Trying To Be A Tree: A Retrospective
"The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim"
-Oscar Wilde, in the Preface to The Compete Works of Oscar Wilde
I have chosen to interrogate, out of temperament and out of necessity, to interrogate Saint Wilde's bold claim during the decade and a half that I have making and showing and selling artwork.
See, what interests me about art is it’s entanglement with life: not imitation, but intimation. The process is all.
I studied contemporary art practice at UC Santa Cruz from 2003-2005, and the faculty at that time were heavily influenced by the zeitgeist of post-conceptualism and, as a branch of the San Francisco Bay Area artistic community, art centered around "identity politics".
As a young painter interested in formal technical competence and finding my place in the classical cannon of Western Art History, the teaching that I received thoroughly disrupted my trajectory at the time and forced me to revaluate my ideas about art and the role of the artist in society. My application portfolio had consisted of life drawings. The corollary studies I made into history, minority studies, post-colonial theory, and post structural theory with an emphasis mythology vis a vis cultural anthropology, lent a strong vein of primitivism, centered on themes of power inequality, violence, it's relationship to sex, to the work I developed during this period. My younger brother at this time was being chewed up by the juvenile justice system in California, one of the most brutally and trenchantly racist and classist in the world, lending a furious tone to most of the work, most evident in pallete and symbolic quotations (the gun). I was, at the same time, longing for the cool rationality and beauty of classical art, trying to find a way to reconcile my disrupted world view with my admiration of the traditional cannon of the West. The wars in the Middle East and the neo-Nationalism of post-9-11 America was at a fever pitch. The internet was replacing the real with the simulation at a breakneck pace. There were so many influences. I just made and made and made. The work was about freedom. The work was about nothing, and everything. It was about surface, it was about soul. I sold most of it.
Flash forward to the Spring of 2011.
I had been living and showing in the San Francisco Bay Area since getting out of school. The style en vogue at the group shows I had access to was a very illustrative, graphic Street Art meets post-pop surrealism (i.e. Juxtapoz magazine). I felt the work I brought to these shows was too arty, not enough bling; it was a bit dark.
The first art I made after college was a series of drawings I made with my left hand while I was nursing a broken right collar bone (skateboard).
The little solo shows I was getting at coffee shops and restaurants and stuff like that went well. I had fun curating warehouse parties and live painting at clubs and stuff. I was influenced by everything. I hadn't had space to paint at first so ended up doing a lot of drawing and mixed media work. When I got settled a little bit I started painting again and a lot of the work became a dialogue between those two ideas-drawing and painting. The internet kept happening. I was cool-ish and networked hard and started getting up all over the place. I even had participated in photography shows. All the upward trajectory of production and attention coincided perfectly with the dive bombing economy. Life.
I had a big studio in a warehouse on the Oakland waterfront, had built my direct e-mailing list up to over a thousand people, and consistently was approached for shows and usually sold well at open studios that I participated in, but this blog was formerly known as Labor Interests and there was something in me that kept me loyal to the working class, something in me that didn't want to blow up, that just wanted to make my work and sell the pieces for the hourly rate of what it took me to make and market them. That's still all I want. But I'm pretty sure that's not exactly how it works. It's been interesting, to say the least, playing this game.
Anyway, 2011, I was a bona fide artist, but it was the real nitty gritty; I was tired, often finishing a long day working construction and battling traffic to get to an opening, doing my best to be engaging and personable (I'm not terrible at it) only to become totally deflated by the simplest of vapid and borderline ignorant comments ("Oh, you work construction? But these paintings are so elegant and sophisticated.") Openings are tough. Selling your guts is a tough play. Being engaged by people oogling a painting for twenty minutes telling me how much they loved it, then not being able to close because their apartment couldn't fit the painting or they were still afraid to spend the money or they only wanted an original work and not a print but would buy neither made me feel both mercenary and defeated. The axiomatic "the first thing you sell is yourself" seemed to stand in direct conflict to the idea stated by Oscar Wilde, above, which I had held to be a self-evident truism. But the internet kept happening. And I still wasn't sure that making paintings to sell as decorative commodities was exactly the role that I was supposed to be playing, remembering all the artists I had studied in college whose stated goal was to change the world.
