At The Regatta
In the series At The Regatta,
I am thinking about the physical exchange
of energy between the world and me;
the direct accumulated consequences
of repetitive natural physical forces.
Specifically, I am thinking about
the way that I incompletely sense,
selectively accumulate, and
finally struggle to fully comprehend
the forces of wind and water and light
that have acted over a timespan
of many years.
This series is built upon long term physical action in the setting of boats upon the water. I want to express the slight desperation of continual questing through the raggedness of literal wear and tear. One influence during the creation of this series has been Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick. The awesome forces of nature embodied in the sea and in the white whale connect directly to my At The Regatta; Melville’s grand global scale is translated to my personal sized purview. The translation of scale from the global to the personal is an important liminal state in all of my works. I try to keep one foot on either side of this threshold. “Adumbrate nature. Walk a given path you are as much its fact as any other. You stand a scale far smaller than trees. A mountain makes you as literal as a pebble. Look hard for what it is you want to see.” (from The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005) This is taken from a poem written for painter Susan Rothenberg, but more on Rothenberg later.
This series is built upon long term physical action in the setting of boats upon the water. I want to express the slight desperation of continual questing through the raggedness of literal wear and tear. One influence during the creation of this series has been Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick. The awesome forces of nature embodied in the sea and in the white whale connect directly to my At The Regatta; Melville’s grand global scale is translated to my personal sized purview. The translation of scale from the global to the personal is an important liminal state in all of my works. I try to keep one foot on either side of this threshold. “Adumbrate nature. Walk a given path you are as much its fact as any other. You stand a scale far smaller than trees. A mountain makes you as literal as a pebble. Look hard for what it is you want to see.” (from The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005) This is taken from a poem written for painter Susan Rothenberg, but more on Rothenberg later.
At The Regatta Statement (continued)
In thinking about the 19th century novel Moby Dick, it is Melville’s heavy dichotomy between the characters Ishmael and Ahab that leaves me, the reader, in a precarious but deadlocked balance. This melodramatic polarization between the active and the contemplative is like walking on a tightrope with a heavy weight in each hand; a plunge into the dark abyss on either side is waiting should the balance be disturbed.
Ahab, (the active) cries “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! And since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!”
This raging physicality is set against the one-who-would-be-called-Ishmael (the contemplative) who intellectually strives to comprehend the whole of nature by describing everything from the exacting measurements of whalebones, through the minute details of processing spermaceti to a whole chapter devoted to an attempt at classification of all whales “a rabble of uncertain, fugitive half-fabulous whales of which I know only by name and not experience.”
I, on the other hand, am looking for a much lighter metaphor, an airier threshold; one with much less gravity involved and not quite so grand a scale. Somewhere between the quest for the active physical accomplishment and the quest for the contemplative intellectual understanding is the threshold where I would like the larger works in the At The Regatta series to be positioned.
I use sketches to test out imagery....but that is the least of their usefulness. The important part is testing out the processes. The sketchy silk-screening of the background on the raw canvas. The drawing and painting of the figure in different thicknesses of acrylic paint from watered down and thin to heavy medium and thick. In this final iteration of the sketch the paint was thoroughly dried and then sanded with a rough-grit beltsander...I was really looking to convey the idea of motion, of a subject with a mind of its own that has no interest in pleasing or entertaining a viewer...except that,as the artist, I hope that it does.
If you want to see it....Here is the first iteration of this piece.
If you want to see it.... Here is the final iteration of this piece.
Whether physical or intellectual, my work also tries to catch some kind of alive but frozen energy.
This work was exhibited in Again, You Paint What?, 2012
Do Or Die
Or, is about the sport of competitive rowing
Even if competition is with oneself
It is about stripped-down honesty in effort.
An event
A discrete timespan
A measured distance.
But compressed into a single frame
It is not about the start line or the finish line.
but about every instant and every inch in between.
More...
We become what we repeatedly do.
The actual quote "The good of humanity is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a human blessed and happy" translated from Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7
Or maybe people are not quoting Aristotle but a 20th century translation by Will Durant: "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly." summation of Aristotle's ideas in Will Durant's, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers (1926) Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness
For this piece, I wanted to somehow record the traces of this repeated and repeated and repeated activity as a striving to achieve the perfect line, the perfect arc, the perfect motion.
This is an exercise in first principles.
A test.
A quest.
This event, like every event, is a reinvention,
Right here,
Right now.
Tracing only the essentials,
It is a mental and physical quest to discover again,
The shortest distance between here and there.
