secondseraph

i would be posting some pictures of my latest paintings from this week, but unfortunately, after i'd taken my very first picture of the new "Radiant Sun" piece, the battery died. shame, shame on me. Now I know how long the battery lasts on this brand-new camera without recharge.
to make up for this fact, i will post pictures of past paintings very soon, as i already have a number of digital images i used for slidework. but for this entry, i need to update as to where i'm heading next in my personal painterly evolution:

splatter.
yes, i'm talking about the Pollock, dripping, chaotic-mess splatter-type painting. why, you ask? well, before we get into any discussion of why i believe splatter paintings (as i'll call them from here on out) are actually art—not only that, but one of the most culturally and philisophically relative kinds of art for the current (global?) culture—i'll first describe the epiphany that led me to conclude that i need to start looking to Pollock as an inspiration.

i was scrunched down low at my latest work finished yesterday, aptly (perhaps effusively) titled "Morihei Ueshiba Defeating his Foes". the piece was very colorful, swirly, and brush-strokey. very viscous paint melded colors into large, organic swaths of blue, yellow, and red, while a gigantic black circle on the left dominated the composition. it was an interesting piece and i got many positive comments about it, ranging from "it's so free and moving!" to "it reminds me of a steamboat" (—don't you love interpretation?).
i however, and of course, was unsatisfied. to me it seemed too—childish? it was childlike, yes, and that was pleasing, but maybe it was how you could see the brushstrokes, or the color scheme was mostly primary, or it looked generally like a halfway experiment in floor painting (which, to an extent, it was. i truly didn't know what i was doing—all i knew was that i wanted a giant ink circle and a horizontal composition).
well, after scrutinizing the thing from various distances and head-tilted positions, i decide to walk up to the painting and look really closely at the lines. at the way the colors moved, at how the brush "puts down information" as my MICA professor says, and at the various splattering that happened to find itself into this particular canvas. then it hit me: jackson pollock painted fractals. the detail was infinite as you zoomed in on his paintings, and yet, the further back you went, it also blurred in together into a giant, seemless color—a lot like how Rothko's paintings work.
i had been getting away from Rothko's work. i wanted to revisit it, but didn't know how. i'd already worked with the colorfield technique. but now, i could revisit the vast landscape of harmonious sound that resonated from a magnanimous canvas by using the splatter technique. not only that, but i could include my traditional archetypes—the square, the circle, and the root forms—into those splatter-fields.
genius!
what more, i discovered after testing this theory on the "Morihei" canvas, i could take aikido techniques and use them as painting strokes—sword cuts, circular sweeps, even jabbing staff motions—to create sweeping waves of watered-down acrylic that created large outlines of various shapes, depending on my liking. i went to work and dipped my brush into the remaining reds and yellows that were leftover, flung at the wall to see how it would land, and proceeded to get a bright yellow stream of paint up my right arm. that's allright. i kept on going, adding some ink into the mix and watching how the splatters reacted to an upright position, dripping down on each other and creating long, flowing strands that changed positions in accordance to chaos theory. it was very beautiful. i walked out of the room and continued the rest of the day slightly on air, and convinced that i'd go to Home Depot over the weekend to pick up buckets of house paint.

the problem with this is that it's messy. i'm still in a classroom. i'll probably have to put up cardboard shields around my wall so that paint doesn't get on cieling, floor, and classmates. i'm sure that my art teachers will be so glad i've chosen to explore one of the messiest painting techniques yet invented by modern artists.

still, i feel good about this new movement. i was searching for a kind of freedom before in my paint, and the typical glowy-colorfields weren't cutting it for me. the subterranean-looking sound-wave lines were closer, but still didn't quite cut it. splatter is the kind of effect i need right now to continue in my evolution. discovering that is hard, especially where you kind of feel that you've reached a plateau, and don't quite know where to step up to next. at that point you really just have to let go and try something new; block out all naysaying voices in the back of your head, put on some music you wouldn't normally paint to, and just go for it. for writers, this kind of exploration is called "composting" (as put by Natalie Goldberg); you take the disparate, random, supposedly inconsequential thoughts of your mind and start turning them over like rotting leaves or raw steaks on a grill. eventually, something starts to sizzle, or you catch a smell, or see a bug crawl out and you say "hum! isn't that interesting," and you go in a new direction. that's kind of what happened to me today.

also: i'm not afraid to continue on in a style that, largely, is already explored. i have a long-hibernated passion for Pollack's style—i knew about him, and was inspired by him, before i met Rothko. so this is kind of a longtime homecoming for me. but a friend of mine, who i will admit is a walking encyclopedia, that said "abstract expressionism is already done". Pollock came and went, the New York school happened and now we've seen it.

i see it differently.

if there is still a fire in an artist for a particular meaning, or technique, or image, or style then that form of art isn't done yet. artist's don't take dead art and reproduce it—true artists, at least (oooh, this is getting tricky), always have something new to explore, even if the particular idea was already visited. abstract expressionism, including work like Pollack's, started in the 50's yes, but those were just when the seeds of a postmodern, global, relative world were beginning to sprout. Pollack was before his time, obviously, but that begs the question, what do we paint now. i largely don't have a passion for creating the realistic—aside from it being my artist personality at the moment—because i don't see it as a relevant art form for the postmodern context. that's a big statement, i know, and i'm not trying to say that realism is dead. it's not; philisophically nor practically. but the current world is an abstract one, filled with relative meaning, perception, and cultural disconnects. it is an unequal world that cannot rely on absolute standards set by hierarchy we no longer put trust in. what was Pollock painting? fractals? nihilism? communism? postmodernism? i don't entirely know, but he was painting a feeling that spanned cultures, ideals, philosophies, and time periods. Rothko did this too, just in a different way. the inherent problem with realism is that you are depicting something, and depictions have roots—therein, boundaries—in what they are depicting. but the further you get into the abstract, the further you get from the realistically bounded and more to the fundamental: therein, commonality. Rothko spoke to me of great unity. Pollock spoke to me in a similar way. what i'm trying to do is restate that principle (those principles) in my own way and, on occasion, add archetypal characters as commentary on the direction and challenges of that unity.

why restate something?
because people don't get it yet.
there are still people stuck in an absolutist mindset because they're not willing, or too fearful, or so entrenched in their modern political worldview, to take a look around and see that things are becoming relative. a simple example is racism in America, which we should all know now is alive and well. it's not legislative, but socio-economic, and it's wrong. fixable? i have no idea. but raise awareness first, and then you may begin to see a solution arise from the discussion. another example is absolutism in North American Christianity, which i've visited and revisited so many times, simply because there's this deep part in me that says "it still matters today".
but it won't matter as long as Christian stay in their absolutist, American cultural bubble, trying to stay relative through very short, very bad bumper stickers and over-logicalized, literal sermons.

dinner is ready. pictures of past paintings coming soon.