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Eleven Approaches for a New Art

30 January 2022 by Rey Armenteros

Approach and method are used interchangeably, but I view them differently. To me, approach is how you start a project. It could also mean how you restart a project or some creative task. It is the course you are about to take. It is the way you enter something.

I exclusively use acrylics and brushes in all my work, but I have eleven approaches. I have given each approach a name. Pure Drawing is when I use bone black acrylic, and with brush in hand, I draw in the method of a graphite, charcoal, or ink wash drawing. It is the most elementary approach because it usually involves nothing more than one color on a gray or white ground. When I use a gray ground, I may use white and other grays to give the tones more depth.

Pseudo-Watercolor/Tempera is the general approach I take to painting. It is more like watercolor if I start with a transparent approach, and it is more like tempera if with an opaque one.

If I use carbon black in the spirit of ink drawings or woodblock prints, I call this approach Ink Line Concoctions. I call it this strange name because I start with a white ground, and I do no preliminary drawing under it. In essence, I am inventing things as they come using the black lines to create these improvisations. It is my excuse to satisfy my penchant for seeking out pure black lines on an immaculate white surface. This one is about nostalgia, a look back at my old ink drawing days, and it becomes a sudden urge to work in that way again.

Flat Coloring is when I take opaque colors and draw the forms of what I am trying to depict at the same time that I am coloring with them. When I’ve covered all the ground with one or two dozen of these colors, I wait until they dry and then delineate the forms with carbon black. I then go back to the opaque colors to shape the figures and objects therein, and then I return to the black lines to reinstate contours. I may go back and forth several times before it is finished. I follow this strange approach in the hopes of getting the flat coloring you can get in printing. I like the flat clean look of mass-produced things, and this is my way of attempting something similar.

In Linear Gray Painting, I work with carbon black and titanium white on a gray surface in a specific way. I put down fluid mixtures of the carbon black with a liner brush and then open into these areas with titanium white on a dagger brush, using a spiraling motion. Like this, I create swirling gray forms onto the flat gray ground. The paint may insinuate forms within the forms, and I seal these with black lines. Though the linear component alludes to drawing, I view this as painting.

When I doodle with a ballpoint pen on a scrap sheet of paper, I take one long line and spiral in forms that create figures. This is difficult to do in paint, even when it is fluid because the line usually breaks before you can finish. (Basically, you run out of paint.) I have come up with a way of extending the line. I lay down titanium white on the white ground, and I draw a line of any color on this while it is wet. If I get my amounts of wet white and wet color just right, I can spiral as much as I want on one dip of a liner brush. I finish such drawings with a contour line in carbon black around all pertinent objects in the image. This I call White Wet Drawing, and I have a dry version where I use a fan brush and take up the line with the next prong of hairs without having to recharge my brush with color for at least a couple of minutes. Actually, I have a third version where I use a liner brush with one hand and a large round brush loaded with liquid color with the other, and the larger brush touches the liner where the hair meets the ferule, essentially loading it, allowing me to never lift the liner up until the long doodle is done.

One-Stroke is something I picked up from craft painting books. In One-Stroke, you can give a modeled look that goes from dark to light. The trick is that sometimes it takes dozens of tries until you get that perfect one stroke. This is what I do when I look for a smooth graduated transition on limbs, objects, continuous surfaces, and nondescript things that need tangibility. I also call this wet-wet, as an abbreviation for the popular technique named variously as wet-into-wet, wet-in-wet. and wet-on-wet.

Wash-on-Stroke is my play with wet-into-wet, though the techniques themselves have nothing in common. Actually, this is what they call a resist, so it might be more to the point to call it resist-over-textured stroke. I don’t know, but I first make strokes with heavy body paint or thick gel medium. I let that dry. With color thinned to watercolor consistency, I lay over just the right amount of watery color so that the color gathers in the crevices of the strokes, forming the appearance of lines and textures you had not seen before. This one is like watching a photo appear into existence, but you have to get the right amount of water, or it won’t work. Too much water, and the colors go everywhere. Too little, and there won’t be anything to see. Trial and error is commonly needed for this to really work like magic. After the forms and figures come to life, you almost always have to go back and use other techniques to clarify these forms.

I have a rough, painterly wet-wet approach that I call Lurid Monsters. It is about unchecked brushstrokes and ugly colors, smearing together so that everything looks hairy like a werewolf under spotlights of red and green (or other color combinations).

The last two approaches are the extras, and I use them but rarely. The first one I call Extrusion and Spatula. With one hand, I extrude color or medium from a bottle or eye dropper or such vessel, and with the other, I commandeer a standard kitchen spatula of the silicone variety to cake on these paint applications. This one takes a lot of push and pull, where every layer either gets closer to what you want or farther. It’s like a game of keeping your balance on a bucking bronco, and it is not until you are sitting straight and erect in the saddle for that one instant that you need to recognize that you are finished and stop instantly or suffer more and more consequences.

And Constructed Impasto is my way of getting an unnaturally deep impasto effect with acrylic skins attached to the painting. Acrylic paints can’t give a painter a satisfactory impasto. So, I use dried acrylic paint skins to place together using an acrylic medium. This can create a contorted — almost thorny — texture on which I paint thick amounts of paint that are mixed with a gel medium. The results almost always look abstract, no matter what I do.

