When listening for the forms, the question, “what forms to paint?” shifts to “how to paint the forms?”. This corporeal process starts with attention to “posture” (all aspects relative to process), substrate and structure, and goes to media, and how pigmented solutions are applied to a surface.

Attention is given to the reflective properties of the paint, resulting in a nearly flat surface. When a surface is flat (non-reflective), it can create a vulnerability helpful for engagement with the viewer. it, the form’s surface becomes porous.

Porosity/vulnerability/surrender is helpful for the exchange of information. The painting is encountered, an experience occurs, that experience can cause information to be created, a type of response or reaction. As humans, that information can form a kind of story. It’s not necessarily a linear narrative as we typically think of a story, (though in some cases it may be) but a story nonetheless. If it generates thoughts separate from experience, then it’s some kind of story. It’s what our minds tend to do, search for patterns, search for meaning, create patterns, create meaning, imagine. (Check and see, your mind is probably doing that right now.) The challenge is to notice and stay with the experience of the contact before the story takes hold. Or, notice the story, maybe work with it and do some investigation, and then turn attention back to the experience. What is the object or process? (the play, the musical composition, the writing, etc…) Can surrender to that object/process/experience occur?

Creating and sharing artwork can be just like that. Folk who make things (writers, musicians, sculptors, videographers, performers of all different types, photographers, painters, all manner of maker, etc…) all create information (with their commensurate available forms) for others to encounter, exchange and experience. When I make a painting, the manifested form is like a request to “consider it this way”. A primary form of my “information currency” is the mark I make on the surface of a substrate. The mark generates information, and the overall accumulation of those marks create the form which can carry that information, and the form can then generate an experience, the reaction/response in the viewer. The form being the result of a process, where the form is now the experience.

Openings are required for the information to leave and arrive. The painting and the viewer each must express a vulnerability, else no fruitful exchange takes place.

—————-

The forms being painted now require a rigid to semi-rigid surface. Dibond aluminum composite panels are sanded and prepared with a custom acrylic gesso, and backed with either aluminum angle or poplar inset frames usually at a depth of .75 to 1 inch or about 2.5 centimeters depending on the scale of the piece.

Each panel is prepared by me in the studio setting.