New Art: (#3) “In Mortal Space Combat”

For those that like sci-fi, psychedelic, surrealist, expressionist, paintings.

Well, I got three under my belt. I also seem to have come full circle and returned to a style and method very similar to my early work, as if I never bothered to finish my undergrad education, and didn’t go on to grad school. I’ve often thought that if I kept up on that work, at the pace I was going, instead of having my teachers stop me from doing it, I would be a successful artist by now.

There’s something that now seems incredibly apparent and stupid in art education when I was in school. There was the idea that you just couldn’t be a painter and be taken seriously. And the glaring problem with that is that some of us visual artists want to make visual art, and not to be told that the whole medium is off limits, and we need to do something else as visual artists. Conceptual art is not visual art. Unlike some of my painter peers who boldly declare that conceptual art is not art, I’m quite happy to call it art, and I could get into it myself under the right conditions. What’s wrong with just thinking of clever things to make that aren’t traditional paintings? Chris Burden has a piece where he had cranes drop steel girders from a great height into a cement pit, thus creating a conceptual sculpture. How is that not fun and cool? Who wouldn’t want to do that, in a way? Just let me operate the crane, or guide it (I once got to operate a small crane to move logs, and it was fun), let that bad puppy fly, and impact with tremendous force and a goodly plop in a thick pool of cement. That’s awesome. But, it’s just a different kind of art, like music is different from literature. So when a painter goes to art school and can’t paint, it’s like a musician going to music school and not being allowed to play any instruments.

Just a quick rant, there.

After doing three of these my idea was to take the best one and make a larger version, get out some of the wrinkles, fix the more egregious mistakes, and make a final image.

Right now I’m enjoying working with time limits and thumbnails. I make the images in stages, which I’ve written down and tinker with, and use time limits, like doing 5 3-minute thumbnails, or, further on, giving myself 30 minutes to lay in color and values. This creates a sort of game quality, which also links with addiction, in a good way, and is a motivator. There’s an element of gambling and luck in choosing which of the initial 10 thumbnails to take to the next round, or even in just trying to come up with any kind of drawing in one minute flat.

I’m really a perfectionist, so can fixate on single pieces for a good long time, in which case time limits seem to help kick up my productivity, at least in terms of output.

If you didn’t see them. Here’s #1 and #2.

~ Ends