Brief Update

I am just checking in to say "howdy." My to-do list is finally getting smaller, and I see the light at the end of the tunnel (until another blast of tasks comes my way). I am far too tired to write anything extensive for you, and I am sorry.

I will say this: for the last few months I have been very adrift in my painting. I start works only to lose interest in them. I have tried doing smaller works, but even there it has not been that fruitful. I have been spending most of my visual creative energy on art-related craft projects and have not really been able to focus on working canvases or panels to the extent that I have to in order to make a good painting.

Part of the problem has been that my own idea of what I want to get done in a painting has been shifting. This is a good thing, but it makes coherence rather difficult. One week I am thinking about Pierre Bonnard, the next about Giotto. The downside is that when one is in this mode, one tends to paint fairly insignificant works: when it comes down to it, no one really needs to see a Bonnard-inspired composition painted with Giotto's technique. Yawn. This is the stuff that art education is made of and has its place, but that place is not in a serious portfolio, much less a gallery wall.

The advantage to this mode of thinking is that it makes one think more generally about art theory. I have always held that good art theory explains why one finds pleasure in Lucien Freud as well as in a Diebenkorn Ocean Park. It should speak to Matisse AND Caravaggio.

When I see a landscape or a figure grouping and think about it in terms of various artists and styles, it forces me to take a more abstract view of art, particularly of composition. That makes me theorize, and theory is the scaffolding upon which good art is built (sorry to you Romantics out there who hold to blind, frenzied creation, but even the most ecstatic moments of Van Gogh were built on solid draughtsmanship and good principles of composition).

Hopefully something interesting will come of this, but I will definitely be focusing in on an exploration of composition in one particular direction. Maybe it will last for ten years, maybe ten weeks, but I am finally seeing some sense of direction to my painting, something that has been lacking for the past three years.

If I figure out how to do it, someday I will post some images on this site (or on another site). I have to admit that learning how to do all that computery stuff is pretty low on my priorities these days.