Category Archives for: Art Concepts

REMINISCING: THE DISTANCE

15 May 2017 by Rey Armenteros

It was one of those garage moments wherein I was cracking open old boxes and dodging the welling dust to get at old memories. No matter how you cut it, looking at old artwork is asking for trouble. The excitement that comes with the curiosity, for me, usually mingles with confusion.

Here is one take on that confusion. It is rare when you look at the old drawings that you find exactly what you remembered. You are either going to wonder why you thought that drawing that was so good was good at all, or you’re going to look at certain mediocre pieces that actually had promise if not a certain something that “those old good ones” lacked.

This is good, you tell yourself, because this is the clarity of distance (the distance of time) making you see what should have been obvious. This is the same perspective you exercise when you put aside a painting for a couple of weeks and get enough distance to see it from a more objective position. You tell yourself this, and you uphold this fickle assessment as something inestimable.

Leave a comment | Categories: Art Concepts, Art Process, Memory

When Style Fails to Make an Appearance

30 April 2017 by Rey Armenteros

When making art, we seldom think about the things that drive us to make the work in the first place. It is something I have noted over the years. Some artists are trying to get their ideas out, putting together things that they would like to see come to life, like large projects that take whatever it takes to make it happen. Others are devoted to a process, the repetition of certain rituals, the likelihood of saying the same things over and over, and I am thinking of painters that paint the same things with little variation. And others are driven by experimentation and what results you could get when you put these several things together in this new or peculiar way.

Related to experimentation is the dynamic of performing a feat, which brings in a win or lose dynamic. If the results don’t work the way you had hypothesized, it may have proved to be a waste of time. This means your performance has a chance of not obtaining satisfactory results, and maybe this is the one drive that encapsulates them all because anything could happen.

I don’t know; these are just words, and without going into extensive detail they might fail in capturing the subtle shifts in the way we go about work.

When I was making my paintings for Memories from a Radio, you could say that I was using every drive I could, and the results were a miscellany of different outcomes and styles. One drawback to being so eclectic with your art approach is that the viewer might not recognize a style. Since their may be few patterns in your work, it will appear to lack cohesion.

When things got sporadic in Memories from a Radio, the only connection I had to avoid a disjointed body of work was the Tarot card iconography of frames and symbols, and I could never be sure to what degree this was able to tie everything together.

In a sense, I was pursuing a feat whose results were variegated because it depends on the perspective of each viewer. Even with the Tarot motif, I still had viewers approach me at shows asking why it was I would diverge so dramatically between paintings.

And as much as this sounds like a cop out, I never had a clear answer for such questions.

Leave a comment | Categories: Art Concepts, Art Process

Pure Memory

08 January 2016 by Rey Armenteros

This is from pure memory, but what does that mean? To me, it could be something as simple as I got this out of my head. But since this is the way I always work, I know there are facets to it most of us take for granted. For example: This is a general memory from my dad’s living room, and there was no doubt a lamp where you see it, but if that lamp looked exactly like that one you see in the picture is highly doubtful. I had to make it up in most places because I simply do not recall. His face, on the other hand, is from whatever I could bring back from direct memory, which is also spotty. There are also points where this picture has taken embellishments because there comes a point to most paintings and drawings where you try to make it clearer or closer to the goal you set out for it.

Leave a comment | Categories: Art Concepts, Art Process, Memory

Newer posts →