Yesterday was the artist’s reception for my joint show with sculptor and glass artist James Tracey. It was a very successful show, we had a great turnout, and I had lots of fun conversations. I even sold a few paintings.

The most commonly asked question or comment about the work was about the titles. In the past, I never really titled my abstract work. I’d name them things like “Abstract Number 3,” “Abstract with Green and Yellow, or sometimes “Untitled.” Is calling something “Untitled” actually giving it a title? In some circles the thinking is that abstract art should remain pure, with no context to it that gets between the viewer and the art. If you paint a mother and child in front of a window at twilight, staring lovingly into each other’s eyes the view is responding for the most part to the context, not the image as a purely visual experience. Titles can also influence the viewer’s perception of the work, get between the art and the viewer. Now I’m not saying that I subscribe to that school of thought. At least I don’t have a premium membership. I have the free budget plan.

When I started doing these latest paintings a couple of years ago, on a whim, I started giving them titles, and to be honest, I felt a little guilty about it. Like I was going against one of my beliefs about art, that representatives from the cult would come knocking on my door. That’s the kind of crap that comes to mind when you study this stuff in college. But then I started having some fun with it.

Folks asked how I come up with the titles. Various ways. Sometimes they just pop into my head when I’m working on them, like divine inspiration, not always having very much to do with the image itself. Other times there’s something that the image evokes, like a Rorschach test, and I base the name on that. In other cases, I’m stumped for a name. I spend too much time staring at the painting trying to pull some kind of an idea out of it. Sometimes I come up with a theme but can’t find the right words. Then I have a trick up my sleeve. Shakespeare. I look up Shakespeare quotes, sometimes using a keyword but often just scanning through lists until I have an “that works” moment.

I do have a concern that giving the work a title pushes the view into seeing the work a certain way, again getting between the viewer and the image. And although I’m not totally comfortable with that, people seem to have fun with it. I think the titles bring people into the work. When I watch people looking at art, I can tell the ones that just don’t get abstract. They just pass right by it, hardly giving it a look. If the title can make them stop for a second and try to figure out the reason for the title, I’ve pulled them into my schtick. Which is a good thing.

Before I go much further into my thoughts about art I’ll tell you a little about what I’m doing with my art practice these days and where I come from as an artist. Yesterday someone asked me what my art background was. I’m afraid I rattled on for way too long telling my circuitous career story. I won’t bore you with that now, although I might bore you with it in a later post. I’ll just say I was that kid who drew all the time, my parents encouraged it and kept me in art supplies because it kept me still and quiet. They didn’t call it ADHD then. I majored in art in college and went on to work in just about every art related job from animation to zookeeper (I managed a group of designers). I retired from that management job in 2009 and have done some freelance design work since then. In 20017 I decided to start painting again, something I hadn’t done since the 80s. I cleared out a corner of my basement and set up a tiny studio and started slinging paint.

Right my work has a split personality. One side of that split is my representational work. I’ve been doing landscapes, portraits and still lifes in what I think of as an impressionist style. I use acrylic paint, and lately I’ve been using Golden Open acrylics for this style. I like them because they dry more slowly than standard acrylic paint so they can be pushed around and blended for a longer period of time, which really helps creating soft edges and smooth transitions.

I don’t consider these to be the primary focus of my work. I enjoy doing them, I like the challenge of representational art and I also believe that the discipline involved really helps develop my ability to see.

The other half of this split personality is my abstract work. I’ve been interested in abstract art since I was in college. Much of the work that I did in college and in the early 70s was abstract. Then as now, the process is improvisational, I start making marks, look at what I have and respond to it with more marks. My current process involves putting down a thick impasto layer using Golden Heavy Gel Medium mixed with color and sometimes a little pumice to create texture. I often press objects into the wet gel to create different textural effects. Then I start working in layers, sometimes using opaque paint and sometimes glazing. Lately I’ve been sanding the surface to bring up colors from previous layers. I repeat the process until I’m happy with what I see. Sometimes I repeat the process until I’ve ruined the painting. There’s always a risk involved, I think a big part of creativity is not being afraid to try something, even though you know there’s a possibility that it’s going to be one step too far and you’re never going to be able to make it as good as it was before you took the leap.

