Dennis Hollingsworth

Pensive

It's been a tough week since I returned from Switzerland. At first, I had licence to recover from jet lag and order my paperwork, to do lists, errands and fix its. I expected to jump back in the studio and squish paint, but typically, I have a circuit breaker that prevents me from working without a sense of where I'm going.

Where am I? Where have I been? Where am I going?

Images of paint come to mind, out of the mists. Is this what I want? I don't want to simply do more of the body of summer painting I had just finished. My work follws one after the other, a story can be told of the linkages between them. In the last three paintings, a black Monet story was emerging. Where is this going? Do I want to fufill it now that it has fleshed out so? The danger is making a cartoon of it... intentions are best when they are incipient. They get overripe and rot quickly once they arrive.

In the art talk at the MAC described in an earlier post, sculptor Eric Swenson ezpressed it best when he said that he begins with a vivid idea that corrodes once he gets into the work, and soon he finds himself in unknown territory and editing and invention arrives at a place he didn't expect when he started. Yea, kinda like that.

A light has to come on, that sacrificial shoe horn of an initiating thought has to arrive. ( I have recurring images of dissolving faces in my head. Where is that going?)

(It's late at night and I'm watching Conan Obrian doing a skit in honor of Quenton Tarantino, the Three Stooges, Tarantino style... lots of blood and gore and screaming clowns on a static stage. It resembles a Paul McCarthy performance. These cultural feedback loops are dizzying.)

I'll be going to New York this Saturday for five days to see what I can see there, hang out with a few pals, check into Nicole's place, my gallery. It's a good time to see a lot of artwork and walk the streets thinking about how to proceed.