Insert Obligatory Bacon Pun Here

A little while ago my mother sent me a message asking me if I was a fan of contemporary artist Francis Bacon. I know my mom is canny, and I know she's interested in my art, but I'm not really prepared when anyone asks me my opinions on the dreaded category of Famous Artists I'm Supposed to Know More About Than I Do. It was definitely a name I recognized; his 1954 painting Figure with Meat is in the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago and left a lasting impression on me when I viewed it in 2005 (feel free to fact check me on that). It was later the partial basis for an abortive series of paintings I created as interpretations of the pay Equus, a series which is incidentally related to my bizarre uneasiness with horses, a subject I addressed in a previous post, and continue to get way too detailed about in an endnote.*
Appropriate to say, my knowledge on Bacon consisted entirely of my experience with that painting and some sketchy recall from Modern and Contemporary Art History. I had though I liked him, people who I knew I liked liked him,† but sometimes I need to research my own opinions before I know if they're any good. So pow, Francis Bacon on Wikipedia.
Honestly, I didn't like his work as much as I thought I was going to. I remembered Figure for being dark and desperate and squalid. Some of his work is like that, but in monotonously presented ways. The way he uses his vocabulary of symbols seems incomplete, notes missing from chords, and while his work is intuitive, it often seems too intuitive, sloshing over into naivety. The nature of his symbols and his reasons for using them are something I can identify with, and in researching him, I found a validation for a basis of inspiration that I'd often felt self-conscious about.
I draw inspiration from images in the movie The Ring. I've felt self-conscious because I was drawing inspiration from a piece of popular culture. My anxiety about that is how fixed in time images like that can be, and how it can carry those properties into the works that use them. I was afraid that people would see what I was doing, and whatever message I was tried to convey would be subsumed by my inadvertent namecheck of a middling contemporary horror movie and the sensational aspects of it.
However, one of the things I learned in my cursory research on Bacon was the partial inspiration for his 'scream' motif; among a short litany of inspirations, a certain scene from the 1925 movie Battleship Potemkin. Bacon apparently kept a particular still from the movie in his studio, a picture of a screaming nurse with blood on her face.
This is something I immediately identified with. What I felt bordered on relief at this demonstration that art could exist divorced from the intellectual content of its inspirations. It would be a hard sell to make the case of Bacon's paintings as soviet propaganda as Battleship Potempkin was. He witnessed a peripheral notion from that work and it spoke to something in him, giving voice to the unspeakable. He saw on accident the shape of something he had only felt before. This is what I felt when I saw The Ring. Those horses looked like a feeling I've had and never had a word for.

In the woods of New Hampshire, you can wander off the path for just a few feet, and suddenly you're in a place that might never have seen a human being, forest so timeless and remote that you feel lost, and that you could be lost forever. Then sometimes you see the ruins of a stone wall, or the foundations of a house buried in a hundred years of overgrowth. It's an eerie feeling when your realize this lonely, desolate place was someone's home once. You realize that even when you're lost in the woods, you're still in footprints of those who came before, and long departed; alien, yet familiar on a fundamental human level that is comforting in the wilderness. I feel that way about Francis Bacon sometimes.

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*In a previous post, I briefly talked about The Ring's portrayal of horses. For the purpose of illustrating what I was talking about in the post, I grabbed an image that was an example meant, one of the first images that came up in the search. Once I stated writing about it, I began to realize how profound the imagery affected the effects I try to achieve in my work. Below is a comparison of the horse image, and an eye I painted without reference far in advance of even having a reason to find the horse image. I almost laughed when I saw how similar they are.

†One of my favorite quotes to take out of context is from H.R. Giger, describing the how Bacon's screaming mouths inspired the design of the Xenomorph from the Alien movies: “It's pure Bacon.”

Corridor II

This post represents the end of the backlog of process photos I have saved up, and the first post centering on an unfinished painting. I'm a little nervous that once I publish these images, I'll languish in a morass of self-satisfacion for the minor accomplishment of making a blog post rather than working on the painting as I should. I want to have updates on paintings as I progress on them, so I'll have to incorporate this as part of my process instead of allowing it to become an obstacle.

