Frosty spoon, babies, maggots, Truman Capote, ceramic Adam and Eve, shark grave,

The tail end of my week off from my day job. It was Holden Caufield attempts a bacchanal. Or some such thing. Drinking makes me sharp the next day. It's a lucid focus, but I'm not purporting some devotion to a drunken master style of art making. It's a method. Nothing more.

The aviary on the North Side of Pittsburgh is pretty impressive. The first birds you see are goofy-looking eagles and macaws. Then penguins. They've been slaughtered by superstitious folk in countries into which they've been imported because they were thought to be trolls. True or false?









I went there with Ange and her kid, Sophie. It was great. I was hazy and jubilant.








Gina and her kids were there, too. Her kids seem to like me more than Sophie. I think I freak her out.

The aviary folk were feeding maggots to some of the birds in the large tropical room. Musty and pulsing with airborne fluid like a giant mouth.















From there to great coffee and Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. It's an early novel of his and it's quite good. Some passages flow like honey and gold.

Over to The Society for Contemporary Craft. It's tucked away in the Strip District near the golden-domed church. A ceramic show. Eden imagery. Some of it really knocked me down.














A long walk up Smallman to Butler, up Butler past some teenage hecklers and into the Allegheny graveyard. My first wander around the grounds. What a sight! The overcast and merciless light was perfect. And, like an audible fart in a French cinema, the infamous JAWS gravestone:










I got a little lost for a while but I certainly didn't care. Will Oldham in the ears, sharp, cold light, wriggling trees desperate for the sky, and coagulated earth. Lose me. Ideas came on like the stickiness of gracefully delivered but shockingly bad news.

I'm Almost Human

I've accrued some paid time off hours for my day job. Enough that I scheduled a week for myself. It coincided quite nicely with a gorgeous turn in the weather.

It's remarkable having my day for me. There is little sleep. I don't want a minute wasted. Mostly this time is to set out the final surge for my first solo show opening in May.

I think the work is strong, but I'm forever remiss to grant myself any room for congratulations. There should be more. More depth, more scope and focus. And less. Less fuss, less guided-ness.

The city is breathing a sigh of relief in the weather's reprieve. I walk the dogs. I drink a lot of coffee and get back on my bicycle for longer rides. The studio work goes, but it's studied and slow. It's the opposite of feeling sure but somehow knowing.













I like having some visitors, too. Heather White came over today. We ate some breakfast and poked around in each other's studios. She's a behemoth of energy and mental organization. We both like personal debris and beloved garbage. I feel at times as though I'm her slow-witted cousin who never went to school. Or something like that. But talking with her is a really nice reminder that need takes precedence over procedure in our art making.

Good things lately:

Matthew Collings' latest Diary column in Modern Painters

The Goya etchings in the special exhibition at the Carnegie. The Fragonards and Daumiers and Hogarths look stiff and dated compared to his. So much conviction and power. Some kind of haunting.

Gooey brie on apples.

Espresso.

New pair of jodhpurs. New belt, too.

Some glimpses of something with power in some parts of some of the new work.

Heaving in the Mind

My friend Jamie makes art about our failures as humans in the form of culture. I think he means that culture is always incomplete. It services us for so long depending on various factors, but ultimately it fails in its timeless and universal scope. I think that's what he's saying in a lot of ways.

We've shown together numerous times. Our work takes pretty different forms. But some of the impetus is quite similar. I think of failure a lot. Not my own in some small-scale quasi tragedy, but as human experience en masse. Always just falling short of what meaning there could be and some calling it the unfathomable and building a religion while others call it impatience on our part and scoff at anxiety.





Jamie Adams "Battle Popes" 2007 multi-plate woodcut
http://www.dinosaurversusrobot.com/Jamie_Adams/Welcome.html


In my own small way I'm always making work about being overwhelmed. Anxiety comes into it as a big theme. The acceptance of mortality is really important to me. I find that grace occurs when we submit to that realization not with passivity but with the attitude that strings of inevitability engage our senses endlessly.

