Control And Conflict

Dormant Does Not Mean Never 2010

Another piece from my new series on paper. Hoping to go bigger and bigger with scale and eventually attack the giant empty canvasses that hang listlessly on my walls. But they can wait. Something about working at this scale has revealed a whole new side to my technique--which is a constant battle between control and conflict. After getting carried away with precision, I have a tendency to destroy. The product being a clean kind of dirty; a gritty smoothness of light with dark, bright with dull. Opposites truly attract. Maybe one day I shall master this marriage, but right now these have been born out of wed-lock.

Bound Masterpiece

I could not be any more proud of my father and his accomplishments as an artist. A book on his life's work Immaterial: The Art of Augusto Albor was published by ArtInformal and released just a couple of months ago. Putting all biases aside, this book is visually stunning and features some of the best work Augusto Albor has to offer from his career spanning 30+ years.

To my parents and children

This book has been in the works for sometime, and now that it's finally here, I can't stop leafing through its fresh smelling pages which have gotten me almost sick with nostalgia. Some of the work I don't recognize--especially the earlier pieces which were sold or given away before I was born. But there are some paintings and sculptures in there which I can recall him slaving away at in his studio while I skipped around him like a pest clamoring for attention. How he tolerated me at the time eludes me. To his annoyance, I even remember suggesting certain colors to add to certain parts of the work in progress. And they were colors I knew he always used--which must have made me all the more annoying.

New Photography

I finally made it to the photo lab to have about a dozen rolls of 35 mm film developed (C-41 processing). I was pleased to find quite a few images I really liked from last month's visit to Las Vegas and Yosemite. Though before I go on, let's not confuse these photos with the photography project that I have yet to unveil, and which I wrote about briefly in a recent post. I am waiting for the right time to present this project, and would like to do so only after I show them in person to a few collectors.

The other pictures I took along the way (including the ones here) have been posted on my website, which now has a "photography" section. Photography is not my forte, though I do consider it to be an interesting and crucial outlet for my artistic expression. I am by no means a professional in this trade, and only get by with the minimal knowledge that I possess. Having said this, I am still proud of the images that arise from my investigations with the camera obscura. I place myself in the world in a different way when I am armed with my SLR camera. I am borrowing what I see: repositioning the mundane onto center stage, creating a dreamworld out of something that already exists, or simply framing something I find beautiful in a glorified way. I am not creating something entirely new from pieces of imagery dug up from my subconscious "visual bank". But like my painting, I remain inextricably the subject and the creator at the same time.

Fish Head Placement

Found a home for my fish head, and now I must begin the layering process. Still in a pickle with this piece so I'm going to let it rest in my head while I work on something else. I will be sure to post a picture of each layer as I go along to give an idea of how I work on my drawings.

Fish Head Soup

I had an impulse to draw a fish head today, and now I must find a home for it in the chaos of multiple half-finished work scattered all over my studio floor and walls. Because the pieces I am currently working on are from studies I collected while living on a farm in Hawaii, I've been creating images that pertain to island life. Naturally, the image of fish found its place in my head. The fish is a very powerful symbol and I plan to use it in this series. It also reminds me of home where fish heads are plentiful in our local dishes. Filipinos love to suck the juice out from the brain cavity of a fish head after it has soaked a fair amount in soup. When I was younger I refused to go near them because I thought the act of sucking on a fish head was too intimate. It looked like you were making out with it. Now, I find this act to be very satisfactory.

I Never Once Slept Through The Sun Rise

I Never Once Slept Through The Sun Rise 2010 (from my new series)

I've been spending long hours in the studio...mostly in gestation. Most ideas still very much in utero, but studies and sketches in full bloom. I'm working differently again. This always happens after long bouts away from the studio. Once I break a routine, I notice I never really go back to it in the same way. I have yet to establish structure in my artistic life. I don't say this because I think I need one, but because I actually want one. It's a personal challenge I'd like to see myself triumph over. A challenge that will have beneficial outcomes for my work ethic. A solid work ethic is very important to me. It's a cleansing process. And I feel purified after long stretches of hard work. As if I've just uploaded hundreds of gigabytes from my inundated brain onto my work table--my sketch books, my paper, my canvas--all filled with new raw data.

