I've been gone a long time. Three months and change. During which a lot has gone down that is not likely ever to find its way toward articulation. It's been a weird, hard time for everybody. The pandemic. The insurrection. The free-floating craziness and stupidity. I have found it hard maintain concentration on the sorts of projects that in the past have given me satisfaction. I have, for example, a stack of books each of which I made it halfway through before picking up another. I pretty much stopped making collages for a couple of months. Like everyone else, I guess, I've been feeling disconnected. Yesterday on some combination of impulse, boredom, and despair I took a blank piece of paper a Pigma Micron pen and started the first pen-and-ink abstract I've done in like forever. It felt good to focus down and watch the shapes emerge and see how they adapted to and talked with one another.
The shapes came first, and evolved the rules of their generation as they emerged over the course of an hour or two. At some point I had to decide whether to fill in the entire paper or not, but it felt better to me to let the shapes exist in a dialogue with the larger field of white. So I did it that way. Today I inked them in, and that became a second exercise in attention and observation. While I was inking them in, I was considering what I would choose to entitle the piece, which began to present itself to me as a kind of archaelogical field. Titles are always problematic for me, in that once you have put a title on the piece you have essentially defined it down. A piece like this one, which could suggest or "mean" a lot of things in a lot of ways, is delimited or reduced by a title. Someone looking at the piece and then at the title is being given a frame that is going to affect the way the piece is perceived. As I was working I wrote down some of the titles that went through my mind:
Because I Said So
Systemic Inertia
Elegy
Little By
Afterword
Wrack
In the end, I decided on "Landslide," which conveys some of the sense the completed picture gives me of various things falling one on top of another. (I'm a fan of Jean Dubuffet, and in many of his paintings and drawings, like this one and several of the ones here, he has what appear to be cross-sections of subterranean environments. So that was in the back of my mind as well.) So "Landslide" works, I guess, although I sort of like the idea of a constellation of possible names, each of which would provide a different filter for considering the work. But at least there is now new work to be considered, which I'm happy about.
