Re-creating a landscape made from ultimate destruction. THE EGG PIECE

In Verdun, France the land is still pockmarked with artillery craters from WWI, enough so that it looks other-worldly. This is reinforced by the fact that nature has grown over the craters, disguising the artificial reason for them, but not completely.

The British painter Paul Nash expresses this in his painting of NoMansLand, 'We Are Making A New World' (1918).

Walking around this battlefield felt fragile, as if the Earth wasn't completely healed. Malformed.

***

Military life makes you feel this way magnified. Trepidation. Every situation volatile, echoes of explosions as well as anticipation of the next one.  On the constant watch of something else.

I am investigating how this constant has affected home life, and family.
To re-create a ground that is constantly inconstant, fragile, unpredictable.

Using eggs (only shells, which are mostly whole, although some fractured) and wrapping them in the protective skin of intestine. They will cover the ground.

An other-worldly landscape
Fragile
protected but unpredictable



Visually I am working with the static movement of eggs.  Balanced, but how they are arranged will represent the kind of frozen undulation of the crater reformed ground at Verdun. The foreboding anxiety of what happened, or what could happen.... stuck in unhealed memory.

Studio work

The basement studio is fine for cutting up porcine. I am pleased with the evolving process of turning the intestine into surfaces.  Depending on when you peel the foil off of the laid intestine, and wether it is nailed down flat, I can manipulate how dimensional the surface becomes.

nailed to wall

this piece dried mostly before being peeled from aluminum. Left to dry so it shriveled a bit more. Next piece will be peeled before completely dry, left to shrivel more naturally.

Banana project or project22, photos

Been messing around with some images from the banana project, now called 'project22'.

I am very happy with how the rotting elements of the photos have a somewhat painterly quality. I recently was in Dresden and got to see Otto Dix's triptych "Der Kreig".  I think one of the most significant aspects of his work is his ability to aestheticize carnage. Parts of that painting is masses of torn bodies, the materiality of the paint used to represent the melting and mashed flesh.  

LISTS

I am going to publish lists from time to time. It will help me highlight themes and connections in the work.  Here's one:

(mother)
carry
care
Bonds
holding it together

inner
intestines
the violence and grotesque mockery
sinews of survival
gutskin coat (Kamlaika-Russian)
     -shamanistic usage (Inuit), transport to the after-life

no guts no glory
Tribalists
war play

fragility
loose lips sink ships
bombs
targeting
invisible/visible

Wrong.

I had some idea that I needed to paint figuratively, I think I was grabbing at some idea of that representing truth. I was wrong. Moving on.

Took some time and made some decisions

The last meeting I had with my mentor helped to focus the direction of my work to what it is doing no, as well as finally put to bed some hang-ups that were holding me back.  Like tattoo. I'm not contending with that for awhile, if it comes out in some form of referrencial experience, fine, but that's it. I want instead to use anything I can to put things in order.  I think its ok to also acknowledge failures...such as some stuff I was working on before last meeting:

No. Just a bunch of decoration and bad illustrations. Moving on.

"I felt the ground shaking beneath my feet, and the shaking was visible in my work." George Grosz

I am excited to follow an idea for a main project that will take the rest of the semester to accomplish, even then working overtime due to getting a late start. But upon talking about it with Davide, he supported this idea and believes it has a lot of potential to pursue it. 

Much of what I started to work on when I finally got some sort of studio put together was not working.  I had to figure stuff out. 

These are pieces that will work into the overall plan, which is scribbled out in my sketchbook and pictured below.

Some elements of this

With something from here

Plan scribbled out here

  

During the Mentor meet some terrific things happened while discussing the project and Davide helped me see successes in previous work I had thought were disaster. Themes and elements of work from all semesters, to include experience as soldier and tattooer started to converge and connections were made.  There will be documentation of the progress, good or bad.

Caught a train to Berlin and met my Mentor...

Before learning I would be moving to Germany I was interested in artists who worked during the Weimar Republic, such as Jeanne Mammen:

Jeanne Mammen, Berlin Street Scene, 1927-29

How fortuitous the discovery I would be moving there.  Even more amazing I'd be able to travel to Berlin to meet with my current Mentor, Davide Zucco.

The move to Germany was exponentially more complicated than originally expected, for both logistic and personal reasons.  Why I didn't think moving my life and three kids to a foreign land was going to be anything but crazy, I have no idea...I thought I would be in the studio (of which I did not have) upon landing.

Now that things are settled, getting back to work in this amazing place has been the most important thing and extremely welcome, in addition to exploring places I've only previously read about.

At first getting back to work was difficult, setting up a life outside the US was beginning to give me rapidly new perspective on issues I realized I previously saw with more of a limited worldview.  Going back to work I realized I needed to expand. I feel incredibly fortunate especially for the opportunity to gain this new information, however my intended work has grown into something else, or perhaps transcended.

