Ephemera

Studio Notes

I'm nervous because I know where I want these new four to go. This is somewhat contrary to my process. Maybe I always know where a painting is headed. Maybe I am always stearing it in one direction or another. Which then begs the question: does true improvisation exist? Can one create anything without some forethought?

Studio Notes

The challenge now is to build up a surface - color, texture. Then strip it down, bring it back to nothing. Push the paintings. Find the negative space and simple, intentional gestures of a sumi-e painting. Away from the all-over attack.

Studio Notes

The first stab at painting in the new digs. Space, or the lack thereof, will define all my work here. Small. Controlled gestures. I have to treat it as if I'm working en plein air, setting up, then packing everything away when I'm finished. I don't have the luxury of leaving a mess. Adjustment of habits. But I must continue to work. No excuses. Bukowski's "air and light and time and space".

Reata (Seika University), Kyoto

Checklist

1. Time & space

2. A little more time, a little more money

3. Self-important cunts

4. Letters that were never sent

5. Wood for the fire

6. Kyoto blues

7. This is unreasonable

8. Considering criminal activity

9. Transmission

10. Do no harm

11. Engagement with damage

12. Gratitude

13. Listen with your heart

14. Bathtub philosophizing

15. Imperial

16. “My Favorite Things”

17. Black coffee

18. Three large sakes

19. Be mindful

20. The path of the butterfly

21. Wake me up

22. Postcards to the Dead-Letter-Office

23. I’m not here

24. Like a piece of fallen fruit

25. Le carré vert

26. It feels like a battle

27. Dystopian future

28. Derail

29. Saint Rita of Cascia

30. Anachronistic

31. at-risk-youth

32. ends will not meet

33. Degrees

1 minute and 38 seconds in Los Angeles.

Checklist

1. A different cadence

2. ukiyo-e

3. Finding alone

4. Must keep trying

5. I don’t trust happiness

6. Well, yeah, of course

7. After a while the sun will shine

8. So much to do

9. Redoubled his efforts

10. Where are you going?

11. Le Peintre

12. Her walk, the way her hips swayed

13. Devising methods and routines

14. Bone-rattling cold

15. regelmäβig

16. A portal for ghosts

17. Simmer down

18. He always liked her better from a distance

19. Tree trunk graffiti

20. Oh man, Nat King Cole

21. With art as their currency

22. Transcendence

23. “Waiting for the Moon”

24. Past tense

25. It smells old

26. I am unreasonably confident

27. Tulse Luper

28. Too fast for his old ears

29. Irons in the fire

30. Pull

31. Learning to count

32. “reduced to an artist”

33. Degrees

Winter Garden is a short film by artist Robert Wallace inspired in part by the diaristic cinema of Jonas Mekas. It was shot from his bedroom window in Kyoto, Japan at the same time every morning over two months in the winter of 2014.

Studio Notes

Finished. Three more paintings and another studio.

Maybe I say this a lot about new work, but these pieces are strange. I like them, but I'm not sure where they are coming from. Is it the melancholia or anxiety of leaving that spawns these odd paintings?

The last from 12-19 Shinkai Gokanosho.

Studio Notes

I don't know if these three new pieces are good or bad, really good or really bad. They are definitely challenging. They feel like the last paintings from the old Red Hook studio: "Order Collapsing" and "French Lessons". There is that same feeling of things falling apart, a flower that has been trampled.

Studio Notes

I think...these are done. We've stopped fighting. But I need to sit with them. Like a piece of meat from the grill, they need to rest.

There is a flatness to these pieces, which is odd because there are about 30 paintings buried in each one. There is real depth, but because they haven't that landscape feel of the autumn series they seem to exist only on the surface. There is something strangely regal, almost religious about them. It is the colors and the kimono fabric.

Studio Notes

A series has to be built all at the same time. There is no catching up. There is a rhythm. Injecting a new canvas or panel into the group will upset that rhythm. Like a drummer missing a beat, the whole song falls apart.

The "kimono four" are somewhere now - finally. Only I'm not sure I like wherever that somewhere is. I don't know if we should stay, or continue on to somewhere else.

Studio Notes

These are becoming those sort of paintings with a million lives. Each new layer is a total obliteration of the one beneath, the one that preceeded it. It is interesting sometimes to record the evolution in photos, to see all the earlier rejected incarnations. There is finally the first faint hint of a painting now. They could just as easily go off the tracks - again.

Studio Notes

These four are still resisting. They won't move forward. I stare at them and I don't see anything, there is no hint of direction. Is it my head? Too much clutter.

I've got enough material here in this little studio for three months of painting. It's a shame I've got less than six weeks.

Studio Notes

Maybe those paintings in the autumn were coming too easily. These new pieces are not budging. They aren't telling me anything; there is no dialogue.

Painting (art) is work, no matter what anyone says. Beware the artist that tells you otherwise.

Studio Notes

Painting is an activity that invites self-doubt as often as it does confidence.

Studio Notes

My efforts to reintroduce color into my work has so far resulted in some seriously ugly paintings. Perhaps it is too much all at once. Just a few months ago I was attacking the concept of a series. Now it seems I'm lost if I try to paint one-offs. Oh, the old familiar battle. Paintings being uncooperative. Ugh. Walk away. Let them have this one. Tomorrow is another day.

Studio Notes

F#@%ing ugly! The cold must be affecting my brain. It's almost too cold to paint. A new viscosity to my paint and my thoughts.

Studio Notes

I've been working in a limited color palette for so many months the introduction of new colors is shocking. I like the unity or cohesiveness of one color. I like moving around from piece to piece without changing or even rinsing the brush.

I was given some beautiful kimono fabric to work with. I am honestly a little afraid of it. It is so powerful, not just the colors and patterns, but the cultural references, the symbolism. I am not Japanese. I have no problem layering Japanese newspapers and other detritus including Buddhist scripture into my work. But I fear this may be viewed as false and contrived. If I lay it in and destroy it as I do with most everything that makes it into my paintings, might that be construed as disrespectful? Dilemma. Thinking too much. Just paint.

be-kyoto gallery (Kyoto)