Lately I've realized that my images center around trauma not in a direct way, but in a way perhaps more horrible when fed through memory over and over again. Leonardo Da Vinci said that painting moves in the mind. I find that to be more and more true the more I get involved with painting. That's how I mean to paint. I think that's a huge part of its power. It moves in the mind immediately and simultaneously it unfolds endlessly as though one could get the feel of a novel at a glance and yet find undulations of engagement on a visceral level over long periods of time too. Good painting says something when it makes its noise. More people could make good paintings if they concentrated on just that simple notion: How do I make it good?









So, my figures are patchy. Every mark is really toiled over on the surfaces so they're taking a long, long time to make. That's rather fine with me. I can't abide painting forms. I don't really know why outside of knowing that I can't abide the arrogance of purely perceptual inclinations presented as facts. Not from me anyway. Previous abstract work was a brash and floundering attempt at building forms of doom. These figures come from the same place, but I feel I have worked into a more sophisticated focus in the mark making and color. The doom has a better idea of itself anymore.

It all adds up to these floating collections of bruises. It feels successful sometimes in that way where it moves like the memory of flesh in my mind. Heaving or breathing shallow, twisting, immovable but falling apart. Moving with love and the consequences of mortality. It has little to do with culture outside of self-awareness. It's certainly a reaction to culture, but not one that's significantly different than someone reflecting on where they were, say, in 1110 A.D. And I'm a product of my time. That's what I meant by inevitability in some ways.








Living is the widening circle to death. There is nothing worth living for, as the process bows to the result. Everything is worth dying for.

LOOKY THE LORD THROUGH! BREATH THIS!

It cannot but too often seem as though it's look here, look here, LOOK HERE GODDAMMMITT. Either that or crouching low and keeping your entrails tucked away. For what? And when?








For some, sometimes called 'that', slippery initiative that supposedly transcends our skin and pulse. To a quick place of no time? Hmmm... been chewed on for millennia. No assurance now, nor soon, nor later. So faith it is. But logic beats that with a stick every day. No? Not every day? One begets the other, perhaps?








And why always perhaps? Someone explain to me the meaningful difference between rot and fermentation. The latter is great, but it's turning point can only be divined by trial and error. And then mostly through the latter again.

We're snowed in here in rickety Pittsburgh. I've got a blood blister the size of a dime on my left hand. The kerosene heater pop gave me over xmas actually does some good in a studio that is essentially just a wooden building with no heat. From the outside it looks to one as though they may be in luck if they're seeking lawn and garden equipment in clean order. But the inside drops down ten feet more and it's actually a turn of the century horse stable naked and creaking and abiding the new absurdity of one animal over others long dead. One more while blackened roof beams look on.









Filth and ferment and turnover and some guise for transcendence. Not escape, mind you, but realignment of things to accommodate deeper living. Deeper than what? Deeper than what a pokey academic mind can follow in books. Not dull, but not exactly leaving a good trail to follow either. Kerosene+turpentine+lead+cobalt+or-a few hundred thousand steps et viola! A few seconds distilled.

A shaman, an alchemist, and an astronomer walk into a barn and the astronomer reveals a handful of semen with a pathetic look while the other two laugh for different reasons.

Hotel Katkowski; It's a Lovely Place

My comrade Rob Katkowski finished his suite of four foot by four foot paintings for the hotel being constructed in downtown Pittsburgh. It was a pretty sweet gig, and he knows it despite all his bitching.









He had some people over to his studio to show them off before they were transported to the hotel for display. No one we know would be able to afford to see them there.

I've seen them a few times in progress over the past eight or nine months. Working with such pragmatic purpose and with a bureaucrat's watchful eyes upon you changes your process. It can leak into the studio like a toxin, but not to the detriment of the work if you've got any vision at all.









Rob rolled with it. They don't all look completely resolved, but the strong ones show the evidence of pushing on to a broader field. I like the one that starts to look like it's jiving on Milton Avery's work. I never imagined Rob going that direction, but it fits. It's more candy-like and less playful (somehow) than Avery's powerful musings but such are the ways of filters and desires.








Rob's surfaces get more fleshy as time goes on. He's been working on thicker and I've been struggling to get delicate thins up to par in my crucible.












