Notes From the Studio: Painting Table

My painting table is on wheels so I can roll it around the studio. This is what it looks like while I'm in the middle of working: paint mixed on wax paper on a glass palette (easy clean up), paper towels for wiping brushes and palette knife, brushes stored in cans, jars of medium, tubes of paint, and brush soap.

-Richard Bledsoe

Poetry: Heather Smith-Gearns

Anchored to Three

There is nothing left to see.

Only stillness with shadow to define provocative white monochrome duality.

My fearful misconceptions contained within, are packed up in boxes,and placed in the corner.

Overlooked, refused,and admired, my devotions neglect – a backlash hangover.

I will never be able to let go – you made sure of it.

Elusive immediate periphery chained to residual space, highlights the fragility keeping your memory alive.

No transcendence, no assumption, only illusion.

Your line a mere index of process.

Disappearing variation in the speed of inscription.

Conceptual gesture become a rupture in my psyche.

I cannot frame you, or place you on the wall.

Your ghost is insistent.

Dominating figure, and ground, yet tragically uncertain.

Our transformed hierarchical structure, important lessons in spatial ambiguity.

In each hesitation, vibrant chroma causes hallucination.

The inevitable process of enclosing, protecting,and enabling.

Anchored to three , upside down, your form in grid.

All the necessary tension creating possibility.

Surrounded by blue field, brushstroke blind, in a fog of gray.

I can hear your voice in the semiotic shift, elusive as usual.

Visible only in the dark.

Dangerous sad for me, this recognition that there is still

ALL TOO MUCH to see.

Vanquished dimension goes on forever, it's painful evolution immediate.

Apparent longing packaged, protected from collective trauma.

The veil becomes thin.

Perpetual sequence moves forward.

I am propelled through normalcy.

I miss you.

I will always miss you.

Today tomorrow, and forever there will be no difference.

This conjured sameness.

I will never reach it's limit.

-Heather Smith-Gearns  

Artwork: Michele Bledsoe

Michele Bledsoe "Playmates" acrylic on canvas 9" x 6"

Artists: Mark Rothko

 Mark Rothko "Omen of the Eagle"

"Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take risks." 

-Mark Rothko

Before he reduced his imagery to rectangles, Rothko explored archaic forms, mythology and tragedy. He claimed that the later paintings he did were about the same subject matter. However, beautiful as they are, his color fields do not pack the same visceral wallop as his more figurative works. Interesting though how the rectangles are already evident in this piece.
-Richard Bledsoe

Artwork: Dain Quentin Gore

Dain Quentin Gore "Syzygy" oil on linen 40" x 40"

THE WALK 1: MY CUP RUNNETH OVER. IT'S MESSY.

Adam and I made the pilgrimage again to Chimayo this year. 

Thursday April 5. We began walking around 6 PM. Starting at the same place we always have. Its a back road off from the freeway near a casino. It leads from pavement to an old dirt road. It looks old and feels old. Our path begins in a small village called Pojoaque.

People have lived here for a few centuries I guess. Part of the Spanish inhabitation of this part of the world in the 1600s. Walking due north we set a pace, brisk but not too strong.  As we walk on this dirt road, dry but with deep spring rain ruts still leaving their mark, the modest, yet stylish houses on either side seem to close in. But its a comfortable closeness.

There are fences lining the road most made of 4 foot high lodge pole sticks, bark still attached.
The tall trees on each side are leafless just barely having gotten spring buds. Their long upward limbs reaching to the now paling, gray blue, soon to be, evening sky. As we walk a little dust rises up from the road. It smells of earth and it feels cool.

Just now around us there are sounds of water gurgling and an occasional dog bark in the distance. I look for a creek. We find a concrete lined irrigation ditch hidden in the bushes to our left. Filled and flowing with spring run off, quicksilver flashes of water that seem alive with purpose. The water wants to get somewhere. Its going to quench a thirst and water some crops.

I recall reading about the mayordomos, or majordomos, of this area. They are the ditch managers. The ditch riders. The ditch bosses. Overseeing who gets what water when. They are elected officials. They have meetings and workshops. A simple job. Its a big deal. Since around 1598 there has been water management for this high desert landscape. It is said this style of irrigation and water wrangling began in Spain where it was taught to them during an Arab occupation. Wow.

