These two paintings, At the Stake (above) and Stranger (below), were the last pieces of art I finished before the move from Las Vegas to Dallas this summer. Along with Narcissist, I think they embody the kind of shift in using color that I’ve been writing about in these posts. Using different techniques of applying the paint, preferring methods that stay focused on the artwork rather than introducing my presence as the painter, I’m putting colors together so that the finished product is an opportunity to look at and enjoy all the different things the colors do: they blend, contrast, hide, emerge, advance, recede, congeal into groups, break apart into little pieces.

There is a paradox in my way of making these works that I like, which is that no amount of self-removal from the process of making these paintings will actually remove myself as the artist. So I can’t really say that I’m stepping back and giving the colors in these works a chance to be themselves and do all the cool stuff that colors do; no amount of self-delusion can erase my intimate involvement with their making. The world is full of unintended, unplanned chromatic activity, but artwork is obviously in a different category. So, I’ll happily retain my agency as painting-maker, leaving Nature and the inexorable unfolding of physical events as the agents of arbitrary color. Art not being a natural phenomenon but a form of communication, I use it to say, “Look at this. Isn’t it great what color can do?”

I’m happy to announce that this sculpture (featured below as “A small, as yet untitled, sculpture”) has a name! The house I’m living in now has walls in the kitchen and master bath that have room on top for display of knick-knacks, plants, art. All of the recent sculptures that I’ve featured on this site now have a home up there in our domestic troposphere. Those in the kitchen look okay; in their case, I’m just happy that they are out of boxes and on display. The runt of the litter (pictured above), however, looks effing great perched in its new home atop the partial wall that separates the master bedroom from the bath. Angled and centered above the door, it feels like a little ancestor spirit, like some kind of sprite that you would see in a Miyazaki film. Before this perfect union of artwork and location occurred, I liked this sculpture enough to keep around for a while; but, now it feels like it lives with me and my family, like it’s a beneficent presence that guards us at our most intimate and vulnerable.

House Spirit is by no means supernatural. Let me make clear that I’m not getting squishy and spiritual about painted wood. What I am is very excited about how this sculpture feels, how I react to it. It’s great! I was thinking of calling it Ancestor Spirit, but I like using House instead, because the effect of this little artwork may not travel to its next home; it may be the kind of spirit that lives with and protects the house and whomever inhabits it, instead of the kind that follows a family from home to home. I’m so pleased to live with this sculpture right now, and I can only hope that it’s next home provides it a chance to reassume its current solicitous role.

This painting and the others that I’ve been working on lately are probably a product of thinking about color and light, as I’ve been doing in some of the recent posts and as I go about my business the rest of the time. You know, like light is what we see at the most basic level, and color is the visible manifestation of light, so, for me, color is one of the sexiest things in the world, and definitely one of the best things about art.

Regardless of what we do with it, color is what it is. A blue car is blue just like a blue pen cap is blue just like… and so on. Hues, tints, shades will vary, but color is color. This means at one level that it doesn’t matter what the painter paints, because the artist must use color, and if you like looking at color–red, for example–who cares if it’s a firetruck or cherub’s butt cheek. But, we do care. Just as a terrible film can be shot with breathtaking cinematography, awful art can be made with fantastic color. In either case, when I see this it’s very upsetting. Sometimes the explicit terribleness of the thing obliterates any consideration of the color (dropping the film analogy henceforth). Sometimes the good color seems a farce and an outrage in the context of the bad use to which it’s been put, like when your charming and lovely childhood friend turns up married to a simple jackass, all that potential publicly squandered. Color is the charming and lovely childhood friend to us all, and we hate to see it misused.

Which is to say, that my studio practice lately has centered on a return to abstract painting as a way to eschew the complex dimensional concerns of sculpture and focus on using color in a more blunt way.

Another great thing about color is the way (infinite) combinations of it can suggest light and space. Narcissist is an attempt to render this effect abstractly, so that you can enjoy the tiny interplays of color while feeling the tug of the brain trying to render the colors into an image, into light and space. Like when you stand too close to a George Seurat, who, along with his fellow Impressionists, singled out light and color as the roots of visual experience. That is part of the art tradition that my paintings are coming from.

Patrick is a companion piece to Le Baron; I made them at about the same time, used similar methods of distributing the colors across the triangular units, organized the colors into stripes, etc. The softer, friendlier effect of the colors reminds me of the big-hearted, dumb, squishy and pentagonal cartoon sidekick for whom this sculpture is named.

