don’t be anachronistic
Thanks to the constant onslaught of mass media, we are forced to look at so much ordinary visual information that no matter how many symbols, back stories, analogies or clever references one builds into a painting, it is impossible to see that sort of work as an object of higher function. Paintings need exceptional formal invention (as well as subjective relevance) to be received by the sophisticated viewer as anything above a car commercial or highway billboard. This has always been the case, and it is only when we get nostalgic that we forget that it takes tremendous effort to to position ourselves in the actual contemporary state of painting.
the disposable plane
The suburbs and exurbs are permanent destruction of both land and culture. There will be no re-building of the old landscapes, the ranches, farms, groves, swamps, and forests which were replaced by the rotting, cheaply-built stucco-boxes. They will become ghettos and dangerous wastelands and kudzu-covered shells. No land is disposable.
Unlike some other products, the collapse of the market for these overpriced houses will not be followed by a quick “correction” which will make everything right again. The investors who currently own the loans will not be willing to loose half or two-thirds of the value of mortgages which they were not responsible for selling to the homeowners in the first place. Home prices will rise so gradually, that the owners will not live to see the day that the purchase price is recovered. The contractors and real estate agents who built and sold these pieces of garbage were the only winners in this scam.
Now this is the modern and future landscape, geographically, economically and politically; not some ultra-urban, high-density abstraction of New York, Chicago, Berlin or Tokyo. The mega-city is the truth for some people, but certainly not most. The future for most Americans will be the unending expanse of polluted, low-density ghetto.
The problem in the United States has been that we treat land like a concept, an imaginary disposable plane, an infinite supply of ideas, a painting, or rather a collection of paintings that can always be expanded; there are always more canvases and sheets of paper to buy at the store on which we can just keep ruling and scribbling. In places like Europe people know their land is limited; they just have the one canvas to play with, so they don’t go wrecking large portions of it quite as often. One day we will see our land in this way, maybe not, either way we don’t currently treat it that way, only as zones of more or less monetary value. We have not yet completed our manifest destiny of paving over the continent.
Land is our one truly limited and irreplaceable resource. When we run out of oil and coal we may have alternative energy plans. There are no alternative land plans and no renewable land resources.
writing an artist statement
Writing a proper artist statement for an academic program is proving to be even more difficult than making the art itself. Generally speaking, too many artists rarely think it’s their responsibility to learn how to express their ideas in writing, and rarer still to carefully consider their audience, intentions, all the sources of their ideas and methods, etc. To pack all of this into a one-page statement, make it sound intelligent but not pretentious, has become a massive undertaking in research and practice. I have dozens of handwritten and typed notes and sound bites lying around, but I still don’t have them organized, not that I’m even through making the raw material yet.
I made myself a short (unfinished) list of rules for the statement:
- describe intentions
- explain motivation(s)
- demonstrate awareness of precedent
- articulate a position in theory/philosophy
- articulate a political position
- try to NOT list influences by name, especially other artists
- do NOT treat as pedagogy
This list has been growing gradually and I expect it might continue
Helldorado
The first recorded instance of this clever portmanteau word was to describe the town of Tombstone by a late arrival to the gold rush who found himself a dishwasher instead of a wealthy prospector. I find it an apt description of a place to where so many people moved to escape the city that they brought the city with them; late arrivals to a pastoral exurban fantasy they themselves helped destroy in the very act of moving there. In an additional layer of irony, the ease with which they were able to purchase their ugly, faceless houses became the downfall of the American housing bubble in the late 00’s, kicking off the Great Recession to follow. The fantasy of the American dream became its own downfall, played out on the stage of some of Florida’s most scenic landscapes. Desire destroyed its object, so that the land is now placeless, an anywhere and nowhere, and the people who enjoy living in it are anyone and no one, content to have a safe place in which to park their SUV’s after a 90-minute commute from their jobs in the faraway urban center.
winter
Ah, winter. Easy wardrobe choices. Cover that uncut hair with a ski cap. Also, painting in an unheated studio space. Acrylic paints, even the best of them, become permanently brittle at temperatures below 49°F so beware, especially when shipping. My technique: never open the door!
What climate do you work in and how do you handle winters? Summers?
restart
I am starting this blog for several reasons, but the primary one is that I enjoy talking about art, and specifically painting since that is what I have chosen to do. There is a lot to be said about painting, some you learn in art school, as I did; some you learn by experience, which I have; some you learn by working in an art supply store, which I did. Painting, like all art, touches on all branches of philosophy: semiotics, politics, phenomenology, sociology, aesthetics, ontology, etc. It touches your life in real ways if you do it, look at it, collect it, read about it, or even ignore it completely.