Milton Avery "Island"



Rob's intense but polite. He paints with purpose and he always gets me excited talking about technical things. Brass tacks. That's his new obsession. He's gotten down to brass tacks. Ha! Kill me now. He's sold me on it, too. Luc Tuymans uses them on the edges of his surfaces. Rob saw his show in Cleveland but I missed it because I'm a boob. And Mike Ninehouser is a pushover for women. No, I'm just a boob. I should have made it there. Rob and I have both gotten very energized by Tuymans only lately. We warmed up to him in the past few years, but now we're fairly agog.






Luc Tuymans "Rabbit"




Do people take Rob seriously enough? Who knows. Some do. I take his work ethic very seriously, but he's a sweetheart and won't fess up. Look at this kid:

Some good blue art.

Mike Ninehouser


I happened upon an art opening at The Spinning Plate art collective. Or whatever it is. Some people I just saw last night at a friend's New Year's Eve party were in the gallery space milling around. I met most of them just then.

It was Mike Ninehouser's apartment. The party that is. He's funny. I've been hoping his art would get more of that and less flimsy seriousness that doesn't need to be there anyway. He's starting to do it. Less of that Pittsburgh artist's tendency to make mythic images of stylized figures and animals and more fuck you in the surface. A really pretty relentless surface of paint a little like a course Tuymans with all the gloominess and some confounding sense of seriousness. This despite tits and wolves and extremely clumsy paint handling. He's pulling it together. There's an almost accidental relentlessness. He tells me that he's trying to loosen up the paint. I don't really believe that but it's sitting there in a much better way that it was before.





Mike Ninehouser


It's a tidy show. Not as much variety as would be beneficial. There were some sculptures by a fellow named Gabe Felice. I saw him on the way into the show. Oh, I thought, there's that kid I blew off at a New Year's Party four or five years ago when I was in a dark place like I am sometimes. I gave him the cold shoulder equivalent of "go eat your own shit." But Mike pointed him out as the maker of the two assemblages to which I really responded. "Time Machine" is some sort of chairs in a coital pile painted blue with a painted head panel and a tape recorder painted silver that makes farty moaning noises when you twist the nobs. Up above is a mechanic's light. It's kind of superb. It sold for nine dollars. Funny and cobbled together but sad too. I recall I apologized to him some months after our rocky first meeting. He sat in a chair against the far wall with his girlfriend looking like someone who thought he wanted to go the school dance. But he didn't.





Gabe Felice


His other piece I liked less was on the floor really low. It's painted white. It was less than a meal at McDonald's too. Somehow they seem like they should look dated and like someone's been gumming the nipple of Rauschenberg and Johns but they don't. Shit, I don't know. Kudos to him.





Gabe Felice


Another guy was Jason Rosemeyer. Someone told me he was an outsider artist. Ok. Anyway some of his things were alright too. I liked this one because it looks like Shell Silverstein designed a record cover for some British group in 1962.





Jason Rosemeyer


Everyone seemed like they were friends. Ashley Andrykovitch's pieces were interesting at times too. Still a little too typical of that Pittsburgh Wes Anderson "I care in a tender but unattached way" in some ways though. Everyone's work had a similar feel in this children's learning experience sort of way. A lot of clunkiness and bad surfaces. Not necessarily in a detrimental way, but not always helpful. A lot of blue.






Ashley Andrykovitch


I fished a framed photograph out of the trash in the corner. A really tacky and badly composed image of a sexy girl in a slinky dress showing off her legs on a stairway. The artist was there but I didn't tell him I took it. It was so trashy that I had to take it. Good cheese and crackers there too.

More Holla. Less Daze.

Xmas with a small portion of the family. I wanted to shoot some of my father's guns but constant freezing rain prevented the redneck reconnection ceremony.

For pop: One bottle of Butterscotch Schnapps
For mama: One handmade bag, one pot of poinsettias.
For big sissy and man of matrimony: One grocery gift card
Plus hugs and kisses for all.

I grew up in that one house for 18 years and then one or two more. It looks smaller every time I return. There were eight of us in it for so many years.

Pictures of people I haven't met: My little sister's husband and his family. My older brother's twins. Scattered Americans just playing our role.

Pictures of a past of which I have so little idea.