I have a certain palate of colors that I like to use that I refer to as my "resident evil colors" consisting of yellows, browns, off-whites, reds and blacks. Sort of a sherwin williams swatch collection for a haunted insane asylum, if you will. I want to have a continuation of the Corridor series that would have a limited palate, but was more controlled.

To start, I obtained some pine panels from the Home Depot (this is not an endorsement; it's the only game in town and they treat artist like shit there because they wish we where contractors instead) on the basis of the tone. I had for some time wanted to take a whack at the gimmick of incorporating portions of the exposed wood surface as an element in the painting. An earlier, separate attempt at this was an unmitigated disaster that looked terrible, but I was able to use my experience with that as an example of something I should do the opposite of for this painting. Instead of having the wood be an inert background element, I decided to use it as a variation of my established two-tone underpainting style, using the wood instead of white.








I hadn't really though too far into the future when I began my painting like this, it was just a place to start. the fact that the color of the wood turned out to be an absolutely ideal foundation for the skin tone I was after was a huge bonus*.
I added the hands in on a whim, even thought I can't render them especially well. In retrospect, I think I had a subconscious need to try something in which I had past failure to try to prove something. The drawing pass looked good, but at this point I was somewhat despairing. They look ok in this picture, but irl very buldgey and sausagey. I liked the idea of the red hands, but I don't like the painting of the idea much at this point.









I'm really trying to push the idea of the self as architecture here. I feel like my own sense of that idea is still very cloudy and abstract, I am and in love with the concept none the less. This is one of the reasons the late Zdzislaw Beksinski has become a large influence on me. I sense that he was addressing similar concept as those which interest me, but using a unique vocabulary. The idea of architecture and figure existing in the same space appeal to me, but where he integrates, I try to instill a sense of invasion and conflict, versions of one thing in conflict with itself.




This is a few passes later at the stage the painting is at now. For once, forcing myself to do something I dun wanna do actually yields results. On the theory that the underdrawing was essentially sound and therefore usable, I just kept tweaking and tweaking surface tones. I sometimes believe that only by having many layers of failures will you have a good tonal foundation for success. I think this is the third approach I tried on top of two that did not work.
Some portions are getting tighter and tighter while others, sadly, languish in neglect.











A detail of the hands. The next step, I think, will be to wash a light, low saturation skin tone over the light side of the hand to give the veins a sense of being beneath the skin instead of sitting on top.




















The face. A little tighter, a little more profuse and detailed. Its relationship to Study for Corridor II is more apparent. I still haven't settled on a background concept. This painting has been very much plan-as-you-go. I started with a general concept and now I'm just making shit up as I go along. I haven't decided what to put in the hands yet either.
















*hehehe, huge. hehehe, bonus.

Study for Corridor II

This painting is titled Study for Corridor II only because I believe that it's a cop-out not to give paintings unique titles. In a way, painting titles are the only form of poetry I have any capacity to appreciate. They are one line haiku-like statements that create a point of reference, a method of contextualizing the painting holistically using the symbiosis of a major visual work and a minor literary work. So personally, I perceive "Untitled" works to be intellectually lazy; placing the burden of mental effort on the viewer to puzzle out the artist's intent, rather than making an effort to guide them to it. I'm sure opinions differ, which is why I talk about perception and not objective truth. I digress.
The reason I was so reluctant to title this the way I did, was that perennial occurrence, in which I had actually abandoned this painting for some time before even conceiving Corridor II. This is another instance in which I must reluctantly consider what I had intended to be a work in its own right to be a study of a later work. I considered different titles, but to title it otherwise would be dishonest.

I began by utilizing techniques I had discovered by painting Corridor I, painting a two-tone black and white underpainting on primed MDF. I am making a conscious effort to paint things that enjoy painting, and so I initially gravitate towards compositions instinctively, without really reasoning through it at the time. Recently, this results in head and shoulders compositions. Retrospectively, I think this appeals to me because it provides immediate visual cues as to the nature of the painting even in silhouette or at a distance. It also has a strong triangular composition with most of the visual weight anchored at the bottom, which I think gives presence to the work.
I've heard it said that people paint what they enjoy painting first and best in their compositions. I enjoy painting eyes, so I filled my face with them. In hindsight, this turned out to be a mistake.

