Sorry, I have been counting. The hard financial reality is that I have to make money.
So now that the business of making money and selling houses is out of the way, I am free to ponder Fine Art again.
It is nice to have these things in their place. I find something gratingly unpleasant about the commoditization of Fine Art. Somehow its practice is purer if it is not overtly linked to the monetary value of it. Anyway, I don't mean that to be an excuse, but it has changed how I am engaging with my practice of painting.
Namely, it gives me time to think about what I want Art to be.
I want my art to be like a relic of existence. Have the physical thing, the finished artwork, be a metaphorical mirror to the greatest of all chemical reactions, the spark of human consciousness.
So, my world is my community, and my interest in our personal and social relationships. So I started with wine, using the substance itself to paint images of good times. I want it to be like a coaster, the spill loosely gossiping about the people who where there. The daubs of wine dried and crystallized on the paper configured to look like past conversations, a rowdy argument, a misunderstood glance.
In production I found it hard to get the clarity of the image. In order for the stain to be dark enough to be read as a line, the paper needed to soak up a lot of the wine. So there was a lot of tiptoeing around the studio, trying not to disturb jell-o like puddles on each page that littered the floor. All with the intermittent coos of a 6 month old Winston sitting in the center of the studio.
I was thinking about moving on to coffee. I think it would be much easier to craft an image out of coffee because it is naturally darker. And I won't have my studio smelling like a wine bar. But it feels a bit too much like Starbucks and downtown loft lifestyles.
I like the way the wine looks, because it has to lie there so thickly, has a shininess to the deepest parts and sometimes you can see the crystals from the sugar.
And I have a friend who buys wine, we are talking about pairing the images with particular vintages. Plus what I love to draw, the lines of gestures and body language, is more akin to drunken nights than the morning jitters. So I think ill keep on with the hedonistic studio.