What You Tried to Say to Me

I had resolved to leave the Alaska of my birth, walking into a mist of all the possibilities to be expressed in painting and through the mind's lens of painting and the hands and mind of the painter and the terrible infinity of the canvas. I was not good, until I was better; I had to become better. And I saw this possibility in a painting from life of a woman whose gentle power was so compelling that I wiped out and repainted her image 60 or 70 times before the futility of it pushed me to toss it in the dumpster.

Long gone, left in anguish on that pile of garbage was the three by four foot illustration of her luminous skin, her violet top, a wry smile, her maddeningly perfect nose, all of this sunk among hundreds of distracting bad guesses of proportion, color and light; that is the painting where I learned to paint. I remember her sitting on that ugly beige sofa- a couple of hours here and there. I remember my awe of her growing as I worked - my real introduction to painting's ever-heightening of your awareness of the whole perceivable world. I remember the futility of infusing the bright colored mud with life, some echo of her being, resonant in living power before me, and in memory; but was compelled to do so, to not just passively see but to feel all of the resonances of that moment. I was trying to illustrate, to empathize, to celebrate and impress at all once. The painting was doomed.

One drive for making art is hardly mysterious. She was beautiful inside and out. Her eyes flicked with limitless curiosity, and her internal life unspoken flashed across her countenance like a puff on the ripples of a ocean cove. And when she spoke it was with quick wit, music and almost inexcusable wisdom.

Years earlier I might have tried a wheelie on a green Schwinn- I assure you I would have crashed into the nearest ditch. But the motive force is one thing; it's cheap, small-faced and unspeakably dull to reduce human life to motive force. I fell for her of course. But bread is a lot more than grain, water, salt and hunger.

It is interesting that I cannot remember exactly where I painted it. 25 years have passed. Maybe the studio downtown. I went through 4 studios in Anchorage that year as landlords pushed me out when bigger money came calling.

A few days out from the road away, I found this song; passing by late one evening, I was out, she left me a cassette with this song.

It is, by all rights, as sappy as as an old white spruce in late spring. But it hits. Even Tupac loved this song, so much that his girlfriend played it as he lay dying so that it would be the last sound he ever heard.

The Art World doesn't seem to talk about Van Gogh much, as famous as he is. I think we need to talk about him a lot more. Not the pop culture version, not the over-elevation and branding of his personal story, not the ludicrous string of half-scientific "explanations" for his artwork.
I am convinced that Van Gogh's best work is a kinetic product of him at his most perceptive, most open to the truth, most magnificently and terrifyingly sane.

I think of Cypress Trees. Simple trees, but each mark is infused with a wholly unguarded connectivity, to the earth, the light, the living air, his hand and eyes, the paint, all that is. Van Gogh was religious. The painting and the act of making it is indistinguishable from the most active and unguarded faith; I am irreligious, but at my best moments, I glance something like it; any artist could.

While painting, I've touched tenuously this connectivity between a person and the whole of the perceivable world that comes through and is expressed by the act of painting. That happened in little flashes in my garbage painting and I saw, I think, more than I could manage- certainly more than I had the skill to put in the work then.

We need to talk about what is to be a human being, and how we build and recognize that, and grow it, and why this is ever denied to anyone. And why this simple song is so close to a truth of art.
Long since, I am grateful for the gift of that cassette.

On "Untitled" 2015

Untitled is one of those paintings where I started it setting up problems that I could not have known how to finish until I dove into in - and indeed, was not happy about displaying until a key, nearly final little market brought it together enough to feel it was worth showing. Like many of my large paintings, including Patricia, Population, and another large Untitled piece in my studio, it is a of jazz, begun with a melody guessed and something of a color structure, and weeks, months, and sometimes years of refinement; it's executed reactively, in the moment, like jazz, but its structures emerge and are refined over time, like a classical work.

I've grown to like this one- it's also in that group of abstracts where I worked on the edge of losing it constantly (painters will know exactly what I mean). There are some paintings that you "give up" on early, but keep working on, ready to follow where it leads only after you surrender all your assumptions about what it SHOULD be.

If you look at the detail photo, the relationship between the two final marks: the isolated, complex and bilaterally symmetrical blueish mark in the upper right, and the leaf like folded mark in the lower right, after a lot of refinement, made the whole work well enough to show. The energetic forms that I forced into illusionistic space elsewhere in the painting (DeWitt Cheng ties this to Abstract Illusionism) could be much looser, but these two demanded very specific forms that were organically "believable," meaning that look less like paint and more like a painting of something specific.
But what? Here's a way to look at this: paintings are often about what is heard and felt, not only what is seen: if it works as visual music, I'm doing ok.

"Untitled" is available for view at my studio by appointment. Sales information is on my website, www.JamieBollenbach.com.

"Fabricators"

Buttressed by the mushier flavors of critical theory divorced from its humanistic core, this view of art in this NYT article, an old, Post-Warhol concept of the conceptual as supreme, elevates what are basically fussy collectors as artists while Artists become mere "fabricators," patronized as heroic. It that now our meaning of what is supposedly contemporary?

This view of this NYT article about what Art is, is very common in museums and especially in the high end of the art market; I think it often reflects a worldview not only doggedly amoral but hostile to that very process of creating meaning from all of the senses and all of the materials to signify what matters, art-making that has been part of the human experience since the very emergence of our species.

