Still feeling this idea from several years ago that I'll probably repeatedly post forever = "Riding bikes in shorts while thinking about 'riding bikes in winter gear while thinking about riding bikes in shorts'"
I passed my two year anniversary living in nyc working as a "quality assurance analyst." I celebrated by getting back into a bread-baking routine; I hadn't done this since moving down. For "the restaurant" in Providence I used to do loaves three at a time "the short way," with a shorter fermentation and no second rise, but now I'm doing one at a time "the long way."
Attended a cousin's wedding. We camped near the site of the ceremony and I changed into a suit in the tent; first time in one since 2005. Fam asked several times if we were worried that Eric Frein was hiding in the nearby woods, but no, we weren't.
I focused on preparing new paintings this month and consequently produced no new writing. (Can imagine regularly reporting exactly this over & over, over the course of the next however many years.) Meanwhile, I've got three viable ideas that've been pushed by the year's nominal deadlines, each at some level of "I started working on it, recently checked up, and think I think the core idea is still basically okay." So maybe I'll say I'm shooting to put out a new Desk Memo around Thanksgiving?
Currently I have no deadlines and can freely spin the studio night wheel to point at whatever, but maybe someone will ask me to do something, and I'll have a deadline? Maybe it'll be you?
Around I think last January I had a deadline to write what I think one reviewer has since referred to as a "brief, oblique supplementary text" for Mickey Zacchilli's "RAV First Collection," her incredible "some people living" comic's first five issues in book format, published by Youth in Decline. Now that book is out.
Love Mickey & have strongly admired her drawing & writing for a long time = Pretty thrilled to see this come up, and assuming it's actually my text being referenced, pleased/honored to be briefly, obliquely occupying a couple of its pages. Either way, "Buy this book."
I have a nine day "staycation" coming up during which I'm gonna start two new paintings. After making studies and drawings for three months, I have two ideas ready to take to the mat in a 22"x30" way. The experiment is: "maybe front-loading the problem-solving via extensive pre-production will pay off with fast turnaround"
Here're two incomplete studies from September:
The one on the right is a painted-out version of a drawing. I tried this earlier this year with a grid drawing and didn't really like it there either. Something abt my drawing ideas feeling fast, flat, loose, and 100% line = poor skeletons for a format where I'm now mostly attracted to problematizing high-traffic color and tightly-packed forms operating across shifting depths. I'll probably keep messing with this, but I haven't yet figured out how to render a drawing directly without thinking "it needs a lot more stuff (but doesn't really deserve it)."
The one on the left is a strategies demo for an idea I had while finishing up work on "viewing uncertainty..." that I'm going to begin full-scale during the "staycation." It's a continuation on "depth" and "flattening" thoths but subbing out the brutal layer phasing from said piece in its main section - subbing in a genie-form and a simpler lattice structure for prior one's two intersecting and very ropy lattices - and situating that in a somewhat broader tableau, instead of as a full-frame singular attack. It's gonna be an "all current tools" painting featuring all of the rhythms, systems, and routines I've been working for the last three years in miniature, in a where's waldo/highlights magazine/rosetta stone/babbling parakeet "what're all these things" blitz-mode = pretty excited to paint it.
The other one I'm gonna start is a more mannered, formal and strictly work-intensive "new constellations animation," following the "sunrise animation" study I posted last month as a sort of concepts baseline. Emphasis is gonna be on complex rotation of simple color and form units across three layers: it's gonna be a martial, brute-force production process that puts the work I did this year on improving speed, endurance, and mark-making consistency on these systematic ones to the test. Plan for October is to get the final design locked, and at most put down base colors. This one will most likely be my winter project.
I visited Mike in Austin again. We took a train outta town and camped in the woods, went swimming in a freshwater spring on this guy's giant private property garden, ate a million delicious sub-$10 meals, walked dogs, watched trains, came back with a lil poison ivy, did a decent amt of drawing,,,
Here're a couple =
If you are reading this please send me movie and record recommendations and/or zip files.
Aphex "Syro," Cumbia de los Bee Gees youtubes via Jordan, Rundgren "International Feel" (microscopic congeal / cook a delicate meal / taking turns at the wheel / a couple years to reveal), Resonant Hole mix for BUTW, MMOTS "Kool new song.wav," Fennesz "becs," Okkyung Lee "Ghil," Ghost "Opus Eponymous" via Mike, Yoshi Wada + Tashi Wada live
Movies = A Most Wanted Man, Boyhood, Mummy 3, Gremlins, Tampopo, Assassination of Jesse James by Coward Robert Fjord
Books = Vandermeer "Acceptance," wodehouse cont'd
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