Dennis Hollingsworth

Lost Ahora

(Middle of last week.)

A story quickly told:

I started a large canvas with the intention of learning from the egg breaking juice I've squeezed recently (link, link), thinking about the closed circuit formulation which animated paintings such as this, this, and this). The idea behind the closed circuit thing was to start by drawing in and color fill an image, which is sliced/sheared up with tools such as drywall knives... then the paint goes down again, the image encoded in the pile that was sheared off, dropped down at times, rocked out in flowers, blended into mud and printed with paper peels for maximum fractal effect. A closed circuit, like an ecosystem, like a virgin.

A fine idea. But I wondered if it had legs. Closed or open, one or the other approaches are equally dangerous each in their own right, the former a death by rigidity and the latter by dissolution. Meanwhile, I was moving in a direction that was pointing up the dimension of image and text. I wanted all of this to have an impact on what I was to do next.

So down an image went. Both modes were on my mind, closed circuit/image and text... and by the time I sheared the paint off, I noticed the bleed of oil through a canvas, a sign that I forgot to seal it over with two or three coats of matt resin. The initial coats of rabbit skin glue couldn't keep the oil away form the canvas weave. I both liked and didn't like the resultant image I saw at first. I figured that I could let the paint dry and seal up the canvas afterward to continue onward. As I hung it up on the wall, the question formed: why not just let it be?

There on the table was the sheared pile of paint, the image encoded into its' mass. I could imagine a perfect painter (G-d?) being able to drop the pile in such a way as to reverse the force of the shear and deliver the image back again to it's original state. That I couldn't, that no human could, is a fine testament to the inherent fragility of humankind, the very definition of what it means to be human. Painting and wretchedness. The big question was whether I should continue or start another canvas with this pile of encoded paint. To throw this encoded pile onto another canvas was to break the circuit, a broken egg in other words.

And so I did. The next four blogposts should illustrate this.

My friends rolled into the studio as the week went by. Andrew Hahn was the first to say it: "You're done, dude." I had already made the decision, but it was fresh and doubt still hovered overhead, certainty was not yet rock hard. It was good to get a confirmation. Then Henry came by, animated. He had a lot to say about challenging my project, and the brightest jewel in our discussion was Henry's bon mot:

You don't have to
give the motherfucker
an extra scoop!"

Solid gold.

A question remains: where and when does one come to the... extra scoop?

Posted by Dennis at May 3, 2009 11:12 AM