The "contemporary" view - at least a century old at this point - marginalizes poetry, the human hand and eye, dismisses both individuality and community and empathy. It's hostile to the value of creativity itself, and utlimately, by methodically eliminating why actual Artists- artists by any historical standard- would have any worth, it demands compliant enthusiasm for the dominance of rich people as the final arbiters of the human experience.

Ironically, it is often justified by a wholly degenerated form of pseudo-Marxist critique whose main point seems to celebrate the commodification of absolutely everything, particularly all the processes by which capital A Art is created.

You can always tell this view by the tired trope of "well Reubens/ Rembrandt/ Your Momma had assistants," or the ceaseless war on painting as a bourgeoise activity- so "bourgeoise" that every human child has an instinct for it, and you can see yourself up with a painting kit for about $30.
Museums now fill so often with half-art, cold, impoverished, 2nd tier illustration created by uncredited artists. This mirrors some patrons' Social Darwinism, Art as spectacle, as the wholly branded self, broad, empty, interchangable: parts that might as well be made by robots and sold on Amazon.

The mission to dismiss Artists as art makers seems a hell of a lot like a bid to erase Art that varies from a nihilistic world view: an erasure of deeply humanistic ideas/artworks born of the building and deepening interplay of material, hand, eye, senses and mind.

At real musuems and galleries, I take comfort in watching museum-goers invariably linger far longer, and engaged far more deeply, in the rooms of artworks sweated over and loved and credited to the people who not only thought of them, but earned the fully flowered refinement of their idea by the work of their hands and minds and senses, their whole being, physical and mental and spiritual wrapped inside the creation of the work.

That is a human being, seeing and making, in balance with the world. Why any feeling human being, let alone entire Art Schools, work so hard to destroy this is despairing

Three grumpy notes on the modern museum experience:

1. Far too many installation and video display shows take up gigantic amounts of gallery real estate far beyond their artistic merit. 1 artist (half the time skating on the craft of others) vs 50 who have might have displayed aesthetically worthy work. This habit shuts down, rather than enhances, the access of artists who are not experienced at playing the curatorial game- and those artists are so often well-connected, wealthy and all too often, facile.

2. Digital art is fine to the extent that it is emotionally and intellectually powerful: but digital art has uncounted outlets, as near as the screen you're reading this on. I love all kinds of museums, high, middle, and low, but the video- more video -MORE VIDEO has turned into a boring, repetitive, extremely didactic and emotionless experience, one easily supassed by curating for yourself at home on the screen you are using now. It should take up the precious resource of a museum gallery when A) it is truly outstanding, not merely visually loud, and B) aesthetically requires physical space to display, not merely insisting on the imprimatur of artiness that musuems convey.

3. If you show short narrative video, fine. Do it in wholly separate, theater were people can sit comfortably and it is not a horrible distraction from all other kinds of visual art nearby. Otherwise I assume your point is to shit on all other forms of art, which at points in history is fine, but don't pretend anything about this is transgressive. It's an old, old, old game now.

Open a movieplex, make a you-tube channel, sell an app, incentivize less lucky, more creative people make your work for you, install slightly unusual drywall arrangements, and make your t-shirts, like any normal capitalist operation. Fine. Just stop taking up so much space needed by any number of people who have something to show we'd all benefit from seeing. 

Fall in Love With the Damned World or We'll Never Save It

It's all wrong, a pink cream cheese flowery whip of a painting, a lovely woman painted in a lovely way with loving attention, in colors all too pretty in a room papered in pink swirls, the painting of a besotted man squirming in reverie under her bemused return of his gaze- it is grounded in her, in Miss Samary's force, alive in the air itself: an aura radiates around her and interplays with the softness and her own self-possession.

She is as breathing in this moment as any moving image; more so. She is staring with the lightest but most relentless clarity; time swirls within the painting- 150 years are a wisp, a spring breeze on the arm, a swallow of champagne.

Fall in love the damn world or we'll never save it.

La Reverie. Renoir- Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Sammary.1877.

On Hating Painting

An easy contempt for human beings comes from a lot of sources. And I can't help but notice that a lot of people who hate people hate painting. 

If you really paint you are valuing what you see - and you can choose anything as a subject that can be imagined or perceived, and all of the possible intersections.  

You paint, and begin to know it. The more you think you know it, the more it escapes from the prison of the concept that what you thought it was. It is new and strange. You adopt it into yourself. You paint it and it changes you, and you change the subject in which you have inserted yourself, and the subject of your work, in turn, changes you.

Zealots of one flavor or another often despise art and painting in particular: the finger into the sand makes a mark that escapes their control of your perception of the world. And that is because authoritarians of all varieties love the principle of control more than they love the world.

They love control because they cannot separate the rise of any new uncertainty from their own crippling fear. And art, even doodling, disturbs the illusion of control like a rock throw into a pond.

And long may it be so: it is the making of art, not tools, not language, not math or greed, that defines human beings uniquely; it is the reason that we are not other animals. Painting is the direct image-product of the human consciousness, marked by the hand into the stuff of the earth, an instinct and a gift every child inherits, far beyond words. It lives within the richest human sense, the visual, the seen, the imagined, the understood, a river 100,000 years old and running as fresh as the next mind that sees and chooses to observe.