In Phoenix our canals, and the few remaining irrigation ditches around the city, were supposedly vestiges left by the Hohokam Indians. Whoever came up with the idea had it right. It gets the water where it needs to go. In hot summers when I was a kid we swam in the ditches, canals and flumes around the Valley.

There is a grayness to this landscape we walk. The result of failing daylight and winter hangover. Yet almost as soon the road rises it begins to fall and we walk down towards a creek where we are blessed by emerald green patches of spring grasses and sprouts.

Some of the people from the homes on the road have placed bottles of water and boxes of oranges on small tables by their fence boundaries. A gift to the pilgrims. The walkers.  I am always heartened by this show of hospitality to strangers. It is so simple and yet I find myself touched by it.

Now we come to an open area, its where the creek crosses the road and flows west. Water flows across a concrete pad imbedded with metal drain gridwork. The road goes down and then back up to meet the main road that runs east and west just ahead of us. It is on that road we will begin to walk in earnest.

NEXT: THANK GOD FOR SHOES

-Jeff Falk

From the Archives: Gallery Beginnings

Deus Ex Machina Gallery and Studio was founded on November 7, 2007. The space we were moving into had been painted up as a baffling orange and brown grid by the former tenants.

Looked like a 1970s kitchen.

Michele Bledsoe presents-clashing like a pair of cymbals.

We repainted the walls into the purple and green motif we use to this day.

Michele Bledsoe, Richard Bledsoe, and Jeff Falk hanging the first show. The opening was December 7, 2007-a day that will live in infamy.

Article: Art Review-Richard Bledsoe at Deus Ex Machina

 Richard Bledsoe "Saint Ness" acrylic on canvas 36" x 18"

Article from Barry Graham's Blog "Illusionary Flowers in an Empty Sky"

Artwork: Heather Smith-Gearns

Heather Smith-Gearns "Constancy and Permanence" acrylic on canvas

Notes From The Studio: Skylights

Deus Ex Machina Gallery has two skylights, with northern exposure. The quality of light they emit is beautiful.

Artwork: Steve Gompf

 

Steve Gompf "Italian Televisor 1896"

Artists: Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch "Summer Night's Dream: The Voice"

"When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights."

-Edvard Munch

Commentary: Inadequate Art

 Marcel Duchamp "Fountain"

Strange times we live in. It's going to be getting a whole lot stranger too, so it's best to be prepared. 

Art is my healthiest obsession, so I cultivate it. What I've seen in my contemplation of art and the systems that have grown up around it is both a terrible indictment and a glorious new chance.

The contemporary art world is still infected with replicating viruses caught from Duchamp's urinal. For a century now we've been hearing the same joke, with variations on the same old punchline. To encounter Duchamp and his myriad offspring is to leave the world of art, and to enter into philosophy, semantics, theory. What we have been presented with for too long is an intellectual approximation of art, a commentary, not the thing itself. Art is not a discursive process, a debate, an explanation. It's an encounter with something that can not be spoken, that exists beyond reason.

 

The way the art world is run encourages this mistaken view of art. Yesterday's counter culture is today's establishment, and the trendy radical ideas of a few generations ago are dogma today. Contemporary art all too often brandishes hostility, obscenity, or obscurity at its audience. Most people, when confronted with this type of contemporary art get the point-this is not made for people like you. Its inaccessibility lends it a spurious sense of superiority.

But this is not good enough anymore. With the tough times we have ahead as a culture, art can't remain as a plaything of a decadent elite. The artists need to return to the true function of art-as an exploration of human potentials, universal experience, an evocation of a state of consciousness that there are no words for. 

We need this now. The artists need to show us our strength. To keep playing referential games and sneering at the values of others would be to fail in our duties at a perilous moment. Too much of what is being presented as art is inadequate for these times. It's getting to the point that this is worse than a mistake, it is actively destructive.

The good news is this era of error is ending. What takes its place is up to us. 

-Richard Bledsoe

Artwork: Jeff Falk

Jeff Falk has created an ever-evolving installation in the rafters of Deus Ex Machina.

