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"Grotesque Banalities and Trite Repulsions" (GBTR for short) is a series of paintings and drawings I have been working on from 2005-present. This group is an expansion on the work I started in 2004 which culminated in
the solo show "Resurrection Vs. Insurrection" held at Gallery 58 in Jersey City, New Jersey.
This extended statement is my best attempt at providing a definitive practical and conceptual resource for this ongoing exploration.
I will start with a description of the materials used and the process involved in making the work. I will end with it's significance and some of the tensions inherent therein. I will follow that with an interview I did with a now defunct Japanese website, some discursive observations on my influences, and the context within which I work.
My hope, in the end, is to sketch out as much of the framework that the effort abides by as is possible. The rest will just have to be left up to the inexplicable poetry of what this work does when it finds itself just beyond your optic nerves.
Materials Used, Creative Process and Relevance Therein
I use BFK Rives 300 lb. cold press printing paper and Strathmore medium drawing paper (the 18" x 24" pads) for drawing. Ampersand Clayboard and Gessoboard for acrylic painting. And #10 cotton duck canvas primed with white acrylic gesso and stretched on pine stretcher bars for oil painting.
I use Holbien's Acryla Acrylic Based Gouache and water based oil paint (Winsor and Newton's Artisan brand and Holbien's Duo brand are my favorites). I don't stay brand specific with brushes but limit the size of them to between 000 round and .25" flat but sometimes I use 1"-3" gesso brushes for large explosive painterly areas. When drawing I use BIC Mechanical pencils with 0.7mm lead that I buy at the drug store, a Staedtler Mars 780 drafting pencil with HB leads, and a standard X-acto knife.
I collect and archive images found in a variety of magazines (though largely National Geographic, heavy metal magazines Terrorizer and Decibel and Art Forum, Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, etc.) and online through Google Image Searches. Categorizing them into subject folders like Zombies, Cat Brains, Crying People, Families, Metal Heads, Pigs, Blood, Deer Guts, Preachers, Rednecks, Sharks, Fire, Fatties, Vomit, Terrorists, etc. for easy reference. I come across interesting things I want to keep daily so the archive is always growing.
I designed the images in GBTR using a now ancient Apple 450 MHZ PowerPC G4 with a Dell CRT 17" monitor and Photoshop CS. I pulled elements from the image archive and digitally collaged them using an intuitive process where randomity, discovery and improvisation played key roles.
When I was happy with a composition I printed it, made a graphite transfer to paper or canvas and rendered it out using the printout of the collage as a reference. When the source imagery contained a lot of detail I duplicated it as closely as possible. When it did not I invented forms, shapes and lines often resulting in what Robert Pincus of the San Diego Union Tribune in describing my work called "a kind of cartoon baroque style".
I am sometimes questioned about whether the painting and drawing part of my process is necessary or holds any relevance. Some want me to simply produce the computerized collages I use as my reference as an end product. While I have shown them on occasion as digital prints it has never seemed like enough. Painting and drawing the collages is a way I can smooth out edges, make different levels of resolution and photographic quality consistent (or different) and otherwise indulge my precisionist obsessions.
I, as a viewer of art, enjoy looking closely at highly detailed work to discover evidence of the way miniscule variations in value and color make themselves manifest. I, in turn, like providing that for viewers of my work.The materiality of hand done work is crucial in that provision. It gives the work a credibility and substance it wouldn't otherwise have. It is also an important part of intellectually processing and reflecting on the work's content. Lastly, I think there is something conceptually vital, telling and significant in the process of examining the relationship between the pixel and handmade mark.
As Gerhardt Richter put it,
Perhaps one day I shall find something that works better than painting! For the moment however, I am used to working with brush and paint, and I find this both simpler and more full of potential than photography, which is too bound up with easily repeatable tricks and manipulations. And even when I paint a straightforward copy,- something new creeps in, whether I want it too or not: something that even I don't really grasp.
- from The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993 pg. 25.
It's an excruciatingly slow process though. One that leaves paintings unfinished for months and sometimes years on end while I work for a living, and then try to find the focus and energy to follow through. It's something I'm not entirely at peace with but to this point exists as my primary method of creative egress.
