Diary of A Serial Painter
Phenomenological ontology of series of abstractions.
I am myself too much
I started a new series of paintings the other day. I started with just the one painting, which I will show you. It wasn’t designed to be a series, but something happened when I finished working on it that day.
What happened is that I liked it too much. I almost thought that I would just leave it at that and call it finished. I decided to take a break for a couple of days and investigate the painting, explore it a little.
I thought about it, thought of what I could add to it. I have a few ideas, but instead I decided to start another painting, a series of paintings, in fact. This had now become an official series of n number of paintings.
Before I show you the state in which I left the second painting, started earlier today, I want to make a statement about the first painting in the series. The point at which I left it, the state that it was in when I left it, I’ve long been telling myself that a painting is always finished when I leave it behind, for any amount of time.
What would happen if I died in my sleep, I mean literally? The painting would have to be finished. Or else my successors would say it was unfinished, but then I, its creator, would not be around to argue. Surely if a painting is finished or not, I should be the one to decide?
So while I truly loved the result of that first day of painting, there was something about it I really didn’t like. I have been painting abstractions for 20+ years and I have to be honest with you, I much rather work on more figurative subjects. It’s a lot more work, it’s much more of a challenge, and when I finish a piece with at least some sort of figuration or representational elements in it, I tend to feel much better about myself. I feel better about my work in general and about who and what I am or represent as an “artist”, that elusive category of beings.
Look what happens on the second attempt at abstraction.
Is it just me or are you beginning to see a pattern here? How long can this go on for, do you think? The series, I mean. The series of abstractions. The indefinite series of abstractions that look more and more alike.
Is that what they call a Style in artistic practises? When does one decide that imitating oneself in one’s craft is not going to be sustainable in the long-term?
I was once told that my work lacked a certain coherence. It would appear now that my work often times suffers from too much consistency. Can there be too much of a good thing in painting?
The Concept in Painting
I shall now introduce you to one of the antinomies in painting: The concept itself. I once struggled for many years to do one thing in painting and one thing only. I wanted to paint the concept of History. I must tell you that the project, called The History-Project, was a near-complete failure. I learned a lot from that project.
Here is my attempt at a purely abstract painting, abstract and conceptual. I call it Figure 2.8 Cottage and Trees:
That must be a failure of some kind, of the image, of painting itself, or some fault on the artist’s part. Or maybe it’s this website, or your web browser. Are you sure that you have the settings adjusted properly?
Here is an abstraction from over a decade ago, one of the first pieces in the — failed! — History-Project. Tell me if you see the resemblance.
It would seem that my abstractions are either not all unique or original, or that they are set on a ten-year loop. Or perhaps there’s something much deeper to this.
I think we are wrong to call paintings abstractions. At the very least, if they are abstract, we could call them non-representational, if it was what has long been called a pure abstraction. But abstraction, I find, is a misnomer. It’s a concept borrowed from some other place. I don’t think it has any real place in painting.
Again, there is a much deeper issue at work here. I find more and more that many of the people I meet seem to have lost an important connection to something, not to Nature necessarily, but to something or other. I would put forth the idea that maybe people have abstracted themselves out of their own emotional lives. Out of their lives, period.
When you design a series of abstract paintings in your mind, where is the concept of the series, in each individual item in the series, or else across all of the items in the series put together? When do you decide when a series stops? Is the concept of the series of abstractions in your mind, in the text that accompanies the paintings, in their titles, in the title of the series, what?
To be continued…
A.G. © 2013. All Rights Reserved.
