Dennis Hollingsworth

Foto Shop

This summer has been tricky getting constant access to an internet connection. My usual pit stop is Hamed's internet cafe nearby, but that is the kind of thing that is good for checking the mail and surfing the news, downloading podcasts... blogposting requires another pitstop or two and last year, it was a pirated connection at a nearby youth center. But for some reason, they aren't as available to me this summer as it was before. Thanks to the good fortune and generosity of friendship, Nacho has let me use his Vodaphone connection while he's in Barcelona, so I get to surf online a bit more than usual this week.

So, what is better to start off with than a foto session? What follows are shots of recent paintings, each in proportion and therefore the relative size difference.

ww#309

ww#310

ww#311

ww#312

What you might see here is a wrestle with an aspect of drawing that I am seeking in order to disturb things a bit. #309 is a buried drawing and #310 is a kind of exposition of various states of drawing and erasure all deployed in tension in relation to one another. I have this abiding notion of painting as a dynamic tension between drawing (that which delineates, divides and makes distinctions) and flowing (the state of media as is proceeds out of one's direct control). Ever since I left grad school, I took a dim view of the mandate for all artists to straddle all media and after I digested the idea of the dead author (late 80's critical theory) and the evaporation of materiality in favor of some kind of conceptualist's nirvana (the fruit of the PostModern tree), I was determined not only persist in painting, but to embrace both its' material presence and especially a deliberate entanglement within its' realm. (I'm not exactly sure why, but the image of a happy Laoco?n comes to mind with this topic.)

My favorite method of navigation in painting practice is tacking. After persisting in one direction for a time, I tend to favor something completely different, bearing in mind that the maxim (a source now lost to my memory) that "...to become conscious, one must become aware of contrast". So after reprising the idea in a more compact and modest form in #311, I flung all procedures out of the window to scoop and plop my way into a completely different approach in #312.

And this is where I now am, a bit excited with a new discovery as I stand up the next large panel in my studio for this week's new adventure. Lots of work to do, still.

As a postscript, here is a video I was about to delete. It is essentially a repetition of an earlier one, and therefore a bit redundant. But here it is anyway, a small note in passing: