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!

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