"a blog about my studio" / home, 2015@tombubul.info, @tombubul. Created 7/12/15.
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Switching studio chair to a somewhat looser format: I realized that by focusing on literal monthly process I was losing (or unable to see) the higher-level narratives that more accurately describe work that I was trying to capture in the first place. Think I'm also susceptible to "Trying to get everything in during the update" and that maybe doesn't make any sense. Moving to a "when I want to" basis for "misc thoughts," and to an "irregular" schedule for things like solitude, self-doubt, hopes/fears, and progress in work. So that's roughly the new schedule/style here: "Incomplete, disjunctive, irregular, and informal."
New one pic.twitter.com/DcgPkkQD5x
— Tom Bubul (@tombubul) June 1, 2015In May, I re-edited and posted this scene report for Mothers News that I mostly wrote last November.
Here's my new one pic.twitter.com/xSOlpiRS81
— Tom Bubul (@tombubul) May 8, 2015Other than that I've pretty much just been painting. My focuses this year have been "learning to paint faster" and "trying to stop making every new thing 'the best thing yet,'" and instead learning to allow each new thing to just be what it is.
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Jeff posited that ".info" stands for ".informal." It's definitely my intention to have this website sprawl eternally, "covering the many angles of my 'interdisciplinary practice,'" but it's also kind of come to feel like a requirement that there just be a coherent single-serving page for my painting that isn't a psychotic scroll. So that's now tombubul.com, and at the time of posting this, it's already fairly out of date. :)
— Tom Bubul (@tombubul) March 3, 2015
I switched from paper to panels for "object presence" reasons. On a materials tip, I'm also running into what feels like the outer limits of what's reasonably possible in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish in painting, with gouache: I don't know that I'm using it for what it's "for" anymore. So my fall project is starting over with oils, to see whether it's a good idea for me to adopt the material format that most other painters seem to agree on.
Improving speed has been a normal matter of planning, process, and discipline, but also to a surprising degree a matter of basic acceptance.
Re: planning, I now have a fairly clear idea of what it will take for a given idea to reach "done" before I begin it, and a better sense for the order of operations when a piece is in progress. This has largely translated into an increase in scale: this year's 24"x36" panel takes about as long to make as 2013's 18"x24" piece of paper. (So by that measure, I'm working roughly twice as fast as I did two years ago.)
— Tom Bubul (@tombubul) January 19, 2015
I'm having a great drawing year, and my pipeline, "tons of miscellaneous drawing -> painting sketches -> studies -> vetted ideas" is currently surfacing more exciting, actionable stuff than I have time to render.
Other process and discipline lessons have been basic - "I can't put my computer on my drafting table." "It's better if I work standing, with panels on the wall, than if I work sitting (because I can't 'get up' from standing)."
Re: Acceptance, If I know from the plan that N colors enacted N times each via whatever mark-making scheme lead inevitably to the painting being "plan-done," the two-keys-turning that makes it "done-done" is being okay with the results. Will I fix every micron-sized errant mark? Will I accept the gouache horizon on things like coverage and speed, or work 300% harder to push the materials 10% further? If I accept that the materials I chose rendered in the plan I designed with my current skills such as they are "are" the painting, I can just be done and move on. If I object to qualities of gouache, I should try something else. If I object to shortcomings in my own control/hand, gotta just take Michaelangelo's advice:
Learning how to go faster pic.twitter.com/ajg8VdF08j
— Tom Bubul (@tombubul) January 4, 2015I had an upbeat critique with the painter Barnaby Furnas at Bruce High Quality Foundation University; he said he wanted to see one of the smaller ones "parlor-sized." I mean, it'd be a pleasure; just gotta find a parlor. If you've got one hit a player up.
BHQFU was an interesting background thing to have this winter. It rules to have a free thing to go to in NYC, but I think in the end I became uncomfortable with the "Free School" idea as enacted by the class I attended.