One of my goals with a sculpture like this is to give a specific shape to something that hasn’t existed before. This sounds redundant, since this is basically the definition of creation, which occurs everywhere all the time, art being just one small venue of the process. But, the obvious bears restatement sometimes, especially when the artist is poking around for what’s really going on in his or her artwork.

So, Patrick is a sculpture that is unique in the world; it doesn’t try to represent something to be seen around us. It is what it is, and we recognize what it is because it has pattern and geometric form and color. The first two of these, pattern and geometry, are ideas that we’ve derived from nature but that really don’t exist on their own; they are ways to describe to world. Color, on the other hand, is closer to the world. Visually speaking, it is the world, because color is light, and light is what our eyes gather and send to our brain, which, incredibly, becomes what we see. So, in this way, Patrick is a combination of ideas about the world with, as I see it, the world itself.

This analysis doesn’t make the sculpture good art, but it does state something about where this object comes from and how we might decide if it’s any good or not. The bluntness of color as a basic element of the world is what turns me on both as an artist and a fan of art. The more theoretical elements of art, like pattern and geometry, are indirect, having originated in nature then passed through many human intellects and then made it to us; this indirectness is just less exciting than the gut-punch of color. For me, part of the thrill of making art is the tension between unleashing the primordial power of color and controlling it with intellectual devices. I’d rather just have color on its own, but my job is to give it shape, to manifest it somehow, and there are enough ways to do that to keep artists occupied until the last eye has absorbed its last photon.

Here is a new sculpture featuring shifting color patterns, rotating geometry, and flat, graphic marks that wriggle across different planes.

I just read that first sentence again. The problem with writing about art is that it gives the impression that those words were part of my plan in making the work, like I started the sculpture with a checklist of three items, and once I accomplished each goal, the piece was finished. In fact, I just made the thing and then later conjured words to describe a completed process. Part of the fun of making artwork is relaxing into the lizard brain, pre-lingual and reactive. But then writing about the artwork kind of de-emphasizes the making and focuses on the thinking, which, while useful (or else I wouldn’t write about artwork), misrepresents the experiences of making and looking at art.

Sometimes it’s awful to read what artists have to say about art, theirs or others’, but sometimes it’s great, and it can make the artwork bigger and richer. At least with visual art, you can stop reading the words and look at the pictures.

This piece was completed more than a year ago, and I’m just now sharing this image of it, courtesy of Ambient Art Projects, where the sculpture debuted last year in a show called “Pairs.” The form originated from the paper-folding technique that I’ve been using to generate sculptures for the past several years.

At the risk of repeating myself, let me say briefly that this kind of dumb origami that I do in preparation for a finished sculpture suits my approach with these works. I like artwork that makes an impact without resorting to virtuosity. Technical or stylistic flourish too often elicits responses like, “Oooh, look what the artist can do,” when I’d rather hear, “That thing’s cool.” So, folding paper into simple forms is one way to arrive at interesting, distinct, but not flashy, shapes.

Using rules of pattern and repetition also gets the artist out of the way. The logic of color and composition in pieces like this one is evident enough, and my interest in this kind of organization, again, is to let the piece speak for itself without too many visual cues that point back to the artist.

Finally, I want my 3-dimensional sculpture to point back to its 2-dimensional roots. This piece and others like it seem to be paintings that have been folded and assembled into something that is in the round. I want the abstract language I use in my artwork to be relevant to the world around that artwork, and by combining 2- and 3-dimensional elements in works like Whirligig I think I’m getting somewhere.

Our world is what it is and we have infinite means to describe it. The work of an artist is to select from among the limitless ways of describing our world and make something resonant and even new with the few tools in our hands. I’m drawn to the omnipresence of stuff that’s either 2- or 3- dimensional in our world, and (more importantly than my own private interest) I think there are essential qualities of the world that can be described by making things that embody flatness and roundness in different ways.

The second dimension is the realm of ideas; the third dimension, experience. The second is literature, drawing, painting, photography, film, tv, computer; the third is sculpture, architecture, theatre, music, sport. The second is Plato; the third Aristotle. The second is a love letter; the third is sex.

So, I have a lot of material to work with, and I’ll be lucky to do any of it justice.

