Pictures and Their Stories, the facts
How to Make a Rug, a Lesson
1. First you make a painting. Make it in oil. Put too much varnish on it so you never feel comfortable showing it.
2. Store the painting for 20 years.
3. Offer the painting as a gift, free and clear. Wait for the beneficiary to pick it up. After a year, quit waiting.
4. Shred the painting.
5. Weave the strips.
6. Step on the finished project. It's a rug.
We traveled a lot in the 1990s, and, of course, I photographed everything: the views at Macchu Pichu, the storefronts in Venice, cemeteries, rooftops, you name it. And sometimes I used the photos as the basis for paintings, mostly under the title "Picture/Pattern/Paint." The following examples are small works in acrylic, 36" x 36."
I’d started my painting life using oils, but in 1976 or so, after doing a lot of silkscreen work in my unventilated kitchen, I developed a toxic reaction to turpentine, thought I would die, so I shifted to using acrylics. In 1993, when I’d decided to do these large and uncharacteristically literal paintings, I thought surely my reaction to oil paints and solvents was ancient history and that these two pictures would be well suited to oils. I started on both paintings, roughing them both out, developing both of them at the same time, but within a few days, I knew that I couldn’t work with the poisons. So I hurriedly finished them and set them aside.
Did I ever show them? I can't recall, but I do know they were hung in my private studio/gallery for years and then finally put into storage, unseen and unwanted. They hadn't made sense with the other work I'd been doing, they were so literal and plainly pictorial. But, in spite of Aperture's flaws (described below), I liked them. I considered them to be meditational devices, and I pictured them hanging in some corporate or medical lobby where people had to sit and wait. The viewer might see their visual and conceptual contradictions and, perhaps unconsciously, arrive at their modest Zen-like content after lengthy contemplation.
Did I ever show them? I can't recall, but I do know they were hung in my private studio/gallery for years and then finally put into storage, unseen and unwanted. They hadn't made sense with the other work I'd been doing, they were so literal and plainly pictorial. But, in spite of Aperture's flaws (described below), I liked them. I considered them to be meditational devices, and I pictured them hanging in some corporate or medical lobby where people had to sit and wait. The viewer might see their visual and conceptual contradictions and, perhaps unconsciously, arrive at their modest Zen-like content after lengthy contemplation.
Black Water, on the left, was an from image made during a week we spent on the Amazon River in 1992. The main river is an opaque brown, and it’s called “brown water,” while the tributaries are like polished mirrors: “black water.” I like the idea of looking down in order to see up, always have. The painting on the right, Aperture (also titled Venice View), was from an earlier photo taken in Venice, Italy, and it’s really quite tricky to look at.
You have to make an optical choice to look either at the surface grid or “into” the work’s central aperture. When you look at it from a nice distance --- both paintings are 60" square --- you find your focus shifting back and forth, foreground and background, and it is, I'm pretty sure, good for you, a brain exercise or a stress cure. I always envisioned these paintings being in some corporate or medical waiting room, inviting long study in order for the visual and conceptual ingredients to be discovered.
But Aperture had real problems: when I finished it, I was unsatisfied with its uneven surface gloss. Since I hadn't used oils in so long, I needed advice, and a painter-friend told me to continue adding layers of varnish. I did, and it was a mistake; the finished work could only be shown and seen in dim light, else it reflected in a distracting way. I hung it in an unlit corner and eventually, along with Black Water, offered the paintings to my online friends as a "give-away." Black Water quickly found a good home, but poor Aperture languished in storage for another year.
A fellow finally did claim it. As a gift, it came with two conditions: although it was free, the new owner had to understand it was not without value, and he must display the work in a setting that didn't have strong light sources. Yes, yes, of course, he agreed. Weeks went by and the painting still sat in my studio. He needed to borrow a truck, he said, but still he did not come. A year passed. You can't give it away bitterly evolved into You can't make someone accept your gift. This was, and is, a tough lesson to learn, one I had resisted. The truth of it makes me sad. But then, the idea of putting one's shoes on the former-Art: there was some meaningful (and mean) satisfaction in that, my making the ultimate insult. I put "making a rug" on my To-Do list. And last week, feeling sickly and needing something unchallenging to work on --- "dumb work," I call it ---, I began.
A fellow finally did claim it. As a gift, it came with two conditions: although it was free, the new owner had to understand it was not without value, and he must display the work in a setting that didn't have strong light sources. Yes, yes, of course, he agreed. Weeks went by and the painting still sat in my studio. He needed to borrow a truck, he said, but still he did not come. A year passed. You can't give it away bitterly evolved into You can't make someone accept your gift. This was, and is, a tough lesson to learn, one I had resisted. The truth of it makes me sad. But then, the idea of putting one's shoes on the former-Art: there was some meaningful (and mean) satisfaction in that, my making the ultimate insult. I put "making a rug" on my To-Do list. And last week, feeling sickly and needing something unchallenging to work on --- "dumb work," I call it ---, I began.
20 years in the making, and I have a new rug.
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