Dennis Hollingsworth

Ahora/Admin/MailCall/

(This, a shot of a painting in progress -the first touches in the first four hours after the most recent of three previous scrape offs.)

Once upon a time, an art world guy asked: "Can I watch?".

"Uh, I don't think so." was my response. That would mess my head up, I'd end up performing, not thinking of the work at hand. I woldn't be able to get deep, I'd skip on the surface. Too close. I keep no company in the bathroom nor in the studio. Nuh uh. No way. Not gonna happen.

The reason why? Shyness, of course. Though I struggle against it. But there's more to it than subjective catatonia.

Painting for me is a alternating series of small achievements and failures and achievements in tumbling succession. And sometimes the most marvelous paintings occur after proceeding through the most wretched passages. Great beginnings, stumbling surprises, car wrecks turning into train wrecks, fast gambits and slivers of hope, smothered desperation, and then if I am ...lucky... grace. I cannot anticipate when or how this will occur and certainly, after having experienced wonderful paintings snatched from the jaws of defeat -as it were- I tend to lend myself to sustained bouts of doubts... heavy, heart wrenching, horrible, sickening, nauseating doubts. Why? Because I believe that this is a tempering process: that by alternately superheating and plunging into cold water, the stress might forge a better painting. It's what I think of as a wisdom perculiar to painting, won through hard experieince.

Now, imagine being in this terrible-but-still-good place...
And someone else is in the room,
Watching what you are doing.
Having thoughts.
Looking at you.
Like they are going to do anyway in the exhibition, but a thousand time worse.

And then I started to blog. (Slap the knee with the hat. Guffaw.)

Is it the same difference or if not, then what's the difference?

Well, one crucial difference is that while I consider this blog a bibliography or appendix to the paintings, and even though I have thought of it also as a virtual studio visit. such a virtual visit is controlled ...like an actual studio visit. In this situation, people arrange an appointment and I try to be productive around this monument of distraction in my day (albeit important as it is). I'd clean up, in other words. As in a mirror, while one can dial up this site and drop in, what you see is tidied up a bit. Still controlled. ?Claro que si? ?Como no?

I think of the Picasso film "The Mystery of Picasso", that famous Claude Renior film of the artist at work.. I Googled and found a site with an interesting description:

For a while, it doesn't seem very promising, as the early images are barely more than impressionistic cartoon half-sketches. One of the first ones proceeds past what seems an apppropriately finished state, to be more or less ruined-looking. Interestingly, instead of being able to conclude that 'with every work of art there's a point of perfection' that one must attain without going beyond, we here realize that for every finished painting we see, the artist has has to deal with a living, growing entity, and only he could decide when it was finished.

Further down, dark loamy earth:

...That's when we realize that because a painting-in-progress 'changes' with time, the 'mystery' is that Picasso is almost telling a story with his painting. It has anticipation ('looks like he's almost finished this one') and suspense ('what's he doing now?'). When the picture is done, we're left with a complex awareness of earlier images and abandoned directions. The visible work is just the top layer painted over the now-buried earlier versions.

One realizes that painters must look at their finished canvasses and think not of what's there, but of the earlier versions underneath that only they can remember, like the invisible alternate futures of a Luis Borges time-travel story. The creation of each picture is an animated film, an adventure where the director (Picasso) launches himself into regions unknown, and takes us with him.

There you go.

Therefore this blog.

***

And now, the mail:

(BLOGPOST IN PROGRESS)
(Somehow, a day intervened in the posting of this enty. Whoops.)

Moving along... from the most recent correspondence:

Steve LaRose dropped a line about the beginning of this blogpost (I paraphrase):

I know that you are not done posting for tonight but I just wanted say, "See, see, that's why musicians have it made! Imagine making mistakes, taking chances, reaching highs, plowing through the lows, getting in a groove, getting in a rut! Imagine doing all that, while someone else is watching! Not only watching, but participating! Responding! The painter's studio is so lame compared to being in a band. The shitty thing is, I have a tin ear and no soul. I can hardly wait for streaming video blogs."

Oh, you've got a soul Steve. (I thought you were in a band once upon a time, correct?)

I know that one day, this transparency thing will go global. That is, our every act will be open for inspection and we may have to invent reasonable shadow places, virtual private domains to chill out from the white hot heat of public scrutiny. The day when we can go to the local Apple store and buy the latest version of an Apple G-50, the guys at the genius bar will unscrew a box from which wisps of nanobots will fly up your nose and subsequently install themselves onto your optic nerves and cerebral cortex or somesuch organ... and wala! Online 24/7 with a wink and a nod.

Until that fine day....

In that email exchange, Steve was concerned about the public/private confusion in the act of sending me emails. I shall forthwith add a tag to the notice in the left margin requesting people tag their correspondance as a blog comment so i don't inadvertantly post private correspondence.

Done and done.