I have a hard time with tedium when I paint. If a painting becomes unpleasant to work on, I don't want to do it anymore and I'll go paint something else. Oh, how this happened. There are so many freaking eyes on this thing, by the the third pass I didn't want to see any eyes for a while. I've tried to value the work ethic of pushing through difficult portions of the work, but over and again I've found out this results in me doing shoddy work just so I can be done, and that's what almost killed this one. I put a bunch of ears on it at one point and it looked like a bunch of Shreks mashed together. I started throwing all kinds of washes on it and it turned magenta and foggy so I tossed it in the basement in disgust for a few months. I did NOT feel like having a picture of it at that stage.

After I'd had a chance to get over eye fatigue (ha ha), I wanted to do a painting that was like the one I'd abandoned, but as a continuation of the Corridor series and of the scale and ambition of the last Corridor painting. The aptly-named Corridor II will be detailed in a subsequent post. In the process of making Corridor II, I used many of the lessons I had learned from mistakes made on my unwanted stepchild of a study. Moreover, I was learning lessons from Corridor II that made me realize that I could salvage the study. This is the first pass.



Once I got off my butt and started working on it (procrastinating, incidentally, from working on Corridor II) this painting came together quickly. This is a few small passes from its completed stage. I used to be big into incorporating type, but I've come to regard it as a crutch, so I've been avoiding it. This time, I liked the idea of it, but I tried to make it somewhat obscure and not so in your face. I'm really terrible at both painting background and at wanting to paint backgrounds, so at this point I'm doing a lot of looking thoughtful and going 'hmmmmmmmm' until I went with "I don't know, red foggy trees or something" and I approve of it. I think I'll try a more refined version of the same in Corridor II.

Heeeeeey Satan!

Sometime, I do something that is not my specialization but for whatever reason, I approach it with the same giddy optimism as I approach my paintings, and the end result is satisfying in the same way. One of the first instances of this experiences for me was the Halloween costume I fashioned in 2009. I was unemployed and found I had a great deal of time on my hands, and not a whole lot to do besides wait for rejection emails and work on an overly-ambitious devil costume.


For my concept, I wanted to do a full-face mask with a horse's head as my basis. I realize that the devil is supposed to be a goat, but personally I find horses to be extremely menacing.*
The framework is corrugated cardboard hot-glued over a bust I received from an artist I went to school with that is both a beautifully crafted work of art and an extremely useful tool for mask making. It is slightly larger than life-sized, so anything I build on it fits comfortably on my admittedly oversized melon.




The teeth, for which I received the most positive comments, where thirty or so popsicle sticks hand-carved with a box cutter (kids, don't try that at home; I got a pair of jeans with a big slice in them and a gross story for making that mistake.) I then primed them with guesso and painted them with oils. The gums were built up from a few layers of rapidly applied hot glue. Originally I planned to paint the gums with nail polish, but it turns out that stuff doesn't cover very well. I wound up painting them as I did the teeth, but really carefully because the paint doesn't like to stick to the hot glue material.




After a certain amount of time (forever) the paint on the teeth dried, and after a few layers of liquin on the whole affair to gloss it up, I put some skin on. I built the substrate in a skeletal manner, so hopefully I wouldn't have to do a lot of modeling with the skin. For the skin, I used an old bed sheet attached to the substrate with a variety of different glues, then guessoed all over to both prime the surface for painting and basically cement the whole thing together with latex. I was not especially satisfied with how this portion turned out; The material was less forgiving than I had hoped, and it looks pretty poor on the edges of the mouth and the nose. Also featured here are the horns made from cardboard covered in electrical tape. Classy!