Each approach is only the beginning of a drawing or painting. In the middle of an image, I may switch gears and try something different. For example, I may take a painting that I started with Linear Gray and add color glazes on top of it to enliven something that might not be working at the moment.

It may sound eccentric to number and name eleven approaches. I need the variety in my work, but at the same time I have to organize it in my mind so that when I work, I don’t just pull out random occurrences based on whimsy.

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Geisha Machinations

17 October 2021 by Rey Armenteros

“Come on, you got to help me with this thing,” Max repeated. I said not interested.

“I don’t have anybody else to do the art for me,” he insisted. I said tough.

“Why don’t you think about it?” he offered. “It might be good for you.” I said screw you.

Yeah, that’s right! Max had it coming. It was always a problem with him! I had done work for Max in the distant past, and I’d be stupid to do anything for him again. Good luck, and remember to close the door on your way out.

Yes, he was a friend, sure. But for matters of work like this, this was the only course I could take. I don’t do work-for-hire. I have learned my lesson. My decision wasn’t going to ruin him. He’d learn to live with it.

I allowed my imagination to go over the possibilities of his having to find the artwork for the geishas he wanted from some other source. He’d have to go pay somebody up front, first of all. He could probably only afford some second-rate artist, or most likely somebody straight out of art school. It made me chuckle.

And from there, I started coming up with a story behind these geishas he wanted that were now kind of ingratiating their way into my unconscious and making themselves conscious for me. If I were painting geishas, what would they look like? You know, geishas, for the purposes of art, did not have to be Japanese. You could almost be making a statement about that iconic figure, the geisha. Think about if you made images that came from all walks of life. And if you did not exercise the ideals usually associated with them, imagine the artistic merit behind such unexpected incongruities as a black geisha, for instance! What about a male geisha? What if I based geisha portraits on people I used to know, trying to bring up faces from my memory? That would be an interesting game.

I don’t know if it is my propensity to make up stories that had me coming up with reasons why an artist like me would even paint geishas in the first place.

Up until then, I have had nothing but bad experiences with work-for-hire, including every instance with Max. But I was turning and turning what could happen if I did help him. It was just conjecture.

Within a week, I was calling him, telling him I was seriously thinking about doing it. He just wanted these geishas, I know. He wanted geishas for this card game version he was trying to license from a smaller game publisher. The publisher sold a popular card game, but they rented licenses to people that wanted to make different versions of their card game and sell them on their own. Max wanted a geisha version of their game, and he had been in contact with their top guy about it. The top guy wanted to see images. Since Max was not paying me up front, I was going to take liberties with it. I knew he wouldn’t mind.

But I had already made up my story around it. I told him he had to do me an important favor. “Sure,” he said, “anything.” (What else would he say! He was giddy as a schoolboy.) My stipulation in our work-for-hire agreement was that he could not tell people that he was hiring me but that he was giving me a commission. He asked what the hell the difference was? To his ear, it was the same thing. Okay, true. Yes, of course. One was a fancier version of the other. But the way I have always felt about it, commercial artists were hired, fine artists took commissions. He was waiting for more.

Okay. And I went into this elaborate story about how (supposedly) he had seen my own paintings on geishas and how he was so taken in by them, that he wanted to use these paintings that were already finished for the card game he was trying to license from the publisher. If anyone asks how he saw them because we live in other sides of the country, he could say that I had wanted his opinion on these geishas and had sent him images of them. You fell in love, I insisted, and needed them in your little card game.

He didn’t understand why I needed this technical difference.

I needed this, I said, because I didn’t want some schmuck coming along after looking at my work and thinking they could hire me for some work or other. These are not illustrations, I finally came out and said. This was art. You were hiring fine art and using it as illustrations.

“Okay, okay. Whatever.” Max wasn’t convinced it would work my way, but if that was all I wanted…

When we hung up, I started going over the details of my story. If Max did not hire me, and I had done these geishas as my fine art work, as I had made it up in my story, why in the world would I be painting geishas? To make geishas out of everybody? Ok, sure, but geishas were that exotic symbol for Japanese culture. It had been romanticized to death. What would a serious artist be doing with geishas in the first place? I would have to need a pretty good story for this one.

My story had to be airtight because I didn’t want people seeing through my art, as if pinpointing some cheesy whim I had for these geishas. The geishas were just my way of making portraits of anybody. I wanted to have freedom with the faces. I didn’t think I was painting anybody ugly, although my tastes and the tastes of the common person are not in any way related. Essentially, all of this back and forth led me to the original concept of making geishas out of anybody and materializing them from people from my past.

I know my concept was thin. I still didn’t have a very good reason as to why I was painting these geishas, but at least I was going about it a little differently, and this was always better than perpetuating the stereotypes. I went to work on them.

When I showed him the first batch, he said that they were more like art than the type of illustrations you find on playing cards. He started skirting the issue, but basically he wanted more sexy but without getting sexual. When we hung up, I detected that he was being nice. What he really wanted to say was that he couldn’t use them, and I could infer logically from that observation that he was probably now having misgivings about asking me to do this.

