Dennis Hollingsworth

Lameness, Plus.

Usually, an artist/blogger should make it all look easy. Don't show the sweat. Betray no fallibility. You're an artist, you must have an eye on posteriety: become the marbled icon, levitate into branded heaven.

Not today and not in this blogpost, people.

I should have known that the weight of the rig I devised was too heavy to repeatedly lift the four paneled 8'x16' painting back and forth from flat to vertical positions which is typical for me when I'm painting these heavy-thick-impasto-wet-into-wet-alla prima works of mine.

I felt more than a little stupid, as if I had just failed an elementry engineering test. The shoulders of the architect in me had just been rounded off a bit.

The forlorn strategy: rig up a minimal frame of two horizontal stiffeners top and bottom, and four legs that catch the stiffeners with wheels at the tips so I can hoist the painting between the wall and the floor.

Finally, after a bit of schedule slippage (I wanted to be mixing paint two days ago to start the new year off with brio), having crafted a fine wood butcher's folly*, I finally got into position late last night to call in my friend Bart Exposito to help me lift the beast up. Immediately, we were able to stand the rig up without rupturing our abdominal walls, but then I noticed the strain on the rope that I was hanging on to. I knew that I was pushing the limits here, but it was only at this moment did I fully realise that the burden of weight was too much for me to handle. I was lucky to be able to ease the beast to the ground without rope burned hands or dislocated shoulders. And there on the ground it lay with my pride.

Stubborn reality.

Phil Wagner came in for a look see. He suggested larger pulleys, the increased diameter is a bigger lever arm. I could cut out a pulley from 3/4" plywood in three disks with two different diameters and glue them together. Then, I would have to attach a frame to the ceiling to hold the pulley in place.

I began to imagine a Rube Goldberg set up. The rig was becoming the art. The painting was becoming an installation where painting took second place to a drama about a painting-about-to-take-place. It wasn't that the thought repelled me... I could call up Adam Janes and suggest some kind of collaboration, he's working somewhere in this territory. But nah, don't go nuts Dennis... let's retread here.

The Phil suggested a friend of his who has an engineer's mind, who frequently consults to artists to McGyver solutions to problems like this. Did I want his cell number? No thanks Phil, but thanks for the thought. It was time to take a step back and look what was obvious in this situation.

Reality: the painting is too heavy as it is, and it is too insane to expect to flip it back and forth like I did before. So instead of moving the painting, I'll move.... me. The solution was as plain as day: leave it on the floor and move myself back and forth from the loft for a simulated upright view. And how to get into the center of the canvas? Reuse the struts as rails top and bottom and buy another couple of longer redwood planks to span atop the rails and float above the painting as a kind of scaffolding.

Later, Bart and I repaired to Hop Louie for a beer so I could cry into it. The image of hauling up the panels with a pull of the rope was too sweet to let go easily. By midnight, I was over it and planning the next day.

*see defintion #5 here.