Nevada, 2009–10, acrylic on linen, 54 x 120 in., many hours. Music: “Build Voice” by Dan Deacon.
When I began painting Nevada, the penultimate painting in a series of Nocturnes I began in 2006, I had just finished a small body of work that I moved through very quickly. Of course it is advantageous for a painter to move quickly, because time is precious and especially so to a painter. However one lament—among many painters, I assume—is that something is permanently lost in completion. Perhaps this is why we sometimes grow to loathe finished work. I, for one, am always most fond of the painting I am presently making, or even better, the painting I’ll soon begin.
“Document your work” is a mantra that gets passed around to young artists endlessly, and it’s good advice most of the time (“Destroy your work” is often better advice). As I was doing just that last summer, I realized I wasn’t documenting my work, I was documenting my finished objects. “Work” is a verb first, in my mind. The paintings I make are athletic efforts. For pragmatic reasons, we need to document our stuff, not our work. But the expression got me thinking. What if, for my own pleasure, I could document all the wonderful little moments between beginning and end? The process of finishing can be grueling; constantly revising portions of the composition to a point of resolution, spurning passages of paint and color that are wonderful in and of themselves if a negation to the ever-forming goal of the project. No matter what turn the content takes, my technical goals with paint are rather traditional; everything needs a reason to exist. Every “stroke” needs to serve something. If it doesn’t, it needs to be fiddled with.
Revealing process is dangerous. Not for antiquated and clichéd reasons to do with secret techniques, but because you, dear reader probably stopped reading this three paragraphs ago. Our attention spans are short. There is much for us to see in the world, and increasingly less time to see it. We have but a few moments to show one another a few things, and we’re wise to be picky. There are times in the studio that I wish I could share the odd and intriguing state of an unfinished painting with others. I suppose I could call the works done at that moment, sacrificing larger aims, and becoming a technocrat of painting’s process. Problem is, that’s just what hundreds of painters did for decades, and the results are uniformly boring outside of their historical context. Further complicating matters is the fact that the moments of process that I wish I could keep come early and often. Fetishizing process is no way for me to go on, but I have often wished I could satiate the needs of those who have let such an obsession grow and expand.
The best way I could think of to share these infinite (and infinitesimal) moments is by presenting them in the fluid context to which they belong—time—and by keeping them as brief as they must be in order to keep the signal that emits from my studio stronger than the noise. I wanted to reveal the tedium involved in preparation, the rhythm involved in a composition’s progress, and yes, the lack of rhythm—the off-beat anxiety—of work that is unresolved. The video above doesn’t show every “how”, and certainly not the “how-longs”. But it hints at much, and reminds me of all. I am always finding ways to keep what I have found.