If he didn’t want to pay me in the end because the job was not done to certain standards, that was his problem. It was not going to ruin our friendship. Plus, I could sell geishas to anybody, as actual paintings, as real art — I had no doubt about it.

Do you see the problem? It’s right in front of me as I am writing this down, but it wasn’t clear to me when I was in the middle of it, coming up with these plans in my head about what was supposed to be real life circumstances.

I did another batch, and I was getting closer. I sent them to him. He kept saying they were too good for a card game. This is art, he kept saying, not the graphic type of work he needed. I was aware of what he was talking about. Mere illustrations were going to knock it out of the park. High art was going to do nothing but scratch heads. I still believed I could get both: recognition as an artist with an idiosyncratic outlook on geishas and a good commission from the selling of these cards.

I guess I was too much of an artist for my own good!. We joked about this, but before hanging up, my laughter had already dried up. I had no idea where I was going to take this scheme for making geishas. Really, I was out of ideas. After spending too much time thinking about it, I called Max right back and asked him if he had examples of what he had in mind, to send me some goddamn pictures already!

Right away, he sent me some empty-headed online images of women in white skin and bouffants wearing dresses that vaguely looked like bathrobes converted into negligees. This was the subtle sexuality he was shooting for? “Not too much T&A,” he had told me, “or the geeks would feel uncomfortable playing this card game.”

I found it appropriately ironic that the hypothetical geeks he was talking about probably needed more sexuality in their lives, but as long as it were not in their board games.

Okay, that meant the nipple could not press against the garment, but the breasts themselves had to be ample enough to hold their own in a men’s magazine. I was starting to admit that there were now too many balls to juggle. For an enterprise into fine art that was trying to be sincere, my artistic intentions were cheating their way toward the truth. I knew my story about making these geishas as an artistic endeavor was starting to fall apart. My art was more idiosyncratic than I even knew. I was having mixed feelings about this, happy that I was different but wondering what that was going to cost me in the end of all this subterfuge with the world at large — but really, with myself!

I went back to the drawing board and cooked up seven more geishas. It took me quite a bit of meandering, but three weeks later, I was sending him one after the other, geishas simmering in the juices of saturated colors with breasts that could push through the shapeless vestments of a fantasy kimono.

He liked these, even after remarking once again that they were like art in a gallery, too beautiful to look at (which read like volumes about their actual value in this venture). He contacted me a few days later telling me that he showed a couple of people, and somebody was asking about my work. He didn’t know what to tell him, so he was asking me about that story I had been fishing up about this being art that Max had seen in my studio, or something — he couldn’t remember. He thought I should just come out with it — the truth. And if I did, you never know; maybe they’ll buy something from me.

I had to sit and think about this one more time. Because I had also forgotten the intricate plot that went with this. I took every element of my story and gave it a structure like something from a psychological novel, and then I laid it out for Max in the simplest terms, hoping that simplicity was going to get me out of the quagmire. When I got back to him, I gave him my condensed story in under five minutes. I asked him if he got all that, and Max said, “Oh I’m taking notes.” Ah, humor. I had him recite it. In the end, he told me he’d try, and he said it with a little tune at the end of it that meant, “Let’s see?”

We stopped talking for a while. Max didn’t need anything from me anymore now that he had submitted my most recent geishas to that game publisher, and I had nothing more to say.

Months after that, it occurred to me that I had never heard of what the publishing company thought about Max’s cards and my art. I wanted to ask him when the checks were going to start coming in already. I got Max on the line. He didn’t give me a straight answer. He said he too was still waiting. I told him to give them a nudge, that we were growing old already! A couple of weeks later, we were talking about it, and I asked him if he got ahold of them. He said they weren’t returning his messages. I asked him how long it took him to design that little geisha version of their game for those game publishing ingrates? Because, as I laid it out, his hiring me had cost me well over a hundred hours of work.

I started to get the idea that we were never going to hear from that publisher. All this time, I thought I was going to see actual money at the end of this, at least from the asshole publishers, but doubt was written all over this little endeavor of ours. I had forgotten half the story behind my geishas and am now trying to sell these strange little gems online without any backstory worth a sawbuck.

And waiting for the orders to come in, now that I had forgotten about the concept and being a genuine artist and laying all that to rest already. In the meantime, I was coming up with an elaborate rebuttal for the next time Max asked me for anything. I was baking this story with lots of vinegar, because when I gave him a taste of it, it was going to make him cry. I can already hear his reaction, like a whistle sharp enough to break glass.

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Making Paper out of Paint

05 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The “paper” is that middle strip with the figures

 

I wanted to get into a paper show. I hadn’t worked on paper in a few years. I called the exhibition space and asked how flexible their definition of paper was. They said, well, what kind of work do you do? I told them I draw and paint on paper I make at home, and then stick that onto a plastic panel. They said that satisfies the definition for works on paper.