This small piece is the product of my ongoing efforts to make cool 3-dimensional forms that start from and sometimes bounce back to their 2-dimensional roots. I imagine that the little squares could spin outward forever or re-collect back to some flat starting point. And the paint job at times accentuates the sculpture’s planar quality, at others its spacial quality. It’s kind of molecular, kind of cosmological.

The five sculptures of Teetering on the Brink

John Bissonette has mounted an exhibition of new sculpture in the great stone hollow that is the Rotunda Gallery, where not only the physical space but most of the viewing public, passing through because of some inconvenient piece of civic business, are ambivalent to such art shows. Bissonette has experienced this dubious relationship first hand: one of his prior sculptures was damaged in the course of a recent group exhibition in the gallery. The piece, titled “Thanks” and featuring those words in the artwork, took a sarcastic turn after the incident, which saw a styrofoam chair break as if from a bar brawl. A serendipitous accident, and as of my last visit to the gallery, unrepeated in the new show.

This effort, entitled “Teetering on the Brink,” features five human-scale sculptures made from materials that, in their various ways, evoke a fragility that feels specific to Las Vegas. Styrofoam, drywall, a mirrored closet door, an abused shopping cart, some glitter; some if not all of these materials would appear in a Las Vegan’s top ten list of stuff that comprises our city. Styrofoam is the standout ingredient here, a material that Bissonette has carved and glued to represent, at full scale, 1) a 6-foot utility ladder, 2) a wrought-iron chandelier, and 3) a vase and floral arrangement atop a narrow table.

Discussing the styrofoam’s qualities is both obvious and necessary, because the material hits a target in this context that I never saw until now. Clearly, it is a brittle, fragile, formally temporary yet chemically eternal substance; and, that it depicts both objects of construction and interior design in these pieces highlights how those qualities shape Las Vegas’s dynamic economic duo of development and tourism. Bissonette’s gesture of depicting iconic yet banal Vegas objects in styrofoam avoids a minefield of cliches by being modest and straightforward. The works lack the pretension of a topical social agenda through their craft: while they are not spot-on perfect likenesses of what the pieces represent (webs of hot glue here, clunky lettering there) the sculptures embody the artist’s labor and care. These are proudly hand-made objects.

Grey contemplating the used-car-lot-flags that frame this styrofoam depiction of a ladder.

More importantly, I think, is the play of stark white styrofoam against the different textures of earth-tone stone in the gallery. Material connotations are beautifully reversed here: wide, glossy brown floors and high, rough-hewn stone walls feel cold and sterile as the background for artificial, yet hand-crafted styrofoam, the softness of which becomes human, even sensual. The long, curving arms of the chandelier sigh a little breath of life as they sag and bend under their own weight. The ladder is rigid but friendly, and the vase and flowers, against the deep red background trimmed with white molding, is frankly more lovely than any arrangement you’d find in the Bellagio or Palazzo.

The physical poetry of these pieces in this particular environment makes your gut say, “mmm hmmm, yes,” so that you can start to think about the clearly local implications of this artwork from a quiet place, a mental lotus position. Rounded out by a post-minimal, drywall-paint-mirror piece, which is a different kind of formal antidote to the infinitely stone gallery environment, and a shopping cart that buckles under the weight of its full glitter-load, the show reminds me of a quote by Israeli-born artist Michal Rovner: “My affinity is to not judge, not even to comment. I only ask questions and wish for peace.” This aesthetic stance is not for every artist, but something like this comes to mind as you walk among these sculptures. By way of criticism, I would suggest that this show’s title goes too far in commentary and judgment, for while the works here do teeter on the brink of just lasting the two month duration of this exhibition, the phrase also transcends the show and admonishes Las Vegas for its multi-tiered fragility. This fin-de-siecle tone needs no statement here; by virtue of the work alone, the exhibition handles nuances of vulnerability, haste, permanence, and care.

Click here to watch John Bissonette talk about this show.

“Teetering on the Brink” at the Clark County Government Center Rotunda Gallery through March 12.

A group show of emerging artists has the great benefit of the romance of potential: you enter the gallery a little more open to the chance of pleasant surprise, and if nothing gives you that unexpected zing, you leave the gallery knowing that the artists are young yet, and maybe next time one of them will dazzle you. For me, this is the case for the 4-person exhibition at CAC in the Arts Factory, which is aptly named “Tomorrow People,” a nice title which vaguely suggests procrastination but vigorously states the premise of the show, to present some young artists who have their eyes on the near future.