I thought I should want to change the world, but I just wanted to be happy.
I decided to fold up shop in the Bay Area and beat a retreat to the Central California Coast, where my mother's people, of Italian and Native American descent, had deep roots. The plan was to land at my grandmother's house and work for a few months to pay down some bills and put together a small war chest, and then move to Santa Barbara to pursue representation and exposure in the LA art scene and work on a mobile pop-up gallery concept that I had been developing with my friends that were living there (who were also starting a festival). However, life is what happens when you are making other plans, as my fallen hero John once remarked.
I herniated a disc in my lower back working on a somewhat spectacular finish carpentry job for Debbie Reynold's son Todd Fisher at their ranch out in Creston, Ca.
And, there was a serious love/heartbreak, which peeled me from the production of the beginning-to-be-marketable brand of paintings (see Atlas, above) that I had been developing, and forced me into an even deeper consideration of the role of art in society, the relationship of art and the artist, and what shape I wanted this to take in my own life. I created a series of forty or so small photo-surrealistic paintings and drawings that examined the profound emotions that I was feeling at the time regarding love and loss, memory, life decisions, mythology, perspective, patterning, the body, art, reality, the soul....
In response to my back injury, I took two semesters of architecture classes at the nearby Cuesta Community College, in order to develop a professional skill set that could build (get it?) off of both my construction/carpentry and my artistic experience and lead to a supplemental source of income to my studio practice, and that necessarily wasn't physical labor. This lead to the Organitecture series, and to my current employment and self-employment as an architectural designer.
My tour of duty as on-again-off-again as founder, curator, and general manager of Branches Mobile Gallery gave me a tremendous amount of insight into the process and the business side of the process of showing and selling artwork . I've come to believe that the role of the artist is as described by Oscar Wilde in the quote mentioned above: to hide the artist and reveal Art.
However, in this late age of disenchantment, compounded by the extreme malleability of reality pre-supposed by digital technology, the taken-for-granted lack of privacy in the modern police states, the cult of the self and the selfy, that I've felt it important to find and explore and exhibit the truly vulnerable aspect of my self, and self-consciousness, my searching for the higher Self in archetypal forms, narratives and ideas, the missing spirit-in-the-world, which everyone knows is there, but nobody knows how to believe in anymore without resorting to dogma and bigotry. I employ a lot of techniques and ideas critical to the Surrealists practices, especially the idea of the automatic/authentic movement as a way to access the subconscious as a way of my pictures as offering points of meditation for my audience to consider the idea of this higher Self inherent in human consciousness. There is a mutual vulnerability in the process of sharing art, by the viewer and the artist. That vulnerability is the point of balance. The world navel. The germ from which ideas can grow and become values.
Thus is the creator and vendor of images and image-objects in this, the age of the selfy and a tweeting President, tied to that of the Mystic in mythologies that spread from the ancient mercenary roots of the 4000 year old warrior culture that the modern global political situation is heir to. This path, my path, now becomes the singular focus of my life, but at the same time, melds completely into the needs and drives inherent in life. They become symbiotic. The work is about, not freedom, but the Net of Being. About the utter impossibility of freedom. I suppose I am casting myself into the guru role a bit, the sacrificial role a bit. I remember seeing Kandinsky for the first time and saying, this is he, this is my master. I have a spiritual hunger. But I know it is all but a dream, a song we use to enchant ourselves. Which is why the critical study of mythology is such an integral part of my process. I am searching for a better world, within and without.
When in the studio, it is the happening of a picture that I cultivate, trying to remain sensitive to the magic of its' appearance, the music that comes through; synesthesia. It is the small moments, looking, moving, seeing, moving again, that establishes the rhythm of my pictures, and my life. My work is my spiritual practice, without it I am lost; I am a drowned man.
