michigan). I was fascinated with his art work. I had always drawn from the days when i could remember anything. I had always been deeply interested in and created cartoons all through my elementary and secondary school years. Art, then, was a natural area to explore.

I enrolled at El Camino College in LA as an advertising design student. At the end of my first semester my design instructor (Charles Blusk) told me that I wasn’t a designer but was a painter. I was involved in a car accident one nite. Didn’t get hurt, but my car got trashed. I had no money. Got the car more or less fixed up by the other guy’s insurance, then ran out of money and couldn’t stay in California. I was taking courses in drawing at UCLA and one day I was lamenting to my teacher that I had to go back to Iowa because I ran out of money and couldn’t stay in California. He then proceeded to tell me how great the University of Iowa/Iowa City was. He was an MFA graduate of Iowa Print program. This teacher’s name was John Paul Jones [printmaker]. Iowa City was 26 miles from my home. I went home and enrolled at Iowa. 7 years later I left there with a BA, MA, and two MFA’s. They finally got sick of me at Iowa. Gave me all the degrees available and told me to get out into the real world.

All of my base values for painting were developed at Iowa. My natural connections finally attached themselves to abstract art, especially abstract expressionism, and not the realism related to the human form. This realism was Iowa’s forte. I like to draw the figure, and sometimes painted it while in school, but I soon discovered that using realism also required story and literature involvement. I told and created very bad stories. I don’t think this way. I live in a world of grunts and sound and all the visual excitement and stimuli found in nature. The visual excitement related to the stimuli and not the concreteness of the images in nature. I didn’t care about how the leaves looked. I did care about how I felt about the leaf, how the leaf sounded in wind and crunched under my feet in the fall. Trips to Chicago and NYC museums and galleries ultimately helped to cement my relationship to AE. I especially fell in love with the energy and images of Hans Hofmann; especially the fine example located in the Cleveland Art Museum. I went for it.

I left Iowa in august 1967. 41 years later I am still at AE in some form or another. Also my work in the past several years has moved closer to music in its abstractness. Music communicates directly to the mind and emotions. Painting in order to do this in the same manner has some road blocks in its way; the visual nature of painting and the visual nature of our physical environment. Sound has no tangible physical body in nature; the physical world. Something causes the air to vibrate and our ears pic this up as sound. Our eyes pic up the color vibrations in nature/the real world and we see this with our eyes as trees, leaves, sidewalk, other people. Sound also allows our verbal language to operate. Language operating with the real world and our ways to attach words to this visualness creates literature. Here it all mushes together to form our high order communication processes; literature, film, books, illustration, and so on. You know the definitions and the many examples that describe and define this kind of stuff and the attendant processes. You can do this definition better than I.

Looking back over these past 41 years and the different paths that I have taken with my painting –looking for ways to solve my quest to be a painter – and never really finding that comfortable place. A couple of years ago i decided to return to music for clues as to how to move on. My research uncovered an element that was surprising and then not surprising. In music I loved improvisational jazz. I could get lost and travel to lots of different places while engaged in improvisational music. I decided this was a good place to launch this NEW energy. I also decided to use Automatism as the element from which to launch things. I used Automatism in the past, but never relied upon it as a painting-making device. I would examine the automatist or chance urges, but would procrastinate them away via mental painting; never really put the paint to the fire. So much of the real energy never got established in the painting. This kind of making procedure had to go. I started doing what the “first solution ideas” were suggesting to me from the automatist process. I now use chance and automatism (purist approach) as the primary device^(1.) for making all my paintings on paper, canvas, linen, cardboard, wood, plastic. There will be more supports as time goes on.

I react differently when using diverse supports and media combinations; my painting on canvas tends to be a little different than my painting on paper. And the beat goes on. Set my different support and media combinations along side each other — they do look different from one another visually, but the feelings seem very similar. I think this is so because chance and automatism allow for the inner forces to merge with the paintings. This inner force comes from within my nervous system and because of this there is somewhat a singularity in its nature. However, if there is any schizophrenic aborhations, then the visual images will take on different personalities. We all posses some form of schizophrenia — most of the time it isn’t clinical. So we all possess some degree of multiple personality/s. I am not a psych person, so I will not go further with this. I am not really interested in the detail of how all the internals combine; the input data to my brain and how my brain analyzes and reconstructs the data, then exposes this data via the chance/automatism process simply works for me. As long as it works, I won’t argue with it and won’t make any changes to stop it.

This is where my mind and art is located today, 1:11 PM 1/4/2008. For you as audience (the spectator), as well as for myself as audience (the art-object maker), I am a voyeur in my art; an intellectual voyeur conjuring up a soup of intelligence and emotion. As a maker I present you the spectator with a mirror which reflects your self to your self. From this angle you make of it what you want. In one way or another it (my art) pushes the buttons. Love it. Hate it. Never indifferent. This is why my work is difficult to sell (and show these days). Art does communicate. I didn’t start out making these kind of things; not consciously anyway. It evolved over the years. Many say it was there in the beginning. They (my teachers and early gallerists) saw it and promoted it. There is a truth in this process. Today many folk don’t want to be near the truth. Put on the iPod and drop-out-tune-in to their own world. Airports are full of these zombies.

Chance and automatism as process allows for all of this to happen. It allows and creates the ingredients for my soup.

enjoy.

dpn/matthews nc/1:15 PM 1/4/2008

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1. A short story. My uncle was a close friend of Wayne Thiebald. They were both living and working in Sacramento CA. The year was 1968 or there about. I sent some images of my painting to my uncle as he wanted to show them to Wayne. Wayne wrote to me and said something like this: “Good work from a student perspective, but you need to find a gimmick.”

For some reason, then, I was offended by this statement. At Iowa, gimmicks in painting were a no-no. In 1968 gimmicks in painting = pop art and minimalism. AT Iowa this was sacrilegious and a no-no. And to Wayne Thiebald Abstract Expressionism was overexposed and needed to be overthrown and was a no-no. Today, 2008, automatism and chance are my gimmicks. Way to go Wayne! And we meet ourselves over and over as we travel the circle of life.

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