My take on art, and some background to the ideas behind my paintings

I'll start by saying what & why I like stuff first, then describe my thoughts & feelingss behind what I paint.

I grew up in a household and environment with zero art interest (surrounded by disgusting browns and greens in terms of household colours), and that was further enhanced by my art teacher at school, who seriously didn't help. So I detoured around the subject as much as I could, which wasn't difficult.
Having said that I loved maps, can remember making maps of my area before I was 11, but that was it.

Around 71, aged 19, I was in a very self reflective post acid blow out bubble. Not surprizingly my visual awareness had been heightened, if not activated by acid, some album covers hit me strongly, I remember the Quintessence album with the fold out sleeve and psychedelic mandala, but I still never drew or anything, don't even remember doodling much.

In my '71 onward reflective period, I started to get into art a bit, Edvard Munch was my starting point. I liked the way he flowed everything together hinting at the kind of visual connectedness between things that I experienced on acid but with an emotional component, especially his landscapes. I would have had great trouble at the time articulating that. Most people know 'The Scream', though for me that was too dark.

The obvious cultural corollary for acid at the time, in arty terms, had been the art deco movement, people like Mucha, but it never triggered anything for me.
Then I came across Paul Klee's Notebook in my local library. It had a big effect. It was a pretty big book with his sketches, ideas, test outs etc. One line from that book hit me hard, “Drawing is taking a line for a walk”. I had no idea why it hit me so hard but it did. I found it fascinating through that book, getting so close to the inner workings of an artists mind, even
though his work itself never completely gelled with me, a little too stiff and Germanic, and not enough flow. I then explored a lot of modern art, got into Kandinsky a bit, I suspect for the superficial psychedelic aspects but also his sense of space, but also the specific colours he was into. The next artist to hit me was early Mondrian, before he went abstract, and Cezanne, especially his watercolours of landscapes. Again I suspect the flow angle and nature combined was the attraction. Acid, outside, in nature, rather than urban environments, had hit me really hard, felt like a core part of my being, was still trying to find a way to represent and reaccess
those experiences/head spaces. I was doing a lot of drawings then.

That all died down drastically during my early guru days, (I was following/involved with an eastern meditation guru at the time), though after 2-3 years I did start following up on modern art again, and after 5 years or so started painting for the first time, just as I got into artists who were on that midway point between reality and abstraction. Mondrian's journey to abstraction I found fascinating, and then I finally got cubism, it hit me hard. In general I
preferred Braque's stuff to Picasso's.

At that time my wife and I were nursing her mother, who had double incontinence and dementia and required 24/7 care. I did the night shift, but that left a lot of time for painting while she intermittingly slept, as well as a lot of meditation time. That went on for 7 years. In about the 2nd of those years I came across the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell, who radically altered me, as in bigtime. I became obsessed with him, almost to the exclusion of anyone else, although I do remember having a very powerful experience in the Rothko room at the Tate then. The lighting was very low in the Rothko room, so they were almost like spectral presences around the room, very meditative, although I was also aware of the dark emotional undercurrents, so the effect was not quite life transforming, unlike the effect Motherwell had.

Motherwell, how to describe what it is about his work, that to this day resonates so deeply with me?
This will be tricky.
One of the reasons I have problems with the standard canon of western art through the renaissance, right up to the impressionists, is that I can never seperate, nigh on most of the time, the awareness of the stifling cultural milieu they were produced in, the stiffness in the sense of being in a body, and the absence of any type of primitive rawness outside of the culture they are produced in. They are too conscious of how they are being perceived, of trying to satisfy clients, but also their sense of colour and space just does not resonate with me at all, a sense of time and movement frozen. There are some partial glimpses that escape that sense of claustrophobia and lack of resonance I feel.
Vermeer, Rembrandt's self portraits and a few of Murillo's and Velazquez's and Goya's work.

Standard technique never really does it for me, rawness and truth to the moment, especially in terms of being in a human body, does. No accident that, like Motherwell, the Altamira cave paintings, a lot of zen calligraphy does do it for me way more than pretty much all of western art. I've seen some Aboriginal and north American Indian art that resonates in a very similar way.
But expressionism, Pollock etc, a lot of the Germanic stuff also leaves me cold, like they are alienated from their bodies emotionally, so letting it all out usually just passes me by. As I write this for some reason, the word puritan is coming up, I find simplicity very attractive. I am definitely north european rather than mediterranean from that angle.

One of the reasons I like Motherwell so much, and I suspect that this also applies to my interest in Cezanne and Braque, is the way they don't hide their clumsiness, doubt, indecision, in fact embrace it as aspects of themselves and in the truth to that approach, transcend it. To quote a review of a Gunter Grass novel by Gabriel Jospivoci, "stammering is the truer, more exact, more imaginative word, and Grass's books, we could say, are all stammers, false starts, hesitations, haunted by the inability to move forward, to round out the sentence, the paragraph, the work. But like all the greatest artists, he has made a strength out of weakness."

