No Good Ideas

That's how I've been feeling in recent days. 

I've been tooling along on little things while I've been working around the house, refining - by bits and pieces - our living situation and my working situation too. I have been trying to work by impulse and push things forward in this 'meanwhile' space of adjusting to my work environment.

I pinned up a largish piece of absorbent paper I recycled from work (seen in the last In the Studio post) and was instantly confronted by by an immediate lack of ideas.  In fact that's how I started in on this piece; scrawling NO IDEAS in illegible script in charcoal. And then proceeded with the next non-thing in my head. One blind step at a time.

The intensity of this feeling was punctuated on Friday when the Garrison Art Center, back in Garrison, NY posted on its website a look back at the Salon des REfUSE from 2014 as part of their Virtual Exhibition Series.  Viewing these images of that show renders such a good feeling.  The embodiment of a light space and sunny days installing with some good and great friends.  There was, at the time, a fair bit of trepidation on my part as I worried about the adhesive bonding my column of paint roller covers withstanding the stress of the accumulated weight. The adhesive did hold and  the those two days were a great moment of realizing a long thought on project. That work appears now as a full and complete embodiment of idea, place and execution, resulting in a very successful end.

That column is one of my favorite and best works ever.  Distance is an amazing clarifier.  Those small Latex Essays that were additional contributions I made to the show also still hold up well.  They had already aged nicely and come into their own (by my eye) by the time of the show.

But the eternal fact - for the most part - is that any intention behind those works grew from the circumstance - namely, I need to pull something together for this show - and aside from that, those works too came - generally - from a place of no idea.

It's a constant place of discomfort.  Faith that these things will work themselves out may exist, but being in the moment of uncertainty is a key ingredient of the process. Live it, Observe it. Respond to it. Move on. It's a model for the righteous atheistic life. It can be a challenge, and I try to live up to it as consistently as possible.

Here are some works created in the 2015-2016 time period which I had forgotten about until recently uncovering them.  These too, I know, came out of a place of uncertainty, and today, they feel quite resolved to me, and part of a cohesive whole.  So that's how it goes....at least some of the time.

all of these are mixed media on oil on canvas, and are generally in the 9"x 12" range.