Gilles Deleuze on Foucault on Unicorns

A proposition is supposed to have a refferent. That is to say that while reference or intentionality is intrinsic and constant in propositions, whatever fulfils that purpose is extrinsic and variable. But this is not the case with statements: a statement has a 'discursive object' which does not derive in any sense from a particular state of things, but stems from the statement itself. It is a derived object, defined precisely by the limits to the lines of variation of the statement existing as a primitive function. As a result there is no point in distinguishing between the different types of intentionality; some could be furnished byt the condition of things, while others would remain empty and offer instead an example of generally fictive or imaginary states (I met a unicorn) or even generally absurd ones (a squared circle).

Falling of my chair laughing at the laundromat led me to what will be my next post on personal pronoun play in my paintings.

Wil Murray: All Dressed Up Like a A Little Man

WIL MURRAY

ALL DRESSED UP LIKE
A LITTLE MAN

NOVEMBER 1 TO
NOVEMBER 20, 2006

PMG SECOND ANNIVERSARY PARTY

ANNIVERSARY PARTY / ARTIST RECEPTION
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2006
FROM 7:30 PM

Patrick Mikhail Gallery
2401 Bank Street
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
1 800 388 3298

Pardon Secured...I swear this is the end of my Redemption Song

So, if one looks down time and into my paintings (temporal depth not illusionistic depth, although that may be coming), then something I’ve been saying for years indicates best what I’m on about. The redemptive end bit. Or, at least, what I'm not on about.

When I talk about the finishing a painting, I have said for some time that it is not when “angels are singing” that the real end happens. This loud, triumphant end is inevitably false, mistrusted and eventually dismissed no matter how grand and seductive.

This glorious end, doubted and having been strived for, is too hard to look through, you could not look down the time of the painting through all the angels swaying and singing and lighting firecrackers. The smoke of the glorious redemption is too thick and disallows the reading of temporal depth.

Engulfs and forces a single qualitative judgment of each mark as it is made. The assessment of a mark’s position in relation to the redemptive end ONLY. This perpetuates a popular lie that paintings are a single image, representing an instant, a snapshot. In this to trust the glorious end mean that marks serve the purpose of this lie, they flatten and defer to a future event in which their relationship to every other mark made in the name of redemption will be sanctified. All other marks will have, by the nature of glorious redemption, been eradicated. To paint this way takes advantage of the viewer by playing all games toward a lie.

The redemptive end is not phenomenal or glorious because it was never in doubt, a paintings end, its redemption is secured by its beginning. There are marks made in between which seek the redemptive end, there are extraneous marks whose position in relation to this end are unclear, and all are at once irrelevant, and the marks without which there would be no painting.

New Studio Photos

Some recent photos of finished work in the studio.
More Images at Wilmurray.com and Patrick Mikhail Gallery

Wil Murray, 2006 (12" X 12")


Wil Murray, 2006 (12" X 12")


Wil Murray, 2006 (12" X 12")


Wil Murray, 2006 (12" X 12")


Wil Murray, 2006 (28" X 48")

What Came Before After

The summer heat and my working 60 hours a week meant that I spent three months working almost exclusively on one painting. Entitled “The Profit I Raise Out Of This Boy Will Burn Your Eyes Clean”(studio photo above, 84” X 48”), it was the impetus to dig a little deeper into an ongoing discussion I have had with friends over the years about how the possibility of narrative in my painting, and how it differs significantly from music, literature or film. Thanks to Gavin, Justin, Jesse and Heather for their patience on this subject.

Music, literature and film are each contained by a beginning and an end. Each of these forms bring their audience along through time, their form predetermines a clear beginning and end point. A book is opened and begun from the first page, and read to the last. Even if you open the book to the middle and read backwards to the beginning and stop three pages from it, you are playing along a linear line.