The works–by Leah Craig, Catherine Cruise, Justin Favela, and Thomas Willis–are nicely curated and well placed in the space, with ample elbow room for the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed media works to do what they need to do. Any view of the show encompasses works by most or all of the artists. And each of the artists has a distinct mojo that, like Kiss’s face makeup, offers a clear choice so you can pick your favorite.

Works by Willis, Cruse, and Craig

Mine is Leah Craig, particularly her odd wall pieces made with thin sheets of fused plastic. These are new and experimental works, full of that lusty potential, but still hanging on to elements of her drawings, particularly the use of a meandering, delicate line. While this line work evokes half-remembered ideas in her more conventional drawings on layers of translucent paper, in these tattered plastic things the line feels unnecessary and distracting. This said, these pieces have a visceral, Eva Hesse-like presence, especially the large untitled piece, which dispenses with her drawings’ delicate linear descriptions of familiar neighborhood footpaths and goes for the blunt embodiment of the moment when, out on those same streets, a gust of wind blows a plastic grocery bag into your face.

Justin Favela uses similarly modest materials to far different effect. His large, cardboard-and-paint signs draw on the neon-powered aesthetic of the Vegas Strip and a flippant, Spanglish humor. Estardas is a pulpy reincarnation of the old Stardust sign featuring the piece’s title, a nice Spanishized mispronunciation in place of the original hotel name. Across the gallery a smaller but double-sided sign reads Hella, Hella, Hella Bomb! with a kind of joyful gusto that makes you wonder if you’re in on the joke. A pallet of 1,095 mixed media tamales, all aluminum-wrapped, completes this trifecta of light-hearted swagger, which after the reflexive smiles, leaves you with the suspicion that, having just shared a laugh with someone who speaks another language, maybe he wasn’t laughing with you. This impression could be a shortcoming of Justin’s pieces, but the attitude, the humor, and the different uses of language point to the possibility that an ambiguous hostility is at work, and that would be a cool thing.

Grey checking out Favela's Estardas

Catherine Cruse is the traditionalist of the show. Two untitled watercolor drawings and two large oil canvases feature the nude female figure reclining and twisting in familiar poses. The drawings have a freshness and facility, while the paintings sag under the weight of a lot of paint and a lot of hours with the palette knife. Works like these, which have some elements working for them (pretty good color and form in the figure) and some elements not working (harsh lines separating figure from ground and absent content outside of the figure itself), remind us of how hard it is to pull off a naturalistic oil painting and how tricky it is for a contemporary artist to contend with the masters who invented the rules of the game that Cruse seems to be playing.

Thomas Willis’s works also have elements of naturalism, but in a dreamy modern context. The two bigger pieces feature images of keys, cell phones, and other pocket contents, arranged in a tight radial pattern. Rather than painting these objects on the white background of each piece, he masks and reveals the intricate parts of the image, then burns the exposed gesso. This technique is impressive, especially in that it accomplishes the rare feat of using tape to mask a painting without leaving ridges when tape is removed, ridges that have been the bane of many a west coast art viewer (and artist) for decades. The result feels like it was made with an archaic camera or a new x-ray technology for airports, and the tone of these pieces is of delicate observation to the immediate environment, like a poet sent into reverie by a paperclip, or the Flaming Lips lyric, “driving home the sky accelerates and the clouds all form a geometric shape.” Something romantic is happening in Thomas’s mathematical arrangement of everyday objects. Focus and ingenuity notwithstanding, these pieces feel like they are still on their way somewhere, and that place may well be awesomely weird.

In all, “Tomorrow People” doesn’t give it up so soon in our new relationship with these artists. The potential is there, and the show is a good flirt, flashing glimpses of what we may have a chance to lay our eyes on if we all keep showing up. Turning potential into great art is a rare and flighty thing, but we want to see what happens when these artists take it all off, so we’ll keep showing up. Tomorrow, people.

Works by Favela, Willis, and Cruse. Grey heading towards Favela's 1095 Tamales.

“Tomorrow People” at Contemporary Arts Collective, in the Arts Factory, February 4th – March 19th

This is the latest sculpture in which I manipulate flat material into simple shapes, paint them, and attach them together. In this piece, Curse the Morning Sun, I like that it retains its flat beginnings even as it twirls and wrinkles in space, as if 4 decorative paintings weren’t good enough, so they got together and started a band, making a stronger statement than any of the individual units could have on their own. At least this is how I think about them in the studio.