That is a very modern concept, especially in terms of being a culturally more acceptable path to take.But before finishing this section there is another area of body expression that fascinates me, and that is sport. I suspect that this relates very strongly to my interest in Motherwell and zen calligraphy.

Although I do connect with the competitive side of sport, I suspect that is mostly about how that sense of competition is more likely to increase a sense of being in the moment, in the body more completely. No accident that my favourite sports book by far is 'A Zen Way of Baseball' by Sadahao Oh, which describes his approach to baseball as a martial art and how he
approached transcending the conceptual limitations that stopped him from being in the moment. A fascinating read, even if you aren't into baseball I suspect. I've always been fascinated by this aspect of sport, I suspect this is true for most people who are into sport. The moments they remember are always when people like Messi, Pele, Zidane, Best etc etc went to another level and transcended their limitations to express a sense of sublime beauty and artistry in the moment, that whole so difficult to attain sense of being in the zone. I know the one game I truly experienced it while playing baseball was unbelievable, so much so that my sense of time altered, everything went into seriously slow motion on one play that I pulled off and everyone in the ground stood up and applauded. I found it rather fitting that we were playing a Japanese team at the time Any feedback is gratefully received, and from where I'm coming from whether you feel you have anything to offer conceptually or not is irrelevant. I should think I pretty much covered why in my first post. To me art is no different, especially most of the art I'm interested in, than appreciating a moment of sublime artistry by Lionel Messi. Yeah it might enhance your appreciation if you knew what technical areas he was working on, how he thinks in his head, what diet he has, what conditioning
programme he uses, his awareness of interplay with his teammates etc etc, but I suspect not by much.

Sub-bass series

The sub-bass painting series for me is purely about trying to find some way of hinting at my experiences of sub-bass, which have been purely visceral as far as I am aware, although the sheer atavistic tendencies have regularly gone into that in-the-zone zen territory too on a regular basis. So that is definitely part of it too, but even that is quite visceral, verging on primeval.
The experience of sub-bass for me has been quite revelatory. Certainly an experience unlike any other aural experience I've ever felt/heard. The only other aural experience that gets close in intensity, out-thereness and sheer rawness has been from the late Coltrane (such as The Love Supreme and Ascension), Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Evan Parker, Peter Brotzmann, Art Ensemble of Chicago type of free jazz, especially when Evan Parker is going his full on circular breathing route using a tenor sax.

My experience of sub-bass has certainly been less discordant than that, although it can be almost as disquieting. One experience at a dubstep night at Plastic People especially sticks in the mind, only time in my life I've experienced my cranium bones seriously wobbling, certainly freaked me out a bit for a few seconds. The sound system there was very powerful, and the experience was certainly enhanced by the huge amount of green being smoked there, it was also a very small club It was 17 years ago I first experienced sub-bass but my best experiences of it were at dubstep nights about 6 years ago. Seriously pissed off I missed out on dub back in the day.

Sub-bass, for those that don't know, is bass right at the edge of the aural range for human ears. It is as much a felt experience in the body as one that is heard. It's experienced like a very deep rumble/wobble in the body, in dubstep they talked of it rattling your rib cage. I can imagine whales would probably like sub-bass. It feels as though it's coming from within your body, rather than your body receiving it, like a primeval rumble from within your being.

Now I'm under no illusions that I'll ever be able to get close to a visual equivalent of its effects, and at the moment I'm painting it as external bass rings as if they are wobbling from bass bins, which is a little too literal for my liking. Since sub-bass is a pure sine wave, I might try painting it as sine waves through an abstracted body, I'm keeping that for later.
So far I'm no more than half pleased with what I've done, although the feedback I'm getting is quite positive so far, they are a little too 'pretty' to hint at the almost ghostlike spectral rumble that I experience sub-bass as, and they are also a little too close to Rothko looking paintings too.

The sub-bass sketches so far have all been done digitally using a graphics tablet and software. Just got a 40" x 40" canvas to do my first painted version.

The Baseball Series
Still unfinished, based upon the swing plane dynamics and torque of Nelson Cruz's batting swing as seen from behind home plate, with some abstract mash ups included.
Quite tricky trying to hint at a time series in a frozen moment covering all those aspects, especially torque, which is the stored kinetic energy created by coiling and resistance which is at the core of all power hitters swings. There is also something a little raw and clumsy about Cruz's swings, especially when he goes the other way, which I really like. Think I'm
also trying to project into these paintings something of the self doubt and tentativeness that Cruz carries with him emotionally, which he constantly seems to dealing with.
The thrid one is from overhead home plate breaking down his swing in moments of time.

The Other Paintings
These are harder to describe. They relate They relate to my experience of being in my body, fragments of memories, my experience of space and time. The original lines start purely from taking a line for a walk with as little conscious thinking as possible, just staying true to the line, then working colour into the shapes though they do evolve then too in form.
I spend a huge amount of time taken on each painting, just meditating on them. This leads to
extensive refining of the lines to reflect a sense of internal integrity, while trying to avoid, like the plague, how they will be perceived and the awful habit of slipping into easy mannerisms and cliche.

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