I was actually stretching the truth. The “paper” I work on is actually acrylic skin. I make this paper with acrylic grounds and mediums, like modeling paste, gesso, and fluid medium. I apply layers of these substances on silicone sheets. When I’m done with a paint skin, I easily peel it off and adhere it to my painted panel. The work I was going to submit to this show titled, Works on Paper, had no real paper in it. And yet, I wasn’t worried. It wasn’t like they were going to inspect it and then disqualify me.

Ever since this show, I have been looking at my process as a paper-making process. It makes sense. The concept alone propels me into making the many layers of paint to properly make my paper.

It takes over a week to make a small batch of this synthetic paper. I don’t just make these things on silicone sheets; I make them on polyethylene kitchen cutting boards with various textures, and this makes my painting surfaces have the textures of woven papers and laid papers, giving my make-believe paper a world of variability.

The only problem with it is that it is too demanding. It is the same old work, with little variation, year after year. The process of placing spread after spread of paste or gesso is the type of work I don’t find pleasant. It requires no thought but it does require concentration. And this is a bad combination for you if you need some manner of mental interaction in which to sink your teeth into.

When I am painting, I am completely engaged, working with a concept and executing the steps to get me satisfactory results, making on the spot decisions and changing plans, making the whole drawing and painting process into an elaborate game. The comparison with making plastic paper is accurate. This is the one aspect of my art process that reminds me of the hopelessness brought to life in Albert Camus’ work.

In his novel, The Plague, Camus delivered the same inexorable doom chapter after chapter— you knew exactly where you were going three hundred pages later, and in making skins, you know where you are heading a week and a half later, after hours of work and concentration. Camus’s novel is striking, but I still wonder to this day to what degree I like this one work. It is thoroughly depressing, it puts your life into perspective, it puts on display the most extreme bodily function: that of survival against the inevitable. The characters have nothing to engage with because they are stuck in this city wherein the plague is getting worse, and they can do nothing about the quarantine or their condition. All they can do is wait.

In Japan, I met an old man — he wasn’t exactly an old man; he looked older than he was because of the infirmities that he had to suffer. He had complete white hair. His voice was feeble, and his demeanor whispered the burdens of a convalescing gentleman. But his face was still smooth. We were teaching at this worn out middle school, where the students were in control and the teachers were the last vestige of order and reason against the coming apocalypse.

I was a sort of teacher’s assistant whose only real use in the program was that I was the only one who could speak English in a native accent for the students to try to emulate. The convalescing gentleman was no longer a regular teacher, teaching only some of the time, only when his condition allowed it. He was very surprised by the state of the school.

He would turn suddenly to watch two eighth-graders fighting in the main office, knocking over chairs and slamming into faculty desks, and he’d comment about how bad these students were getting. None of the regular teachers were breaking up the fight — no, a few were actually getting out of the way. That was what it was like in that school, where the teachers were afraid of the students. It took two tall, male teachers a full minute to decide to break up the fight because it was getting serious. They got up and did just that, and my colleague was appalled, and I would have been too if I hadn’t already known the school for what it was. It was that kind of school, the kind I was intimately familiar with growing up in the States, but not the type you would ever associate with Japan.

Student behavior and the teacher reactions to the students were predictable. There was nothing shocking about it once you understood the rules. After a while, we both accepted it.

We would talk about things. We both had ideas we absorbed from books. This recovering teacher was a reader like I was. He confessed that no other book had ever affected him as did The Stranger by Camus. He told me it made him think about things as a young man, and he was never able to reconcile the ideas Camus was presenting with the course of his life. Camus laid out a reality that he did not want to accept but that he could not ignore.

When I read that book a few years later, I thought of my Japanese colleague. It was a story with a simple premise. The notion that someone would gun a stranger down for no other reason than a fickle momentary response was too surreal to take seriously. The inevitability at every stage thereafter was as dependable as water eventually boiling under heat. No surprise ending.

It left me wanting more. I never read it again, but I would recall moments at the beach before the shooting and moments in the jail, and the plain tone that depicted these unlikely and yet unavoidable circumstances digging into a finality and a simplicity that was total.

The rolling of a stone. This is the making of fake paper in an art career. Two plus two equals four. If you say that enough times, you will find just how fascinating this equation actually is. But once your kids understand that there is a connection between this and two times two, and then two to the second power, their minds will begin to find patterns. Patterns can be interesting. They can lead to concepts. Patterns and concepts and many other observations and ideas creep up when I work on images, but they never do when I am making my plastic paper.

In Camus’s version of Sisyphus, Sisyphus rolls the stone up the side of the mountain only to have it roll back down to the bottom. He does this over and over, for eternity. The rolling of the stone exudes the meaninglessness of our actions. It makes me think about what it is I do, and I don’t like to think about that stone.