I have always wanted to write about painting in this way but thought that I either might be unqualified or that no one would want to read this kind of thing or someone was already doing the same thing (investigation inconclusive) or that I would be somehow ruining the magic of painting for everyone, like revealing Oz behind the curtain, or worse, all of the above. Turns out that while I don’t know everything about painting (and really who does?) no one seems to really be talking about it in depth in a format I’m interested in reading. I paint for myself and hope someone else wants to look at it, so I guess there’s nothing wrong with writing the same way.
review…
Lindy T. Shepherd
Orlando Weekly
“Playing off the grid”
New works by Rick Jones
Abstract urbanscape painter Rick Jones has spent the last five years or so as an active artist, collaborator and supporter of the Orlando arts community. This impromptu display of nine new works at Taste restaurant in College Park will likely strike those familiar with his compositions as something altogether different; it’s as if his typical geometrical pieces have been whirled about. In addition to more light and vivid colors, there’s a sense of movement and freedom achieved by Jones’ looser hold on the grid.
Even in March, when Jones held a solo show, Deep Field, at Stardust Video & Coffee, critic Richard Reep wrote on his website that the title piece “combines geometries with a loose orthagonality integrating an angle that is neither 45 nor 60 degrees but somewhere in between, the resulting facets are uniformly dark or light with tones either purely white nor purely black.”
He’s broken away from that uniformity in this show, which consists of small graphite drawings and acrylic paintings. Fresh from a trip to New York, Jones says he whipped out the pieces in a period of calm creativity. None of them are titled, and they pop out in the narrow room that serves as a gallery near the front entrance – it’s cozy if not conducive to far-away perspectives.
In Jones’ cityscapes in black, white and shades of gray, the horizon rises and falls with what appears to be differing high-rise structures, and the forefront conjures a slice of urban jungle. There are multitudes of lines and angles that cross and intersect, in addition to the occasional asymmetrical mass that suggests form, such as a tree or a
shadowy figure.
The acrylics also depart from uniformity. On the widest canvas, the colors and subject matter change from the left to the right side, suggestive of a landscape; a tall, dense structure appears to be flanked by “scenes” in green and blue set against a white background. In a small, square painting, black outlines are thick and close up, like an architectural detail of a New York City apartment building; therein, a block of intense purple imparts drama – it’s just another story in the big city of life.
There’s warmth in these works that makes them breathe and gives a sense that they’ve been released from their trappings.
Review of “Deep Field”
by Richard Reep
http://richardreep.com/modernism-sighted-at-stardust
In the wintry sulk of Central Florida’s art exhibitions, Rick Jones’ Deep Field is an outlier, being neither representational nor topical, but rather seemingly a few specimens excavated from high abstract expressionism, fitting little into the multipolar art scene slopping around in the galleries and museums of today. He is mining some of the traditions of that movement and presenting a view more than tinged with the philosopical approach of modernism, and as such his work is interesting in this day of unraveling pluralism as we question nearly everything and find only anti-heroes and decay to be worthy of worship. Jones takes the opposite approach, and his fairly rigorous canvases are worthy of note for their aesthetic adherence to the principles of modernist tradition.
Jones is studying structures that have nearly no hierarchy, no perspective, no beginning or end, mostly no depth or edge or even, damn it, a focal point. The modernists threw all of these out, and Jones carefully takes his point of departure from these rules to develop geometries with nested, repeating patterns that are neither organic nor purely artifical. He appears to hold back from dipping a toe in either pool, and therefore studiously avoids representing something else: “Art as art” (Ad Rinehardt’s famous epigram) a rule by which Jones vigorously abides.
“Deep Field”, the painting with the show’s title, combines geometries with a loose orthagonality integrating an angle that is neither 45 nor 60 degrees but somewhere in between, and the resulting facets are uniformly dark or light with tones neither purely white nor purely black. Contemplation of this piece leads the viewer into an exercise which we nearly never do today, but which was a favorite pastime of viewers of abstract expressionism, an exercise in which the mind slowly discards all of the conventions imposed upon it from school: seek, find not a center; seek, find not an edge, seek, find not a hierarchy, seek, find not a purity; and so on until one reaches a unique placeless space far outside of the closed universe in which we educate ourselves about art.
The destination on this particular journey is an inner aesthetic one that is worth the trip. Jones’s larger pieces such as “Gold” takes one effectively into this wierd spatial no-man’s land, although it has a slight clustering of density that might derail the train a bit into a conventional focal point. But largely these work, and they prove that art, as critic Suzi Gablick once noted, is timeless in its appeal, unlike science (to which modernism kept hitching its wagon, only to be frustrated) in which each new notion is quickly replaced by the next. In today’s juxtapoz world, one can still enjoy a modernist treat like these paintings provide.
Jones isn’t a purist, and betrays a certain sense of humor in a few of his paintings. “The Geography of Nowhere” breaks his rules to turn one of his crystalline, non-hierarchial forms into a cartographical allusion, perhaps stretching his point to suggest the modernist placelessness influence on our cities. But if one ignores these mannerist distractions – a sop, perhaps, to viewers who find his more disciplined canvases a bit too austere – the rest of the show is quite good.
Modernism, thank goodness, failed in its scientific pretensions, and a Pollock or a Rothko is quite as relevant today as it was 50 years ago; unlike a science paper on, say, Pluto, which would be negated by research coming after. Jones’ exploration of some of the lost concepts of Modernism is pleasing, and he stakes out a unique position in Central Florida with Deep Field.
