Dennis Hollingsworth

Ahora

A quiet time in the studio.

A time to collect myself...

This weekend seems calm but it only seems so.

A thousand things are swirling around me. Emails and Filemaker Pro and calendars and telephone calls and boxing and shipping and appointments and... blogging and...

...painting.
Oh yea, painting.

I had charged myself up for this show in K?ln, planning on delivering a brace of paintings that would turn against the seeming dulcent calm and serenity of the previous show in Z?rich. I told myself: "Color, Variety, Intensity." Look over the last few blog-months and judge for yourself if I have accomplished this.

I did my best... and this is my point: I'm still in the doing of it. I have planned to paint two more paintings, and I promised works on paper for three galleries... and it tasks me to my limit to hit my marks. (I'm not complaining here, I promise... ) Andr? was kind enough to depressurize me: "You are already at 7 paintings now. I think that we are on a very safe side in terms of amount of the work.", but I have ideas for the next two paintings, so I might as well press on and take advantage of the (creative) tension at hand. The last painting I do probably won't have enough time to dry before the shippers roll in anyway.

I've started to catalog and title the work, beginning with the works on paper. now, my titles come from this here blog. I comb the blog with the painting before me (or in mind) and a word or a group of words naturally assert themselves from the rest. To do this directly seems wrong to me probably because sentimentality has been burned away with a hot PostModern poker from decades past. The word is maudlin. Bad, bad, bad, that. I would hesitate to say that the writing and picturing in this blog is sentimental since I am capable of so much more (yes, and don't make me weep, now) and that I have intentionally kept topics directed by curiousity as much as possilble here. But there is something about investment in these blog pages and there is certainly something about investment in the paintings. (I'm teasing out a difference between sentimentality and investment here.) By sifting through the words, especially around about the time of the paintings in question, I think I have found a way to assign a monniker to my work that is fluid and invested.