In my paintings, the sole comparable narrative is the one that the painting tells of its own creation. The narrative of creation is seen in the singular image of the painting. You look down time, through the last marks made. The linear representation of the narrative is foreshortened and flattened into the single image.
Until now, the solely additive process of layering of paint meant that any mark would have to b protected through until the end if they were to be seen at all in the final image. Switching to acrylics last year, I began to remove sections to reveal older sections underneath. Compositionally this meant uncovering elements from which the subsequent marks had drawn their position, form, colour etc. and worked not as a replacement for the protection of marks(it would be impossible for me to hold in my head what each layer held underneath the visible), but a new way to include older marks later on. Even, in the case of “Making Love To His Eagle”(photo below), finish a painting by revealing the very first layer of paint.

Working on “The Profit I Raise Out Of This Boy Will Burn Your Eyes Clean” this summer a further and more elaborate confusion to the narrative the viewer would look down presented itself. The final mark made on the painting was re-applying a very central section from the first weeks of the painting in exactly the same spot it had originally appeared.

I can’t tell if this destroys the simile between the narratives of different forms or how it elaborates the one I am working with.


This post represents the beginning of what eventually led to the following posts:
Painting As Obituary
Mark Making and Prayer
Thanks To Flannery O'Connor: A Redemption Song

An early morning meeting with Ken Moffett

A studio visit this morning with critic and friend Kenworth Moffett (that's him all stylish on the left, with Jules Olitski and Clement Greenberg). He had come to Montreal for Peter G. Ray's new exhibition in his studio/gallery space in Point St. Charles.
In the course of our discussion, he expressed a desire for stronger marks which assert themselves more, inflect more stability, and lend greater cohesion to the composition. I surprised myself by replying not only with my usual lines about going further and seeing what lies past strength and cohesion, but my eeking out something about not having found a method to make strong marks that don’t just feel like another painter’s strength borrowed. That I am finding a back door to strength, or maybe ignoring the door altogether.
After an hour he acknowledged that the paintings are a “long look”, and that they come together after some time in front of your eyes.
It was lovely to find our friendship had grown out of the hero-worship stage.
I love having Ken to the studio, the conversation travels so many places from loneliness of painting to new possibilities in Beijing to my job at the Laundromat to the joy of friendships forged in a shared of love of painting. The possibility of an east coast painting junket next spring was suggested.
The delight lies in a temporary relief from the terror of action through the love of growing friendship. Maybe a bit polyanna, but Ken makes me hopeful.
Now I’m off to the Guido Molinari retrospective at the Maison de la Culture de Maisonneuve, it is two blocks from my studio.

Thanks to Flannery O'Connor: A Redemption Song

In the narrative of creation the painter lives with each painting multiple lives of varying lengths. Each painting, with its life lived has a narrative of creation whose length is determined by the time it takes to find redemption. Or the end is following a completely separate track, redemption is decided upon the end.

The relief of the end of the painting is the bliss of redemption. No longer suffering the delights and terrors of unsustainable marks and impermanent compositions, constant promise and threat of irrelevancy of a very real and well-documented present. Pathologize the marks you mythologized yesterday. Happy and silent, ignore the triumphant false end of yesterday.

But was I relieved every time? Was I redeemed? Shit, I can’t remember. Do it again. Maybe the next painting will simply never end.

The end, the redemption leaves me two questions:

1. Does the redemptive end of the painting result from every mark made, the complete creation narrative of the painting?

2. Does the redemptive end of the painting result only from those marks intended to procure redemption upon the end?

Loop Gallery Collective

I have accepted an invitation to join the Loop Gallery Collective in Toronto and will be showing there in July of 2007

Barnes Mann and Hawkes

Most of my thoughts, written down in gaps between customers on dozens of small notebook pages at the Laundromat, are occupied with two subjects: narrative and redemption, and how each relates to the other and to painting. This will be most of the content of this blog. The small pieces that are by-product of this thinking.



These thoughts are infected with the writing of three authors: Djuna Barnes, Thomas Mann, and John Hawkes.

Mark-Making and Prayer

In love, I speak many words as small prayers. They describe in their distance from the romantic weather that soaks and dries us both, all the unspeakable things I wish love could be.
In painting there are marks that serve a similar purpose. Describing in their distance from the guileless marks made before them the type of mark I would make in this spot if I were going to make a mark on the painting I have been imagining.
Sometimes prayer is foisted on a mark. By changing the marks around it, it is hollowed of any original value and made to serve as prayer. This is an impressively violent way of making marks. If thorough, it makes subsequent marks appear to have been prayed for. When the violence is through, I am relieved to find I am someone for whom prayers are answered.