And this is where my hell is going to be located, with making paper for no good reason. I am going back to an episode of a TV program titled Night Gallery. It was Rod Serling’s short-lived resurgence of Twilight Zone ideas. A hippie ends up in hell, and he’s in a waiting room asking when he was going to be taken in already. The other people waiting alongside him are all manner of annoying people talking to him about every nonsense. Finally, he can’t take it anymore, and he goes to the receptionist window once more and demands to be taken into hell already, and they inform him that the waiting room is his own personal hell, since this was the sort of situation he had always hated when he was alive. Of course, he screams as the other waiting room people harass him, and I can feel his pain because my hell was the one of over and over rolling a meaningless stone, making a dozen sheets of blank, plastic paper, concentrating on this in order to get to the real endeavor, waiting for the day when…

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Techniques in Black

11 July 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Black lines are my way of chiseling definition in my acrylic paintings. Lately, I use lines that are alive with variation. It is the line type I witnessed in Japan when contemplating the Japanese calligraphy. The thick black lines in certain Japanese letterforms cover as much area as the white ground. The lines taper drastically, and one line would connect with another at an angle that feels perfect. I make lines that are distant relations to what I found over there.

Comic book artists spot blacks. This is when they choose certain areas in their drawings to cover in black, and they do this to propel certain parts of the image forward and for particular effects, such as creating forms that come out of a pool of black or balancing black areas with the non-black forms. Often, a figure will have almost as much black on it as not, like a silhouette that is partially visible. Having used such heavy-handed methods before, I am now bringing them back into my images to see how they tie things together.

In drawing with a brush, the hatching techniques you use can be more like “feathering.” This is when your parallel lines have more body to them; they taper in ways that are inherent to a brush. I have been looking carefully at woodcuts and wood engravings. There is a similar line there. It is usually a more rigid line, but it has the same taper. The difference is the lines are white instead of black, and yet they create black lines nevertheless; the black resides as the negative spaces of the white — or vice versa. There is also a simplicity to woodcuts that I covet in my complicated thoughts and permutations, in how I constantly turn and turn an idea until it is exhausted. Simplicity is the key to stronger images.

In my old search for styles when I was a youth, I came across two techniques that I used in my drawings. The first one came when I discovered that you can overload a brush or dip pen with ink and draw with thick, wet lines that slipped and thickened all over the drawing. You can manipulate blobs of black and create some of those black areas comic book artists were using. But I was using it in a silkier, more silvery way because I was allowing streaks of white to interplay with the black. Using this overly wet technique, I was imposing a shiny and smooth finish on everything.

A couple of years later, I was also working with broad black areas, and I found a way to give a figure dramatic lighting by infusing certain parts of a figure with pure black. And if you had enough of these black areas creating the figure, you didn’t even need a contour line to tie it together. A viewer would still be able to read these black and white splotches. Later, much later, I would see that this technique I “invented” had been used countless times by other artists, and I am thinking now of Kathe Kollwitz. The nice things about not including certain contour lines is that a drawing can insinuate something through strange juxtapositions without coming out and showing them.

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The Duchamp Effect

29 December 2020 by Rey Armenteros

You can define this effect as that set of circumstances that prevents you from pushing a work of art forward. Fortunate or unfortunate, the effect surfaces when an accident puts a halt to the forward motion set by the decisions that came before it. At once, the painter is paralyzed when contemplating the next step.

Accidents appear in art in all sorts of ways. Some works of art were put together more by accident than volition. As an art student, when I started shading, I didn’t want to make faces in the mirror. So, I got accidents. My policy of making things up however I liked produced strange results in a hypothetical portrait, such as unwanted pencil mustaches, patches of scrawled sideburns, coal marks on one side of the nose, unfinished goatees, hairy foreheads, and Hitler.

Those types of accidents were not the good kind. But the Duchamp Effect comes from the happy accidents. The worst version of this is when the accident you just had when that damn brush fell from your grip makes that corner of the painting vibrant! You eye that corner with jolly surprise, because it is perfect. But then, there is the rest of the painting to contend with, and it is only related to that corner because it happens to be attached to it. All that to mean the painting is not actually finished; so you continue working on all the other parts to bring them to the same level of that accidental piece of perfection — without hitting the stellar corner itself, of course, or you’d ruin it. And then, that fortunate accident becomes a curse that you will dispel only when you finally acquire the courage to obliterate that explosion of good luck and move onward already.

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A Little Respect for a Thirty Thousand-Year Old Tradition

22 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

As an artist who uses paint to make his objects, I take a measure of color and mix it with another measure of color. I try to get it just right, but I often overcompensate so that I have enough. I then choose the right brush for the job. It depends on the size of the area I am covering and the shape of it and the effect I am trying to get.

When I apply paint, there is a three-dimensional aspect that might not be taken into account unless you’ve done this before. The paint goes on a surface that has some form of surface characteristic. It could be a texture, or it could be something more subtle than that. As you apply more paint, you are adding onto this surface. Even with a medium like acrylic paint, which is supposed to dry flat, you get a buildup of layers that add to the surface tension. The next application of paint will be affected by what lies underneath.

The changes of surface can grant different possibilities. If I work a wash of color on a granulated surface, it would spread through the crevices and create a soft cloud of veiny transparency. If I applied pasty opaque colors on the same surface, the colors would skip over the tops of the granulation giving me broken colors. If I scrub the same paint on that surface, it would give a hazy, dirty effect. If I dabbed three different colors from my palette and let them work wet-into-wet onto that surface, it would be and yet another effect that I cannot quite predict right now because it would depend on the proportions of color and the amounts of paint and how diluted they are, among other factors. And that underlying surface would affect my efforts in one of many, many ways that I’m not sure can even be categorized.

