I sometimes fail to remember the depth of my presence.

If life is like color and there are complimentary moments to balance it all out, the good with the bad, the bright with the dark, then right now I’m making sun-kissed lemonade. The weather in San Francisco was ridiculous the past few days, heat in the high nineties, anxiety to match, insane molten sunsets, onyx-like waves at Ocean Beach. Beautiful and difficult.

I just want to check out. I try to deplete my calendar and it fills up as quick as the page was turned. How do you say no to your friends when you adore and love them so much? It feels like shaving off skin to deny us time together. If nothing else, spending my time grinding away stress on a bicycle has been a high point. Biking should be mandatory. Bike manufacturers should receive subsidies like farmers do. Taxes from heavy polluters and unnecessary SUVs should subsidize zero-emissions travel for youth to get them into the habit now. Things could be so much cleaner.

July is just around the corner and my vacation from work isn’t scheduled until August. It seems as though everyone is visiting or returning home in between that period, too. Last night, during a decompression walk, I had the idea to just take the summer off. Stop trying to put all my energy into making art and just say no to creativity. I immediately began to think about how to conceptualize and visualize the process directly after the first thought, so we all already know what a failure that choice could become.

Lemonade.

As soon as I am done with my morning tea, I am headed over to the paint store to pick up a couple of quarts to start a new project. One would think I would be printmaking, hitting the silkscreen, but no, and I haven’t even collaged in three weeks. Ebb and flow. Marathon not sprint.

The project I am starting is actually going to be paintings derived from a collage I made. I’ve never thought myself to be a painter, but, more an image maker, idea translator, concept constructor. I am okay with this. If I am never described as “painterly,” I will not suffer. However, with all this talk of planning and ideas and process over the last few months, banner moments of indolence and otherwise spontaneous detours, I sought and found my motivation and direction. Here’s to no flat tires when I get to my car.

Does anyone else not care about the new iPhone 3G? I don’t. It made me think that one of the last major diseases (nearly) eradicated on the planet was polio and that was back in the fifties?! How much technological advance have we come forward with yet how much additional suffering and unhappiness are we swimming in now? The increase of pollution and corporate corruption? I have yet to understand the real purpose of a hand-held computer device as such; I realize most of the planet is hooked in to the excessive capitalist drive and that is what I am hinting at. But, what rocked my cradle were hearing of all these people who a) “couldn’t stand to wait until July” to get the toy and b) “can’t wait” to trade in a one year old piece of technology to…upgrade?

While I own an iPod, I don’t use it very much. It’s my third and it has become deprecated from my life. Same with my cellphone (my fourth,) I don’t enjoy using it, but it’s my only phone line and the object was free and the monthly fee was cheaper than the last. I have text messaging and internet access disabled, too, because it just seems unnecessary in the end. Yes, I realize the ‘value’ to having maps-in-hand and the ability to communicate in a crowded restaurant, but for 1970plus years we made do without it. We even eradicated diseases in those centuries. People used atlases, wrote memoranda, and stayed focused on the activity at hand instead of being engulfed in the palm of their hand. It just appears to me to be an extended form of masturbation.

I read a brief article on purposelessness and it spiraled my thinking wildly out of control. I will have more to say on this in the future. I will write you a text-message.

(For my faithful readers, I am trying to get commenting open, however, I seem to have a glitch in my Wordpress. Thanks for your patience, I really want this to become a participatory forum, but, I have not yet solved the problem.)

What is the goal of creating a color chart? The first challenge with any piece of artwork is to stimulate enough dynamicism to keep the viewer engaged whether visually or conceptually. Color charts and color grids generally provide nonobjective images for the viewer to interpret any sense of emotions or concepts related to the experience of viewing such image, or objective images that have been magnified to a level of abstraction. But, in the case of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance” or Gerhard Richter’s “256 Farben” with such infinite combinations, no one is able to discern any one final interpretation, except perhaps anonymity or the phenomenon of permutations.

Secondary in color charts is shape: the outer format of the whole image, and the inner format of each individual area of color. Uniformity or contrast, parallel or perpendicular proportions between edge of image and edge of shape, rectilinear grids or jagged formats, et cetera. What do we interpret from the design choices of the artist in arranging hues?

I think that color charts provide the artist a suitable turf to become alchemist with geometry under the guise of hue positioning.

Sometimes you just realize you are never going to have an experience that you desire. An idea will remain in fantasy alone, trapped, lacking the proper actors to play the role. And while we use experiences to fix our ideas, some ideas are indelible, unchangeable, and solid.

This is okay. The human process is made with an infinite number of ideas and experiences to have. And while we may sometimes repeat the same ones over and over, improving upon it each time we go, occasionally a new idea and experience comes to the surface for us to share. There is permanence in death, there is permanence in loss, there is a permanence to a moment lost in the past.

Ideas remain well on after the expiry of their birthright… to both our benefit and to our own demise.

The quote from John Baldessari that I posted last week, “Solving Each Problem As It Arises” is incredibly inspiring to me. I wasn’t yet twenty when I saw it for the first time, and for all I can remember, it was my first major contact with a Conceptual Art piece. On first view and reading, the premise is simple: Baldessari discusses his feelings on how artists process through ideas and lead themselves through work and to an exhibition. A fairly simple quote, and a fairly simple idea of painting a quote (or an idea) on a canvas.

As one learns more about Baldessari and his work, and the more one examines this work in particular, one can begin to appreciate the finer nuances that really makes this simple idea a grand work of art.

The real presentation of the idea, though, falls on these two facts:

1) Many of his paintings were not painted by him, but by others who were commissioned to perform the work needed to realize his ideas;

2) If you look carefully at the painting, you will see that the immediate problem presented was squeezing all the letters of the words onto the canvas. You will notice the varying sizes of the letter O, some wide and fat and others, most prominently on the right side of the canvas, skinnier.

With great simplicity Baldessari demonstrates in his design that sometimes the way an artist solves a problem is by shoving things in, reducing things down, hyphenating, kerning, shrinking, and otherwise making like-things different from themselves to get the idea across. The process is now the idea. In our daily lives, as artists-all-in-our-own-right, we perform these actions everyday, whether it is an extended hug with our loved ones, or coffee on-the-go as we run to catch public transit. The idea might be “do this now” while the reality is “limited space/time.”

Idea, problem, and resolution in one moment.