I am currently working on a series of drawings that represent the time I spent farming in Hawaii. Strong colors and patterns are coming out, which I didn't expect so much. I'm still on the fence with a few of these pieces still in production, but I am intrigued by the element of surprise each one has to offer. I really cannot predict the outcome of a single piece of work currently. I may start from a photograph study of the wild agave plants at the farm, and end up with a picture that is less about the plant, and more about the geometric shapes around it. I love watching it unfold in front of me.

My Inks

My tattoos should be read like photographs. Images frozen in time and space--not moving forward, nor backward. Not moving at all. Zero inertia. Still epitaphs of the person I was and was not; of who I wanted to be and who I didn't want to be. A moment captured; a moment gone. Great symbols of nothingness; tokens of being.

I attribute my tattoos to my spontaneous character. They have all been products of my impetuous and fickle nature, and my zeal for personal expression. I care very little for them in the sense that I harbor no ill will towards anyone who decides they don't like them. I am rarely offended by this nor do I feel the need to defend them. I am not particularly attached, nor am I beholden to them. They simply are. My ink will never define who I am and will never encompass the whole of my complexity because unlike them I am alive; I am not static; I am not frozen in time and space. I am a creature of change and I continue to evolve, leaving behind a trail of immutable symbols, of lost words and images.

But I won't remove them. I don't hate them. I sometimes look at them fondly because, like photographs, they do bring me back to a time and place; like a memory compass. But most importantly, it is my story which I am most proud of. Tattoos can serve as great narrative tools. My own tattoos, however, are nothing but tiny fossil fragments of a personal history that is still being written. Each one unique in the memories they conjure. But let's be clear that I do not need them to remember. My memories and dreams run deeper beneath my skin. My tattoos are not as real to me as my own consciousness and imagination. They are as superficial to me as the clothes we wear and the jewelry we don. Taste is liminal. There is nothing permanent about the things we use to express ourselves. Which brings me to the conception of the tattoo on my left underarm: "liminality".

In The Studio

I'm on a roll. I'm trying to come into the studio as if it were a 9-5. Attend to my duties like a good employee. I plan to have two weeks of intensity consisting of lows and highs, small mistakes, big mistakes, bliss and woe. I always start off slow with more self-doubt than anything else. It takes me about an hour to get a grip and come to terms with what I need to do; what direction to take; which mood to quench. It has nothing to do with a lack of caffeine or stimulation, but everything to do with my own body mechanics. And most times, I honestly can't tell you what it is exactly that inspires me to get on with a piece of work. It just clicks like a spark to lighter fluid. My inspiration to paint isn't always the same as what I consider to be a constant stimulant to my own existence and lust for life: Nature, Love, Desire, Sex. I don't dwell on these when I'm creating, or when I'm trying to create. I just create. Because I am a product of all of these to begin with. I am all of the above.

Ode To Campfires

I'm not exactly writing an ode to campfires, but more a collage. I haven't camped out as much as I did this past summer and so I decided to paste all the adoring photos my friends and I took of the campfires that have kept us warm in the last couple of weeks.

Showtime

Now is the time to lock myself in the studio until my Manila-bound flight in three weeks. I am practically exploding with new ideas and have a bunch of opportunities knocking at my door. When it rains, it pours! And I mean this in a positive way. The only minute negative detail is the fact that I will be forfeiting my studio space at the Art Explosion Studios in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. September is my last month before I have to say good-bye to this little space which has been my solace for the last year. It just makes sense in this current juncture that I save on rental costs until I get a better sense of what's to come in the near future. Besides, why pay for a studio that I will not be using for the rest of the year? I've been using it as a storage unit more than anything else. My travels have kept me away.

My recent trip to Nevada took me into new territory--not just physically, but also artistically. This time, with photography. I've always played with this medium in creative ways, but I decided to make it my main instrument for this particular series I had in mind. I admit, I'm a virgin to the ways of digital photography, so I made sure to solicit the help of a photographer friend in order to keep the technical components on point. I don't even own a digital SLR so I definitely needed the support and equipment to follow through with the shoot. And I am so grateful to her for all of it.

I'm currently trying to wrap up post-production on the pieces (very minor polishing up) before I can confidently unveil the new series, but I am feeling a tinge of excitement over these images. Keeping it fresh has kept me on my toes and looking forward to revealing the different ways in which I am able to make my ideas come alive.