In the first meet with my Mentor we spoke of work transcending the work before it.  It doesn't completely abandon the work before, but takes what it needs and moves forward.  I completely understand this idea, and look forward to working more and what comes out of this semester.

Some words on the banana project...

 For the banana project (its temporary title), I glued 9mm bullet casings to 22 bananas so that they took a phallic form disguising they were bananas, they looked instead like curved metal porcupine-ish objects made of radiating bullets.  Each banana I placed into its own rectangular plastic sealed box, so that the banana stood upright. I then compiled the bananas together to form a wall.

Close up of two sealed boxes of bullet banana construction.  First day of construction (no decay)

Bullet bananas in residency space.  The organization of the boxes changed a few times.

The initial idea behind it was a comment on the statistic of 22 US veteran suicides a day. The following points explain how the imagery corresponds with the intent:

• First, the idea of gluing bullet casing on a banana, is ridiculous. The absurdity of the act alludes to the absurdity of the present situation regarding veterans returning from multiple deployments to a war that called upon them many times with promise of aftercare, only to find the VA failing them.  
• Using a basic form of food, such as the banana, worked to signify a form of nourishment, 'that which feeds you'.  
• The shape of the banana, most phallic of all fruit, represented the hyper-masculinity inherent in military culture.
• As an institution, the military deconstructs the civilian and re-builds them as soldier, in so giving them an armor, both literally and figuratively as pertaining to the effectiveness of military training and the ability of that soldier to act in extreme situations.
• Visually and symbolically the bullets on the bananas represent this armor.
• However, separated from the others and placed into the clear boxes, the bullets, or armor, begins to weigh them down. As now on display, decaying from the inside while we can only see the armor, holding its shape (as I made a standing structure out of the individual clear boxes, 22 of them, so that viewers can inspect them easily, as well the decay happens slowly over time).

                                       *               *               *               *               *               *

• In his TED talk Sebastian Junger speaks of the military as being a tribal like society in that they are taught to operate as a unit, camaraderie being the bind that keeps them going, especially in the worst experiences. After separation they return to American society which does not operate like a unit, but rather for the benefit of the individual. The veteran then feels total isolation from this, having experienced how lethal that existence can be. It is not the malfunction of the veteran, but modern society.  To over-valorize the veteran and hold them to a 'special' status then further ostracizes them from society as a whole. 

During the residency, more ideas came out of this and it generated lots of great thought and discussion, to include themes not as military specific. Such as impermanency, the passage of time, the grotesque, and the idea that the slowly changing landscapes inside each box were themselves a type of painting.  It was suggested I do time-lapse videos of them or photograph them.  While at the residency I experimented with quickly photographing them and the outcome was promising.  I would like to continue with this, although with actual photography equipment.

These three following pictures are three weeks into decay (notice the 'bleeding' of the banana juices and mold. As well the patina of the casing brass):

Of course moving overseas impeded my immediate experimentation with the bananas as I could not get them through customs for many obvious reasons. They are left and stored in Florida where they surely have melted and are decayed. Becoming something different then they once were, still in their separate boxes, now hidden away in a Florida basement.  I am quite excited to discover their state the next time I see them.

Moving to Germany and getting ready for Residency ### 3

This morning when I woke up, I had for a moment (however brief) a feeling of accomplishment. Through this completely ridiculous last few months also known as 'the longest move of my life episode'....I realized next week is the residency, and I actually feel good about the work I'm bringing.  This semester, regardless of the move, brought many realizations about how I approached art making and how the last 11 years tattooing tailored that process. There is a difference in the approach to tattoo as there is to fine art, at least for me.

There were many aimless ideas, at first promising and definite until the actual attempt at creating it... so a lot of sinking ships. 

Many times too embarrassing to show my mentor, and even that is interesting.  In tattoo there is no failure, ya dont eff up, so I'm incredibly critical of failing.  I needed to let that go. 

I read and researched more and tried to let studio work happen a bit more organically, come what may.  Last semester, I'd start a piece and keep going until the end of that piece. And every piece followed the same formula, much like tattoo. This semester I broke that process.  

                                          

Two unfinished pieces.  I am happy with the direction these are going in, as I am incorporating the spit-shaded technique using liquid acrylic (that can only be done on hot press watercolor paper I concluded this semester after much experimentation) with regular acrylic. The contrast of the more realistic cut pieces of the liquid acrylic on paper and the gestural more expressive acrylic on board is interesting to me.  I think I can push this further, perhaps even more layering and overlapping of paper and the two different kinds of acrylic.

The top piece is also done on a board covered in a target that was shot up at a weapons range, as other pieces I have done this semester.  I enjoy the narrative that could develop with this idea, as well the paper is awesome to paint on. Weird.   

   

Bits and pieces

Here are some failed attempts during the struggle this month.  However, certain aspects of these may be used later...

This is a tattooed portrait on rawhide,
it also can be viewed from both sides

Although this is a NOPE. 

NOPE, total fail. embarrassing