Besides continuing developing my painterly skills and my understanding of pictorial space, part of me finds a need to start classifying or make some sense of the work I've produced for the past six months. Also, while I would like to keep my process completely unpredictable, open, and based on intuition, I would like to find a way to present my research and all the information that I have gathered. When one employs an intuitive process that isn't goal-oriented or censored, one ends up with an impressive amount of work and information. I think the reason for this is that when one works towards a "goal," this actually reduces the output, meaning it takes away the "flow."
Today, I started to count what I've produced in my studio during the past six months:
- 345 drawings and paintings in various mediums
- seven sculptures in wood, cardboard, and paper
- various displays and installations of my artwork in my studio
- eight small sketchbooks with notes and drawings
- 3,200 iPhone photographs (featuring my process in the studio, daily walks)
-926 videos (studio process, daily walks, videos of Instagram feed), a few edited to short videos placed on social media
- daily posts on FB and Instagram
- daily reading of critical articles in the NY Times, le Monde and various art magazines (on average two-three articles per day)
- several hundreds of pages of printouts of artworks by other artists
- daily reading of academic articles
So, it feels a little overwhelming. I now think that the time has come to start looking at these different things I've produced and start thinking of what they represent. I'd enjoy presenting my research into the meaning of Painting in a more cohesive format that can be shared with others. At the moment, I'm thinking of using my artistic output (paintings, photos, videos) in three ways simultaneously, inserted as images into a video, compiled into a book, and used as materials for collage paintings or sculptures.
To not feel overwhelmed and discouraged, my mind turned to Carl von Linné, the botanist who invented the two-name system, binomial nomenclature, which gave a generic and specific epithet (genus and species) to organisms. During his lifetime, he named and organized over 14,000 plants. (His work interests me also because the naming of plants coincided with an increase in the transportation and dispersion of plants across the globe fueled by colonization, a subject I touched upon in my Plantes Voyageuses exhibition in 2014.)
I did a little search and found an article written by James Prosek in the New York Times that traced Carl von Linné's journey in Lapland in northern Sweden. I thought it was well written, and it made my mind travel. I hope you will enjoy it. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Once we put a name on something, as Linnaeus did compulsively, we've identified ourselves as the observer and the named thing as the observed — a barrier is placed between, lines are drawn. If I am observing, it suggests that I am separate from nature, but in some of my best and most memorable moments, I am part of it, when a certain amount of the knowing is shed. Such a moment happened on the vast lake in Lapland as we watched a thousand shades of day flirt on the horizon with darkness in colors beyond names and perhaps even beyond language. "
James Prosek, "A Botanist in Swedish Lapland"
By observing, describing and naming the artworks I've made, I will create a distance between myself and the intuitive process, however, by naming I also recognize the existence and unique qualities of these intuitive artworks.Â
"To name a thing is to acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else that has a name; to confer upon it the dignity of autonomy while at the same time affirming its belonging with the rest of the namable world; to transform its strangeness into familiarity, which is the root of empathy. To name is to pay attention; to name is to love. Parents name their babies as a first nonbiological marker of individuality amid the human lot; lovers give each other private nicknames that sanctify their intimacy; it is only when we began naming domesticated animals that they stopped being animals and became pets. "
Maria Popova, "How Naming Confers Dignity Upon Life and Gives Meaning to Existence"
Popova, Maria, "How Naming Confers Dignity Upon Life and Gives Meaning to Existance," Brainpickings.org
https://www.brainpickings.org/
Prosek, James, "A Botanist in Lapland," NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...