Once the painting is done, we have something else that the surface of the painting does. These are the possibilities of the painting for the viewer and not necessarily the artist. The painting catches the light a certain way because of the surface. The viewer detects that surface with every shift of their feet or slightest turn of the head. Light shimmers and plays off the surface making it alive. This painting has a tactility on display that is in every way a part of the painting and that can not be recreated in any reproduction of it, whether in high-quality photographs or video recordings of it. In fact, it is an object that may be mostly flat, but it has a third dimension of depth that is there, even if small and subtle, and this depth creates the agency of life in this otherwise inanimate thing.

Furthermore, the direction of the paint strokes might move along the form of the figures in the painting. They might help to intimate corporeality in the depiction of humans, flowers, buildings, or mountains. In a nonrepresentational painting, globs of paint concoct their own delight. Swirls of glossy paint can look exquisitely delicious for no other reason than to celebrate the combination of colors that may only hint at something else like an old reminiscence, not just through the color palette chosen, but through its transparency and thickness.

Layers of transparent colors create optical effects that can be seen in no other way, as the old masters have shown in countless paintings. A cloth painted in purples and whites and yellows all mixed together would not be the same as the same cloth made with strokes of the same colors in translucent layers. The former is alla prima painting, and the latter is working in glazes. You have the option of one or the other, as well as many other methods. Your alla prima painting can be an impasto work that juts out of the surface in puffs of color like on a birthday cake, or it could be textureless.

I think these are valuable properties in a work of art. It has weight. It takes up space. It possesses the physical properties of an actual object. I can make things happen with these properties. I can appreciate them as a viewer when face-to-face with a painting on the wall. I can hold it and turn it around if I wanted to.

When I think about the limitless physical qualities of a painting, I wonder what about it can be said to be an analog? What does that even mean? Analog? What is the painting analogous to? Since making art is the oldest thing we humans have evidence of doing (as shown in works of art that are far older than anything else that survived antediluvian civilizations), I come to the conclusion that making a painting like this cannot be an analog to anything humankind has any memory to. So why do some people call it analog painting? Yes, there are people out there that call actual painting, analog painting. Where did this inappropriate term come from?

If you are familiar with the term, then you might have a guess about its origins. I have a theory. The software industry responsible for the imaging systems on computers had to come up with new terminology, based on clarifying the products they were releasing. They were touting the line of digital imaging, and under that broad umbrella, there was something they were developing they called “digital painting.” It was basically forming computer “tools” that attempted to emulate the experience of making a painting but solely on a device’s screen. How do you distinguish this from the other kind of painting? You couldn’t call the medium of pushing paint around on a canvas as “real” painting because it made your product sound flimsy by comparison. You couldn’t even call it “physical” painting, because even though it sounded a little more neutral, it still implied the same thing.

As an industry, you want this new term to fulfill two things at once. You want to distinguish that other product from your own product, and you want to put down the older technology because you feel your product is superior to the old-fashioned materials. You reach back in the recent eras of technology to fish around for some word that could sideways label the old stuff and at the same time deliver it a backhanded slap. Other digital industries were already using the old word “analog” to rest its case about what was so inferior about anything that was not digital. What better word?

So, why am I insulted? It is ironic, because if you are not in the business of making art, you probably never heard of analog painting. It is the working professionals themselves — the ones who should know better — that have adopted the term. I doubt most of the public is even aware of digital painting or of that ugly term for real painting.

I have nothing against digital imaging in general. It can produce some innovative images, and on occasion, I get inspired by someone coloring a comic book with a strange palette I had never seen before or by a graphic designer who juxtaposed elements from various images on a poster or website page. There are fine artists that do marvelous things with computer imaging, and my defense is not leveled against any of these areas.

Digital painting, on the other hand, is a branch of digital imaging that doesn’t always bring about the most interesting results. This is when a digital imagist strives to push around pixels in a manner that seems similar to the way that paint is moved. Through an indirect device, “digital painters” try to rehash painting techniques established by physical materials that have always had direct access to these techniques.

This new type of pixel manipulation has a plethora of brush possibilities that can create all manner of effects with whatever color you choose, and you can manipulate them afterward. You can even invent your own brushes and tools in the program. Digital watercolor has wet-into-wet. The strokes of digital pastels admit textural patterns analogous to actual pastels. And so on. But is it the same?

I have always found it a little strange that this growing new technology aspires to emulate a technology that is at least thirty thousand years old — and not doing it too well as I write this. It may one day actually fool everybody, but even if that ever happens, it cannot emulate the physical properties of a painting on a glaring screen. You can’t get those properties when you print it out either. In essence, you are making a painting that does not really exist except as a bunch of colors that come on a device when you summon it with a few clicks. As technologies make their shifts over the coming decades and inevitably supplant older ways of viewing image files, I would be a little concerned if my career were mostly based on work that takes up no space in this world.

