about the process

For me, painting has always started with the subject (what the painting is of). Some people like to come up with all the content (what the painting is about) before they get started. What usually happens for me is some idea/image will pop into my head and I try and figure out how the hell it got there and what its significance is. This is usually resolved through thinking, researching anything and everything related to it, going through the well of information/personal experience. All while this is going on, painting is taking place, as a way of working through these ideas. The problem with this way of working is of all the hundreds of ideas going through my head, whose to say which idea is the right one. It’s like a relationship, they all seem like the right one at first, then after 5 paintings you realize there’s nothing there and you’ve wasted a lot of paint and canvas. But such is life, the bad paintings are just as significant as the good.

Not to mention that the ideas might not even be a painting idea, it might be a video idea or a print idea, or a three-dimensional idea. As an artist you need to move through mediums to do what you need to do, be all that you can be, it is what it is. I’ve had painting ideas that I couldn’t do in a painting but made a great video, drawings meant to be sculptures, paintings turned into prints. One big dialogue which mirrors the interior dialogue of the brain/psyche/unconcious. Thoughts leading to thoughts which lead to more thoughts, making the un-visual visual. It’s like therapy, only the kind that makes you more insane, one that thrives on the bizarre and wacky.

“I don’t work in terms of conscious messages. I can’t do that, it has to be something that I’m revealing to myself while I’m doing it…which means that while I’m doing it I don’t know what it’s about.”
-R. Crumb

"When you’re painting, you have a central thought that pulls in various kinds of details, and that’s the way you make a painting. You go in a direction, and you gather up whatever you need to move that way. It’s not necessarily that you have planned to make a picture like this. It’s not, “Well, now let’s say something about myself.” You’re saying, “Now let me make another painting.”
-Jasper Johns

Intro

So I was jogging the other day, listening to Blood Sugar Sex Magic, and it must have been around the 3rd mile or so when my mind started to take off. It's my favorite part of the run, and it's where I do some of my better thinking. For some reason on this particular run I decided I wanted to create a painting blog. Why a blog, and why should you care? Well, I'll tell you, keeping in mind that by doing this I'm really telling me because I don't care whether or not you read this. I'd actually prefer you didn't, but hey, I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life. I really just need to defend my masculinity by claiming I use things like myspace and blogging for artistic purposes. That being said, I wanted to create a blog that had some kind of artistic intent, showing a painting in various stages, while at the same time keeping my thoughts in a place I can find them. Of all my notebooks filled with writing, I'd be lucky if I could read my own handwriting, forget about finding an interesting idea.

The whole purpose of this blog is to trace the evolution of an idea. As an artist, primarily a painter, I've always been interested in the way an idea changes and is shaped through the artistic process. So what I'll be doing here is trying to map out this whole art-making thing, begining with the original idea and hopefully ending in a finished product, accompanied by images of the works in progress (sketches, drawings, paintings, videos).

And as much as I am reluctant about letting any asshole into my work/head, if I learned anything in grad school it was that writing and talking about your work/bouncing ideas off people/getting responses is pretty healthy for the work and helps it to evolve. I also learned that I never want to live in the midwest. How's that for $40,000

So here it is, A Painter's Blog. Durer and Degas had their letters, Donald Judd wrote essays, now it's Johnny Paintbox's Blog. Welcome to the 21st century.