don pelota

I started painting in college. I was a creative writing major who discovered late in my college career that my childhood tendency to draw tanks and spaceships was hinting at a deep desire to make art. What I learned, thanks to my mentor Dale Johnson, was to paint landscapes on canvas. I still love juicy, painterly landscapes. George Bellows, Chaim Soutine, Claude Monet (his later stuff is like painting porn to me) and Joaquín Sorolla are just some of the people whose work can give me goosebumps.

Despite my love for landscapes, in my own work I find myself returning to a strange mix of direct painting and monoprinting, which I call “monopainting” (see my monopaintings). I’m sure it’s already a thing, and I could look it up if I bothered.

Typically, I will begin a painting by painting directly on the paper, making random blocks of color in a rather lawless and intuitive fashion. Oddly enough, the compositions at this point end up looking like landscapes. Often, I lay this base color at the end of an evening’s session with whatever leftover paint I have (I hate to waste paint!). At the next evening’s session, I come back to that “canvas” with no idea what I had been thinking the night before. Which makes me perfectly happy to negate the initial image and begin overpainting using type blocks or by painting on smaller pieces of paper and transferring the paint to the canvas using my hand, a brayer or the back of a brush. I continue that process until I’m either stymied and abandon the piece, or I feel that I’ve wrestled the composition into something that I can live with. That’s the process in a nutshell.

Here’s what’s interesting about monopainting: you’re only barely in control. Sure, you mix the paints and make attempts at creating shapes by painting onto the type blocks or paper scraps. But the application of the paint is imprecise. Not all the paint adheres to the canvas. Nice passages are created and then accidentally erased with the next layer.

With this process, I’d say the formula is:

• 50% randomness
• 30% unforced errors
• 10% skill
• 10% luck

I frequently get the opposite shape I intended because I didn’t properly reverse the image when I painted it onto the scrap. I don’t always modulate the colors well, which results in some unfortunate juxtapositions of color. In almost every painting, I paint myself into a corner (which is to say that I end up with an ugly composition or imbalance of colors that will require a radical intervention to correct). But that’s also part of the process.

The whole effort can be described in two parts: you create trouble and then try to extricate yourself from it. Which mirrors the writing process. You’re never really able to look at a plan and then head straight for the endpoint. There is always wandering, trials and errors and dead ends. You often end up in a bad place. It’s always darkest before dawn. And hopefully, you’re able to kill your darlings and launch a bold intervention that brings the piece back from the brink.

Occasionally, I pull a rabbit out of the hat. The mistakes might align to produce something that holds. I’ll let readers judge which of the pieces on this site are successful. I’ll tell you right now that most of them are not. But that’s ok. I told myself that in starting this blog I would just post the work, regardless of how imperfect a piece might be. I see more value in sharing it all, rather than posting only the best pieces and giving the impression that I’m batting 1000.