If you are a commercial artist that wants to make a painting-like illustration for a client, then I can see the great advantages of “digital painting” over anything that came before it. It is convenient and fast. If something needs alteration, it can be done without tearing down anything from before. Everything is saved, and if you ever have to go to a previous step that might have been buried under some color, then you can. This flexibility is invaluable to someone who is working on the clock, where time is money.

I guess these thoughts are really for those that are aware of digital painting and the other term and have not really thought about why they even use the other term. You can call the work of illustrators digital painting if you want. In my view, you don’t have a painting if you are not in fact using paint, but I can understand the convenience of this term and will not roll my eyes the next time I hear it. But please, please do not call what I do analog painting. There is nothing analogous about it, the term does not mean what it describes, and you are going to risk insulting me and every painter that is practicing today, along with every painter that came before all of us.

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A Trial of Random Sequences

21 August 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I was thinking about this because I was reading Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire. Neil Gaiman wrote in the introduction that Moore quoted someone else when he said that you can start anywhere in a circle. His novel was supposed to be seen as a circular path, I suppose where you could take the end and connect it to the beginning and make a ring out of the line of the story. Gaiman even suggested starting the book wherever you like and then wrapping back to the beginning to finish whatever you had left out.

I was momentarily fascinated by this idea, and it brought to mind sequences of numbers. When I cast for a sequence of numbers, I think about what is random. I have used the 312 pattern before, believing it to be random, and reading Moore’s novel as prescribed by Gaiman would be similar with 231 — starting the novel in the middle and then going back to the beginning. The difference with my 312 is that you’re staring the novel toward the end rather than the middle.

I have to distinguish the meaning of random. It does not mean for me the casting of dice or something similar to get any number that was not provided by voluntary choice. It means the implication that a set of numbers is random because they lack a pattern. In essence, it is an artifice.

So, I realized that you really can’t get a random distribution with just a sequence of three numbers, because they can still imply associations.

A sequence needs at least two numbers. Two numbers can only give you 12 or 21, which implies forward or backward, and there’s nothing random about that. Three numbers gives you 123 and 321, which have the same problem as 12 and 21. As I mentioned, 312 and 231 also create a logic, with you starting somewhere in the middle and then finishing off the earlier parts. That leaves 213 and 132, and the problem I have with them is that one of the numbers remains in its own spot; 3 is in its proper spot in 213, and 1 is in its spot in 132.

Maybe four numbers are needed then. 1234 and 4321 are out for the reasons already established. 2341, 3412, and 4123 are also out because they give us a sequence that begin from somewhere in the middle and move toward the end and then wrap around to finish the rest. Of what’s left over, anything that starts with 1 (such as, 1342, 1423, 1432, 1324, 1243, 1342), have the problem of having at least one number falling in its proper place, and we can also preclude the ones that do it for 2, 3, and 4 (4231, 4132, 2431, 2134, 2314, 3124, 3214, 3241). That leaves a few possibilities that do not have these patterns. But when I look at 4213 and 2413, the implication shows that even numbers are grouped at the start, and with 3142, the odd numbers are at the start. 4312 has the odd numbers in the middle, framed by even numbers, and 3421 has the opposite results. That leaves 2143, and I have to say, if I can see one flaw in this combination of these numbers, it is that the evens are in the odd places, and the odds are in the evens. So, I feel it is impossible to display a random line of numbers without any implied meaning unless I make the sequence larger.

I think five numbers might do it. We already know some of the problems against a random implication, so I won’t bother listing dozens of numbers. I will fish for a number and see if there is anything wrong with it. 34251 might be the answer, and there might be more than one answer to this when using five numbers. It has none of the issues that we have described, but I have a feeling that if we stare at it long enough, a problem will arise, because patterns present themselves when new facets occur to us. After looking for a minute, I actually recognize something that does not bother me as much as the above qualities, and yet it makes me wonder if there isn’t something better. The pattern I found is that you start in the middle and continue a line going backward and forward to the next available number until you run out of numbers. From 3 (the middle), you go back to 4 and then forward to 2, and then back to 5 and then forward to 1. There has to be a better possibility.

25413 feels like it can cover the problem. It looks random, and I cannot demystify it into a pattern with my normal modes of interest. I haven’t looked deeply into the possibilities with a five-number sequence and feel there might be a couple of others.

This makes me think that what interest an artist has with numbers has nothing to do with all possibilities, as it might in math. It has to do with the right number for the right job. It has to be an exact number fulfillment or the work falls apart.

It also makes me think about how the appearance of a random number is anything but random. If it were truly, random, any number would do. You would just blindly pick one from a lineup of available numbers. To an artist, random is the absence of pattern that would intimate some form of meaning. When an artist is talking random, they are talking about the implication of random and not the actual phenomenon.

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Through Concentrated Breath (the essay)

10 July 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Meditation-type drawings like those I did in Korea can be used like training in order to later work with images in the mind. I would sit in front of a blank sheet of paper. When I loaded my brush with ink, I would pull in a deep breath and close my eyes. Keeping my eyes closed, I would exhale slowly and completely. I was taking away all thought from my mind as the air exited my mouth. Once it was all gone, I was ready for the cycle.