Depict a human doing something, but without really including the human figure. Hmmmmm. I was thinking of a painting called Improvisation 26. Vassily Kandinsky,1912. Huile sur toile, 97 x 107.5 cm.
We can tell, with little information, that people are rowing....just as we can just as we can tell from far down the street that someone is hailing a cab or waiting for their phone app to work. This is what I take from Kandinsky's 1912 improvisation. Check out this link but come back!!.
Layers, transparencies and a depth of materials.
Collaged surfaces, pigments, and substrate canvases
Underlying supports and means of construction clearly in evidence
check, check, check.
silkscreen on canvas
sewn canvas construction
hard edged acrylic paints
dry pigments encased in acrylic medium
I am looking for a distinctly separate, but tightly related, collage of materials to combine in a single focus image.
One last theme that I want to explore throughout the At The Regatta series is:
The activity of tracing human impact on landscape and landscape’s impact on humanity.
Here are two quotes from Jane Urquhart's novel Away. that follows the lives of multiple generations women in a family. They highlight the contradictory notion of traces....things that lie beneath and are so deeply ingrained by repetition that they never really go away...........contrasted to the quickly faded surface traces of action and interaction.
“These women inhabited northern latitudes near icy waters. They were plagued by revenants. Men, landscapes, states of mind went away and came back again. Over the years, over the decades.”
"The three most short-lived traces: the trace of a bird on a branch, the trace of a fish on a pool, and the trace of a man on a woman."
In thinking about the 19th century novel Moby Dick, it is Melville’s heavy dichotomy between the characters Ishmael and Ahab that leaves me, the reader, in a precarious but deadlocked balance. This melodramatic polarization between the active and the contemplative is like walking on a tightrope with a heavy weight in each hand; a plunge into the dark abyss on either side is waiting should the balance be disturbed.
I, on the other hand, am looking for a much lighter metaphor, an airier threshold; one with much less gravity involved and not quite so grand a scale. Somewhere between the quest for the active physical accomplishment and the quest for the contemplative intellectual understanding is the threshold where I would like the larger works in the At The Regatta series to be positioned.
Optimist: is a class that is sailed and raced all over the world.
Optimist: is the boat that so many many sailors would have first sailed solo at the age of 7 to 10.
Optimist: I believe is a mental state that every sailor must inhabit before they can ever set sail.
and passage of time
in Optimist.
I explore
the way we sense,
the way we accumulate, and
the way we might understand,
the forces of wind and water and light
that have acted
over a timespan of many years.
We remember a conflation of all the
glorious sunny, windy days
But in an imperfect way that is prone to
erosion, bleaching and scouring
A by-product of that very sun and wind.
Some completely defined and heavily applied
Some lightly applied, not so deeply ingrained
The shape of the sail is
Nothing but
The background linen
Because it just is
The background
The process test?
Heavy acrylic paint
Applied to the foreground
And then forcibly removed
With a belt sander.
A shiny layer of Roplex
glosses over
The violent erasure
filtering out the
damage.
upward and outward
to a distance
Rock, cloud, sail, sea
Equal weight
Equal definition
Equal density
The process test?
White ink on white canvas;
can it hold its ground
against the raw canvas sail?
And pure gel tar texture
winds through
the foreground water
Wind propels
water and sail alike.
The process test?
Fibre paste transforms the ground to paper.
Watered down acrylic clings to paper
Between the plastic of the full acrylic layers
Lightly sanded erasures
Foreboded.
Ingrained through
much repeating.
While details
of the foreground
fade to white
The process test?
Lighter and lighter application
of the silkscreen inks
while progressing toward
the foreground.
Very thin crackle paste and water
emphasize the fuzziness
that appears when trying too hard
to examine the details
up too close.
of remembered scapes
give way to textured weather
in the more up close
and physical foreground.
The process test?
A diagonal slice of
more sketchy silkscreen.
Thick molding paste
added and scraped away
then thinly covered
by watery paint
budging the other shapes away,
before it engulfs and destroys,
the entire image.
The process test?
Overlapping newsprint stencils
Crashing into each other.
thin water based acrylic
covers fibre paste
sandpaper removes them.
One boat remembering many trips
Or many boats together?
The process test?
Only the rocks are solid.
Water and air are harder
to define.
A shiny layer of Roplex
some very thick, some lightly
over all
All on the same tack
No, no
its not a race.
The process test?
Measured lines of linen
in both the water and the sky
but then who's measuring?
Molding paste foreground texture
very thin middleground
silkscreen application