02/04/2016
I have consulted John Dewey's texts at the Library.
I found, unintentionally, information about Milton Avery. I knew him, but superficially. I like him: he is radical and daring; at first sight, his work looks like a little amateur. In particular in some clumsy contour lines and disproportionate figures. It reminds me of Matisse, but it seems to be a self-taught artist, as if he had not had formal training. However, I have seen he actually was trained, and he also made drawings in the usual style of regular learning processes. In some of my works, I try to accept and take advantage of my own inability, wich is not the same as his.
02/10/2016
I find an art supplies store. They have a few packs of plasticine, named Plastalina; they are perfect for me in their proportions and colour.
{During the past year I have been using it (not Plastalina but the one I have always known, Jovi). I managed to finish a large painting (Archinombre, 2015) and some smaller ones in pink tones. I took advantage of the sense of waters in different shades by not totally mixing; later, I incised verses of Cuban singer-songwriter´s songs and fragments of Western novels (the best-known author in the 70s was Marcial Lafuente Estefania. My father read his stories, and I also used to). A friend told me he liked the biggest painting because it reminded him of a tombstone; I hadn't thought of this. The process finally led me to make a small sculpture in white clay that I titled Offense; hardy and compact, it summarizes all the material I had been working with}
I buy three packs: two brown, one pale green. I also purchase a sheet of linoleum and two rubber plates with the intention of continuing to work with engraved or printed texts; but I think also choose them because of their proportions, colour, weight, materiality.
02/20/2016
After 30 minutes walking I came to a cemetery, what a coincidence. I did not know it was there. Messy, scattered, small, humble headstones on the grass; American flags, soldiers, French families; a tree near to a pantheon somewhat larger than others: very theatrical, more like cemeteries I know. I do not like it; it seems out of tune between the stone blocks.
When I was leaving after taking some pictures, I looked at one last tombstone. It is a rectangular block of gray stone, smooth on three sides and inscribed with names. What would usually be the base and top of the stone is unworked and rough, like a normal tombstone, but left unfinished and lying on a pedestal. It is incongruous, and this catches my attention. I like its proportions, the relationship between the smooth and rough sides, the feeling of weight, the sensation of American-stone-grave. My father told me that, as a child, he used to say in Basque the best wood for walking sticks was Amerikako egurra (wood from America). He did not know why the wood was called this, and failed to show it to me. Anyway, the walk today culminated in something I think Dewey would call experience, as I read the other day:
…we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfilment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience. (Dewey, 1935: 35)
Besides, the stone gives me a solution for something that has haunted me for days: when I bought the plasticine, even if it was not entirely clear for me, I had thought of making small sculptures and photographing them, because I can't carry much weight on my trip home. I also wanted to further explore the issue of gravure texts.
Within these intentions, a background image appears as a deep insight: a sculpture by Jorge Oteiza in Irun, which, speaking of the power of sensation, I have used in my classes linked with Hieronymus Bosch's painting De Hooiwagen; It is a matter of proportions, weight, and colour, and has to do with a naked torso I'm trying to draw, my father's, perhaps; or mine in the mirror, already 51 years old. A few days ago I saw Godard's Goodbye to Language. Beautiful, somewhat pedantic; dog scenes interspersed all the time, very disturbing. Dewey also says (and I think of Godard and myself):
The dog is never pedantic nor academic; for these things arise only when the past is severed in consciousness from the present and is set up as a model to copy or a storehouse upon which to draw. (Dewey, 1935: 19)
While watching the film, I had thought LANGUAGE might be the word I would write in my drawings. In the first pictures in Charlottesville, I had continued with texts, with sentences extracted from the Estefania Westerns
The singer—songwriter's lyrics had been shelved.
As a synthesis: the block of plasticine as it comes out of its package, its narrowest sides perhaps deformed, placed on the big green block that looks like mouldy butter, with LANGUAGE engraved on it. Then photographed.
When leaving the cemetery, I find a separate building, small and precisely proportioned, which draws me in. It is a barber shop and has one of those mobile luminous symbols, like the one in Hopper´s Early Sunday Morning, who also has a particular relationship with Avery on how they use and spread colour on flat planes. Now I prefer Avery. I record 30 seconds of its movement; Dan Holmberg said you always have to record more than you can handle, and I think it is good advice; this brings me to the radicality of Avery, to the clumsy but effective lines he traces. To overstep the proper limits, to leave your liking behind.
The barber shop confuses me: how to integrate it into the image of the block of plasticine? Would it be better to leave it for another time? I know I have no obligation to use everything that inspires me, but I want to. It adds sensations that matter to me: barber shops open until dawn in Manila, with undercover sex trade going on in the back room; Flamarique´s hairdressing, where my father used to exchange Western novels with other customers; the French flag and the emblem of the Revolution; Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix; stars and stripes. It's my way to add themes, and although I know they are impossible to decipher, I also feel them as the sustenance of the image.
While viewing the grave, for a moment, I thought I had synthesized in my imaginary everything that now concerns me: proportions, materiality, colour, body, family, sculpture, painting, language, resistance. But now I have to include hairdressing.
When I get home and try to materialize what I have seen, I can´t find the way to do it. This time, the experience does not happen; an action too planned, too intensely dreamed, it dissolves, it produces no results.
03/18/2016
I'm tired of enclosing colour into defined shapes with dark lines. It's what I like now, but I get tired of it. It has to do with tombstones, with Avery, with Dewey, with chopping the plasticine with a large knife, with the order and with no longer beating around the bush. But in the drawings I'm doing, it starts to seem false, and I think I need references to apply colour in new ways.
I decide to lengthen the rides and look for less urban routes. I choose the stretch of Rivanna Trail that goes behind Kroger, and while walking through the woods I take pictures non-stop with my cellphone, by selecting the motifs just more or less, without framing or focusing; without drawing or delineating shapes, you could say. I see myself as a gunman spinning his pistol, firing haphazardly, and I enjoy it.
Later, the images just serve me moderately as a model for the backgrounds I had imagined; what helps me is the ride itself and the violence of shooting with the phone, which in my imagination manages to make a hole in my drawings and open their contours.
03/25/2016
An Afro-American woman in the supermarket ahead of me has white hair and wears an impossible combination of prints. I envy the USA at that time and want to paint that way.
04/10/2016
An out-of-focus cowboy laughs from the crowd which has been listening to Donald Trump. I also want images just like that, but can not stand them: double bind
