mobile for road trip!

Just downloaded the WordPress app for iPhone and my first announcement is… I’m moving to Salt Lake City in about two weeks! I’m driving there so I thought I should have some way to write on the trip. More updates to come!

me on Orange TV

http://www.orangetvfl.net/participate-the-cultural-advantage/rick-jones-video_75bf853e0.html

video

 

limited edition print

Limited edition prints of Airfield are now available for pre-sale and are awesomely-priced at $25 (plus $2 for domestic shipping).

Airfield - limited edition digital print, 14x14in.

The paper is 14×14 in., thick, archival, matte poster paper. The image is an 11x11in. high-quality digital print. There are only 75 available and each is numbered, dated, titled and signed. The original painting (which is sold already, by the way) is pictured below:

36x36in., acrylic on canvas.

If you’re interested email me at rickjonesprojects@gmail.com and I’ll send you an invoice.
Cheers!
-rick

Flying Horse

This is Flying Horse Editions, a fine art press located in downtown Orlando

http://flyinghorse.cah.ucf.edu/

 

art is always a great Christmas gift

… just sayin

don’t be anachronistic

Thanks to the constant onslaught of mass media, we are forced to look at so much ordinary visual information that no matter how many symbols, back stories, analogies or clever references one builds into a painting, it is impossible to see that sort of work as an object of higher function. Paintings need exceptional formal invention (as well as subjective relevance) to be received by the sophisticated viewer as anything above a car commercial or highway billboard. This has always been the case, and it is only when we get nostalgic that we forget that it takes tremendous effort to to position ourselves in the actual contemporary state of painting.

the disposable plane

The suburbs and exurbs are permanent destruction of both land and culture. There will be no re-building of the old landscapes, the ranches, farms, groves, swamps, and forests which were replaced by the rotting, cheaply-built stucco-boxes. They will become ghettos and dangerous wastelands and kudzu-covered shells. No land is disposable.
Unlike some other products, the collapse of the market for these overpriced houses will not be followed by a quick “correction” which will make everything right again. The investors who currently own the loans will not be willing to loose half or two-thirds of the value of mortgages which they were not responsible for selling to the homeowners in the first place. Home prices will rise so gradually, that the owners will not live to see the day that the purchase price is recovered. The contractors and real estate agents who built and sold these pieces of garbage were the only winners in this scam.
Now this is the modern and future landscape, geographically, economically and politically; not some ultra-urban, high-density abstraction of New York, Chicago, Berlin or Tokyo. The mega-city is the truth for some people, but certainly not most. The future for most Americans will be the unending expanse of polluted, low-density ghetto.
The problem in the United States has been that we treat land like a concept, an imaginary disposable plane, an infinite supply of ideas, a painting, or rather a collection of paintings that can always be expanded; there are always more canvases and sheets of paper to buy at the store on which we can just keep ruling and scribbling. In places like Europe people know their land is limited; they just have the one canvas to play with, so they don’t go wrecking large portions of it quite as often. One day we will see our land in this way, maybe not, either way we don’t currently treat it that way, only as zones of more or less monetary value. We have not yet completed our manifest destiny of paving over the continent.
Land is our one truly limited and irreplaceable resource. When we run out of oil and coal we may have alternative energy plans. There are no alternative land plans and no renewable land resources.

ontology and Robert Ryman

This past July my girlfriend and I took a trip to New York and New Jersey, mostly to see art (she has an art history degree) and of course to do some touristy stuff like see a Broadway show, Ground Zero, the High Line, Chinatown and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, among other things.  After four intense days of New York City we had plans to drive an hour upstate to Beacon, NY to see Dia: Beacon, a huge museum dedicated mostly to large-scale artworks such as those of Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, Fred Sandback, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Richard Serra and others.

Dia: Beacon also has a significant amount of work by Robert Ryman, a painter whom I had underappreciated as a sort of academic, theoretical painter; no one with much relevance to my own ideas on painting.  Having been there to see several of his pieces in real life and really think about them I have changed my tune completely.  He is one of the most important painters alive and it’s unfortunate that more students, artists and “civilians” are not enlightened to his work.  I don’t know what’s going on in art schools today but he was never mentioned in the entirety of my undergraduate education, save for a small piece of his being included in a university museum show of contemporary abstract painting.

The initial reaction by most people to his work is, naturally, “It’s all just white!” and that’s mostly true, except for his very early work, but what I say to people to get them to re-focus their attention on what his work is really about is to compare it to how a blind or a deaf person experiences the world.  When you remove one sensory experience, the others become heightened, more attuned to the ontological (the philosophy of reality itself as opposed to how it is mediated by our senses) reality around them.  Ryman’s paintings use only white paint because he is essentially painting everything except color (although technically white is a color).  We are force to look at what paint really is: surface, volume, molecules, to imagine what it would be like to touch it, how light reflects off of it, how it was applied, how it interact is various ways with its support surface and apparatus.  Ryman has painted in innumerable different ways in order to fully enlighten us on all these factors and perhaps to make us realize just how arbitrary our typical methods of painting really are, such as “acrylic on stretched canvas” or “oil on panel.”

Why white?  It’s not only the most neutral or “absent” color, Ryman makes it beautiful in a way no one else has.  In art school I make a giant spaceship-like structure using only cardboard and kraft tape, and one of the revelations of the project was to really see the color of cardboard.  It’s orange!  I had never thought of that before.  Similarly, Ryman makes us see color in a whole new way when he removes it, and only it, from our experience of painting.  It’s a simulation of an ontologically pure object, as close as we can get to “seeing” without looking.

That epiphany this summer yielded many others on the seemingly arbitrary components of painting:  Why is it viscous? Why is it on a flat surface?  Why does it dry faster or slower?  Why do we apply it with brushed or rollers, or other tools?  Why oil or acrylic or gouache?  It is much easier to contemplate all the dimensions of painting: hue, value, viscosity, texture, opacity uniformity, surface (both optic and haptic) and therefore make better, more informed decisions about how to paint, when you remove a dimension you are used to having around all the time.