colored pencil
this stuff was tedious and painful, but it led me out of drawing and into painting, and its process led me (thanks to Alexis Graman) to Malcolm Morely whose work continues to instruct my painting process.
None of the following is true but came out of me at the time, after staring at those North Carolina mountains for several days straight:
the smelting of Appalachian glass quilts, as pictured here, represents one of the last surviving “rustic combinatorial” processes which first emerged within one of only two failed southeastern shaker communities along the nc/tn border during the 1850s as a way to incorporate stained glass effects into places of worship without the incorporation of filtered sunlight, as some sects considered this “artificial convolution of light” a gesture of superiority towards divinity, “as if light were not good enough”
This smelting of quartz results in the emission of sulfur dioxide gas, which reacts chemically in the atmosphere to form a sulfuric acid mist. As this acid rain falls runs and collects (traditionally half outdoors in mountain lean-to’s, or here in our shed), we trace its capillaries and pathways to generate a diagrammatic model whose regularities are not those of the “mentations used to manifest nature” and which divulges through a system of transformations a pseudo random six digit hex color value as it evaporates, (a modern convenience - the shakers used color tables derived from biblical taxonomies) which we then use to choose pigments for corresponding geometries that can be recognised if at all only afterwards as “correct combinations”, usually dictated by a designated matriarch in the community, or here now with one common primary dictum -
“only once the biases and blind spots of faith have been partially or fully removed”
Forthcoming publication
A diary entry from the time when I was working on the third one:
In the case of any one, even just one, finding this out-loud contemplation of something so frivolous as image making with pencils edifying...
always trying to get aligned with that dance spicer talks about with the broadcasting
i write practically here
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Modes of Generation
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I'm often torn between creating images that take 1 day and images that take 1-2 months (or ocassionally longer).
The quilts take 1-2 months. Drawings in Decision Manual took sometimes a few hours, sometimes a few days.
These have existed as two separate pursuits very difficult to reconcile practically for me.
I have been advised by my commiserates to work on more than one thing at once, keep the practices in parallel. I cannot / am unwilling to do this.
As soon as what I do starts to feel prescribed to me, like a habit from a TED talk about creativity, or really anything other than "I need to do this right now", I will toss it like a rotten tomato.
When I commit to generating 2-3 images a week, the stream of ideas begins to talk back quickly. A flow can happen where you feel the future reaches into the present, and you are being fed the ideas. I really like that.
With the larger longer ones, that flow of ideas gets suppressed and sacrificed in service of.... we'll get into it
When committing to working out a larger image, I have taken two approaches:
1) knowing precisely what I intend to render (quilt 1-2, fundraisers, other of my larger graphite pieces)
2) deciding not to know and letting the piece generate itself (partly quilt 3)
I became burnt out on the drudgery of 1. it's like data entry
If I'm to exchange years of my life for the experience of coaxing images into existence, then it should not, in addition to taking me away from people of the living world, also be boring.
Kate said the quilts look somewhat like "Bro, are you okay?"
The latter approach I have reached at but not truly fully explored, as I will explain in the following chapter.
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Glass Quilt March - Swimmer
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Eventually I will write about the "Glass Quilts" in general and how they happened to start happening, but for now we'll hop into #3
While working on Glass Quilt March - Swimmer, I made a mid-flight attempt to salvage the soul I might have lost, to keep the process interesting for myself
I had started at the beginning of March with the familiar "I need to bury myself in the paper" feeling.
And then, though I had thought I had sworn off the practice of laying out tasks large enough to require a borderline inhuman level of willpower and determination towards questionable ends,
My excuse was this time, "it's still cold out, and your birthday is coming, and you know how good it feels to finish these big images, so do it for You, Jake, future you will love to see how this turns out."
so i drew up this layout and began scratching away, at my standard 22"x30":
This lasted for about two weeks. I diligently meted out my time every day to work on my grid for a couple hours, which as always turns into hookey, avoiding social outings to squeeze in another few hours, etc etc
Until I was not sleeping enough, I was overwhelmed by how little the page was changing, uncertain about whether this type of abuse was worth what I was working towards, and most importantly, a question that has haunted me even since beginning multitracking music 12-13 years ago:
Am I just making a spectacle of my will?
I think of Martyr Group's "Always on the Run"
It was in the morning I resolved to make my mind up for a week
in a mortal moment I resigned to find a mountain I can reach
except, in contrast to the next line of the song, I was *not* always having fun.
One of these late nights, tired of being in my studio, mind-fried, delusional about how I might be able to finish a whole layer of color that day,
I moved the piece on the easel to the edge of my bed so I could sit softer and change my environment.
