day 8 | stitch + scratch; get on with the bad.
make bad. i was reminded of my mantra that set me free. it is ok to make bad art. actually you can’t get to the good stuff till you’ve worked through the bad making. this came to me while dana padgett introduced our postmodern painting art history class to “bad painting.” it was like omg, it is ok to actually make bad art. i didn’t know i could do that. it was an odd sort of permission that ultimate moved my primary practice from graphic design to full blown art. there was something about looking at the work from that period, well actually most of postmodernism, and the way dana presented it, something in me actually clicked. with a two hour break each TTH between her class and my graduate design cluster, i put the time to work making my own bad paintings slapped up on 4×4 boards (small is not in me). i splashed out “my first bastardized dekooning-pollock in under 5 minutes,” and went on with a whole series of my own bad paints (circa 2005ish). my work has evolved from there into real space and alternate materials.
make bad. ok, well they aren’t really that bad, but… ha. first time to stick this images together and a pattern is clear — mouth and projections. hmmm. now i am going to have to think about that for a bit.
i was reminded this morning that relative to my writing, i should again set myself free by making bad. make as much bad as possible, as fast as possible, to get to the evolution of writing in real space with alternates materials than that which i needed in the beginning. MAKE BAD. school, perhaps, a phase in the making bad evolution, or not, just make. certainly no one taught or even suggested my current medium, it resulted from two things. one, i was making, making, making my bad, and two, a trailer (i had borrowed) tire as i backed it up through a storm gate and sliced the sidewall on the gates edge all the while attempting to retrieve an art tree for Barna Kantor all leading me to a mom and pop tire repair shop just off of down town houston and to a heaping mound of defunked tubes headed for the landfill. mmm. urban detritus flesh, hides, that i could sew!
0 underlying, undergirding, this whole art making evolution which isn’t going away has been writing. though it was my hand scratching out the texts, it mostly went unnoticed by me. it was simply needed. so the challenge now is to make bad writing right alongside the making. i’ve been doing it for a while now, so perhaps a big portion of the bad has already passed under the bridge. i hope to get to the meat soon. stitch (make) and scratch (write)!
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