I begin painting the surface using oils. Up until this point I'd been waffling on either the classic red devil, or a more boney look like Frank Langella in Masters of the Universe, but I thought what 'what the hell' and went for red. I felt it was more dramatic.
I made some attempt to disguise the weaknesses on the nose and mouth with the paint scheme, with mixed results. I emphasized the wrinkles that occurred, giving a more haggard appearance. The wrinkles were always intended, I was only displeased with areas that are more geometric, and so tried to obscure them with darker colors.



Everything all together for the first time. You can even tell that the paint is still wet. While I like the smooth transitions and intensity of color that oils can achieve, it was a very long painful wait for this thing to dry so I could try it on and run around.
The jaw in this image doesn't looks so bad. The reason it looked so rough was that I got way too ambitious and wanted to the jaw to articulate. This was engineered into the final design, but the skin was too stiff and the tolerances on the substrate too close to allow significant movement. The result was an unresolved look with no kinetic effect to justify it, an error I could have rectified if I'd planned a fixed jaw. Hoisted by my own petard, blast!



Finally dry, I glue it to a helmet with a chinstrap and run around growling like I'm freaking nine.
The horns are fun, because it makes me tall and therefore surprising and impressive to drunk people at a Halloween party. Not so impressive however, was the fact that I was unable to successfully fit through a standard door without undignified gymnastics. As long as I didn't try to move from one room to another, I was fine.






The mask, in its intended environment. Making this thing was a lot of work, and there was some times when I was disappointed with what I'd done, but it also resulted in two extremely satisfying experiences: One, coming down the stairs, encountering a kid tripping balls on mushrooms, and completely freaking out his universe. Two, dressing up like the devil and doing combat with a kid dressed as Captain America, an experience I'd recommend to anyone.

Cheers!




*I attribute this to the movie "the Ring" and its portrayal of horses. I realize that this isn't everyone's favorite movie (though it is a favorite of mine) however, the way it informed my sense of horses as a concept wasn't really related to the movie itself. The horse imagery used in the movie instilled in me a sense of the horse as strangely human-like in a way that is tortured and servile, and straddles the uncanny valley as well. These concepts of para-humanity and horror are concepts I enjoy addressing, and so horses as a symbol of these senses appear periodically in my work.

Looking Like an Idiot is so Important:

So much of my process involves making ridiculous faces.

Corridor I

Corridor I was the product of the lessons I learned by creating what I would later title Study for Corridor I. Another artist I know was assembling a show in a tiny gallery at the Institute, and I wanted to have a painting of some ambition to throw down since I so rarely get the chance to exhibit.
When I created Study, the image of the yawning mouth appealed to me. I wanted to base the work around it in a more fundamental way than I did in Study, in which I attached the mouth form to an existing figure drawing. In Corridor, I wanted the mouth to be a competing entity as well as an element of the figure. Most people I talk to about my paintings refer to the action of the mouth as 'screaming,' but the effect I was attempting was that of yawning, growing wider and deeper and slowly forcing the figure apart and aside. The little bending games I played with the teeth were supposed to be a vehicle for that intent, but I think I got too caught up in the profound blackness of form that I was attempting when I should have been pushing motion harder with riskier, more dramatic gesture. I am becoming more meticulous in my brushwork, and I sometime fear that I will lose the willingness to take those kinds of risks as the work becomes more precious from longer effort. I must remind myself to be reckless.

This painting hangs in the stairwell of my home in such lighting and positioning that it gives the very strong impression of a person standing on the stairs when viewed out of the corner of the eye. It startles people from time to time and makes me happy.

Study for Corridor I

As is often the case, this painting was intended to be a work in itself, because I find the idea of producing studies to be tedious: why would I want to do a painting that I wasn't serious about? However, in the process of doing a painting, I learn new techniques, and often the idea of the painting becomes more elaborate and ambitious than it was when I started. If that evolves into something that appeals to me, I'll paint it again, and so my paintings sometimes become studies after the fact. I guess the subsequent "real" painting is more like the retconned remake of the original, the michael bay's "transformers" of the humble animated toy commercial that was my original painting, if you will.
This is the first work that came out of the series that I'm painting now, what I now regard as the study for what would become Corridor I. The genesis for this was the overwhelming desire at the time to paint something, paint anything. I have a hard time falling asleep at night, and in trying to bat myself into something resembling a rational sleep pattern with coffee, I sometimes hit what I refer to as the Sweet Spot. The Sweet Spot is a potent combination of conditions consisting of specific quantities of: exhausted recklessness, tooth-buzzing caffeine intoxication, and drowsing incoherency. In this state, I find I do the work that satisfies me most, and quickly.

