Clocks, Maps, & a Large-Scale Disaster

Welcome to my art blog. I post here monthly at most, about my artwork and the influences behind it, with some news about current sales and exhibitions.

Currently, I have a painting in an exhibition at the New Museum Los Gatos, and eight paintings for sale through Avenue 12 Gallery in San Francisco. You can browse fine art giclée prints at my print store, and original paintings in the portfolio menu on my website.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

- James Baldwin

Clock V, ink and watercolor on paper. 12 x 12 inches.

Currently in the Art in the Time of Corona exhibition at New Museum Los Gatos.

The painting above is really about how time sort of collapsed in 2020. I have read that time always seems to collapse when there's a large-scale disaster going on.

When I started these paintings, it was a month or two into the lockdown, and I really loved the process of overlaying numbers. It created an impression I only ever get in dreams, and my life was starting to feel more and more like dreaming. Dreams largely draw on a cognitive library of generic objects and object features, which is why faces are often indistinct—and also why, if you open a book or look closely at a clock in a dream, the numbers and letters are unrecognizable. A dream clock might very well tell you the time, which you could read simply by looking at the positions of the hands, but the numbers wouldn’t make any sense.

There's this feeling that we *should* be able to read the numbers, but we can't.

There's this simultaneous stress and tedium of a large-scale disaster. Initially at least, nobody knows what’s going on, but everybody feels that something big is happening. Consuming art, music, books, movies, TV, and other media skyrocketed over the last year, for reasons we can all probably understand. Art can so easily turn into escapism, and I don't mean to say that doesn't have its own value—it is useful to get a break from your own life, and even from being yourself.

However, I don’t think those of us who make art get to use it to escape, and I think that consuming art is often not the escape we may think it is. Any time art moves you—and all good art does—you end up going full circle, until you’re standing there from the other side, looking yourself and your situation square in the face.

My clock painting gives us no information about the time, but it's still recognizably a clock. So now we get to posit different kinds of questions. We can’t stay stuck asking "what time is it?", because we can't answer that. We get to ask things like: "Why does it look like a clock if we can't read it?"

Hydrangea x Rhododendron, ink and watercolor on paper. 10 x 14 inches.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was trying to handle big changes in how I took care of my baby daughter, as well as my elderly parents. Fortunately, my parents live in the same city as we do, but at first we saw each other only through glass, and then only outside. So one way or another, I started spending a lot of time in gardens.

I got really fascinated with flowers, and I started combining different perspectives while painting them, and trying to find it’s real personality in the different layers. March is definitely springtime in San Francisco, so everybody's gardens were blooming. The gardens felt like placeholders for neighbors who were sheltering in place, or even sick, or in quarantine. Flowers became reminders—like they were saying hey, somebody lives here.

That gave me a lot of hope and energy when I really needed it, painting growing flowers while it seemed like the rest of the world was holding its breath.

In progress, 2021. Ink and watercolor on paper. 21 x 28 inches.

I actually started the above painting over a year ago, at the beginning of 2020 before the lockdown. I was certain I had ruined it, so I put it away. I had spent maybe thirty hours reproducing—freehand—an 1805 map of Stockholm on a huge, thick, expensive sheet of watercolor paper. When I finished with the map, I added some impulsive changes, and when I stepped back, I hated how it looked. Honestly, I was so mad I almost tore it in pieces. Instead of stuffing it into a drawer, I put it up on my studio wall, as a reminder to think things through before doing something permanent.

But now it was January of 2020, and it really started feeling like there was some hope again. I looked at this painting again, and I wasn’t mad anymore. I thought "can I save this?"

So, I started making…I don’t know how to put it. More of Stockholm, I guess. They were elaborations of the cityscape at first, but soon I was inventing coastlines and landforms, designing whole villages on the fly, parceling out land that didn't even exist. As I layered the maps, they got more wild and less like the real Stockholm. So the painting became even less like the modern map of Stockholm than it had been at the beginning, but more like my experience of Stockholm, where I had spent time in 2015 and 2017, on the two extreme ends of the seasons. I made something I had thought was unsalvageable into the start of a beautiful and meaningful new painting series, and I was also doing world-building. These feel like good activities for this second year of COVID.

I always try to make art that surprises me and makes me ask new kinds of questions instead of dwelling on questions that have no answer.

None of us can know what’s going to happen, but we can ask ourselves what kind of place—mental or physical—we want to live in.

How can we make such a place for ourselves?

How can we share it with others?

My beautiful studio space at Workspace Artists, San Francisco

My approach to the 1805 map of Stockholm seems like a similar approach I use with my clock paintings. It's not about just freeing yourself from your situation, it's also about looking at your situation from a new point of freedom, and changing it.