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.
ontology and Robert Ryman
This past July my girlfriend and I took a trip to New York and New Jersey, mostly to see art (she has an art history degree) and of course to do some touristy stuff like see a Broadway show, Ground Zero, the High Line, Chinatown and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, among other things. After four intense days of New York City we had plans to drive an hour upstate to Beacon, NY to see Dia: Beacon, a huge museum dedicated mostly to large-scale artworks such as those of Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, Fred Sandback, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Richard Serra and others.
Dia: Beacon also has a significant amount of work by Robert Ryman, a painter whom I had underappreciated as a sort of academic, theoretical painter; no one with much relevance to my own ideas on painting. Having been there to see several of his pieces in real life and really think about them I have changed my tune completely. He is one of the most important painters alive and it’s unfortunate that more students, artists and “civilians” are not enlightened to his work. I don’t know what’s going on in art schools today but he was never mentioned in the entirety of my undergraduate education, save for a small piece of his being included in a university museum show of contemporary abstract painting.
The initial reaction by most people to his work is, naturally, “It’s all just white!” and that’s mostly true, except for his very early work, but what I say to people to get them to re-focus their attention on what his work is really about is to compare it to how a blind or a deaf person experiences the world. When you remove one sensory experience, the others become heightened, more attuned to the ontological (the philosophy of reality itself as opposed to how it is mediated by our senses) reality around them. Ryman’s paintings use only white paint because he is essentially painting everything except color (although technically white is a color). We are force to look at what paint really is: surface, volume, molecules, to imagine what it would be like to touch it, how light reflects off of it, how it was applied, how it interact is various ways with its support surface and apparatus. Ryman has painted in innumerable different ways in order to fully enlighten us on all these factors and perhaps to make us realize just how arbitrary our typical methods of painting really are, such as “acrylic on stretched canvas” or “oil on panel.”
Why white? It’s not only the most neutral or “absent” color, Ryman makes it beautiful in a way no one else has. In art school I make a giant spaceship-like structure using only cardboard and kraft tape, and one of the revelations of the project was to really see the color of cardboard. It’s orange! I had never thought of that before. Similarly, Ryman makes us see color in a whole new way when he removes it, and only it, from our experience of painting. It’s a simulation of an ontologically pure object, as close as we can get to “seeing” without looking.
That epiphany this summer yielded many others on the seemingly arbitrary components of painting: Why is it viscous? Why is it on a flat surface? Why does it dry faster or slower? Why do we apply it with brushed or rollers, or other tools? Why oil or acrylic or gouache? It is much easier to contemplate all the dimensions of painting: hue, value, viscosity, texture, opacity uniformity, surface (both optic and haptic) and therefore make better, more informed decisions about how to paint, when you remove a dimension you are used to having around all the time.
aesthetics and value part i
There is plenty written about aesthetics in art, more so than any other aspect of art, but that’s probably because any formula for explaining why we feel the way we do about aesthetic experiences is so elusive. We generally don’t like to think of things as completely subjective; we want to qualify and quantify experiences to the nth degree, mostly so that we can re-create them, improve them, explain ourselves and the universe and share ideas with and relate to other people. Despite our best efforts to explain aesthetics (the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty and value) we have not satisfactorily described exactly what is beautiful and positive and what is ugly and negative, or even if that dichotomy really exists. It is purely a psychological question about which the outside universe does not care.
I run into this question because I catch myself denying that I care about aesthetics at all, thanks to my overblown worship of the Abstract Expressionist philosophy that seems to deny formalism and aesthetics completely. Barnett Newman famously said, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,” and I believed that he meant it, until recently. He and others in the movement, Rothko, Motherwell, Pollock, were, for a time, struggling to break away from a school of art which was pure formalism and aesthetics, pretty pictures, which was especially difficult when faced with formalist geometric abstraction (Mondrian, Malevich, etc.). Now I realize that Newman’s was a statement of rhetoric, of hyperbole. Of course his paintings are gorgeous, and he knew it at the time, but to acknowledge it at the time would have been to confuse his argument that his paintings were (seemingly) pure psychological experience, pure spiritualism, “sublime” as he called it.
Now when I make something which just happens to be aesthetically pleasing, I can’t help second-guessing myself. I ask “is this okay?” and “what was my real intention in making it this way?” and I have trouble with the answer because I try to paint very intuitively. Who knows what in the subconscious decides to make something “pretty” or not? The composer Aaron Copland said that, even when you are not aware of it, when you are creating something you are making decisions. As mysterious as the creative germ may be, you still have the power to decide to write (or paint) x instead of y or z, and you will do yourself a great deal of service to be aware of when you are making these decisions, to be “aware of your awareness.” I first read that phrase in high school, when I still planned to study music composition, and only after finishing art school did I understand it.