The trick is to recognize when a picture is flawed in the most meaningful ways, and, then, stop.
Make the next picture. In that way a history can be devised: a mythology of the artist as an experiment.
My pictures are always rooted in life--moments, memories, ideas and snapshots I carry through series of translations, interruptions, and elaborations in various media. In this way, I see my work as a type of mythologizing process, in that: a process whereby specificity and universality are put into a tacit and dynamic relationship with one another.
The landscapes around here and the way they echo the old myths from the Mediterranean, my ancestors ghosts, and the mysteries of my own unfolding identity are a huge part of Trying To Be A Tree, present in palette, form, tone, rhythm.
As I drift into middle age, the need to love and be love, the madness of wanting to procreate, to keep the insane circle turning, the relentlessness of life, the deep, deep roots of my role as an artist, as a seer; I bear witness. It is a lonely road, full of doubt and fear and self loathing, the Artist carries these demons in his box of colors at all times. Forward, forward. Quiet now. Make the pictures.
The important thing is not to be afraid.
In mythical narratives, people transform into trees to escape impending tragedy or conquest; the gesture signifies a sublimation of the divine infatuation (called “ate” in ancient Greek-which can roughly be translated as madness, possession or inspiration) that brought ruin and suffering to mortals who became the objects of it’s gaze for too long or too intensely. It is very rare that the mythologic forms anything so discreet and logical as a chain; much more often, what we see and feel when myth is at work is a web, a net, the “nexus rerum--the connection of everything with everything else, which alone gives meaning to life”.
So, the pictures are an exploration of this mechanism, a reaction to the divine presence in every moment, and all of nature, and a desperate quest for reconciliation of "the human" and "the natural" in this crucial moment, calling for a shift in consciousness towards environmental awareness, activism, innovation and wide spread social evolution, as well as towards empathy, compassion, vulnerability and mutual respect between human beings, and within and towards ourselves. In my way, I am trying to create beautiful things. I don't think I'll ever really be able to conceal myself; my pain and my rage, my ego and my confusion too loud for that, and even the act of trying to conceal oneself as an artist can be branded and trademarked. (And the internet just keeps happening.)
But I can dedicate myself to the process, and trust in the moment--allow myself to keep learning and growing--forward, never straight.
I was so nomadic for so long.....and life was just so overwhelmingly beautiful.
All I wanted was a place to sit down and compose it a love song....
It gave me that.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim"
-Oscar Wilde, in the Preface to The Compete Works of Oscar Wilde
I have chosen to interrogate, out of temperament and out of necessity, to interrogate Saint Wilde's bold claim during the decade and a half that I have making and showing and selling artwork.
See, what interests me about art is it’s entanglement with life: not imitation, but intimation. The process is all.
I studied contemporary art practice at UC Santa Cruz from 2003-2005, and the faculty at that time were heavily influenced by the zeitgeist of post-conceptualism and, as a branch of the San Francisco Bay Area artistic community, art centered around "identity politics".
As a young painter interested in formal technical competence and finding my place in the classical cannon of Western Art History, the teaching that I received thoroughly disrupted my trajectory at the time and forced me to revaluate my ideas about art and the role of the artist in society. My application portfolio had consisted of life drawings. The corollary studies I made into history, minority studies, post-colonial theory, and post structural theory with an emphasis mythology vis a vis cultural anthropology, lent a strong vein of primitivism, centered on themes of power inequality, violence, it's relationship to sex, to the work I developed during this period. My younger brother at this time was being chewed up by the juvenile justice system in California, one of the most brutally and trenchantly racist and classist in the world, lending a furious tone to most of the work, most evident in pallete and symbolic quotations (the gun). I was, at the same time, longing for the cool rationality and beauty of classical art, trying to find a way to reconcile my disrupted world view with my admiration of the traditional cannon of the West. The wars in the Middle East and the neo-Nationalism of post-9-11 America was at a fever pitch. The internet was replacing the real with the simulation at a breakneck pace. There were so many influences. I just made and made and made. The work was about freedom. The work was about nothing, and everything. It was about surface, it was about soul. I sold most of it.
