I might have an artist talk in the near future, so I am considering some ideas for that. You subscribed to this thing, so here are some issues I am working through.
To the barely initiated, it will appear as a skidding left turn for me to do what I have done over the past few years. If you were remotely familiar with my work, you saw an artist transition from small, laboriously cross-hatched graphite drawings to a man painting large, abstract shapes. There were a series of steps. It looks like this (moving from left to right):
I am not deluded when I imagine how many people have a firm grasp of the trajectory of my artistic development. Less than ten people know what I am up to. Everyone else gets a glimpse every two years, by which time they have forgotten what I did before the current body of work. I once heard a famous comedian interviewed, and he recounted a discussion with Jerry Seinfeld about whether or not he should use old material when he appeared on The Tonight Show. He wanted to avoid repeating jokes the audience had heard. Seinfeld said, “How many people do you really think have seen all of your jokes?” That was a sarcastic but nice way of saying, “How arrogant are you? There are over 300 million people in this country.” Who sees everything that I make? Me. That is it. If I emerge from my studio with the frequency of a burrowed cicada and the work looks different, no one should assume that I have made a drastic transition. You just missed the connecting points that happen in isolation.
I have skipped steps. I will not deny that. But seeing the obvious move so far down the road made it a waste of time to do anything else. To this point, I think of my career as a path through 500 years of Western art history. That was not a deliberate goal, but I know how the dots connect both in my studio and the canon. It is there. There have been no dramatic shifts.
I work with a few simple goals like shape and color. I get a few of those pieces under my belt and think, “I miss using line.” So I bring the line back. Then I tire of shape. Then I miss shape. I work with a saturated palette for a while and miss muted tones. You can see where this is all going.
The shifts are not wild mood swings. They are a culling of extraneous elements. The recognizable subject matter slowly grew to be irrelevant. If you think of my paintings as a stack of layers, I peeled off a layer at a time to see what was necessary. Over time, I convinced myself that the bottom layer was all that was needed.
Maybe when I was young, I had something to prove. I wanted to show my capability of juggling multiple ideas or demonstrating mastery of a material. After a while, what is the point of doing that other than serving your ego? Is my work the result of the passing of time, maturity, or both? A person may get less literal with age or become more comfortable with ambiguity. Let the mystery be. I have less concrete ideas to communicate now. I am more interested in less tangible ideas, like joy or peace. Not in a hippie way. Pursuing joy is enough to sustain a career, particularly now when people seem to take performative pride in being miserable.
To anyone younger than me who is reading this, I get it. You have ideas and opinions you need to express. I read a summary of statistics that show most geniuses do their most significant work in their 30s. Go for it. But be ready to rotate out of it at some point. It will not make you any less ambitious, but your ideas will get less literal.
There is why I make my work. There is what the work is about. Those are two different things.
Art around Nashville:
The Nashville exhibition with the most eyes on it lately seems to be Emily Weiner’s Never Odd or Even, a painting exhibition that plays into its palindromic/symmetrical title. I make my students consider symmetry and the golden ratio. Weiner makes exceptional use of both in her work for this show. Never Odd or Even is on view at Red Arrow Gallery through February 24.
I have worked through a few books, movies, and albums.
I may have hit my limit on tech books. There is only so much a person with little or no control can learn about algorithms before finally throwing their hands up in the air and saying, “I am just a cog in a machine.” The only legitimate way to fight this data-harvesting behemoth is to log out forever. Considering that I am typing this into a website that is not my own, you can tell I am not ready to do that.
Here is what I have read/listened to lately:
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is not a new book. It was good to listen to this before Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld. They both examine social media, data harvesting, and algorithms. The difference is Newport has never had a social media account of any kind, and Chayka appears to have participated in every platform placed before him. Newport does not see our future as an inevitable march toward surrendering to the tech gods if we remove ourselves from their equations. At the same time, Chayka thinks there is a solution that can return power to the people. In my heart, I am Newport. In my actions, I am Chayka. As a result, I am disappointed in myself.
I am halfway through Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm, a decent primer on how the business world uses AI. I do not know what the book's second half will cover, but the first half reminds me of the old IBM quote, “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”
I listened to last year’s From Strength to Strength by Albert C. Brooks, which attempts to help those of us pushing 50 to stay engaged and productive. Long story short, you may or may not have reached the period of your life where you are ready to stop being bold, breaking stuff, and taking on large ideas. If you have, your gift is that your brain has synthesized every bit of your life into one cohesive database that can be tapped for mature leadership. I have felt the ability to integrate seemingly disparate ideas into a unified form grow over the past few years. I might just be connecting the dots where there are no dots and am confusing people, but in some ways, that is not my problem.
