Condensed energy, Frank, and jazz

Hidden & heavy (new old forms)
acrylic on canvas
400 × 350mm
2018

I’m looking at the recent group paintings I’ve made, working out which ones feel successful and which aren’t quite there yet. The former have a certainty about them, a condensed energy. They’re not lacking anything. Nothing need be added or can be taken away. The paintings stand on their own.

My struggle now is how to regularly access that condensed energy and those moments in which a work becomes complete.

I may be able to reverse engineer the construction of these successful work into various elements – lay down a background colour, put in a net like form, place a solid form over an area that’s not working, etc.

Such a replicable formula may be a useful starting point but it doesn’t necessarily invoke the moment the disparate parts of the painting come together, nor does it guarantee the feeling of “condensed energy”. Scale has its part to play here (the marks in relation to the canvas and to each other), colour relationships, texture, shape, etc. While these formal elements are important I suspect the key is the clarity of my intent.

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It’s 8:59pm and I’ve just read the following passage from the foreward in Frank Chimero’s, The Shape of Design. In it Liz Danzico quotes from one of Frank’s emails:

You know what I love about jazz and improvisation? It’s all process. 100%. The essence of it is the process, every time is different, and to truly partake in it, you have to visit a place to see it in progress. Every jazz club or improv comedy theater is a temple to the process of production. It’s a factory, and the art is the assembly, not the product. Jazz is more verb than noun. And in a world riddled with a feeling of inertia, I want to find a verb and hold on to it for dear life.

The yellow highlight is mine – a studio is also, “a temple to the process of production”. (Remember, Warhol had his factory). It’s this mention of process which resonates right now. Painters paint. Painting not as noun but verb. Only through “the playing”, through improvising (around a structure, a form), only then is there a living, breathing space in which all the various elements have the opportunity to combine and become complete.

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