The reason? I am fixated on the significance of this process in terms of labor and the politics of the gift. Mike Kelley wrote in the eighties,
The hidden burden of the gift is that it calls for payback but the price unspecified, Repressed. The Uncanny aura of the craft item is linked to time. Crafts are the literal embodiment of the Puritan work ethic. They seem to announce that work is it's own reward. This is conveyed by the long labor-intensive hours required to construct them by hand. They speak the language of the wage earner in which there is a one-to-one relationship between time spent and worth. The equation is not between time and money it is a more obscure relationship drawn between time and commitment, one that results in a kind of emotional usury. The gift operates within an economy of guilt; an endless feeling of indebtedness attends it because of its mysterious worth. And the highly loaded nature of these objects is intensified by their material nature: by the seeming contradiction that their emotional weight far exceeds the worth of the cheap and lowly materials from which they are constructed.
- from Mike Kelley- Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals pg. 52.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding where Kelley is coming from, but it seems to me that the sense of the puritanical work ethic and the gifthood of craft that he speaks about are at the heart of the labor-intensive process I employ. It is as good a description of their necessity as a method for appealing to working class wage earners as it is a way of creating commodities with some sense of value to bring to the affluent contemporary art marketplace.
At the same time it is a way of synthesizing the Dada/Surrealist automatism involved in the work's beginnings as collage with the tradition and history of painting in a contemporary paradigm. Unlike Kelley and his generation of postmodernists who were appropriating craft objects to critique capitalist constructs I am appropriating the folk methodologies used to make those objects so that they may participate in the very same dubious constructs despite their grotesque banality.
The result is a group of objects formed from a combination of several hackneyed modes of aesthetic egress all of which are caught turning into or in on themselves. What is generated by this implosion is a reactionary, conservative backlash as "revolution" in an understanding of image making. This, of course, is irrelevant, boring, and well tread ground when put into the context of the nomadic, ephemeral, constantly in flux, fashionable, contemporary bleeding edge. The consequence is one level at which the title of the group can be understood.
"Grotesque Banalities and Trite Repulsions" is, as a self-critical observation, a body of work whose "mysterious worth" (as Kelley described it in terms of the economy of guilt associated with the gift) frustrated and rendered cliche.
The indebtedness and mysterious worth wind up amplified, then confused and finally drained of their lure...
Interview with flashfilm.com 9.03.2008
This extended statement is my best attempt at providing a definitive practical and conceptual resource for this ongoing exploration.
I will start with a description of the materials used and the process involved in making the work. I will end with it's significance and some of the tensions inherent therein. I will follow that with an interview I did with a now defunct Japanese website, some discursive observations on my influences, and the context within which I work.
My hope, in the end, is to sketch out as much of the framework that the effort abides by as is possible. The rest will just have to be left up to the inexplicable poetry of what this work does when it finds itself just beyond your optic nerves.
Materials Used, Creative Process and Relevance Therein
I use BFK Rives 300 lb. cold press printing paper and Strathmore medium drawing paper (the 18" x 24" pads) for drawing. Ampersand Clayboard and Gessoboard for acrylic painting. And #10 cotton duck canvas primed with white acrylic gesso and stretched on pine stretcher bars for oil painting.
 |
 |
 |
I use Holbien's Acryla Acrylic Based Gouache and water based oil paint (Winsor and Newton's Artisan brand and Holbien's Duo brand are my favorites). I don't stay brand specific with brushes but limit the size of them to between 000 round and .25" flat but sometimes I use 1"-3" gesso brushes for large explosive painterly areas. When drawing I use BIC Mechanical pencils with 0.7mm lead that I buy at the drug store, a Staedtler Mars 780 drafting pencil with HB leads, and a standard X-acto knife.
 |
 |
 |
I collect and archive images found in a variety of magazines (though largely National Geographic, heavy metal magazines Terrorizer and Decibel and Art Forum, Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, etc.) and online through Google Image Searches. Categorizing them into subject folders like Zombies, Cat Brains, Crying People, Families, Metal Heads, Pigs, Blood, Deer Guts, Preachers, Rednecks, Sharks, Fire, Fatties, Vomit, Terrorists, etc. for easy reference. I come across interesting things I want to keep daily so the archive is always growing.
 |
 |
I designed the images in GBTR using a now ancient Apple 450 MHZ PowerPC G4 with a Dell CRT 17" monitor and Photoshop CS. I pulled elements from the image archive and digitally collaged them using an intuitive process where randomity, discovery and improvisation played key roles.
