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Making Money $150 An Hour

Since its on a project-to-project basis, I would have to say that it is a good thing. Just think of the installation work you could do with that sort of money!

September 30, 2008 by rickjonesprojects

My project in painting, drawing and cut-paper work, for the last three years, has been a thorough searching of occasional epiphanies of form and scale. Once in a while I get a flash of some vague form or color, in a dream, a daydream or in another work of art or design, and I try several times to reproduce it and create variations of it. I want to fully explore the potential in these rare and deep mines of the subconscious, what Barnett Newman called the sublime “plasmic” image. He too, along with Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionist painters in the late 40’s and 50’s, adopted the Surrealist technique of Psychic Automatism so reach ones mind into the sublime, scale-less world of the subconscious, bringing back forms that are at once from nowhere real and universally understood. Being able to see these ideas clearly enough in the mind’s eye to paint or draw them is much like a composer’s ability to frantically scribble down a sonic idea onto the notational plane of the manuscript. “Writing,” transcribing or notating these forms is the best way to describe the process, as it feels more like hearing than seeing. (Actually listening to certain types of music is a great help in my process of putting ideas to paper – Ligeti, Penderecki, and Gorecki work well.) The rest of the process, examining shapes, lines, colors, media, etc. comes from pure practice and experimentation and waiting for the “happy accident” to occur. It is a very slow, incremental process between major changes in my paintings. On the other end, before any new ideas come, I spend time looking, listening and reading, taking interest and researching subjects with similar or relevant ideas and forms: architecture, biology, land planning, linguistics, engineering, philosophy, and of course, other people’s art, music and design.

Allotropes are different structural forms of a single element, such as the allotropes of the carbon atom: diamond, nanotube and graphite. I find this to be an interesting way to describe much of what I’m trying to do, which is to take one formal idea and put it through the sea of other influences in my head and make new variations out of it. Recently I had an idea to make large, irregular, curved shapes and encircle them with rectilinear “walls,” like plant cells with overgrown nuclei, then to squeeze these blocks of lines and shapes together into a larger form inspired by urban design and architecture. As always I am careful to avoid scale-specific forms, such as faces or bodies, so that the abstract field of vision has no scale at all, and can be seen as a space of infinite scale, in which all the gestures and colors and endowed with profound communicative potential.
Color has probably been the most difficult formal element to handle. It’s hard to see clearly in the imagination, it behaves like a wild animal which education only serves to distract and ruin one’s instinct in dealing with it, and corrections are rarely possible once it’s committed to canvas.
Brushwork is next on the list. Drawing is such an immediate way of working. Ideas go directly from the head to the paper with no perceived intermediary, the hand moving instinctively like a dancer whose gestures are traced on the surface. Ink and graphite are so romantic to me, silvery-gray dust particles trapped in the protruding fibers of a compressed and flattened amalgam; rich, opaque, dark fluid, wetter than water, landing on a soft bed of white fibers, quickly seeping in to stay trapped forever, but not to spread where it doesn’t belong. Lines go where the mind tells them to, the same way you write words. Paint does not go where you tell it to without a lot of practice. Generally speaking, paint is a thick, viscous, sloppy thing which sits on the surface, refusing to seep into the world you’re trying to create. It is infinitely varied and complex and has such wildly different properties between vehicles, pigments and additives that no amount of guesswork or conjecture can make it work properly. There is no end to the techniques of painting, and when you do learn just enough to get by, your education stands in the way of your instinct, which must again be conquered before the brush moves like the pencil again.

cheers, Tenour.