She asked me where I found the patience to do the work, a question I don’t think I’ve been asked. I did not have a ready answer. Since then I’ve been thinking about her question. Where do I find the patience, being a restless, anxious type? I’m thinking patience is akin to focus and that focus requires a quiet mind, so the question has morphed into “How do I quiet my mind.” The best answer I have for that is to give the mind something to do while I do something else.

All artists have various tricks and techniques to get into the studio and work. Mine has been to clean and organize the studio or clean the house before I start a session in the studio. Here are some other ways I’ve found to quiet the mind and, therefore, give me patience:

Counting
Washing dishes
Weeding the garden
Repeating the same task over and over (pretty much how I do a painting)
Taking a really deep breath before I touch brush to canvas
Playing with my dog, Zack
Sweeping the floor

I scratched Zackdog behind the ears in his favorite place and watched his eyes glaze over in bliss. The he went off to be by himself and do his own gazing, at late afternoon walkers, the neighbors going to the dumpster, a car driving by, ever watchful for the odd bunnie that might make itself visible and then freeze (as if that were some brilliant defense mechanism).

This is my idea of a good time and it’s when I fall in love with Marfa again. At times, something deep inside us guides us without our conscious awareness and we are compelled to act. We owe it to ourselves at these moments to listen deeply to ourselves and not the noise around us, or the well-intentioned advice of friends or colleagues or lovers. To be selfish.

Yes, on days like today Marfa is a piece of heaven. Don’t move here.

Before I go any further, it’s probably best to explain that for the most part I have exited from the ’scene’ criticized in RANT and found my way back to the work and, that on the topic of galleries, get snarky, which is a waste of energy better spent daydreaming, napping or reading a novel.

If you can get beyond the fact that RANT is so obtuse as to fail at actual communication, sounding like Rosalind Krauss on a bad-hair day, there are some valuable nuggets hidden in the artspeak (ironic as it places the rant squarely within the scene it critiques).

My favorite bit is at the beginning:

How do we survive the poisoned glance, the uncomfortable handshakes, the innuendos of undeserved arrogance? We might recognize that introverted scenes produce bile and hysterical defensiveness, yet we remain unable to discover alternatives—this is not that alternative, but only the chance to go into free fall. We begin with a scene at the end of its limits—a scene unable to go beyond the sound of its own insecure high-pitched neurotic voice, a scene on the brink of implosion. The members of this scene are stuck between a craving for validation and approval and the fallout that accompanies unrequited desires.

Every artist knows the worried expression of the curator or director who, on meeting your glance at an art opening, quickly looks away, terrified that you, the artist, are going to hit them up. Also we all know what it is like to be engaged in fitful conversation at these openings with someone whose attention is taken away by scanning the crowd for a more important person they might engage.

The second source that piqued my interest, W.A.G.E., is unfortunately doomed. The Canadian and European models it propounds are unlikely to ever be instituted in the U.S. Still, it’s interesting to read these models (linked to from the W.A.G.E. website) as information you can use to find your own way within the scene while definitely taking a detour around the whining tone of deserving more than you’re getting and the belief that someone else can do for you what you should do yourself.

Why doomed? Well, there’s a link from the W.A.G.E. website to a Code of Ethics by the National Artists Equity Association in 1974. For those of you counting, that’s 35 years ago. And has anything changed? No. Also, if you try to find a website for the National Artists Equity Association you’ll be led to a lame portal site, mostly advertising, and a notice that their domain may be for sale. Sad state of affairs. I won’t even bother providing a link.

On the bright side, I got some affirmation from both sources on my decision to exit myself from the scene for the most part, and find a way that a recluse like myself is happier. That is to do my work when I can and when I’m inspired and to support myself financially doing something else which gives me the freedom to work only with a few galleries where the relationship is a good and pleasurable one and overcome my reservations about providing galleries with free inventory.

The paintings are a reflection of the unfathomable, that for which there is no complete narrative, only brief and infrequent glimpses. And I don’t mean to be overblown; that’s simply what they are. They are also a mundane history: I made these marks with this color for six weeks last November; in the fall of last year I spent one week collecting the seed pods from clumps of tribulus terrestris (goathead or puncturevine).

My paintings and other objects I have created are unabashedly retinal. They do not possess a narrative as in ‘this painting is about…’ This lack of narrative, I naively think, is obvious in the works themselves. They are, actually, about no story, no narrative, a reflection rather of a state of being as no-thing gazing out at inexplicable phenomena. Most of the time creating a work is not done in the actual creation, but in this state, sitting on my front porch, for instance, looking. And if I can recapture a way of being in which I lose track of the names of that which I see, something truly miraculous can occur during which all there is and me are all subjects gazing at each other.

If you take away what you do and the stories you tell about who you are, if your history were erased, your family and everyone you know were to disappear, who is left? And what is it that that subject which is left is experiencing?

A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.

Paul Gardner

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Michelangelo

All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent; and this crumpled matter called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.

Louis Kahn

The subjects of my paintings are color and perception. The six panels of Work Group1 (2008) continue my investigation into subtle differences of light and color (color being a quality of light) through the use of multiples.

The work is divided into three diptychs. Each diptych’s final color is the same, only the underpainting differs. The final colors were applied thinly and loosely using transparent or semi-transparent colors. This causes the top color to mix with the color underneath in the viewer’s perception, subtly altering the perceived hue. The color perceived does not actually exist on the surface of the painting.

Another result of working loosely is that the sufrace color appears flat at a distance, yet closer is actually many colors which distance blurs.

Installation View

Installation view

Come to the Courthouse this weekend for all the fun and activities, arts and crafts! You can find me at booth 666 selling my popular goathead knitwear now cooler days are upon us: scarves, knit caps, gloves and socks all made from 100% natural, Marfa goathead. And this year I also will be introducing the goathead thong…only for the adventurous! The Food Shark will be offering their tasty goathead seed pie.

How to Harvest Goatheads
Put on a pair of soft rubber soled shoes and step outside. It’s that easy! Within minutes you’ll be enjoying handfuls of goatheads to use in your crafts and cooking.

Goathead Gift Certificates
This year you may purchase Goathead Gift Certificates redeemable at any Dollar General store in West Texas, including these fine products:

Ladies Tool Kit

Wet Ones: Cleaner and fresher than dry toilet paper alone

Idee Multicolr Search Lab Flickr Set

Thanks for turning me onto this, Canton.