Tracking the Right Brain-Part 2

I do not sketch before I start a painting.  Painting non-representational (I try to avoid the word abstract- it is too loaded and too easily misunderstood), I instead start by imagining palettes that contrast and play off each other well, and then spend time color mixing (physically and mentally) as a way of "planning" a painting.  However, I have tried to expand the concept of palette to mean more than just color, but also include the texture, current events, and zeitgeist of a given moment.  This means that I am usually hunting out promising little nuggets as I go about my day. Here is an example I am currently mulling over: I recently uncovered my copy of The Beatles album "Magical Mystery Tour."  I hadn't listened to the album for years, although I could hear some songs from this album on many local radio stations since it is always popular to play The Beatles songs.  I started thinking about how The Beatles' music has just became available on itunes recently and remembered one reporter on NPR predicting that this would not amount to much considering how most people already have music by The Beatles in one form or another.  This struck me as a little funny and a little sad, this strange cycle of pop culture.  Once, Magical Mystery Tour really was magical, The Beatles being pretty avant garde and innovative in their time (I think the album was released as a part of the film, which involved loading circus performers and the the band into a bus without a script, and filming their random journey).  But we live in a culture of saturation, and so they are able to become background noise, acceptable as office music, as one local radio station loves to say.  And yet, there is still a continual push to reintroduce The Beatles to our world- the release of un-heard studio sessions a few years ago, the anniversaries of album releases commemorated by new packaging of, say, Sargent Pepper, the observation of John Lennon's birthday marked by new interviews and tribute stories- all of these readily come to mind.  How much re-listening can we do?  It seems like we will not hear anything new.  And yet, I was really excited to see Magical Mystery Tour the other day, and put it right onto my ipod. And right now I am studying the colors of the album cover in my studio.

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Tracking the Right Brain- part 1

As an exercise, I thought it might be interesting to try to track some of the right brain thinking that goes into a particular painting.  This is a bit treacherous to do, as I have found when I am standing in the awkward space of an art opening and someone asks,"where did the title for this one come from?"  In such situations I find myself talking weird circles around what was probably the most interesting part of the painting for them, like someone trying to explain a funny joke and leaving out all the context that actually makes the irony work.  I usually get a response like, "Oh, okay,"thus ending the conversation.  The truth is that art is usually better at posing questions than answers, and that whatever form of communication art offers, it usually communicates so much better as a painting, which stands still in all of it's layers, verses words that spread out, encircle, and add to meaning in unexpected ways.  I would prefer for the viewer to come up with the bulk of the story, so I try, in the form of painting, to provide  a good prompt.

Even though this is all true, the teacher in me thinks it might be at least interesting to take apart the non-linear mental narrative that contributes to the building of a painting.  And so, some portion of this blog will be dedicated to sifting through the mental material that goes into the building.  It might deflate the artistic gesture but revealing the mundane under pinnings of an artwork, but I hope it will also shed light on why the every day and the painterly merge so well.

So, I have been thinking about mountains and thinking about adding them to my new painting. Like steep, snow covered mountains.  This could be because I incorporated mountian-like shapes into the last painting I made that was this size. This could have come from a friend recently posting a picture of herself in Vale on Facebook, which made me think about the image of the Rockies, always a hazy presence on the horizon in Denver where I grew up. But it probably came from the cover for the Radiohead album  Kid A, which I borrowed from the public library to add to my ipod.  This is troublesome, because recently I was sitting in a meeting at school and I showed a fellow teacher an image of my painting Microsoft Windows and Dirty Laundry  and  he responded,"Hey, this looks like the cover for that Radiohead album Hail to the Thief."  I saw the resemblance, and I knew that this connection had to be a coincidence, but I immediately started to doubt myself.  Was I stealing imagery?  Am I that easily influenced?  I love to listen to Radiohead while working in my studio, so maybe there was a psychic connection?  I dunno, but today my solution was to paint steep, snow covered mountains, hanging into the frame of my painting upside-down, like stalactites.  Take that Radiohead!

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

Starting a Painting

Over the last week I've built two panels that are 4'X6' each, wanting to make a large diptych.  I have stretched canvas over them and gessoed them, but today I started "working" on top of them.  The start of paintings...it's a funny thing.  I can't really say where paintings start.  This one could have started last month, as I sat in my studio finishing up the small pieces that are now a part of the "Formed Alliance" exhibit that is now up at the Frame Guild in Wichita (small plug there), looking over at the vacant end of my studio and feeling a sinking tug at my gut, wanting to return to painting something big.  It could have been a few weeks ago when my son said, "Dad?  How come you haven't made a painting about gum before?"  It could have been the weeks since as I have dealt with insomnia, half way composing a large horizontal plane in my mind and half way willing myself to not compose it now, as I always make better decisions in the moment reacting to happenings with the canvas and media instead of some "plan."  As I said above, today was that day when the happenings started to happen, along with those moments where I was negotiating, compromising, and daring things to happen. 

I have learned not to romanticise or fear the blank canvas too much, partly because it is such a cheesy cliche and partly because those ideas tend to slow me way down.  I am always telling my students that left brain thinking dictates that we do not have to start at the beginning of things, with a logical plan, but can start by jumping into the middle and starting to swim around.  I did find a great nugget of wisdom years ago when reading a book about Richard Diebenkorn.  The passage talked about how after the artists death when family members were sorting through his studio they discovered a little list of notes the artist had made for himself about starting a painting.  I, as an overly eager undergrad, promptly copied the list so that I could post it in my studio and allow it's light to shine on me.  I am reproducing it here without permission or proper bibliographic citing:

Notes to myself on beginning a painting...
1. Attempt what is not certain.  Certainty may or may not come later.  It may then be a valuable delusion.
2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued- except as a stimulus for further moves.
3. Do search, but in order to find other than what is searched for.
4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
5. Don't "discover" a subject- of any kind.
6. Somehow don't be bored- but if you must, use it in action.  Use it's destructive potential.
7. Mistakes can't be erased but they move you from your present position.
8. Keep thinking about Pollyanna.
9. Tolerate chaos.
10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

I love this list.  I have no idea who Pollyanna was/is, (I am pretty sure Richard Diebenkorn's wife was named Phyllis) but I know that seemingly random obsessions can often prove useful when entering into a studio mentality.

One day, after making many many more paintings I will have to make my own list of starting notes.

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com