I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
I mentioned in yesterday’s post Weight Loss Medis and the Re-Architecture of Desire that I was having trouble producing paintings that I liked and that I enjoyed painting lately. I don’t know if it has to do with my recent start on Wellbutrin, an atypical antidepressant, that I’m using to curb overearing and overdrinking. Maybe it was just a block as I was trying new things.
Yesterday I made an attempt to push through the block.
I’m not done with my Motion Memory series but I wanted to try something else, something with metallics. I’ve been so into studying precious metals lately that it seemed a natural thing to do. Speaking of natural, I thought maybe I’d do metallic forests. I have been reading Naomi Novik’s book Uprooted, a dark fairy tale about a menacing wood, and that seemed like a good direction.
But painting forests bored me. I wanted to do something industrial instead, something machinery like.
Inspiration from Claude, and from a robot sculpture
I discussed it with Claude and asked for color palettes using a taupe background mixed from titanium white and raw umber, a mix I don’t normally use. Raw umber is a weird color, a muted dark brown that is more yellow than red. Burnt Umber, one I typically use in my background mix (with black) is more reddish. Raw umber has a greenish or grayish cast to it. Mixed with white, it makes a kind of greige — grey beige — that isn’t like anything natural, to me. It’s more like a Pottery Barn interior paint color from the year 2000.
Claude suggested seven color palettes that consisted of this taupe background, additional neutrals, and a pop of color. I picked “Monochrome + blood” to start with:
Base: Taupe through black (full gray scale)
Pop: Cadmium red medium or alizarin crimson
Vibe: Drama, tension, Franz Kline but warmer
That color scheme reminded me of the robot sculpture Can’t Help Myself by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. This robot moves around and attempts to clean up a red fluid that’s leaking out of itself. It only makes a bigger mess in the process.
I saw the robot on a trip to Washington, D.C. maybe ten years ago. It was mesmerizing and disturbing. Today, it makes me think of Byung-Chul Han’s achievement society, where everyone is always trying to do more and be more and achieve more. And sometimes all you do with that is make yourself and your life a mess.
My first mechanism painting
I decided to call the new series the Mechanism series. I like that word because it suggests machinery and mechanics but it also suggests the mechanisms of culture and society that oppress us or uplift us (mostly oppress).
It’s a little weird and it reminds me a bit of the machine version of the final creature in the Demi Moore flick The Substance, a body horror film that is truly creepy. The painting suggests a machine of sorts but it’s a frankesteinian one. Maybe it’s a conveyor belt and there’s a pully system, but it seems to be leaking. And what’s the arm doing? Who knows — but it’s recursive.
I named it Auto-Exploitation to recall Han’s idea that in the achievement society, we exploit ourselves. We are both slave and master. The master decides what goals we’ll have and then the slave must pursue them. Usually these goals are around conventional and external success, acquisition of money and material things, and making ourselves look more and more handsome or beautiful. In contast, in the obedience society that came before, it was institutions like workplaces and the government that exploited us.
I’m much happier painting industrial/mechanical appearing shapes than simply suggesting nature with my abstracts.
I’m excited to get started on another one today, perhaps with this color palette from Claude:
Cool Minimal
Base: Taupe, cool grays, blue-gray, cream
Pop: Cobalt blue or phthalo blue
Vibe: Steel, winter light, precision