Work-in-progress

I always believe questions happened for a reason. And last Fri afternoon, it did.
I replied a painter friend with a questioning statement - why I feel more than I think? On Fri evening, another dear friend gave me the answer.What a wonderful life it is. Answers coming to our doorsteps. Thank you.

On 26/1/07, at 2:21PM
Hello Ben,
I'm only honest to friends.
Jan 15 post is not about you. So, be happy.

You aptly described my imagination of a series and that involves the nasty tedious process you mentioned. You have to trust what I say, sometimes. I don't paint but it doesn't mean I can't feel what a painter feels. I don't own a business but it doesn't mean I don't have the left-braincells to tell you what makes a people tick. Trust me on this. I'm making a living out of it. :-)

I don't mean to kill the rationales literally. The Analog paintings give me the impression that you were calm while doing it. Am I right?Again, a feeling. I have no idea why I feel more than I think.I'm not ready to post our discussions on the blog yet. There's some "sacredness" to it which makes me uncomfortable - between us and the topic.
- Ade

On 24/1/07
You've never been one to cover up your real feelings. I looked at your blog today and saw the photos of your exhibition and the comments. I wish the photos were bigger because I still don't quite grasp what it was all about. I also noticed your entry for January 15th and felt like it was directed at me. If it wasn't, forget it, but if it was, it doesn't make me very happy.

I like the way the 'Analog Painting' turned out, but I don't know what the purpose would be in making a series of them. What do three or four of those paintings say that one doesn't? They'd all look the same, and changing the colors would just be a superficial move in order to make a series. One idea I had about a year ago that would make sense as a series was to use the same taping-off-lines strategy, but making the piece a true analog by taking a real piece of music and transcribing it through color into a painting. For instance, each note of music would have a corresponding color, and each time that note occured in the music, a line would be made with that color. The first line at the top of the painting would be the beginning of the piece of music, and the bottom would be the end, and in between would be the progress of the whole piece transcribed into colored lines according to the notes or ranges of sound. A series of those paintings would make sense because you could make a piece for God knows how many songs and pieces of music. There are two large obstacles in executing that kind of thing. One is that I can't read music, nor do I know anything about recognizing notes, tuning or pitch when listening. My connection to music is an emotional one, not the connection a musician has who appreciates technical virtuosity and perfection. That's why I made the analog painting - to celebrate the romance of the 'sound' - not the music. The other obstacle is that the first analog painting took eight months to complete and each successive one would take just as long. The reason it takes so long is that I can only make a new line when the one before it has dried. I can't put tape on a line that's still wet. The rationales will not be killed, because this isn't 1950 anymore when artists could throw paint on a canvas and call it meaningful and be exhibited. That was the modern age, and this is the post-modern. Whether an artist wants to be a part of it or not, it is, and they belong to it. You can't ask an audience to erase fifty years of art from their minds at the door. Technique has been mastered in all its permutations, and all that's left to be explored is content and ideas. That's where art lost the common person - when it became something that people had to think about instead of an exercise in technique. People want art to be easy, but it's not. You don't go into a genetics lab and expect to understand what they're doing, but if you spend the time to research chemistry and science, you'll begin to understand it. With art, people expect magic. They expect to look at something and immediately know everything about it, and they want that 'everything' to be something agreeable. That's not how art works though. It's like any other field of expertise - it requires some work on the part of the viewer to achieve understanding. An artist who doesn't know what to say HAS nothing to say. Ideas are the only currency in contemporary art and it's never going to change from here on out. That doesn't mean art has to be cold and clinical and void of feeling - artists just need to be in control of what they do. My work is all about romance. Not in a man-woman way, but in the longing for something gone by or just something 'better'. It's a reaction against the predictable and the common and the 'wrong'. It sometimes asks for pity, and it's also about martyrdom and standing up for what you believe in the face of long odds.
-Ben


On 23/1/07
Ben
You can direct your mails to this address. It's more convenient for me to use the office account than hotmail.If you've read my latest blog entry, you'll know that we are living in parallel lines with my recent exhibition and your analog paintings. Such coincidence.

I took an excerpt from your mail to reply my friend who masterminded the cassettes. I hope you don't mind. Check out the Comment section under "the making of [O=O].I like the bigger piece of the analog paintings. The distortion and disproportionate waves disturb my vision, makes me uneasy. I suspect it'll have a bigger impact if i see the actual scale. The bigness may kill me - I want this one! You can extend this analog into a series. Music and painting are your 2 greatest interests - you have a lot of stories to tell through it. Please do it.


Yes, I recognize the Broken Tree from the last mail. I like it but I wouldn't hang it in my room. It feels commercialize, like the ones you find at IKEA (google it if you don't know). You experimented well - the one-color litho definitely tells the story better. I like the inversed one, both the colors and the fact that the position feels odd.Dead tree is amateurish to me. I don't like it. I don't like the subject matter too.You are in your paintings. Kill the rationales, but I can feel your calmness in some paintings better than others. You were at peace while painting the analogues. Tell me if I'm wrong.- Ade

On 21/1/07
Here are some more recent paintings of mine. The images were taken with a digital camera, so they don't look as good as if they were proper slides. The 'Analog Painting' is a big piece (4'x4') that took me eight months to finish. The idea behind it was that I wanted to make a painting that celebrated analog sound, which is the reel-to-reel tape method that sound and music was recorded before digital technology. I like the warmth and the imperfections in analog sound much more than digital, so I wanted to figure out a way to show that in paint. I came up with the idea of taping off thin lines of paint, starting from the top, and for each line I sealed the tape tight on the top edge and left the bottom edge a little loose so that paint would leak a little when I brushed it on. I wanted the lines to be really thin so that the leaks would show up more and be wider than the lines, thereby highlighting the imperfections. When I finished each line, I figured out what place in the line bled the lowest on the surface and started the next line from there. You can see this in the detail image. As a finished piece, the lines kind of cancel each other out and the bleeds and spaces are what you see, i.e. the representation and celebration of imperfect sound. You'll recognize the image in the 'Broken Tree' (these are not official titles) paintings. I didn't like the crispness and modern colors of the piece I made before with this image, so I decided to remake it using one-color lithography. I wanted the image to look like a really early 1840s photograph/daguerrotype where you can still see evidence of chemicals in the photographic process. However, the image is not a photographic image, and that's my way of validating my aesthetic - by making it look like it was recorded in time. There's a gold sheen on the surface of the two pieces - especially the first -that you can't really see in the images I sent.

The 'Dead Tree' piece is another piece where I used the one-hole-punched photographs of tree leaves as a representation of a processed environment. In my body of work as a whole, these circles of foliage have come to represent all that I don't like or disagree with in the world. Basically, it represents mankind's hand in the world, which I mistrust. So, in this piece, among this processed environment sprouts a romantic-looking tree from a romantic floral embellishment in the border and the tree has died after being exposed to the processed environment.

Later, Ben.