I started by painting a rough head and shoulders directly onto a piece of MDF*. More and more, I finding I dislike primed surfaces. I like the personality the surface media can have in terms of tone and texture. MDF, incidentally, is mostly tone, and not much texture. I would recommend roughing up the surface first, but I'm too lazy to actually do that myself and I won't pretend for a second that I'm not. I would NOT recommend using oils like this; it would be like painting on a greasy fast food napkin.
At this point, I'm not concerned about likeness. I find that if I just concentrate on painting a beefy white guy, it becomes a self-portrait over time. Aside from the superfly afro, it's pretty generic. It is also at this time that I try to get as much gesture as possible to my brushwork, so I can paint small over it later.

The best of the likeness comes out when I start putting in some expression. I more or less bulldozed over the generic expression with a dramatic little grimace. The grimace is what I wanted to paint all along, but I needed a face to paint it on. The shirt gets a little work here. I think this shirt is when underpainting white on a black ground started to seem like a technique with a lot of possibility for what I'm trying to do.



The finished painting. This work is a good example of why I love the immediacy of acrylic. I never really want to think about background when I paint figurative work like this, and it allows me to blow through the foreground with a lot of loose brushwork, then hem it in with paint. It allows me to do things like go balls to the walls with the afro, then tone it down until it fits. I think I went through a few afros of diminishing sizes before going with this one, a process reflected in real life, but much more slowly. When I was done, I tossed this up against the wall to dry and then forgot about it.

For a while after, I was trying to stick that grimace on everything, including this horrible hand painting that did not work out and now has an even more horrible painting on top of it. When I was working on it, I tossed that on the wall too so I could scowl at it from various distances, resulting in this juxtaposition. It made me giggle, and I can use it to wave goodbye to you now.

*MDF is short for Medium Density Fiberboard. It is essentially a block of dried glue with sawdust suspended in it. It is very cheap, and very flat, but also quite heavy, fairly difficult to present attractively, and the corners will deform on rough impacts. I like it, but it's not my first choice. Top five, though.

Forward

Facebook is a crowded room where you must shout to be heard, and in being heard one is distinguished only by dint of being the most desperate for the attention of the uninterested. While all-caps typing has become a classic faux pas, all-caps thought seems de rigueur: in a place where anything you need to say needs to be said in 400 characters or less, value is placed on conspicuousness, and instantaneous mental digestibility at the expense of the depth, or even the completeness of thought.

I feel that I am not alone in my thoughts, that I’ve commiserated with people on the shallowness of social media culture; repackaged pre-thought thoughts made a million times manifest in all the shades of only-so-many-ways-to-say. My sense of the perceptions of others is that these disappointing qualities are the result of some epidemic of banality reaching a withering hand into the ears and noses of the otherwise astute and turning their brains to mush.

In this fiction, I find, lies the most frustrating truth; there’s nothing wrong with us, it’s the place we’re in. You cannot attend an open-invitation cocktail party and expect people to be shouting doctoral dissertations over the jazz ensemble. It isn’t fair to judge a person by their behavior at a party and it’s not the purpose of the cocktail party to be a venue for serious thought.

I have decided to make a break. I like parties, but I also like libraries and empty rooms, and open fields. This is meant to be a quiet place where I can think my thoughts in words and sentences; to make the bombardment of songs and images and pseudo-pop-philosophy that is my stream-of-consciousness into something. I find that thoughts aren’t really finished until you write them down; that until you can articulate what you mean, you don’t really mean what you mean.

So you can watch if you'd like.