7.7.08

I’m thinking of changing the working title of Conan Cancer to Conan Cancer (Chromo-Stone). I was surprised to discover that Oliver Stone co-wrote the barbarian flick. I’m re-watching the movie, and it definitely has a certain over-the-top, Stone-ian flair. So far, the drawing has an every-crayon-in-the-box, tutti-fruity clash going on. Small patches of color and patterns spread like rashes across a slowly drowning under-drawing drawn from the Conan the Barbarian VHS box cover. The cover art is fairly generic and characteristically awful, a painting of Schwarzenegger and his crouching valkyrie/love-interest glaring out in a clump of muscle and steel. Boris Vallejo’s work comes to mind; in fact, I wonder if he painted the cover art? I also wonder what it is that I did with all of those Valejo calendars I got as Christmas gifts when I was growing up…

It’s also funny to think how the working-title sounds like “colon cancer” and “chromosome,” not because these things are at all funny but instead how they reflect on the drawing’s look and content. Excessive, virulent growth and ecstatic cellular processes align well with the aesthetics and nature of a lot of my drawings. I’m back to thinking about drawing-as-disease and how drawings are zones of intense concentration—and why there’s still this impulse to make something pretty or beautiful. For all the apparent randomness of the production with these drawings, they’re already showing clear signs of being systematized, orderly, and otherwise considered. Even though I’m indiscriminately dipping my hand into pencil-filled cookie-tins, there is still a great deal of decision-making going on. It’s hard to unlearn craft, color-sense, and balance—after a certain point, it all becomes fairly ingrained and reflexive, involuntary-muscle-like. Still, it’s good to throw a wrench into one’s process, if not only to provide some degree of resistance and drum up a bit of variety. Then again, it’s still a willful means of generating difference, a kind of meta-control where you’re even programming the errors. So why bother?

7.5.08

One should occasionally, if not often, write indulgently about one's work. All artist statements are laborious and ill-conceived, a toxic, paradoxical mix of justification and mystification. If one of these ingredients were preferred, it should be the latter. Justifying art is like sexualizing arithmetic; earnestly weaving an arcane fog about ones work at least complies with the generative inscrutability humming at the core of any real creative act (here scrutable artists may register indignation—and here I’ll remind them that they are, in fact, arithmeticians).

7.3.08

The working title of the new drawing—the first that I’ve actually stayed with for a respectable amount of time since graduating—is Limning N.I.M.H.. It’s simple and appropriate, since the underlying blue line drawing was made from the cover of Don Bluth’s The Secret of N.I.M.H. (I picked up the VHS from a thrift store in Virginia). It’s a riot of spacey, psychedelic patterns and color on texture black paper, somewhat reminiscent of black-velvet paintings and hippy posters. I’ve realized that one thing holding me from finishing drawings is that I’m growing more impatient with the outline/fill method. With Limning N.I.M.H., I’m allowing myself to start and break patterns as I wish, resulting in a variety of marks and a layering of patterns. It’s just as precious and involved as my other work, but it’s more explosive and diverse. We’ll see. I have a bunch more like-sized toned paper in my flat file, so maybe this is just the first in a series.