***

Working backwards into my mail archive, My young friend Alberto Barcia Fernandez asked a question:

hi dennis,
I?ve seen your last painting, and I don?t know why that you say in the blog that you don?t like it at all. I'm not sure sometimes... it?s hard for me to understand the context without get confused, I have to improve my english.
I just want to tell you that in my point of view it's a very good painting and a very good allusion to Goya?s Saturn.

Thanks Alberto, and no worries about the English. You're doing great. I wish I could speak Castellano as well as you speak and write English.

Realmente me gusta la incorporacion del figurativismo en tu obra, yo he estado pensando como hacerlo en mis pinturas, sin encontrar la manera de hacerlo, es por eso que al verlo en esta pintura tuya me he quedado impresionado.

Alberto thinks that I am "incorporating figuration into my work". This reminds me of a question that Chirs Jagers sent in recently:

Dennis,

I have loved your recent posts about how your paintings look different through the lens, particularly the one that broke out of the rectangle (perhaps an idea there). I almost feel like the art that gets promoted nowadays is specifically because of how photogenic it is (which is a real thing!)

This has also led me to a question. I love your close up details (because they allow me to inspect your surfaces). But I have noticed that your marks/forms exist completely on top of the surface (they are never seemingly below the surface, "illusion"). Is this something you have decided upon? If so, why?

Chris
Dallas, TX

It may be that there are two kinds of abstraction:
1. A derivation of essential elements distilled from one information rich source and conveyed in painting as an expression in reduction. I'm thinking of the Russian Constructivists and Barnett Newmann, and Mondrian and Kandisnky -especially the show at the Jewish Museum: "Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider" back in '03, wherein one can see the representational source of a concert scene as Wassily jetted off to abstraction "non-objective" land...

and/or

2. A trees-for-the-forest thing where the material facts of the medium is asserted first and foremost. This must be an influence from my architecture background, the nature of materials thing.

My point here is that my "trees" (the physical assertion of the paint-as-material)
are thought of as in relation to the forest -representation- the image made of the marks which seem to disappear when you "see" through them. Abstraction/representation, day/night, up/down, dualities which I hope do not become Manichaean in the negative sense.

I think of abstraction and representation as two sides of the same thing: painting. Here's a formula for you:

Abstraction + Representation = Painting.

Of course, I'm sure that this issue has been lit by my previous references to Goya's Saturn and the three scrape-off negotiation between an image referent and a point of departure into another yet sympathetic reality (the painting).

***

One day long ago, a studio visitor once remarked: "I don't see the architecture in your paintings." I guess she wasn't looking hard enough. Sometimes people do. But what about the other features of my experience? I was enlisted as a sailor in the U.S.Navy whe I was a kid to pay for college among other things. Where's that? I am the son of a Caucasian father and a Malaysian mother. Where's that? I was born in Madrid but lived in nine other place in the world afterward before I sailed the South Pacific for five years. Where's that? Maybe it is because of my heterogenaic history compells a blurring movement that points me to the phantasmagoric. Interpolation. The area under the curve screaming up the exponential as x approaches zero.

I wikipedia thusly:

I feel better now.

***

Sorting my mail...

Jim Murray sends a hello:

Hey denn?..been awhile..but been up to ..well..knees..ma??e thighs in
alligators..
some famil??stuff
school
landlord is gonna doze the farmho?se I been renting for 7 years gotta
leave by march 1 etc
******
hope ur wife is healing
always diggin ur blog... dug the thing @ espana..(my?oldest daughter
montserrat was born in barcelona)
really dug the most recent entry!!!!...

Thanks, Jimmy! Knees-thighs-deep alright. Thansk too for the healing prayer. I tend to mute the harshness of living through an accident and rehabilitation, Stephanie is brave sure enough, but she's been through enough pain. We're looking forward to a new-normal once again. It's going to be alright, but not right now.

"recent entry" is referring to this post, I believe.

...cuz I been tinkering around with
ur postits of paintings and bandw photcopying them then re-arranging them
(pequeno bodgones para denn?), collaging them a bit..really having fun!..i
took the sketches u made and printed them off, then folded them , then
enlarged them ..then hand colored them..etcetc..i am starting to get the
hang of ur pics..(in a hands on way)..dylan thomas used to memorize lots of
poems.., maybe in the emersion into the actual pics themselves , one gets a
buzz of the anatomy of the inner rhetoric..(if that don't sound 2
palabra-snarkey HA..but I think im having fun..if u send me a P.O box where
u get ur snail mail ..ill send u some of 'em when I find some curious things
out design wise? Or like eleanor wylie calls in her poem "pretty words"/I
call my stuff/pretty chunks of color Later jimmy jetta

great one by?ammons

A.R. Ammons - Design

The drop seeps whole
from boulder-lichen
or ledge moss and drops,

joining, to trickle,
run, fall, dash,
sprawl in held deeps,

to rush shallows, spill
thin through heights,
but then, edging,

to eddy aside, nothing
of all but nothing's
curl of motion spent.

