July 2009 Archives

Once again this year I'm applying for the West Prize. I didn't win last year, but I was a finalist in the Christi Naked competition, so what the heck.

This year the West Prize site allows star ratings. Visitors can rate any or all of the artists applying. Everyone starts out with the default three stars (very generous, I think). You can see I've got only one star.

This upsets me less than I expected. I thought I'd be crushed but it turns out I don't care that much. I mean, I care enough to check back every day, but not so much that I'm devastated by my low rating. Turns out it's easy for me to rationalize it. I figure most people are only giving high ratings to their friends and relatives and low ratings to anyone making work they hate for ideological reasons. I further figure that the kind of work I do is the kind a lot of artists would hate for ideological reasons. It goes without saying that I consider those people jealous, incompetent nincompoops. So clearly the poor rating of my work indicates that it's actually fantastic.

Or something like that. When my mind works that way, it worries me a bit.

Incidentally, do not consider this a plea for anyone to go and give me a higher rating. Don't worry about it. It's not important.

I'm painting so fast I can't keep up with panels. I still can't figure out if this is a problem or not. Judging by a book I have here with a range of reproductions of good old Vinny Van Gogh's work, he finished at least four paintings in the last month of his life, which is about the same as my rate. He's known for about 900 paintings and he painted for nine years, which works out to a painting, on average, every 3.65 days. So clearly speed and quality aren't necessarily related. But I still don't know if I should be taking longer. I mean, I'm not Van Gogh. I'm not even Kirk Douglas.

Desperate for surfaces on which to apply paint, I stopped at Soho Art Materials on my way in last week. Soho Art has the benefit of being close to the A train stop on Canal Street. There I picked up four Mona Lisa pre-gessoed panels from Speedball. They have the benefit of being really, really cheap.

I've used Ampersand's Gessobord. One of things I liked about it is the surface, which allows me to wipe off the paint, leaving a really lovely texture. Good for skin, for what I'm doing. The Speedball panels completely lack this texture. In fact they have virtually no tooth at all. It's like painting on smooth plastic. Which is actually what you're doing, I guess.

The important thing about the panels, though, was that they were something I could slap paint on. So the texture wasn't a big deal. Because I really am out of panels. It's so bad, I broke down and painted over a partially finished painting that wasn't going well -- and if you've ever read this blog before, you know how bad it has to be before I'll paint over it. It has to be really bad.

This was really bad. Because I have no shame -- not between us, you and I, you know me too well -- I'm going to reproduce my lousy painting here. It doesn't happen often, but every now and then I'll bring home a photo of what I'm working on and show it to my supportive, loving wife Dawn, and she'll say, "Oh my god that's awful." And when she says that, usually she's right. Sometimes there are things I like about it -- there are things I liked about this -- but, really, when she says that, she's right, it's a horrible painting with no redeeming qualities.

I had an idea for this, something using techniques I'd seen in Greek icons, sort of, and after these two photos and some drying time, I started and.... Let's just say plan failed. Miserably. If these look bad, believe me when I say it got much, much worse.

So I wiped off as much as I could using OMS and started over entirely, and got Night in the Bedroom. The whole painting uses Gamblin's Torrit Grey, tubes of which are given away with every Gamblin purchase when the salespeople remember. The paint is made from the air filters in the Gamblin factory, so it contains every pigment all at once and is different each year. I have a bunch of tubes. Theoretically you can use Torrit Grey, white, and black and make a value painting for the Gamblin Torrit Grey contest. I blew it by using a small amount of non-white-or-black paint in the skin tone and hair color. But mostly I'm playing with value here.

The rest of these are on the Speedball panels. At a certain point you can't add paint, only push it around, and if you use a stiff bristle brush half the time you're scraping paint off the panel instead of putting it on. But the effect can be kind of interesting.

I'm deeply uncertain about the last one, The Cinnamon Peeler. I was thinking of the reading by Tom O'Bedlam of Michael Ondaatje's poem of the same name. But I don't think I managed to get across what I wanted; as I finished the painting and stepped back Reilly was mid-sentence and turned, stopped dead, and then finally said, "That is one disturbing painting." Disturbing wasn't at all what I was aiming for.

On the other, um, hand, Dawn said they were some of the best hands I'd ever painted. She always picks on me for how I paint hands, which I do the way I do because I'm sort of purposely trying not to give a crap about them, not to be too precious, and I'm really good at hands when I want to be. So I'm kind of trying not to be good at them, which sounds stupid now that I wrote it out like that.

Anyway. There it is.

Incidentally, I figured out that the hideous glare on all my paintings in my latest photos is from the sun streaming in the windows of my nice new studio. Damned windows. Damned sunlight.