I had been living and showing in the San Francisco Bay Area since getting out of school. The style en vogue at the group shows I had access to was a very illustrative, graphic Street Art meets post-pop surrealism (i.e. Juxtapoz magazine). I felt the work I brought to these shows was too arty, not enough bling; it was a bit dark.
The first art I made after college was a series of drawings I made with my left hand while I was nursing a broken right collar bone (skateboard).
The little solo shows I was getting at coffee shops and restaurants and stuff like that went well. I had fun curating warehouse parties and live painting at clubs and stuff. I was influenced by everything. I hadn't had space to paint at first so ended up doing a lot of drawing and mixed media work. When I got settled a little bit I started painting again and a lot of the work became a dialogue between those two ideas-drawing and painting. The internet kept happening. I was cool-ish and networked hard and started getting up all over the place. I even had participated in photography shows. All the upward trajectory of production and attention coincided perfectly with the dive bombing economy. Life.
I had a big studio in a warehouse on the Oakland waterfront, had built my direct e-mailing list up to over a thousand people, and consistently was approached for shows and usually sold well at open studios that I participated in, but this blog was formerly known as Labor Interests and there was something in me that kept me loyal to the working class, something in me that didn't want to blow up, that just wanted to make my work and sell the pieces for the hourly rate of what it took me to make and market them. That's still all I want. But I'm pretty sure that's not exactly how it works. It's been interesting, to say the least, playing this game.
Anyway, 2011, I was a bona fide artist, but it was the real nitty gritty; I was tired, often finishing a long day working construction and battling traffic to get to an opening, doing my best to be engaging and personable (I'm not terrible at it) only to become totally deflated by the simplest of vapid and borderline ignorant comments ("Oh, you work construction? But these paintings are so elegant and sophisticated.") Openings are tough. Selling your guts is a tough play. Being engaged by people oogling a painting for twenty minutes telling me how much they loved it, then not being able to close because their apartment couldn't fit the painting or they were still afraid to spend the money or they only wanted an original work and not a print but would buy neither made me feel both mercenary and defeated. The axiomatic "the first thing you sell is yourself" seemed to stand in direct conflict to the idea stated by Oscar Wilde, above, which I had held to be a self-evident truism. But the internet kept happening. And I still wasn't sure that making paintings to sell as decorative commodities was exactly the role that I was supposed to be playing, remembering all the artists I had studied in college whose stated goal was to change the world.
I thought I should want to change the world, but I just wanted to be happy.
 |
| A Portrait Shaped Painting, diptych, mixed media and oil on raw wood panels, 48" x 48", 2009 |
 |
| Atlas, 2011 |
I herniated a disc in my lower back working on a somewhat spectacular finish carpentry job for Debbie Reynold's son Todd Fisher at their ranch out in Creston, Ca.
And, there was a serious love/heartbreak, which peeled me from the production of the beginning-to-be-marketable brand of paintings (see Atlas, above) that I had been developing, and forced me into an even deeper consideration of the role of art in society, the relationship of art and the artist, and what shape I wanted this to take in my own life. I created a series of forty or so small photo-surrealistic paintings and drawings that examined the profound emotions that I was feeling at the time regarding love and loss, memory, life decisions, mythology, perspective, patterning, the body, art, reality, the soul....
 |
| From the Lovenotes series, 2011-12 |
In response to my back injury, I took two semesters of architecture classes at the nearby Cuesta Community College, in order to develop a professional skill set that could build (get it?) off of both my construction/carpentry and my artistic experience and lead to a supplemental source of income to my studio practice, and that necessarily wasn't physical labor. This lead to the Organitecture series, and to my current employment and self-employment as an architectural designer.
 |
| Organipocalypse, mixed media on ply, 24"x14", 2014 |
My tour of duty as on-again-off-again as founder, curator, and general manager of Branches Mobile Gallery gave me a tremendous amount of insight into the process and the business side of the process of showing and selling artwork . I've come to believe that the role of the artist is as described by Oscar Wilde in the quote mentioned above: to hide the artist and reveal Art.