I had the laptop going next to me with movies. I think that day I "watched" Braveheart, Dances with Wolves, Airplane 1 and 2, .. Driving Miss Daisy? I'll literally watch the anything I have no standards. (I Love Art)
After spilling a great deal of pencil shavings into my sheets and draining 8-10 pieces of nicorette, I spun up my favorite song for the end of a long day's work Tuesday's Gone and fell back into bed and stared in awe at how little had happened on the page.
In my daze and exhaustion taking in this maniac grid, returning to reality after completely dissociating at the paper, I noticed I had started to move on to certain layers and colors without finishing the previous ones, which was not my plan. I had put on my lil stoic cold determination suit, the testing of the upper limits of my willTopower suit, intending to complete each color layer completely before moving to the next.
There really is something so deeply wrong with that impulse. My own little seed of fasc.
The whole surface I had intended to be basically uniform with no differentiation, as in the mock up above, I was interested in feeling that on my eyes, and for other viewers the feeling wherein the raw sense experience is juiced up with the bits of my soul lost in the creation, the knowing of the time spent - (this is what I'm talking abt with spectacle of will, that most suspicious appeal)
But different quadrants of the page had different degrees of finished, and I said, or something said, this could be so much better. Here you have the ludicrously intricate beginnings of something so much more exciting, which is I don't know, here for you to grow on like moss.
So there I went, I fell asleep with the possibilities flipping through my mind eye like a slot machine.
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However
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What ended up transpiring over the course of the next month finishing the thing was not quite the fanciful sewing of wild imagination and beautiful-flowing-from-the-hip-anything-goes oblivion I had dreamed it would be that fateful night. My inclination towards rigorous rendering continues on still, ultimately, though I stepped in a somewhat less mind-absent-work direction. I still ended up mocking up the basic layout out of fear of truly letting go of outcome control, at least until the end.
I had left the border undecided so that I could really just see what would come up on the fly. That was a bit more exciting, and the way it ended up being somewhat aesthetically out of line with the meat of the image gave me some reprieve from my suspicion of the theme's inescapability. And the way the entire thing riffed but departed from the previous Quilts at least made the whole endeavor worthwhile as a bridge OUT of the series, it suggested possibilities.
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And so
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That's where I'm at now. I started another one, but this time on 48 5"x5" torn squares in a grid. I have them pinned up to the wall and I take them down one at a time to fill in. It helps not feel overwhelmed. It also allows me to get the paper as close as I want to whatever source image I'm copying over, Morley style.
Now as I write this I see that I while I thought this would allow me escape from the heaviness of the work, I forgot to try to escape from the knowing what will be, and I've started on rendering, one square inch at a time, a blown up version of a photograph I took when I was 11 inside of the camper we were living in, of a tv playing a video I had taken of my brother on a dirtbike in a supercross race in Las Vegas. I started a painting of this a few months ago but abandoned it because I didn't like using a brush. At first I thought, yes each square I give myself permission to depart from my source material, to put on whatever I like. But as I complete squares, I am seeing that I'm much more satisfied by the end result of simply copying over the image. To mess it all about with these quilt geometries and current visual themes I've been playing with seems to do an injustice to the idea of honoring this photograph I have carried with me everywhere for the last 6 years, and wanted to lift up since I found it in an old photo box at my parents.
Though something internally has shifted in my perspective. Since I'm not generating this imagery and instead copying it over faithfully, it feels more honest, not so Look at Me and my Will. I'm also just going slow and know that it's going to take several months, and maybe just not caring so much.
Like perhaps that weird determination that punishes me so, it's really only that in that form of practice, that maniacal something-to-prove kind of pursuit of a flashy grandeur.
We'll see, but I'm pretty sure this more (am I allowed to say -) humble, casual, torn up paper, slow, less obsessive thing, less striving towards masterfulness,.. It's more prayer in itself, less deal with the devil grasping for the awe of all.
Not to say that it being "prayer in itself" means anything like "the joy of creation", I still believe something like what the infamous Quentin Crisp says in How To Have A Lifestyle:
"In art as in life, there may be a few moments of ecstasy in the act of conception (don't count on this) but bringing anything to birth is usually a long, painful and appallingly styleless process."
because, as he goes on to quote Oscar Wilde later:
"In matters of great importance style not sincerity is the vital thing."
and of course
"I have put my talent into writing, my genius I have saved for living"
And Oh, that I could say amen
and maybe I can *really* let go, next time.