Hello, bloggers.

The drip has alwas been an enigma for me:  the good, the bad, the ugly.

When I first started out painting, to have a drip in a painting was like a fart in church:  something to be held in and never expressed.  If a drip appeared, I had to eliminate it because it wasn’t in a context.  That was back when I thought I was in control.

But as I freed myself from my own stupidity, I decided that the materials and I were equal and that I was the conductor and not the dictator.

As I stumbled down that path, the drip became more apparent to me.  I have studied it for years, and I know that if it unintentionally appears and is not wiped away, there’s an almost infinitessimal double line, which has to do with the curing and drying of paint.

Those lines used to flash out at me like laser beams and drove me crazy, but if I started eliminating them I got through the composition and came upon the raw canvas underneath, so that wasn’t a good thing.So then I decided to incorporate the drip.  It was like the old question with the interior decorator:  What do you do with the elephant in the living room?  You don’t hide it, you feature it!

This winter I’ve been working on a whole cadre of things in my Florida studio.  I’ve been purposefully hanging paintings on the wall and putting other paintings underneath, knowing that the ones above would eventually start dripping on the ones underneath, causing a change in the topography of the ones on the bottom and the top.

Knowing that I did this on purpose, I had to ask myself, were the ones on top sending down blessings or were they pissing on the ones underneath?  I thought they were pissing at first, so I thought I’d better go sit by the ocean and think about the question of where the drip is in the composition of power and meaning.

The drip by its very nature is dictated by gravity, so it always goes in a straight line.  It comes from the lack of curing of the paint, which is fine when it’s lying on its back—but when you lift it up, it becomes like a boil.  A boil is either ignored or punctured.  I always went for puncturing it and eliminating the residue to pretend it had never been there.

In my new way of thinking, as I let my mind wander, looking at the ocean, I saw all kinds of color, knowing that the water color is actually the colors that are underneath.  I remembered a documentary about Yellowstone National Park.  The thermal waters there are dictated by the algaes, the minerals, and all the chemical reactions.  You’re looking through the water at the wonderful blue; you’re not seeing the water.

What does that mean about the drip?  It, itself, comes out as a unified force.  The surface that it hits and runs across has already accomodated itself to all of the warring principles of my painting.  They have a skin, you might say.

The drip does not accomodate itself to anything because it is the dominant force, and it leaves its history all the way down.  With my regular paintings, they all accomodate themselves because they’re on the same plane, have the same viscosity, and are all fighting with their own weapons.

The drip is impervious to itself, so as it runs through the composition, it leaves the same line, which could be thought of as a distortion of whatever else is in there.  That creatses a dilemma.In my paintings, you’d be hard-put to find a straight line.  So the drip’s straight line and consistent color really create a new phenomenon in the paintings.

So I thought, What should I do about this?  I turned one of the paintings on its side, so the drip would go a different way, almost as if you get a tic-tac-toe symbol.  As you turn it again and again, you get different designs.  If you take a strong red or black and make a shadow color next to it, it creates tensions between the rioting colors of my Dip and the pole-like straightness of the drip.  But the outside interference of the mediator, me, instead of getting rid of it, becomes the composition.

Again, as usual, it solves one dilemma but leaves me with another one.  But that’s what I live for.

I can see that this is going to be a long, involved exploration.  As a very curious pilgrim, I’m never used to just looking at things and marching off; I have to figure out where they are in the system, in the universe, what is this trying to tell me, and how does it fit into the peace process?

If the paiting and the composition and I as the conductor can accept the drip, then I’ve come a long way in acceptance.  That is one lesson I’ve had to teach myself.

Physician, heal thyself; painter, open your mind.

Where is this going to take me?  I have no idea, and I love it!

Matt