If Only a Nightmare.

Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.

-Marsha Norman

It Whispers.
Acrylic on masonite 19x22"

  Frequently around the studio I see polite inquisitions into how one of the artists' night went answered in a desperate tone leaking out of a defeated face with red, glazed eyes. Insomnia is an Artistically Transmitted Infection (ATI) easily contracted in a place where creative juices flow freely.

  Trying to fall asleep is often a futile activity for those that consciously tap into their sub-conscious each day. The main reason most artists sleep in most of the morning is because most of the night is spent with their eyes open in darkness, and then lamplight over a sketchbook, then back to darkness; rinsing and repeating, thinking and depositing.

  The problem I think may lie in the fact that when most people begin to visualize the impossible, their bodies surrender to fantasy for a rationed eight or so hours. But when any type of creative begins to see those familiar, intertwining, translucent blobs of colour, their body kick-starts and the cycle begins again. See, it's very hard to tell someone they're sleeping if they spend most of their day living in fantasy.

  But that moment when reality and dream cross over is always the ripest for harvesting inspiration. The only difficulty is that it is usually too late to get back to work (although you could argue it's never too late). Which is what I considered at 5am this morning, waiting to slip away. But I pulled through, slept on it and made a piece about those soft spoken moments before a dream.

Slap Me in the Face.

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography. 

-Fredrico Fellini

Fixation.
Acrylic on masonite 19x22"

  For the first time, last week I could not bring myself to respect the work of someone prominent in the world of art. Or rather, was stunned at the fact that, whether distasteful, shocking or not, the work of this well known individual (whom I choose not to name as the foundation to his success is infamy) is widely considered to have artistic merit, if only to raise the question of what art really is.
  Truthfully, it wasn't the work itself that shocked me most, it was my reflection on my initial reaction to his work that came as a bigger surprise. Up until last week, I had been able to respect anything essentially artistic, even in a minute way. Without fail, I could find something worth my attention in a piece out of respect to the individual that, however mundane, had created something in his or her own image. But the work I was asked to look at and react to was pointlessly violent. It was created without satisfactory justification to the death it inflicted. So I painted about it without really thinking.
  I guess I've begun to welcome intuitive acts back into my work. The people in this studio have helped me unknowingly with that. For the first two years of my education in design, I had been taught to think, and not feel. I strove to make images that advertised my intelligence instead of my intuition. But most images are looked at intuitively by the viewer, so something created intuitively is like a reciprocal high five. No one wants to high five a formal handshake. A successful image should sting your face in a way that seems like masochism.  

Channel Changer.

"The great advantage of being in a rut is that when one is in a rut, one knows exactly where one is."

-Arnold Bennett

Ghost on a Screen.
Acrylic on masonite 19x22"

  About a week ago, the piece I was working on stopped going my way. My brushes just weren't cooperating, no matter how strict I was with them, so I banished the painting to the dark side of my studio and walked home anxious and frustrated. 

  The best remedy, I knew, was to start a new piece and return to the disobedient one later. So early the next day I went hunting in the antique market near chiesa di Sant Ambrogio for some old photos to paint from. But Instead of finding motivation, all I found was a feeling of shame. Looking through the personal moments of someone I had never met, with the intention to make them my own, felt surprisingly perverse. I honestly thought I would find inspiration at the expense of the aesthetic oddities people in the past seem to hold for us, but the thought of painting a stranger's wedding portrait seemed like really bad karma. Still, I didn't want to leave empty handed and consider the trip a failure, so I purchased four small, black and white portraits to study respectfully.

  Now, I don't want to claim that one of them is haunted, but it totally is (although maybe in a good way). After scanning the four photos onto my computer, I threw one on a flash drive and took it to the print shop around the corner to get it blown up to paint from (I hope the lady there has gathered by now that I might be a painter in view of the absurd things I have her print for me on a regular basis). My intention was simply to paint this centred portrait of a young man as it was, maybe with a bit of colour, as a break for my mind from the piece I was working on before. Only, something beyond my control hated that idea and took my successfully copied image and split it in three, offering an adequate alternative to the redundancy in a painting of a centred face. Two things had me accept this eerie change: 

1. I was out of money.

2. It seemed like something knew what it was doing.

  So I painted it as it was, in spite of its hauntedness and the apparent discomfort of my studio mate. Something had reminded me that these "accidents" are important in making art that feels honest; art that isn't over thought. Art that is plainly a reaction to the illogical shit that happens in a lifetime.

In Need of Lampshades.

"The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need."

-Napoleon Bonaparte

Influential People.
Acrylic on masonite 19x22"

  As an artist or designer, it's quite common to be asked to define who in your field has influenced your work to date. Yet in doing so, your work can immediately lose some of the glory it gained by your hand. It may seem easy from that point to find the obvious parallels between the work you do and the work of your named "influences" which, by means of creative paranoia, will leave you to think of your work as unidentifiable, or even worse, in breach of copyright law. This is why many young artists I know have invented their own formulaic responses to these questions, many of whom find it easier to employ an ignorant shrug than commit artistic suicide with a straight answer when it comes to being seen as an original thinker.

  The first few times I had been asked one of these questions, I swiftly but gently shovelled bits of shit into the ears of my supplicants. I have never thought of an influence as something that could be named in the first place. Isn't the point of successful influence to go unnoticed? 

  For a long time I had been drawing and painting in the dark, deprived of illumination from the shining heroes in the art world, and I was blissful in ignorance. The only art that existed was what I could see by candlelight in the distant Renaissance. But artistic illumination was inevitable, and it became harder each year to dim the lights; to muzzle the people outside screaming PLAGIARISM!

  Influence should be a looming shadow. If you can name your influences, you are either unintentionally appropriating, or over-thinking why you do what you do. You will put yourself in danger of developing the need to justify your work to everyone who may see your work and relate it out loud to something they saw on television. If you let your work be what it is and develop your own visual language, then anything that sneaks in by accident can be considered a welcomed guest.