One way to look at the question of aesthetics is comparatively. For example, I have a clear, reliable aesthetic opinion of certain types of people, particularly women. Stay with me. I know it’s a little juvenile to say so, but it honestly is the most reliable case study I can give myself in aesthetics because I have never once changed my mind about it. Why am I attracted to women? This takes me on a course into biology with which I am not totally familiar. My only assumption is that an evolutionary biologist could surmise that some part of my brain evolved to react this way to ensure the continuation of the species, a leftover from a time when procreation was a lot dicier.
Is this how all of aesthetics works? We’re just wired for it? There is just generally a hard-wired sense of “pretty” and “ugly”?
My real problem is how I feel about making something aesthetically pleasing. What is the value of that? Why bother making something (intentionally) beautiful? Or why bother making something ugly for that matter? It seems pointless to simply exercise ones ability to paint something to which others will predictably react on that level. I guess I don’t really know what other people think of my paintings (or those of anyone else’s) and I never will; I’m not in their heads. The leap of faith required to share psychological experiences with another person with whom we only share phenomenology only takes us so far.
(More to come later in Part II)
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
notation
I’ve been interested in different types of “notation” for years, not only because I used to be a musician (until about the age of 19) but also because of an interest in modern dance which began in music school when I discovered John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. Since then I’ve investigated as many forms of notation, musical, dance and otherwise, and come up with a great supply of examples thanks to the local public library. Labanotation, the most-used graphic type of dance notation, is very attractive to me because of its wide variety of orthogonal and diagonal forms. However, it is hardly used anymore thanks to animation and live video, which makes the transmission of choreography easy and accurate.
labanotation
The 1960’s and 70’s saw an unprecedented propagation of new musical notation due to the inefficiency of traditional Western notation in accommodating the newer, complex sounds of serious, modern orchestral and electronic music.
But what is the relation between these forms of graphic language and abstract art? They certainly don’t exist in our minds on the same type of picture plane as a painting, rather more like a type of written language. More to come on this topic for sure.
agnosia
Hearing about faceblindness (prosopagnosia) in the news so often lately (even Chuck Close suffers from it) has lead me to do some investigation into similar mental illnesses classified under the categorical name “agnosia,” which is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss. It is usually associated with brain injury or neurological illness, particularly after damage to the occipitotemporal border, which is part of the ventral stream. Of particular interest to me is semantic agnosia, which is the inability to assign meaning to objects. This is a curious mirror of the disease known as referential thinking, which is basically the compulsion to assign extra meaning to ordinary objects, similar to the scene in the film A Beautiful Mind wherein Russell Crowe’s character thought he was decoding secret messages in newspaper and magazine articles.
I think these two ideas are relevant to painting in that I see a particular type of formally complex abstraction as a scene that appears to have been a representation that became stripped of its signifiers (semantic agnosia). Some of Cezanne’s paintings seem to have been on this trajectory but stopped short of abstraction because we can still recognize trees, buildings, lakes, etc. to such a specificity that we can identify the location of the scene he was painting. Some abstract painters, whose who do not adhere to Abstract-Expressionist orthodoxy (of painting from pure feeling using no real reference) approach painting in this way deliberately, e.g. Richard Diebenkorn and Georgia O’Keefe. The approach I take seems to come to a similar result but through different means: I do not start from a representation and then work towards a simplified set of unrecognizable forms, although the outcome might seem to suggest otherwise.
The second idea, referential thinking, applies to how an audience may want to treat this sort of scene, assigning to abstract forms a meaning which never existed in the first place. Jason Rhoades created large-scale sculptural installations that were “codes” of complex meanings which were all but illegible to the audience. This may be a tendency I want to encourage, but I’m not sure yet. These are all relatively new ideas to me and I am just starting to work out how they are tied to the idea of resemblance in painting.
cartoon
In the past I have sketched a painting beforehand, although very rarely. I have stuck to the idea of painting automatically forever, mainly because I have found it impossible to predict the conditions of paint and surface at an unequal scale or size. The piece I am working on is probably the second time I have started from a sketch (known as a “cartoon”) and have had any kind of success, and it is the very first time I have used an overhead projector to simplify the transfer.
The key to this process (finally) working is to let go of the sketch as a rulebook or a crutch. I have had to learn to put myself in the frame of mind to: 1. use the sketch when appropriate 2. deviate from the sketch and make a painting according to the conditions at hand, to be in the moment and the place where the painting is happening. After all, paintings are happenings, to me anyway.
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.
Next Art Show: Stardust Coffee and Video
untitled ink drawing from “Deep Field”
“Deep Field” will open at 7pm on March 6th, 2010 at Stardust Coffee and Video. Stardust is located at 1842 E Winter Park Rd., Orlando, FL 32804
“Small Wonders”
I have a piece in “Small Wonders,” a 10×10 group show at LatZero gallery in the Thornton Park neighborhood of Orlando. The opening is Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 7pm. See you there!