I was gonna write more on this in the spring, but in the end I decided not to, since why write a big critical thing about something that I benefited from, was just passing thru, and doesn't really have a lot to do with me anyway? Still, while my main idea is now just "Thanks!!!," the overture for like, a potential critique would've been something like this:
---- "The hypothesis that a "university"-level art education can be acquired in a public community space "for free" is a super nice idea. Whether it's "realistic" or "possible" isn't as interesting to me (I'd go in on "it is" on both counts) as to what extent this proposal is actually being made in earnest at e.g. BHQFU. If it's a cynical proposal - if, 1. a given Free School's primary function is "as an artwork" that is itself "a performance of a school" where "free admission students" are actually the unpaid participants required to activate the school-as-artwork, or 2., if this "performance of a school" is exactly trying to succeed as "an artwork" within the money-system it proposes itself as an alternative to, in its performance of itself - then I guess fuck it: Just another boring cynical thing to stop thinking about. But if it's an earnest proposal - a free school that truly seeks to function on a pedagogical/critical/community level as an alternative to the university system (and artist debt), positing a place in culture for visual artists that does not rely primarily on the favor and patronage of the wealthy - then there's a lot more work to be done."
...I also found this related fragment in my notes, as I was preparing this html file:
"A lot of middle and upper class artists seem to be choosing painting as a more stylish alternative to alchemy."
I read recently that "art" "can't just be 'art' anymore" but I'd say I feel the other way about it, that "art" really kinda just needs to be "art," "now more than ever."
At the free school, an artist from California with an MFA interviews an artist from Long Island with an MFA, then they critique the "student" work together. How these artists pay rent on their graduate degrees, New York City apartments, studios, and contemporary outfits is unknown, but my persistent suspicion is that the situation's plain-English libretto would just read, "Wealth." The "students" want to participate in wealth; the guests are frequently enabled by wealth; the work and the attitudes about work are oriented around or toward a discourse steeped in wealth. Wealth.
The critiques are frequently playful and comforting, sometimes slightly harsh - a form "looks like a dog poo" (poo?! you mean dog shit?!), the color "is a bit muddy" - but never pointed. No one is asked why they're painting, or what they think "painting" "means." Though by being present at this free school, the presumption is that everyone must think something, and that their work must necessarily fit somehow into some higher narrative of "painting" beyond like, private craftsmanship, since the free school frames itself as "an alternative to graduate school." But must everyone's work fit this model in order for a creative person to leave the house to talk about work? And if it doesn't, what should (or can) that conversation better consist of?
I'm no defender of graduate school or MFAs, but I'm gonna go ahead and say that the student work at the free school is not yet at the "average graduate student" level. There is no possibility of a student from the free school rising into the art world conversation that the free school itself inhabits, or to the levels of the moderator and guest critics, via the free school or the free school's advice. However, the free school's most problematic assumption may have been that the students want to make this ascension, or should, or that "the art world" represents a kind of absolute or necessary endpoint. This brings New York's art world's insane relativism and postmodern "openness" about "what an artwork could be," when artwork in this milieu's primary role is frequently "carrying value," to student work whose primary goal is likely just "attempting to be artwork." So critiques become games of manners, oriented to the possibilities and actions of the work with a view to what's possible in "the market," without any real interrogation of who gets to participate in the market at all, or what the student work "is," as work.
So on one hand we have unaddressed wealth: a free school ordered around the art world, and on the other hand, we have unaddressed terrible art.
What should the role of critique in a free school be, then? And can a "free" school placing itself in the NYC art world exist without earnestly and actively discussing the role of wealth in that milieu more broadly and critically, instead of stopping at a basic reaction to "graduate school tuition?"
Attn gremlins of evening & weekend, dm/email tombubul@gmail yr address, I send you pictured mini (free) ... last call pic.twitter.com/trgNdbvgKI
— Tom Bubul (@tombubul) March 28, 2015Shea'la and I made a drawing zine, "Citizens of a Forgotten World," 32 pages 2.5"x4" mini format, fifteen drawings each. I made my drawings in one sitting; felt great to both have a serious drawing day and to make a thing - I haven't made a proper multiple in years, and I now feel that I "understand multiples" again.
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Recorded this:
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Okay, throwing this up. Come find me.