I also read as much of Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War as I feel like I need to read. It is a thorough account of how the CIA covertly supported every avenue of the arts after World War II, using it as American propaganda to combat the growth of communism in Europe during the continent’s rebuilding.
Movie watching has been an intentionally mixed bag.
The Zone of Interest seems to take the idea that it is impossible to film the reality of the Holocaust as a framework for how to engage with it. Rather than attempting to depict the Holocaust in all of its horrors, it deliberately never shows it- but it is always heard and present. It is a remarkable movie. It extends so much respect to the audience by expecting them to pick up on the nuances in the characters’ development.
There is a British documentary called Night Will Fall, which does show the horrors of the Holocaust from the perspective of soldiers who were first on the scene at a concentration camp. The footage is so terrible that the British would not let it be shown for fear of damaging the relationship with Germany when the West needed them to help combat communism. I would not recommend it if you already understand the Holocaust. You cannot unsee it. But we live in a time where vast segments of the world do not believe the Holocaust happened. Those people should see it. That documentary might be as close as we get to capturing it. But even then, it only shows the disturbing aftermath, not the daily terror.
On the other side of the movie-going coin:
I watched the 1977 Japanese horror movie House. It was wonderfully ridiculous. It is difficult to describe and do its surrealist chaos any justice.
I had a sleepless night and saw video footage of Bob Dylan onstage, talking about Sylvester Stallone and the final Rambo movie, Rambo: Last Blood. Why not? I will watch the last Rambo movie. It was terrible. That is not a surprise. The degree to which it was awful was surprising. I am not saying Rambo had a good track record, but I was hoping that one last effort might come close to the original, which I will argue to my grave is a great movie.
Eileen was a modestly-promoted movie from the end of last year. It did not need a big marketing push because it is a well-made but low-stakes movie. It has a beautiful visual sensibility and an engaging character study, but it might be the only movie I have seen in 10 years that I thought needed to be longer. A few elements could have been expanded upon, and the plot could have been tweaked to make the ending land better, but for a night out, it was well-made. It possesses a visual style that is simultaneously indebted to the past but occupies its own space. I have read the word “Hitchcockian” attributed to this movie, but I would push back against that because too much of it takes place outside to have a Hitchcock quality. It has more noir than anything. Will I remember it in five years? I have no idea. I will say that the character Eileen is subjected to the same double standards, misogyny, and expectations of any character in Barbie. The difference is that Eileen credits you with extracting this from the dialogue and the plot of the movie rather than bringing the story to a halt for the sake of a speech while simultaneously lacking any visual originality on its own as it wastes its budget with homages to Kubrick, Jacques Tati, and Busby Berkeley like a film student with $145m to spend.
Is Eileen good? Yes. Is it great? Not quite. It could be. If it were a painting in my painting class, I would be able to suggest a few things to snap it into shape. I would tell the student who painted the equivalent of Barbie to scrape it down and start over.
I think most of the albums I have liked in 2024 are too long. It is not my job to edit your work. Trim the fat. Damn the algorithm. That said, here are some albums I am listening to:
Quatuor Bozzini - Jürg Frey: String Quartet No. 4
Cowboy Sadness - Selected Jambient Works, Vol 1
Egil Kalman - Forest of Tines
Peter Brötzmann and Paal Nilssen-Love - Chicken Shit Bingo
Abdullah Ibrahim - 3
Piotr Anderszewski - Bartók, Janáček, Szymanowski
K. Leimer - Obligations
Gideon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica, and Vida Miknevičiūtė - Songs of Fate
Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu, and Marta Sofia Honer - The Closest Thing to Silence
Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, and Tyshawn Sorey - Compassion
Kali Malone - All Life Long
Monty Luke - Nightdubbing Pt 1 and 2
Ducks Ltd. - Harm’s Way
El Perro del Mar - Underworld
Itasca - Imitation of War
Next month will focus on my upcoming show at David Lusk Gallery in Nashville.
How do you listen to so much new music? When do you listen usually? I find I have little to no room in my head for new music--but I’m not saying that’s a good thing.