Hello, bloggers.

Ever since I arrived in Ireland, Richard has been asking me what I’ve been doing in my studio.  I thought I knew, but I wasn’t absolutely sure because I was experimenting constantly with the Dip, which is what I call the process I use to begin my paintings.  In the Dip I’m always using different types of gesso and linseed oil.  I used to have many assistants but now I do a one-person Dip, and I always have a different formula and procedure.

When I arrived here in Ireland, I had many, many canvases, all in huge boxes.  So with my new procedure, I didn’t have anybody take them out.  I took each individual canvas out of the box, the cellophane, the stretchers...  As I opened the boxes, it almost became a ritual, because I was able to think about what these white canvases were going to finally become. It took a number of days just to organize those, and then the question of what to do with the boxes, since I knew I had to ship them out eventually.  So that became part of the process.  It’s like the old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Around this time, I was watching the weather forecast, which told us we were in for some unusually stormy weather.  This drove me to work harder and longer on the dips, because there’s only me and the materials fighting the inevitable rain, since I work outside as well as inside.  I was keeping one eye on the horizon for the thunderstorms and the other on the pots of paints and other materials.

I filled these great bins with newly dipped paintings.  Then the rain started and kept going and kept going.  It’s been one of the worst rainy seasons they’ve seen here, even the old-timers.  I then had to change my modus operandi, which is working inside and outside, and through this adaptation I was able to continue developing my process.  Working on the inside only had restrictions tied to it, in terms of how much room I had to stack all these paintings.  I knew I would have to stack them in a different way than I usually would, due to space restrictions. My paintings spend some time on their backs, some time on a slight angle, and in other configurations.  So this new arrangement then created a whole new set of circumstances.

Therefore, when Richard asked me what I was doing in the studio, I had to really think about what I was doing.  I was reacting to the reality of the world, so that procedures changed.  When I went into my archaeological dig into my psyche about what I was doing and why, a strange thing happened.  I came up with the name of one of the early icons of my life, back in the 30s and 40s:  Dr. Albert Schweitzer.  He was, in my time, what Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are today:  people who go into Africa and work with the people there.  Albert Schweitzer was probably one of the first who was lionized by the media.  Everybody liked to show how great they were by going to visit him for a week and then coming back and crowing about it for the rest of their lives.

Schweitzer always fascinated me as a kid.  One thing that always stuck in my mind was how he respected all forms of life, including animals, insects, even trees and grass.  As a young person, I was really struck by something that was said by a person who had spent some time in Africa building something with him.  During the course of the work, they came across these huge ant hills, which in any normal course of events would have been destroyed to make way for the building.  But Schweitzer wouldn’t allow that.  He respected the domain of the ants.  I found that very curious at the time.

Most people would probably view that as taking things to extremes, but I believe there’s something to learn from it in a world where we institutionalize everything but don’t really give the credit to the things around us.  It seems to me, in this world of the computer, that many people are retreating further and further into a non-person, non-intelligent world.  So not only do animals supposedly not have intelligence, but could it be that people don’t either?  Is there no dignity to anything except the me-ism we see everywhere?  Are we giving more of an honored place to the machine than we give to an actual person?

I don’t know, because I’m computer illiterate.  I do know that the computer is a great step for the human experience, but if it’s cutting off reality in favor of the mundane thoughts of the whole universe, then we as people could at some point become a distraction, a negativism instead of a positivism.

With this sort of crazy thinking as the backdrop, I was looking at my paintings, thinking about what they’re really about, which is tolerance, understanding, and hope.  I look at the process of painting as a partnership between me, the canvas, the paint, the turpentine, the linseed oil, and so on.  So because of the weather and the space considerations and the effect on how I was painting, I asked myself whether in a way I was becoming a dictator.

This was the beginning of a meditation that led to some interesting inner and outer manifestations.  In my next post I'll share some of that with you.

Have a good weekend,
Matt