Horror. Terror. Herror. Torror

I'm tracking something not mine. Like when I told Ken Moffett that I couldn't paint strength because I had no strong marks that felt like mine. They were all borrowed.
A veil of quiet is all over from the studio and best to keep it and to borrow:
(Didn't want death anywhere near the paintings. Its mention-- with prefix-- in my artist statement makes my asshole close.)
Not mine yet. But then again, when redemption first came up in painting I was priest, paintings were flock, and no sheep un-redeemable(driving on 12th avenue in Vancouver at night, either with Jesse or wanting to tell him or wishing he was the one with me).

"Form in art necessarily is an exertion toward the elimination of fortuitousness and accident and randomness and athwartness, all of that which we may call liveliness-- life being that which doesn't hold still and is recalcitrant to final composure"

""He is a satirist and he is, in a special and restricted sense, an artist, a maker of compositions. The strategies of composition are to be imposed on the deadly chaos of what we may call the facts of life. But Hawkes is also exceedingly stringent in his perceptions, and he will not either reduce the difficulties of the enterprise or meliorate the paradox. The fact is that the strategies of composition never really work-- with the result, for form, by the way, that these intensely composed fictions remain at the quite open-ended and provisional, no less than in the novels, let us say, of Saul Bellow. The dynamic of Hawkes' fictions is this: aesthetic form-- which is to say, art-- is set forth to subdue nightmare randomness, and succeeds only to the point of the contingency of the next and inevitable eruption of that randomness. The stakes are these: art finally implies death, but so does the violence of our lives. And there is a paradigm here: society itself, or history itself, is the deathly imposition of harmonies on human will (the source of which, according to Schopenhauer, is the genitals), on that human willfulness which lacking ht deathly imposition of harmonies commits murders"

From: The Satyr At The Head Of The Mob by Marcus Klein
Published in: A John Hawkes Symposium: Design and Debris. NDP446

PS. There will be a second part to this post tomorrow. I left "Helping Verbs of The Heart" by Peter Esterhazy at the laundromat, and am not one to remember quotes verbatim.

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.

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?

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.