Lots to do…

Prayer Flag (Ochre)
2020.  Acrylic on canvas. 12 x 16 in.

I’ve been making greeting cards to have for sale at my studio during Hwy 62 Open Studio Art Tours (OSAT), among many other preparations.  I enjoy the process; it’s a series of small steps (developing, printing, trimming, pasting, bagging) that is finite, measurable, and not too demanding.  And it results in a clean, pristine, colorful product in a neat little crystal bag that I can stack in a box and not worry about further.  It doesn’t have the rewards of creating the original artwork, but it doesn’t have the risks, either.  And sometimes that’s welcome.

I’ve included several of the Prayer Flag images from last year, such as the Ochre above, which are mostly sold already, but also some of the more current work as well as a few past favorites that make attractive cards.  At least, I will be producing these if I don’t run out of time; there’s a lot to do!

I’d like to reiterate that I will be doing the first and second weekends only (Oct. 9-10 and 16-17) of the Art Tours; I may have confused some folks by posting the OSAT image that lists all three weekends.  There are plenty of fine studios to visit all three weekends, but mine will not be open the third.

In other OSAT news, the Collective Show featuring works from participating artists all in one location will run Oct 2-24 with a kick-off party on Saturday Oct 2 from 6 to 8 pm; I will be there!  This year it will be in Joshua Tree jointly at Gallery 62 and JTAG.

One more announcement:  I’ve learned I’ve been juried in to the 9th Annual Joshua Tree National Park Art Exhibition, at the 29 Palms Art Gallery this November.  More to come on that; I’m in some excellent company and kinda thrilled.

Fall is a busy season in the desert, and I’m running to keep up.  Spending some quiet time with the Prayer Flags has been a calming respite.

We are all Mad Men now

Prayer Flag (Manganese Blue)
2020.  Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 16 in.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be participating in the Morongo Basin Open Studio Art Tours this October.  In anticipation I’ve been doing a lot of reorganizing in my studio, discarding and updating.  That process is interrupted now due to the cooling problem (still with us, but very close to solved).  In the meantime, I’m working on some of the ancillary tasks, ones that I can do in the cool of my office, such as designing greeting cards that I will have for sale at Open Studio.

These cards will include several images from the Prayer Flag series that I completed in spring of last year, such as the Manganese Blue pictured above.  At that time I sold 10 of the 12 Prayer Flags through Facebook, in a very short time and without having intended to.  I’d never done any “marketing” through social media.  But of course, it was covid, galleries were shut down, and I had started posting my work more frequently in response.  Folks liked them and asked if they were available for purchase, and so that happened.

Marketing rules in America these digital days.  Rules all, pervades all.  Marketing of self, marketing of brand, marketing of product, marketing of cause…it never ends.  As soon as Americans got their hands on the technology, the all-consuming self-promotion began.  As an artist I’m supposed to be marketing…theoretically the work, but really, in the current style, myself.  Forget the artwork, I’m supposed to get you to like me, to relate to me, to…I don’t know, want to be like me?  Own a piece of me?  Self-promotion is an end in itself now, ubiquitous, weird…grotesque, frankly.  Rude to say it, I know, but seriously:  grotesque.  In my best moments I see it as sad but tenderly human.  But my more common reaction is a combination of nausea and fright.

And I’ve done it myself.  In the earlier days of the internet, and the earlier days of my career, I was pretty good at selling myself.  Ultimately, though, it made me recoil with a kind of loathing.  I felt trapped by my own “brand” and by the tyranny of the performance.  (Hence, my continual tiresome ambivalence towards this very blog you’re reading now.)

I don’t want to judge my fellow Americans just trying to survive in Late-Stage Capitalism.  We all gotta make a living.  But I think there’s a lot of self-selling these days that does not result in a living but at most reaps a kind of dumb fleeting attention and at worst results in being celebrated for one’s ability to self-promote and literally nothing else.  The celebrity, of course, being the apotheosis of this sad scramble.

The model is not a healthy one, my friends.  Not healthy for society, not healthy for individuals, not healthy for the earth and other living things.

This is not news, I know.  And it makes for a gloomy post.  But I’ve been wrestling with it, because I have to make decisions on how to promote my work at this stage in my career, at this stage in my life, and at this stage in American virtual culture.  I don’t like the array of options I see.  One longs to “opt out”. 

Consumerism has consumed itself.  Let’s see if there’s any place for the spirit in the vacuum that remains.

A New Day

 

Prayer Flag (Indigo)
2020.  Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 12 in. 

The approval of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act yesterday by the Senate virtually assures its final passage.  To me it feels like, finally, an embrace of the job that needed to be done a year ago – the essential duty that was shirked at best and actively opposed at worst by the last administration.   

In the interim, we lost half a million Americans to the pandemic.  Many of them, I am certain, would not have died if federal leadership had done their job last year. 

So today I post a Prayer Flag to remember those lost and to celebrate the new day and new direction that has begun.  May the vile dereliction that led me to create the Plague Faces never torture this nation again. 

Prayer Flags

Prayer Flag (Green)
April 2020.  Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 12 in.

So it’s not all pandemic gloom-and-doom here at Magicgroove studio.  There’s also pandemic hopefulness.  Okay, if not hopefulness then at least the sharing of positive intention and an interlude of grace.

The Prayer Flags series was created in March and April of this year, in that ancient time when it seemed all of us were pulling together, engaged in a common purpose and treating one another with generosity even amid chaos, suffering, and loss.  In that time before our leaders turned us against one another, and we realized that our nation, fatefully, was not capable of resisting the virus.

My work thrived with so much solitude, with the new opportunity to focus and explore in the midst of intense changes.  The prayer flags appeared, each one an improvisation, a mix of accident and intention.  Release of control followed by response, followed again by release of control.  I am perfectly happy working that way, despite the moments of apprehension. I know that forging ahead and letting go are necessary to get to a new place.

And people responded, somewhat to my surprise with abstract work.

You know what?  It was hope.