{"id":9154,"date":"2020-04-06T15:45:13","date_gmt":"2020-04-06T15:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=9154"},"modified":"2020-04-03T15:53:21","modified_gmt":"2020-04-03T15:53:21","slug":"going-dark-for-a-while","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=9154","title":{"rendered":"Going dark for a while"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

My new favorite medium.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve been joking with a number of people that having complied with the social isolation required around the world to fight COVID-19, I can\u2019t tell the difference between this and my ordinary life. Such is painting. I still make furtive trips to the supermarket and Home Depot. I paid cash for one small purchase recently and my fingertips did an absurd dance with the clerk\u2019s in our attempt not to touch each other. Meanwhile, running along the Erie Canal\u2019s towpath yesterday, I felt as if dozens of erstwhile isolationists had fled to that nearly empty channel of water, far more people than I would normally see at this time of the year. Walkers, runners, cyclists and in-line skaters were easily able to keep their distance and most were friendlier than they are in the aisles of stores. Maybe I\u2019m just noticing for the first time how eye contact at Wegmans is as rare as on the streets of Manhattan, where people walk under an unspoken edict never to smile at anyone or acknowledge individual faces in the packed flow of pedestrians moving along Fifth Avenue. (Fifth Avenue is as dry, figuratively speaking, as the Los Angeles River these days.)<\/span><\/p>\n

All of these sequestered hours provide ample time to paint, though I\u2019ve noticed in myself and a number of others\u2014Christopher Burke\u2019s latest post on Instagram talked about his creative rut\u2014that this weird, nearly universal state of suspended animation in society casts a pall on individual effort, for some reason. I\u2019m still painting every day, often for six hours, and making steady progress, but always with an irksome sense that I work more slowly than I would like\u2014yet that doesn\u2019t inspire me to put in longer hours. <\/span><\/p>\n

So I\u2019m busy enough to be posting new work every few weeks, but I\u2019ve withdrawn to a great degree from Instagram, and have been lax in my posts here, partly because of this languishing sense that everything has come to a halt, but mostly because I\u2019m working on a long series of salt water taffy paintings. I don\u2019t want to post them piecemeal, but rather to wait until the series is nearly done\u2014which will take more than a year. I want to excavate all the possibilities from this radical narrowing of my work. I spoke recently with Rick Harrington about this, telling him that I\u2019m rankling a bit from the constraints of doing what feels in some ways like the same thing over and over again\u2014which is entirely the point of the series, to see how a simple subject accurately rendered can end up working the way an abstract works\u2014and he said, from his long experience with his abstracted barns, that you can learn much by sticking with a particular subject for years and years. After years of struggling to emerge from a fog that resulted from the aftereffects of anesthesia during surgery on his throat, he is back in fourth or fifth gear, reaching a new plateau in his efforts\u2014though the sudden stasis in the economy seemed to threaten his momentum in his galleries. (It hasn\u2019t just yet.) Of this, I\u2019m certain: boxing myself into this narrow line of work will provide ample reward and allow me to learn a lot, and could open some doors. But that doesn\u2019t make it feel any less confining, and doesn\u2019t make it any more pleasant to become a reluctant Punxsutawney Phil and renounce a regular dose of likes on Instagram. It all comes down to hours at the easel; like everything else in life, it\u2019s mostly a matter of showing up and letting the work happen. And maybe pushing for another couple hours beyond the point where you want to get outside and forget the canvas until tomorrow. <\/span><\/p>\n

One thing I happen to have learned already, in my pursuit of a certain flow of paint in this series, is that from now on, I\u2019m a lifelong convert to Gamblin\u2019s Neo Megilp medium. It is a gel, rather than a fluid, a safer version of Maroger\u2019s, a medium its inventor claimed was the medium of the Old Masters. It\u2019s lead-based, while Neo Megilp uses no lead. Fairfield Porter mixed his own Maroger\u2019s and you can see it in the quality of his marks. I don\u2019t know why I haven\u2019t tried it before now, but it\u2019s marvelous\u2014it gives a consistency to the paint that allows a fluent application, without dripping or visible thinning of the pigment, and stays ductile for a long time, allowing wet-on-wet technique, which is my goal. And a little goes a long way, so that the bottle I\u2019m currently depleting will last for many paintings, even large ones. It\u2019s a joy. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been joking with a number of people that having complied with the social isolation required around the world to fight COVID-19, I can\u2019t tell the difference between this and my ordinary life. Such is painting. I still make furtive trips to the supermarket and Home Depot. I paid cash for one small purchase recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nGoing dark for a while - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=9154\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Going dark for a while - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019ve been joking with a number of people that having complied with the social isolation required around the world to fight COVID-19, I can\u2019t tell the difference between this and my ordinary life. 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