Being away...

A lot of things come to light when you are away from home.  Don't get me wrong.  I am not saying "I am on vacation and things are GREAT!"  I am talking about discovering something about how I am based on being in a different place, a different location, a different light.  I am making different paintings because the light of Savannah is different than that of Boston or of Central Maine.  That sort of goes without saying.  What I am getting at is this trip to Savannah has put some things in plain view.  Things I try hard not to think about.

First of all, I am a very solitary person and it has never really bothered me until I came here.  For the first time in a very long time, I am aware of how very lonely I am and how unconnected I feel at times.  I have no family to share this experience with, there is no one to call at home, there is no one to check on me and no one for me to check one.  In some ways, it gives me a tremendous amount of freedom, but in other ways it leads to feeling very unmoored.  It becomes clear when I see something or experience something and I want to share it with someone I know and who knows me.

I have friends.  That is not the issue and I share my experiences and feelings and adventures with them.  It goes deeper than that.  My Mother remembered a time before I could remember.  She saw me through many different ways of being and to be able to share this experience (and the emergence of a career after a lot of hard work) would be something.  It would make her very proud and happy and I would have the satisfaction of watching her investment in me pay off.  If I was married, I am sure my husband would feel the same way.  If I had children, they would be proud of their dad.  My friends are happy for me and I know that they love me.  I don't like to think about this at all, but I miss having a family.  It took leaving Massachusetts to realize what I don't have and I don't really have that sort of group of relatives that are in your corner.  Other people have their own families.  Mine is damaged, fractured, explosive and wounded.  I cannot expect that kind of support from them.  

When I was in High School we had to read a book by Chaim Potok called My Name is Asher Lev.  It is a story about an Hasidic Jew who becomes a painter on the cutting edge of contemporary art.  In the book, Asher has to reconcile his faith, his family, and his responsibility to his art work.  On the one side is his father, and on the other is Jacob Kahn, his teacher.  Asher talks about the loneliness that is living the life of an artist.  I sort of understand this now.  

The loneliness of the artist is not an abstract thing.  It really is the condition of making art.  The solitude that I require to make work is not something I would (or could) give up.  What a tremendous gift it is to have this time and this place to make the work.  I am a very fortunate man.  In the heart of all this, though, I am faced with the way I have structured my life to make my work.  I would not change the decisions I've made (to be single, to be childless, to teach, to commit to artmaking as a central fact of my life)  for anything because I truly love this life. However, being here reinforces how much of my life I have done alone.  

Wall Drawing Number 1

Photobucket Album

Wall work

My studio here at SCAD has a wall that is about 22 feet long.  It is great inside the studio and I have plenty of room to work.  The wall on the outside of the studio is blank, painted with the ubiquitous gloss white paint that I guess art schools everywhere use.  I am confronted by this wall (what I guess Melville would call the "whiteness of the whale") each time I go into my studio.  I felt like it was confronting me to do something with it.  In his essay "Whitescapes" in his book, Chromophobia, the artist David Batchelor talks about a kind of whiteness that is accusatory.  This has been on my mind as I pass this wall.

I've decided to use this wall as a site for drawing.

I am going to make some drawing installations on this wall, short-term projects of a week or so. My goal here is to expand my practice to include works that are specific to a location and have a limited means of execution.  I also want them to have as their main focus the formal essentials of two dimensional art.  I am not interested in making sculpture, but rather I am interested in the consequence of a mark on a surface, the evidence of the tool being used, and the duration of a mark in relation to a body.

Miwon Kwon's lecture on Felix Gonzales-Torres has really stayed with me.  Specifically the way Felix's work comes into being based on the certificates of authenticity and how the transmission of the certificate allows for the manifestation of the work.  Since these wall drawings are specific to the wall outside of my studio, it might be necessary to document them in writing in addition to photographing them.  I am not certain if these drawings can be done anywhere, but if someone wants me to recreate one how do I do it? Can I make the flexibility of location a part of the work?  Do I have to be there to install it?  All of those questions that Dr. Kwon posed in her lecture interest me a great deal.  

New Work...

I have been thinking a lot and drawing a lot this past few days.  The thing that has occupied me for a while has been this idea of ecstasy.  Bernini addresses it in his sculpture of St. Theresa, but I have been wondering about it in my own work.

At this stage of my life, I am barely a Christian.  I do have a long personal history as a Catholic so I do have access to ideas and models of trasformation, the miraculous and so forth.  I can call to mind many stories of the lives of the saints, for example.  But in my practice these have not been helpful in determining aesthetic frameworks for this project. 

I remember seeing a movie when I was a kid about the Rapture.  Essentially, this kid and his mom had a fight and she sent him to the store.  While he is there, the Rapture happens, when the faithful are taken bodily from the earth.  There is a terrifying, slow motion bottle of milk falling and smashing on the floor.  The holder had been "raptured" and there was only a pile of clothes where she had stood.  The kid rushes home and finds a pile of clothes in the kitchen where his mom used to be. Needless to say, this scared the shit out of me.  

I have been thinking a lot about that while in Savannah.  The possibility of being taken away in religious ecstasy.  Can that happen now?  What does it look like?  And really, since I am gay and an abomination in a cosmology that contains the Rapture, I know I will be "left behind." Who gets to go?  Who has to stay?  And since the sinners create the opportunities for the saints, is there a way that I am helping the faithful get to Heaven?  What sort of service can I provide for the faithful?  Similar to the service gay men provided to people of faith like Ted Haggard. (FYI if you see the movie Jesus Camp, there is a scene of Pastor Ted exhorting the children to hate gays.  It's edifying.)

As I keep making these drawings it is becoming clearer to me.