However, in this late age of disenchantment, compounded by the extreme malleability of reality pre-supposed by digital technology, the taken-for-granted lack of privacy in the modern police states, the cult of the self and the selfy, that I've felt it important to find and explore and exhibit the truly vulnerable aspect of my self, and self-consciousness, my searching for the higher Self in archetypal forms, narratives and ideas, the missing spirit-in-the-world, which everyone knows is there, but nobody knows how to believe in anymore without resorting to dogma and bigotry. I employ a lot of techniques and ideas critical to the Surrealists practices, especially the idea of the automatic/authentic movement as a way to access the subconscious as a way of my pictures as offering points of meditation for my audience to consider the idea of this higher Self inherent in human consciousness. There is a mutual vulnerability in the process of sharing art, by the viewer and the artist. That vulnerability is the point of balance. The world navel. The germ from which ideas can grow and become values.
 |
| Oomphalos, 2015 |
 |
| Moirai, 2013 |
When in the studio, it is the happening of a picture that I cultivate, trying to remain sensitive to the magic of its' appearance, the music that comes through; synesthesia. It is the small moments, looking, moving, seeing, moving again, that establishes the rhythm of my pictures, and my life. My work is my spiritual practice, without it I am lost; I am a drowned man.
 |
| Ancient Language Pt 2, 2015 |
The trick is to recognize when a picture is flawed in the most meaningful ways, and, then, stop.
Make the next picture. In that way a history can be devised: a mythology of the artist as an experiment.
 |
| Being & Nothingness, 2016 |
The landscapes around here and the way they echo the old myths from the Mediterranean, my ancestors ghosts, and the mysteries of my own unfolding identity are a huge part of Trying To Be A Tree, present in palette, form, tone, rhythm.
As I drift into middle age, the need to love and be love, the madness of wanting to procreate, to keep the insane circle turning, the relentlessness of life, the deep, deep roots of my role as an artist, as a seer; I bear witness. It is a lonely road, full of doubt and fear and self loathing, the Artist carries these demons in his box of colors at all times. Forward, forward. Quiet now. Make the pictures.
The important thing is not to be afraid.
In mythical narratives, people transform into trees to escape impending tragedy or conquest; the gesture signifies a sublimation of the divine infatuation (called “ate” in ancient Greek-which can roughly be translated as madness, possession or inspiration) that brought ruin and suffering to mortals who became the objects of it’s gaze for too long or too intensely. It is very rare that the mythologic forms anything so discreet and logical as a chain; much more often, what we see and feel when myth is at work is a web, a net, the “nexus rerum--the connection of everything with everything else, which alone gives meaning to life”.
So, the pictures are an exploration of this mechanism, a reaction to the divine presence in every moment, and all of nature, and a desperate quest for reconciliation of "the human" and "the natural" in this crucial moment, calling for a shift in consciousness towards environmental awareness, activism, innovation and wide spread social evolution, as well as towards empathy, compassion, vulnerability and mutual respect between human beings, and within and towards ourselves. In my way, I am trying to create beautiful things. I don't think I'll ever really be able to conceal myself; my pain and my rage, my ego and my confusion too loud for that, and even the act of trying to conceal oneself as an artist can be branded and trademarked. (And the internet just keeps happening.)
But I can dedicate myself to the process, and trust in the moment--allow myself to keep learning and growing--forward, never straight.
I was so nomadic for so long.....and life was just so overwhelmingly beautiful.
All I wanted was a place to sit down and compose it a love song....
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