Images and Thoughts

March 14^th

After reading over some of Tarkovky’s book (just a little so far) and the quote on the back about conscience in art making, I think it is important to set down that wonder is my true inner mode of reflection, that my work has to do with a processing of wonder, and though there may be a whole spectrum of thought or intellect through which it might be filtered, the most direct qualities of my person that must come through if my work is to have conscience is the feeling implicit in that wonder.

I am constructing a new place to live in near my studio in sodo—it’s very exciting. Today I bought a cheap used stainless steel sink and all the fittings and plumbing I will need. The studs are up for my walls. There is a large space where a door will sit.

I accepted entry into a thematic show. The theme is mythology, or legend. My intention is to do something related to the trickster mythology I’ve been a bit entranced by, and hopefully I will find a way of working towards it that retains the push towards new painting that has been building up for quite some time: through any filter the surge of wonder can be pushed, until the filter breaks, or weakly so that the wonder is obscured or muddied or inaccessible. After I get my sink in working order it will be brainstorming time.

I also fired off an e-mail to a concept artist working for Arenanet who seems roughly my age, certainly a bit older, from Iceland, who does very accomplished digital paintings of impressionistic city and landscapes. My dad took me to a sounders game and the stadium lit up at night in the fog was quite beautiful, and I had not been around that many people and that much noise in quite a long time. My father paused on the stairs to the second level of the parking garage on the way home because his heart is aging, thankfully assisted by medicine and diet but possibly growing weaker and weaker. I want to make a painting for everyone.

This concept of wonder is an important one I think. It is at the base of all the concerns I have had over the years about romanticism and escapism. And about thought and intellect in fine art. And about my sense of self, relating to all those things.

March 15^th

Reading through Jasper John’s notes and interviews, I think to myself later: read that and think about how you might explore different modalities of making and thinking about making. But I don’t have a powerful mind like that, or rather, not a mind oriented around that way of responding to things. I have my own language of wonder and exploration, and I think the key is not trying to ‘subvert’ that so much as applying it effectively. I can apply it to anything, and so it is flexible like a change of mode. To radio emissions from the wires in binary computers, to rastering, line-by-line construction of pixel values and electron beams, telephone wires, fiber optic cables with information running through at the speed of light, the demolition of mountains to make cables straighter for quicker economic power, everything! I can respond to all this, to the history of this world and its people and their details and lives and even narratives— and I think the value of the process I seek is in this contemporary focus, contemporaneous glaciers and blood and biology pouring over it all, physics and math and astronomy shining through or being revealed dark as pitch from behind everything forming everything.

My current space is coming together. I installed a sink from nothing, with no knowledge of plumbing! Scary and sketchy at times, but it worked! I may make the whole room into a whorl of 2x4s, real and illustrated, with perhaps a perfect square of blue or sky on one wall. It is a strange new joy to make this utilitarian thing that is a place to live. Scary though in implications, it is a bit like building a cage for yourself… but fun.