 |
 |
 |
When I was happy with a composition I printed it, made a graphite transfer to paper or canvas and rendered it out using the printout of the collage as a reference. When the source imagery contained a lot of detail I duplicated it as closely as possible. When it did not I invented forms, shapes and lines often resulting in what Robert Pincus of the San Diego Union Tribune in describing my work called "a kind of cartoon baroque style".
 |
 |
 |
I am sometimes questioned about whether the painting and drawing part of my process is necessary or holds any relevance. Some want me to simply produce the computerized collages I use as my reference as an end product. While I have shown them on occasion as digital prints it has never seemed like enough. Painting and drawing the collages is a way I can smooth out edges, make different levels of resolution and photographic quality consistent (or different) and otherwise indulge my precisionist obsessions.
 |
 |
I, as a viewer of art, enjoy looking closely at highly detailed work to discover evidence of the way miniscule variations in value and color make themselves manifest. I, in turn, like providing that for viewers of my work.The materiality of hand done work is crucial in that provision. It gives the work a credibility and substance it wouldn't otherwise have. It is also an important part of intellectually processing and reflecting on the work's content. Lastly, I think there is something conceptually vital, telling and significant in the process of examining the relationship between the pixel and handmade mark.
As Gerhardt Richter put it,
Perhaps one day I shall find something that works better than painting! For the moment however, I am used to working with brush and paint, and I find this both simpler and more full of potential than photography, which is too bound up with easily repeatable tricks and manipulations. And even when I paint a straightforward copy,- something new creeps in, whether I want it too or not: something that even I don't really grasp.
- from The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993 pg. 25.
 |
It's an excruciatingly slow process though. One that leaves paintings unfinished for months and sometimes years on end while I work for a living, and then try to find the focus and energy to follow through. It's something I'm not entirely at peace with but to this point exists as my primary method of creative egress.
The reason? I am fixated on the significance of this process in terms of labor and the politics of the gift. Mike Kelley wrote in the eighties,
The hidden burden of the gift is that it calls for payback but the price unspecified, Repressed. The Uncanny aura of the craft item is linked to time. Crafts are the literal embodiment of the Puritan work ethic. They seem to announce that work is it's own reward. This is conveyed by the long labor-intensive hours required to construct them by hand. They speak the language of the wage earner in which there is a one-to-one relationship between time spent and worth. The equation is not between time and money it is a more obscure relationship drawn between time and commitment, one that results in a kind of emotional usury. The gift operates within an economy of guilt; an endless feeling of indebtedness attends it because of its mysterious worth. And the highly loaded nature of these objects is intensified by their material nature: by the seeming contradiction that their emotional weight far exceeds the worth of the cheap and lowly materials from which they are constructed.
- from Mike Kelley- Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals pg. 52.
 |
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding where Kelley is coming from, but it seems to me that the sense of the puritanical work ethic and the gifthood of craft that he speaks about are at the heart of the labor-intensive process I employ. It is as good a description of their necessity as a method for appealing to working class wage earners as it is a way of creating commodities with some sense of value to bring to the affluent contemporary art marketplace.
At the same time it is a way of synthesizing the Dada/Surrealist automatism involved in the work's beginnings as collage with the tradition and history of painting in a contemporary paradigm. Unlike Kelley and his generation of postmodernists who were appropriating craft objects to critique capitalist constructs I am appropriating the folk methodologies used to make those objects so that they may participate in the very same dubious constructs despite their grotesque banality.
 |
The result is a group of objects formed from a combination of several hackneyed modes of aesthetic egress all of which are caught turning into or in on themselves. What is generated by this implosion is a reactionary, conservative backlash as "revolution" in an understanding of image making. This, of course, is irrelevant, boring, and well tread ground when put into the context of the nomadic, ephemeral, constantly in flux, fashionable, contemporary bleeding edge. The consequence is one level at which the title of the group can be understood.
"Grotesque Banalities and Trite Repulsions" is, as a self-critical observation, a body of work whose "mysterious worth" (as Kelley described it in terms of the economy of guilt associated with the gift) frustrated and rendered cliche.
The indebtedness and mysterious worth wind up amplified, then confused and finally drained of their lure...
Interview with flashfilm.com 9.03.2008