Collating Recent Acrylic Abstract Art Encounters

Renovation of this website has become an exercise in retrospectively trying to figure out what I’m up to with my painting.

It turns out the answer is not monolithic. To the extent there’s a singularity to it all, it’s more like a tapestry — one woven from many interlacing strands. As I’ve said elsewhere, somewhere on this site, conventional wisdom (I guess that’s a term for the embodied voice of Art experts) suggests a ‘mature’ artist forms a recognizable ‘style.’ Well, at 77 I guess I’m not yet mature, by that standard.

My problem: All these ideas want to be painted. Demand, in fact, they be painted. And these demands move me in different directions – rather ironically, directions painting has gone over the last century at least.

Not having an Art education (I grew up in a place where ‘Art’ was not a word in anyone’s vocabulary and, accordingly, certainly wasn’t a course of study let alone a profession). As a consequence, over the decades, as particular arrangements of possibilities arise, I paint them.  

And then I find out someone named ‘Malevich’ painted Black Squares back in the early 1900’s or someone else painted geometric intersections in the Fifties or yet someone else use color in what’s called Abstract Expressionistic or Impressionistic fashion. Same for minimalism. Photo-realism and Pointillism have not surfaced as desirable pursuits.

I tossed the Maximalist stuff that showed up.Description text goes here

It's all been an interesting path of discovery.

You see, for me, painting provides an {invitation, opportunity, occasion....} to explore pieces of perception, wielding color, line, and pattern in different formats to form a kind of exploratory encounter. When I’m painting, I’m having an exchange with some deeper aspect of myself I call ‘The Thatness.’ To use a spatial metaphor, it’s the place from which the spark for the conversation emerges. To use a different designator, it’s the Source conjuring up arrangement possibilities from beyond the edges of my conscious awareness.

The ‘Thatness’ designation is playful, respectful, and somewhat deferential in that I’m continuously reminding myself — this will sound weird — I’m operating by its invitation. Or maybe its willing receptivity.

I realize there’s a paradox to what I’m working to describe because, in my efforts to momentarily suspend my experience of conscious control by letting go of my tendency to locate my awareness in my Self, I’m trying as best I can to be a good host.

This painting thing, for me, is a balancing exercise in surrender, on the one hand, and conscious application of what I’ve learned about the colors-on-paper over the last decades, on the other. Again, in effect, I’m a conduit for conversations the colors have with one another.

So, this landing page (and the landing page following this one, for that matter) both chronicle exploratory conversations that have meant something to me.