That’s a little bit about what I’m doing right now, in the future I’ll be talking about individual pieces, problems and solutions, and what’s at the front of my mind in terms of my practice. More to come.

You know when you’re over the hill when your mind makes a promise  that your body can’t fill

Old Folks Boogie, Little Feat

Today was my first experience with pickleball. It was also Becky’s second day of being unemployed, but more about that later. Pickleball is a racquet sport played with a low net on a badminton court. The ball is similar to a wiffle ball, hollow, plastic and full of holes. If you’ve ever played the great American pastime, wiffle baseball, you know you can hit the snot out of a wiffle ball and it won’t go very far. You also know that they do really weird things when spin is applied.

We played at the local YMCA, they have pickleball on the schedule three times a week. It’s part of their AOA program. Active Older Adults. I’m definitely older. But I’m not very active, and I guess it depends on how you define “adult.”

About 20 players showed up, ranging in age from, hell I don’t know to I’m not sure. As you get older you lose your ability to judge people’s ages. Any way, from old to older. But it was a fit crew and some of them could move around pretty well. There were two courts, so playing doubles we had eight players going at a time and everyone rotated in and out.

I haven’t really tried to play any kind of sport since the year of the knee, so I was a little apprehensive about actually having to move quickly and even more scary, stop quickly. After one of my stumbling forays after a shot, I heard, “Remember the first rule, no point is worth a trip to the emergency room.” No one ever said that when I was playing pickup basketball.

It went pretty well, Becky, of course, picked it up faster than I did. If you’ve played tennis, it takes awhile to get used to the fact that the ball just doesn’t bounce. I swung over the top of it so many times it was insane. And I kept going all the way to the net to volley, which isn’t permitted.

Now I’m suffering for my efforts. I hurt all over. It used to just be my knees now it’s my hips and ankles and back and shoulder. It sucks to get old.

I’m sitting in a converted Barn situated on the Crow Wing River west of Brainard. It’s an idyllic spot, the quite only occasionally interrupted by 50 caliber machine gun and howitzer fire. The other side of the river is Fort Ripley, a National Guard camp, and the boys are playing with their toys. I’m on one of those storied ‘boys weekend up north’ trips. It started as a fishing and golf trip, but has turned into mostly a drinking and golf trip. Since I neither drink or play golf,  I’m kind of the fifth wheel. I’ve spent the last two days in the solitude that I get most days working at home. But it’s a pretty spot and I’ve been woodshedding on the guitar and doing some meditating.

Of course in these awful days of connectivity, I’m also ending up doing some work. As little as I can get away with, but work none the less. And of course it’s around a big emergency technical problem that is beyond my pay grade. It’s a good thing that I have a great support network, but it’s just kind of a pain having to stay connected to monitor the progress, sooth the client and try to apply my feeble reasoning to the issue.

And then of course there’s the issue of having that nagging voice in your head telling you to worry about the outcome. Taking full responsibility for the mess and not being able to give myself over to the moment. The meditation helps with that. In fact, I’ve been able to have extended periods of adolescent foolishness without the job even crossing my mind.

Tomorrow the boys aren’t golfing so we’ll have some extra time to spew stories and lies and think up ways to get into trouble. I believe that we are going to try to put our host’s portable dock into the water and then move it 50 yards upstream to a new position. So five guys in their sixties in the river with a large metal construction, four of whom will certainly be inebriated to some extent and the fifth with really bad knees and crappy balance.

What could go wrong.

Can you teach an old dog new tricks? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. I’m an old dog and I’ve been trying to learn new tricks. I retired from my soul sucking corporate job five years ago, with the intention of doing freelance work. I’m 65 years old, I think most people are winding down and looking at real retirement at that age. I tell people I’m semi-retired; my 401k got hit by a semi. Continue reading Old Dog New Tricks →