a great calamity

"It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions."

my studio @ the factory on fifth

strategies for wrecking paintings no. 2

Of course I don't really mean "wrecking" them. I mean what Susan Sontag refers to when she says that "scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded [photographs] still look good; do often look better." I want the painted surface to reflect something of the experience of it's making--it's time. I want to subvert the illusion of representation even as I struggle with all my abilities to render an accurate, well measured and proportioned image.

So here's another way I wreck my paintings: I take a flexible rubber-like scraper and draw it through the painting to get unexpected and sometimes interesting patterns and blending of colors. I usually can't work up the nerve to do this until I've decided the painting is a complete and utter disaster. Then I can cut loose and scrape away. Here are two examples of that--the first a smaller 12" x 16" canvas and the second a larger 30" x 40" work:

strategies for wrecking paintings...

As a painter I have so many strategies for "tarnishing" the image on the canvas. I find nothing more tedious that a painting that leaves nothing for the eye to do. It's like a child pounding on the piano keys, as if getting all the notes were the only challenge to making music.

So I routinely wreck my paintings in order to save them from a worse fate. I spread turpentine on them, I scrape them, I rub them, I brush them--sometimes I throw things at them. They're almost always better as a result.

Here's one of my current favorite strategies which simply involves taking a dry brush and raking the wet paint. Gerhard Richter does this all the time and puts the results in the Museum of Modern Art.

Here's something from Richter:

people

"It is when people are at peace, content, full, that they are most likely to meet my expectation, selfish, no doubt, that they be a generous, joyous, even entertaining experience for me. I believe people exist to be enjoyed, much as a restful or engaging view might be. As the ocean or drifting clouds might be. Or as if they were the human equivalent of melons, mangoes or any other kind of attractive, seductive fruit.

When I am in the presence of other human beings I want to revel in their creative and intellectual fullness, their uninhibited social warmth. I want their precious human radiance to wrap me in light. I do not want fear or war or starvation or bodily mutilation to steal both my pleasure in them and their own birthright.

Everything I would like other people to be for me, I want to be for them."

Alice Walker

figurative artist slide show

thinking about painting and the ruined image

"Photographs, when they get scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still look good; do often look better. (In this, as in other ways, photography resembles architecture, whose works are subject to the same inexorable promotion through the passage of time; many buildings, and not only the Parthenon, probably look better as ruins.)"

from Susan Sontag, "On Photography"

your brother's blood

your brother’s blood:

an exhibition of new paintings by Mark Horst

March 1—April 30 at the Stillwater Public Library

opening reception: Saturday, March 13, 2:00—4:00 PM

artist’s statement:

Cain killed Abel: murderer and victim. The resentful one; the howling, complaining one; the gifted one; the rejected one; the haunted one. Cain killed Abel, but it was Abel’s blood that cried in the field. Once that happened they were joined forever—brothers. Am I my brother’s keeper? Which brother needs keeping? These paintings hold a space for us to look at ourselves.

I hope the same is true for the mother-child portraits; the portrait of my father; the portrait of a young couple; the seated figures.

For me, the human figure has an evocative energy which may be why I paint the figure more than anything else. The face, the hands, the arms and legs have their own kind of narrative; their own sense of push and pull; of familiarity and otherness.

My portraits attempt to capture this ambivalence—the recognizable features of an individual on the one hand and the skittish, wild soul on the other; the qualities which we recognize in the figure and the light around the body which we often do not.

, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

what does a painting know?

The visual image carries a strange intelligence. It can speak to us in ways that both deepen and undermine other ways of knowing.

Sometimes this is not at all the case. One reason we disparage art for being “illustrational” is that it is possible to eviscerate this deep work of the visual and harness it like a painted pony to someone else’s cart. Then the work tells us what we already think we know: no more.

But this strange intelligence has it’s own clever power: the visual can also take an image or a narrative and drag it place it never intended to go. Caravaggio’s prostitute saints and rent boy angels say something that the theologians only dreamed of.

What if representational, narrative painting could find it’s feet again, not as illustration, but, as a means of dragging the reluctant soul into a place ripped open by lightening and smoldering in grief? What if the visual image commanded the narrative like an insane dominatrix so that the old stories hauled some unseen strength out of the darkness?

What of Cain and Abel? What gift does Cain bring to the Divine No? What does he see in his brother’s election except some distorted reflection of his own wound? Who would be the keeper for that? What does Abel’s blood say to this man?

Are the wings of Icarus just another reminder that rising up will lead to no good and that we'd all be better off keeping our feet on the ground? Is that what Pieter Bruegel wants us to know? Maybe Icarus’ flight points to the inevitability of this golden, flighty, puer energy—and the need to rise up in order to escape from the prison of life's every-day-ness? What if these images say that flying becomes it's own prison and falling brings its own freedom. What if we grow our wings on the way down?