The cycle encompassed three identical breaths. With my eyes still closed, I would inhale for about twelve seconds, hold my breath for twelve again, and let it out for another count of twelve. This was done two more times. On the third time, I would make the drawing. Each time I inhaled, I tried to summon an image in my head. When I held my breath, I would outline for those twelve counts just how I was going to go about doing the image with that particular brush that was loaded with just so much ink, and what would go first and second and so on. On the third breath, as I released, I would either blank my mind and start all over again, or if it were the third exhalation, I would make my marks on the paper. During the duration of that last exhalation, the whole thing would be finished, nothing more than a handful of strokes that to others would signify nothing.

I invented this type of drawing exercise based on what I knew about sumi painters, how they would spend long moments “becoming” what they were about to draw before putting brush to paper and executing the drawing within seconds.

Without this mode of drawing I did in Korea, I don’t think that I would have been able to deal with my current artistic work. The Cycle can serve as the base form of working with shadows behind eyelids that can strengthen your vision of mental pictures and how to deal with them in drawing or painting. Maybe this is what we mean when we say we are drawing from our imagination. With my eyes closed, the eyelids provided their own shadows not inherent to images in the mind. But they came together in the end.

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The Self-Made Stranger

19 June 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Why pretend that you are marginalized? Am I that different? I could make an angle from the whole Cuban thing. I think that’s what certain publishers want. Recently, my book of essays got declined, and the publisher argued that it was interesting but that their publishing house focused on the disenfranchised. It was their brand.

And I put some thought to this. My essays focused on the plights of an artist. He had expressed interest when I had first sent him my query letter with the pitch. He thought it could fit with his label, and he requested the manuscript. I waited six months for the response. At one point, the publisher asked me some questions about how I envisioned aspects of the book, which gave me an optimistic outlook on his reception of it. Eventually, he rejected it based on their publishing philosophy. As he explained, they focused on underrepresented voices. I already knew that, certainly, but I had felt that an hispanic artist with a history of obstacles would comfortably fit within these parameters.

What can be more underrepresented than an artist that has been doing it his own way throughout most of his career? Someone who doesn’t fit his art into an accepted model of what the public considers an artist? A person who has had to struggle because ot this, who has affected his family because nothing is coming out of his work? This struggle was recreated in many of the essays, and I felt it was simpatico with the publisher’s needs.

There are all types of marginalized people, but I can’t think of one more marginalized than an artist that doesn’t fit into any mold. Then again, if marginalized is becoming an industry, there are very specific types most of the public has in mind, and such an artist who essentially constructed his own plight voluntarily would be left out of that marginalization.

Back in my Miami days, I was once told by someone in the gallery circuit in Coral Gables that I would have a much better chance if I labeled myself a Cuban painter. She was being serious. I knew what she was talking about. Cubans were escaping communism and dying of AIDS; of course there was big money in the martyrdom of likable people from weak countries. But I wasn’t that type of Cuban. I wasn’t going to make anything happen with communism because I never fled from it, unlike my parents and their parents, who might have made better artists with more pertinent messages in their work. I didn’t identify with politics. I just liked well-done comic books. I loved such things, and I saw myself becoming one of these great comic creators one day.

That never happened, but it still informs the artist today, the one that identifies with those years of love growing and then finally lost. I don’t have that fringe angle many artists have because it wouldn’t come natural. It would be that bullshit act during an art school painting critique when the accomplished bullshitters attained the most credibility, and therefore, the most success.

To be the type of artist I am is already fringe enough. I was coming from a different direction when I thought I was going to make it one day. I ignored the normal course, and I fled this country for personal reasons and not political, and when I came back, I noticed I had cut all ties with most everyone I knew. The more savvy grad school successes understand that you weren’t going to get a thing from getting a masters degree; the smart ones went to grad school to make important connections with people that were going to help them in their careers. I had dropped all my connections with one airplane trip, choosing a meandering path to success. Having lost everything that tied me to a social network, I breathed out as if a breath of fresh air, claiming now I can make it all work. I made a valiant effort of this folly, but it has gotten me what most people would have surmised: nothing. And I suppose if I were wily enough, I could turn this piece of foolishness into my artistic fringe, and I am sitting here now, actually thinking it over, because it’s the only angle I have left to hold onto.

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The Long Reflection of the Present

05 June 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I am thinking back on that time when I made all these paintings. It wasn’t just one time, but they are grouped now by the position I have now in regards to them: they are the past, through which all things seem to be in a continuum, and I am in the present.

I am photographing them, remembering what they meant to me while I was making them. How could I forget when there must have been a time (a single moment) when each one meant everything to me! In one flow of days (that perhaps spilled into weeks), this one naked woman made of acrylic paint was a beauty I was trying to recreate from what could be memory mixed with longing. I can’t remember a thing about it now (not one wish that fueled the drive for this one piece), but it was strong apparently, because it carried me forward to the end, where I deemed it finished. I gloated, and then on to the next.

I will be using their photographs as if they represent my present work, and in a sense, they do because they are the latest that I have shown, but if I am photographing them, it means they have nothing to do with what I am doing now.

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