Notes From The Studio: Portable Drawing Materials

Lately when I have been going to the studio to paint, Michele has been joining me, and working on drawings. She realized it was easier to set up for drawing instead of bringing all her acrylic painting supplies along. Pictured here are her supplies-bristol paper pad, separate containers for Prismacolor pencils, pencil shavings, sunflower seeds, and shells-and a Diet Pepsi.

Artwork: Annie Lopez

Annie Lopez "I Will Be Hurt" toned cyanotype

Artists: Sidney Nolan

Sidney Nolan "Burke and Wills Expedition-Gray Sick"

'Painting is an extension of man's means of communication. As such, it's pure, difficult, and wonderful." -Sidney Nolan

Notes From the Studio: Music

Michele and I always have music playing while we paint. This is the stack of CDs that have accumulated in our home studio recently; could be seen seen as the soundtrack for our recent work.

The Ventures - In Space
Led Zeppelin - In Through the Out Door
Neurosis - The Eye of Every Storm
District 9 - Soundtrack
Easy Star All Stars - Radiodread (OK Computer redone as reggae!)
Titus Andronicus - The Monitor
Cat Stevens - Classics
The Soft Boys - Underwater Moonlight
Santana - Supernatural
The Police - Synchronicity
Neil Diamond - 12 Greatest Hits Volume 2
Gorillaz - Demon Days 

Artwork: Heather Smith-Gearns

Heather Smith-Gearns "What I Want Is Not To Want" acrylic on canvas

 

In April, painter and poet Heather Smith-Gearns joined Deus Ex Machina. 

Commentary: Shock Art

 

 Damien Hirst "A Thousand Years"

"Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson 

It's a strange time in the contemporary art world, where this quote is kind of turned on its head. So much of the monotony of post modern art is its lack of decorum. Artists without vision or talent can fall back on creating sterile reruns of the type shock-the-bourgeois antics that rocked Paris around the time of our great-great-grandfathers. Our animal bodies do all sorts of messy things-procreate, defecate, die and decay, that polite society conspires to keep discreet. It's a real shortcut to play in this mud to stir a reaction.This type of work, striving for scandal since it can not offer insight, says nothing about the artist who created it or even the times we live in now. There is not enough substance to inflate disposable trash into greater significance.
In this age where the establishment keeps shoveling out dead end muck, to be strange and extravagant is to be concerned with qualities like skill, honesty, vision and integrity in art. 

 -Richard Bledsoe 

Artwork: Dain Quentin Gore

In March, painter Dain Quentin Gore joined Deus Ex Machina.

Dain Quentin Gore "Mandorka" oil on linen 24" x 18"

Artists: Philip Guston

Philip Guston "Pit" oil on canvas 75" x 116"

"Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible."

-Philip Guston 

Notes From the Studio: Painting In Progress

Some observations on my painting process.

Step one happens internally-a vision is presented to me. In my art notebook I jot down a title and a few words to remind me of the vision. I usually have a sense of the needed size and medium for the painting.


Step two is when a vision I had starts coming back to haunt me. I know then it's time to start that painting. 


Step three is a basic initial drawing, done directly on the canvas, without doing preparatory sketches. This spontaneously generated composition determines the layout of painting. Even as I enhance and revise my images I remain true to my first impulsive design.

This is the start of "The Night of Wonders," 3' x 2'. Drawing done in ultramarine blue acrylic.

I paint standing up, pacing up and down in front of the work-stepping back often to see what it looks like from the most likely viewpoint it will be seen from-a few feet away.

The whole canvas must be covered in paint, and then I work all over the canvas, bringing area after area up to similar points of finish. Painting is a process of constant overall adjustments. I struggle to resist getting too detailed in places while there are still big, less resolved areas.

Here is the same painting after two painting sessions, probably about 4 hours of work. This painting still has weeks to go before it will be completed.

-Richard Bledsoe

Artwork: Richard Bledsoe

Richard Bledsoe "Among the Fortunate" oil on canvas 32" x 32"

Artists: Hieronymus Bosch

"Christ Carrying the Cross"

"The master of the monstrous, the discoverer of the unconscious."

-Carl Jung, on Hieronymus Bosch