Al Di Meola at City Winery Chicago 2015 Print

"I relish fluency in making a mark, pure and very simple, layered over with this contained chaos; does the beauty still show through the dark matter and bring forth these pockets of memory?" Lewis Achenbach : Unfine Artist We are to say, a piece is not finished until it deteriorates into nothing; compost. Art has a self life and we should aggrandize a work's demise. Working through the ugly to recognize the beauty. The glass Duchamp. The crevices on an aged oil painting. Transcripts fall apart in release. A tale retold until it becomes another story; your story. Icons repeated until you identify and the work can move on. Above yet another idiosyncratic couch. The poignancy is, hopefully, in the receivers' moment with the work, that is taken with, to another piece. The act of painting is a dialogue that I have with the surface; a call and response. The process is facilitating the work to unfold into it's proper form. It starts as a solid automatic writing pocket of actuality. A memory, a channeled expulsion, a tug at purity and singularity. Currently, I try "˜not' to paint in a representational way. Attempting to harness an essence of (non) subject. The high challenge is to maintain the honesty of the initial mark-making, as the work proceeds. Colors "˜ask' to be next to one another; layered and passing on the surface. A story proceeds with color marks, slashes and logical moves. The work tells me that it is finished (for now), or that I've gone that one stroke too far (moving that particular piece into another phase of treatment; a chastising or salvaging. A return to prime with sculptured paint ridges underneath). I purge found surfaces to work on, from the streets of NY and SF, to disguarded planks surrounding my studio. Burnt wood, stones, ancestral tools all play essential parts in a completed piece : as pattern makers, derived designs and symbols of influence. Ninkisi nails removed get re-enlivened; sins reduxed. Revisiting past works has come to fruition. Example : a river flood altered paint sketches in the studio and have been reworked accordingly. Water lines and smudges have become "˜work from' points; a collaboration with the elements exterior. Entities, ancient writing and animal formations are manifest. I am not concerned with making anything beautiful at this point. Something genuine and real is motive. In my vocation life, as influence, I (we) do collective art with behaviorally challenged elders and youths.