O yeh a little while ago , when I noticed u tinkering around with some of ur
sketches I got a buzz off it..and it made me think of one of my favorite
sites in the smithsonian (or an?where 4 that matter)...on the nature of
sketchbooks!..i used it frim time to time to shre withmy students how
different artists approach the activity of sketching! And yet how fun and
interesting it is to do!..
I see the??have resdigned the site..(I don't know my favorites but I always
loved the ba??area figuratives!!bischoff park diberkorn joan browns early
stuff, frank lobdells drawings (online at hackett freedman galler??in
sf..etcetc and those cats...

googleinto> visual thinking: sketches and sketchbooks in the archives of
american art

Thanks too for the link! I was teling my friend Bart Exposito about a book of the same title, but it's beyond my Google reach. It was of the 1930's vintage, stuffed with illustrations and ideas which might be antique but still good.

Jimmy is at home on the keyboard. He wrote earlier, referring to this blogpost:

denn??read ur nice entry?where u were having a beer with a friend..then went
off into the bit about making art...i guess I can relate to the humantalk
about the process...
sorr??about my entry..dont mean to have so man? openended
rifts....initiall? I was thinking abo?t chards of color..(and ur reaction to
color being so emotional..> or perhaps more succinctl?..chords of color
which can vulcanize theory's bulletproof vestibule...>most geometric
painting..
when I was tr?ing to express myself..i was thinking abo?t how ur
paintings remind me of jobims..lyrical song waters of march...where he
starts looping (like the french imagists) concrete like objects/events..ans
soon enuf it expands to a groovy?psuedo=symphonic obdy of visual song..
it si hard for me to express such feelings..and im sorry if..(as I seem
to often do..i have massive gaps in coherent descriptoes..soor?..i had to
smile ..as u said "if u can dance"//
I divied up the color poem by?penn warren..connecting the stanzas with
my re-reaction to your comments about color..and ur mini-owie-bend in the
road with ur wifes calamity...as often ..it looks like a james jo?ce gesture
drawing with words..soo..sorry

big congrats on getting ur pic off to miami..then this new gigi..then
the other three..that went ..(I cant remember where)

looking at ur snapshots from past pics..i like the fog greens..the
charlais bull brown tans...the wild rose reds....the corky limestone off
greys.... Which canonize the brightness of the other candied colors u
employ...ive alway? had an affinity with such so?nds to my e?es in paintings

later..jimmy murray

one of my older boys gave me a compilation of terry?reids tunes for
Christmas..i used to dig terr??reid ..and this tune bo?t made me break..i
reall??don't wont to become a man with no expression...

Without Expression - Terry Reid
Have you ever ridden horses
through a rainstorm
Or a lion through a busy street bazaar
There are many things
I'd love to turn you on to
But I somehow feel
they're safer where they are
Well, some people are
inbound with infatuation
And some others spill
depression as the law
From one's mother
getting at no imagination
So beware then
Maybe sin is at everyone's door
Yes, there's a man I know
with no expression
He's got none at all
Yes, there's a man that I know
with no expression
He's got none at all
But you never, no
You would never see this man laughing
Come to think of it
I've never seen him cry
But he might be sitting
And you hear him singing
But by and by he'll stop and sigh before
his voice would even begin to speak
And he'd just cry
Yes, there's a man I know
with no expression
He's got none at all
Yes, there's a man that I know
with no expression
He's got none at all
Have you ever ridden horses
through a rainstorm
Or a lion through a busy street bazaar
There are many things
I'd love to turn you on to
But I somehow feel
they're safer where they are
Yes, there's a man I know
with no expression
He's got none at all
Yes, there's a man that I know
with no expression
He's got none at all

***
Chris Jager and I were writing about his interest in physical anatomy as an artist and as a a teacher. Check out his site, he's damn good. Iasked him what he thought about plastination:

I am not a fan of the "plastination" thing with Gunther Von Hagens. Not only do I find his manner of presentation a little grotesque and indelicate, but I don't believe the process of dying is complete. They strike me very oddly. And I'm not sqeamish. I love attending human disections and all that. But pasting eyebrows on a corpse riding a bike??? No wonder Damien hirst likes him, it's wierd (not in a good way). Also, after visiting the Specola in Florence (where they made replicas of corpses out of wax) nothing compares. These are sculpture, and they look absolutely real, and beautiful, and delicate, and on and on. wow. I respect Gunthers boldness and believe he has only the best intentions...but i don't like them.

then, later:

I dug up a pic for you from the specola. (I'm still digging through the 3000 pictures I took). But this kicks the shit out of those platinates...without even breathing.

I agree completely.

With the specola, there is a struggle (to represent and convey) and therefore life. In the plastination, there is only enbalming (an antonym of struggle, perhaps) and doubletherefore, death.

Without even breathing, indeed.

Coming up in a subsequent blogpost: Doug Henders and Saltz on "Superficial Engagement".

Posted by Dennis at March 6, 2006 11:49 AM