I AM, through my work and in my own way, bearing witness to the discombobulation of the natural world, as we adjust to the technological reinterpretation of what it means to be human.
RECENTLY I stopped in to the UNM art museum to see the Raymond Jonson show, New Mexico modernist, featuring work from the museum collection. I was struck, as I always am when seeing work from 100 years (or 200, or 10,000) ago with the myth of originality. Seeing his work over those five decades pre-figuring so much of what we see today considered to be ground-breaking. Just as when I think of my photo-esq + drawing prints I must remember what Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray were doing one hundred years ago. As artists, I think it's best to remind ourselves we are a human chain of creators, holding hands all the way back to the cave painters, merely adding our own newly-conceived scribbles on those same virtual walls.
SOMETIMES as an artist you do some work, just one piece even, that in the moment truly amazes you. How did I do that, you may say, where did that even come from? It may not happen very often, in fact it does not, it almost never happens. But in that moment you are so lucky (or deluded, egotistical or over-caffeinated) and I know, you haven’t cured cancer (or Covid), fed the hungry or made a dent in inequality, or… But maybe, just maybe, you’ve put something out into the world that will at least briefly resonate with others or just vibrate among the stars, rattle the frequencies like a wind chime in a soft breeze. And even if that does not happen, you have pushed yourself forward, through failure or mediocrity or self-doubt, into a new artspace, a new launchpad, a new you. Even after the glow begins to fade and you’re off on the next adventure. And even if it wasn’t so amazing, remember the feeling it will come in handy, as a seed has been planted and the future beckons.
INKJET prints can be timid, recessive…I want my images to glisten like enamel flames sprayed onto a 1963 Harley gas tank. I want the ink to announce boldly: “when I grow up I’m going to be as strong as paint!”
I WANT to make pictures that are of today, but note the past, and will withstand the future. I learn technique minimally, incrementally, and embrace the accident (Rauschenberg); and allow the experience of creation to guide me rather than the other way around; the penumbra in between the deliberate and the random.
SOMETIMES I wonder, when I see a show, if the artist thinks every piece in the show is equally strong. I don’t always edit out a few weaker images, for several reasons: 1) I worked hard on it, struggled and put my soul into it; 2) as Nathan Lyons said “process not product”, it’s part of the visual sentence of my life. Not every word can be a noun or a verb; there’s also a need for conjunctions and prepositions. Also, by printing full size some of these images and looking at them on the wall over time, I can assess what’s right and less right and where to go next.
PHOTOGRAPHY is my background and was my training in the arts, although I moved rapidly from black and white to glorious color photo-silkscreen and photo-lithography as an MFA student. My work does not fit neatly into existing art-pigeon-holes: although full of photographic process throughout, not enough of a photograph to be perceived as photography; not traditional enough for the printmakers; and way too low-tech for the new media folks. Yet I still see as a photographer and compose as one: almost invariably a new series begins with a prior period of actively photographing (although I just use a point and shoot and only photograph colors, textures and forms that move me, to create a data base for image construction); and when I build digital images I still think in the zone system (thank you Ansel Adams), always requiring a true black (0,0,0 RGB) and a pure white (255,255, 255 RGB) somewhere in the image.
I CAME TO DRAWING through the back door of photography; really, for me it’s essence is markmaking. Marks create a kinship with generations past all the way back to painters in caves, each acting out this inherently human endeavor. My current and recent work explores the interaction of analog and digital marks and their interface with organic forms such as trees and flowers. Through this swirling together of related and unrelated imagery I find myself choreographing the ongoing dance between our human selves and our digital partners as we become increasingly and willingly cyborg, thereby enhancing and extending ourselves through our ever-changing digital abilities…marching joyfully, and sometimes fearfully but pliably, into the AI future we cannot fully perceive as it emerges one day at a time. Even marks created digitally help plant the flag of our souls on the trembling soil, the shifting sand, of our present and uncertain planet. I admit that to do my artwork I willingly embrace and take the hand of my photoshopped avatar who guides me through the digital divide, where together we walk timidly but bravely into the collective experience of this new decade whose very name connotes visual acuity.