There are also sentimental marks, they comfort me by recalling past marks on paintings whose redemption is already secured.

Last Year's Model- Wil Murray Interview 2005

Three links to an interview done by Zeke for my show last October at Zeke's Gallery in Montreal.
I remember that day, I'd spent the afternoon with Briand, a guy I worked with at a reno job. He'd been hit in the board with a flying board from a table saw, but wouldn't stop trying to work even though he was in excrutiating pain. My job that afternoon was to take hime to the bar across the street and keep him drinking. I did, and in turn was a little loose. Word to the wise: a 200km/h board in the chest and 10 beers makes an Acadian man loudly champion the attributes of his waitress' body.
Enjoy.

Wil Murray Interview Part 1
Wil Murray Interview Part 2
Wil Murray Interview Part 3

A review of that show from Cedric Caspesyan at Artquebus:
Candy Power: Wil Murray "Fated Fêted Fatted Fetid" at Zeke's Gallery

Painting As Obituary

Jackson Pollock Alchemy, 1947


When I am in my painting I’m not aware of what I am doing. It is only after I see what I have been about. I have no fears of making changes, destroying the image etc. Because the painting has a life of its own.
Jackson Pollock, 1947

MANY lives of its own?
HAD many lives of its own?
Like the city street a traveler sees for the first time. First glimpses construct for him “the street”. All future changes will be compared to this original. As if this was the original state of the street. Time changes this street as the traveler begins to understand the quotidian decisions and catastrophic accidents that have constructed it before his arrival. Building a narrative of past and future still fraught with lingering mysteries around his first glimpsed eternal marker of present.
When I have lived somewhere long enough to feel my own feet wearing down the streets I walk on each day. When I can imagine the thousands of other feet before my own. When I know what was there before, and how it was eliminated. When I know what is there now will be replaced in time.
I am terrified.
The finished painting is like this first glimpse, but without the terror of continual alteration by you or any other. With the relief of something you will not wreck, improve, or change by looking. The relief of not having to act, to encourage, to put in motion or to stop. The relief of not being asked to choose the form of what you see. The painting has no physical future. It allows you unlimited time.
Earlier I wrote that painting should not be an obituary. But no, the painting is different kind of obituary(here’s where the lack of good analogy for painting falls flat). As obituary, painting’s cohesion as a single image without the beginning or end of a written text can address the unlimited narratives of its own lives in being made.
By what is still visible in each painting, all narratives of making are described. If eliminated, they are still suggested by those still visible.
Battering a painting into a single narrative is a redundant act of heroic violence I am loath to attempt.

Introduction

I have decided to start this blog as a means of keeping my own continuous record my writings on painting and to facilitate discussion of them and my own painting practice.
The past year has seen me write a fair bit about painting, but I have only sat down at the keyboard in order to write artist statements, show proposals or emails with appropriate ends in mind. I am curious to see what comes of my writing when it is not done in the name of further some segment of my career. Finding a greater ove of writing, it seems a waste to only do it when it is made neccessary.
I find a great relief in writing which does not have to be directly describe of my own painting or having to tie ideas to my own practice. Sometimes the threads are invisible for a long time.

For reference purposes, can view my website here or visit The Patrick Mikhail Gallery to see my most recent work and show information. Both of these sites can also be accessed on the sidebar.

Greatest Art History Joke/ Roy Lichtenstein

The greatest art history joke:
The single-frame Lichtenstein painting reproduced as 1 inch square image in an art history textbook. To the right of the image a description of Roy’s process he paints large benday dots, mimicing the mechanical colour printing process.

Imagined:
“For further information on mechanical reproduction techniques, get out your magnifying glass and look at the image of Roy's painting to the left…see the dots? No, not the large small benday dots. Those are his, painted. Yes, the small small ones. Well, the smaller small ones. The tiny ones...yes, the tiny ones."
"Ours: tiny"
"Roy's: small...well, in the reproduction anyway. In real life his are huge and ours don't exist. And Roy's are painted, not printed. Like you can see in the photo to the left”
No one laughs.