August 2024
Robert Motherwell, Buddy Holly, and Andy Griffith
Welcome to August. Tennessee still has the potential for at least 60 more days of heat and humidity. You are not safe here until mid-October. It is the time of year when I raise the lawn mower blade up a notch to keep the blower from clogging with wet grass. The yard is never dry. We have moles in the yard. We set traps, and they are not the humane kind. A skunk died in the crawlspace of our deck. There is no way to remove it without ripping up part of the deck.
I still consider this Substack account more of a blog than a newsletter. I told myself I would post once a month. The problem with this month’s post is that there is little to report on. There was a plan for the studio. It lasted a week. I scuttled it. July has been a mix of travel and studio experimentation.
It is not a hard-and-fast rule, but most artists in charge of their work feel compelled to change it constantly. Someone asked Robert Motherwell why he painted over a hundred Elegies to the Spanish Republic. He made it a point to say that he did not like serialism in art, and the Elegies are not a series for him. He said he would stop painting Elegies if he ever painted the one that satisfied him. But satisfaction is not something people can provide themselves. What an Elegy meant to him changed with each attempt.
A constant restlessness in the studio means taking inventory of my process and making large and small adjustments as I go. As a young artist, I thought these changes meant I was working toward a final, fixed goal and would get there one day. A visual language people would see from 50’ away and say, “Oh! They have a Matthews.” That is not the case. You change as a person, and so should your art. If people like your work, they want you to do the same thing over and over again. People expect this consistency from you, yet they also change jobs every five years. I have never told a friend, “I miss when you used to work for the other physical therapist.” You have to ignore it. Eventually, you make peace with an art process akin to a cat chasing a laser pointer.
You must also get comfortable disrupting successful rhythms to get somewhere new and potentially better. That is not just an art process. Some people still use first-generation iPods. They like the wheel. They want the clicking sound. It was good tech and made for a satisfying tactile experience. But Apple did not hem and haw about retiring it. They said, “Thank you for your service,” and installed a touch screen. A lot of individual critique time in a beginning painting class is me pointing at a section of a painting and saying, “That area looks great. Remember it because you’ll have to paint over it to make the whole painting snap together.” Nothing is precious.
I made some basic decisions for my last show: flat shapes and crisp edges. That forced me to understand how to get the desired surface through brush selection, mediums, and stencils. Once I understood how to do it, the work was not that difficult to make. Building the stretchers and doing the math was more of an issue than the painting itself.
I liked the show, but I also knew that things would change. Years ago, I saw a statement online- “My résumé is a list of things that I never want to do again.” Maybe that is how I think about exhibitions. I want to bank those skills as things I can pull back out if someone wants them, but otherwise, I have other paths to explore.
What would remain from the last show, and what would I thank for its service? That has been the question of the summer. I will break down where I am now:
Ink drawings: You are safe. You will always be safe.
Collage: I cannot work without some collage process. Anyone who does this understands that your brain works differently with scissors or a blade in your hand than with a brush, a pencil, or a mouse. A mouse has an “undo” function. Brushstrokes can be wiped away. Graphite can be erased. Cuts with blades are a different matter.
Flat shapes: Thank you for your service. It is time to regain some gesture in my brushstroke. The target goal for gesture is what I was capable of 30 years ago. So my target is what I think I did when I was 20. I have no work from that time to refer back to. I am only going on memory. My memory is clouded with a cockiness that I was somehow great at it despite my age. But Buddy Holly wrote “That’ll Be the Day” when he was 20, so you are capable of something in your early years.
Crisp edges: We have had a good run, but I am not a robot—it is time to crack the seal and let shapes engage with one another.
We shall see what happens. The painting will be slow. I have two different bodies of work developing right now, and I am content to let them both win for a while. I think they will both slow down as I work on works on paper and writing. I have one more grammar review of my book, and then it will be time to assemble it into a physical object.
Outside of the studio, July came and went.
There was a quick trip to North Carolina with one night spent in Gatlinburg. As the photos below suggest, Pigeon Forge, TN, is still something else. For the uninitiated, this mess is 13 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park- America’s most visited national park. A park that draws three times more visitors than the Grand Canyon. But we are not content with nature’s beauty. We need to balance that with go-kart races, moonshine tastings, and medieval jousting dinner theater. If you work for the Grand Canyon and you want to boost your numbers, take notes:
I stopped by the North Carolina Museum of Art, but this trip’s art highlight was an Andy Griffith mural in Mt. Airy, NC. The silhouette running through the faces is Pilot Mountain. The show has been off the air for almost 60 years, so I feel I must explain that The Andy Griffith Show took place in the fictional town of Mayberry which was based on Griffith’s childhood hometown of Mt. Airy. The show featured a fictional nearby city called Mount Pilot, which later inspired a 90s punk band from Nashville called The Fun Girls from Mount Pilot:
I have not read or listened to any new books this month. Old stuff, yes, but nothing new. The same applies to music. I was aware there was a Steve Reich soundtrack for a Gerhard Richter film, but I never knew it was released. Finding this recording from 2022 was a nice surprise:
I also watched this Stravinsky documentary:
Have a good month.