Statement 9-30-08
My project in painting, drawing and cut-paper work, for the last three years, has been a thorough searching of occasional epiphanies of form and scale. Once in a while I get a flash of some vague form or color, in a dream, a daydream or in another work of art or design, and I try several times to reproduce it and create variations of it. I want to fully explore the potential in these rare and deep mines of the subconscious, what Barnett Newman called the sublime “plasmic” image. He too, along with Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionist painters in the late 40’s and 50’s, adopted the Surrealist technique of Psychic Automatism so reach ones mind into the sublime, scale-less world of the subconscious, bringing back forms that are at once from nowhere real and universally understood. Being able to see these ideas clearly enough in the mind’s eye to paint or draw them is much like a composer’s ability to frantically scribble down a sonic idea onto the notational plane of the manuscript. “Writing,” transcribing or notating these forms is the best way to describe the process, as it feels more like hearing than seeing. (Actually listening to certain types of music is a great help in my process of putting ideas to paper – Ligeti, Penderecki, and Gorecki work well.) The rest of the process, examining shapes, lines, colors, media, etc. comes from pure practice and experimentation and waiting for the “happy accident” to occur. It is a very slow, incremental process between major changes in my paintings. On the other end, before any new ideas come, I spend time looking, listening and reading, taking interest and researching subjects with similar or relevant ideas and forms: architecture, biology, land planning, linguistics, engineering, philosophy, and of course, other people’s art, music and design.
Allotropes are different structural forms of a single element, such as the allotropes of the carbon atom: diamond, nanotube and graphite. I find this to be an interesting way to describe much of what I’m trying to do, which is to take one formal idea and put it through the sea of other influences in my head and make new variations out of it. Recently I had an idea to make large, irregular, curved shapes and encircle them with rectilinear “walls,” like plant cells with overgrown nuclei, then to squeeze these blocks of lines and shapes together into a larger form inspired by urban design and architecture. As always I am careful to avoid scale-specific forms, such as faces or bodies, so that the abstract field of vision has no scale at all, and can be seen as a space of infinite scale, in which all the gestures and colors and endowed with profound communicative potential.
Color has probably been the most difficult formal element to handle. It’s hard to see clearly in the imagination, it behaves like a wild animal which education only serves to distract and ruin one’s instinct in dealing with it, and corrections are rarely possible once it’s committed to canvas.
Brushwork is next on the list. Drawing is such an immediate way of working. Ideas go directly from the head to the paper with no perceived intermediary, the hand moving instinctively like a dancer whose gestures are traced on the surface. Ink and graphite are so romantic to me, silvery-gray dust particles trapped in the protruding fibers of a compressed and flattened amalgam; rich, opaque, dark fluid, wetter than water, landing on a soft bed of white fibers, quickly seeping in to stay trapped forever, but not to spread where it doesn’t belong. Lines go where the mind tells them to, the same way you write words. Paint does not go where you tell it to without a lot of practice. Generally speaking, paint is a thick, viscous, sloppy thing which sits on the surface, refusing to seep into the world you’re trying to create. It is infinitely varied and complex and has such wildly different properties between vehicles, pigments and additives that no amount of guesswork or conjecture can make it work properly. There is no end to the techniques of painting, and when you do learn just enough to get by, your education stands in the way of your instinct, which must again be conquered before the brush moves like the pencil again.
New art, new shows this summer and fall
I’ve been spending the last month or so on a new body of work, some of which is visible on the Portfolio page of this website. Right now I’m still working on the acrylic-on-canvas paintings but there are several ink, pencil, colored pencil and other drawings already finished and ready to be framed.
This work will be in a new solo show in July in Orlando. If you’re in the mailing list you’ll receive an invitation soon with all the details. It won’t be publicized through the press so check here often or sign up for newsletters at rickjonesprojects@gmail.com.
(Thanks to filmmaker Chris Bremer, Katie at Frames Forver in Winter Park and Sam Flax Art and Design Supplies for their generous support!)
Later this summer/fall I will be in a two-person show with Jonathan Scarboro, which will feature several new works on paper from both of us.
And Thread returns with a big fancy new multimedia art show this fall! Details on this event are forthcoming so if you’re not already on the mailing list write to rickjonesprojects@gmail.com or info@threadorlando.com to stay in touch!
Paintings at Frames Forever in Winter Park
13 of my smaller and medium-sized paintings are now on display at Frames Forever gallery at 941 Orange Ave. in the design district of Winter Park, FL. Stop by and see them (and Katie)!
Also, the collection of large paintings at The Vue in Downtown Orlando will only be at that location for another week-and-a-half or so. It’s been a privilege showing in such a nice building. Check it out before next weekend. All but one of these paintings are still available!
New Paintings this Saturday (Feb. 2nd)
Rick Jones
New Paintings
This Saturday night at 7pm (2/2/08)
(show runs through 2/29/08)
Lots of brand new work no one has seen yet, plus a few
oldies-but-goodies. There was a cancellation at Stardust for February
so I jumped on it a few days ago and have been painting like crazy.
So come on out Saturday night and hang out, have a drink, whatever.
The Vue
Last night was the grand opening of The Vue condo building downtown. Fun party. I had eight paintings on the first floor and got a lot of positive feedback, so hopefully that will turn into something. I’ll post pictures ASAP.
