Harry. 11 Aug '05, 12.52pm PST.

This is the last painting from my summer class. I've improved a lot over the summer thanks to Boris at the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side. He's a great teacher that I highly recommend studying with if you're a beginning painter like me.

Well, my second painting course came to a close this weekend. Was a short course this time. 8 weeks at the Educational Alliance with Avron Soyer. The Educational Alliance group of people is really different from the group I painted with in my class at the New School. Most of the students are much older and already have a lot of experience painting on their own. Some have very firmly established painting styles. I love getting to see their work evolve and appreciate the opportunity to occassionally talk to them about what they're doing and what they're thinking about their work. This is what I was missing this summer and why I was interested in the idea of finding a painting partner.

This first year as a beginning painter has been pretty hard. I've learned a lot by talking to my teacher about what I'm wanting to explore in my work, and that has helped me tremendously to not feel like I have to push to get somewhere quickly. I'm finally beginning to feel more comfortable with the process of creating and living in the drawing and painting medium. In the beginning of the year I was so rigid -- drawing these tight shapes learned from very academic drawing classes at the Art Students League that are probably meant for more experienced artists learning the anatomy. Now I'm getting more sensitive to the figure by way of learning to sense shape and volume. This sensitivity in paint is somehow also improving my drawing.

It's been a terribly difficult, but very satisfying year. I have so much to learn and it feels like I will never stop learning. For a beginner, I feel like I've at least become familiar with the medium, learned some technique, and above all am working at it instead of just dreaming about doing it. I don't have any sense of my own style yet. I spent the beginning of this term trying to work directly with emotion and did a lot of paintings that were dark and with figures that had a very grafitti-ish look to them. But the direct painting of emotion was very hard for me. I ended up feeling blocked and hated drawing/painting with confronting those emotions. Some people do this well and it works for them with great results. When I began to ease up on myself and stop trying to paint emotions directly or tell a story, but instead looked for the poetry of life in what I paint, then the process of painting felt less difficult. That's where I am now and I hope to continue on this path.

The most difficult thing for me in learning to paint is accessing that part of my creativity that's closely linked to play and feeling. It's hard to first feel something before beginning work. Maybe this is why it seems easier to focus on the craft of drawing or applying paint to surface rather than expressively communicating an idea or feeling.

In a telling dream I had last night, I'm in some sort of wizard's school and am seated among my peers in a classroom. A beautiful ghostly figure appears before me and takes my hand, reminding me that she was "the one who kissed me". I remember the kiss -- a sensual lasting moment -- but I think that this must be a test, and so with great sadness, I ask her to leave. I approach the wizard teacher and he tells me that she was indeed real and that this wasn't a test. I have missed my opportunity.

Strange, but somewhere in there is the hopefulness of remembering the kiss and the promise of that return to the senses and passion. It's as though I'm waiting for this to awaken in my pursuit of painting, but I don't know how to trust my muse.

My closest friends know that web design and information work is not my passion in life. If anything, they're interesting pursuits, but I'm not exactly passionate about either. When Robin and I met, one of the first things she wanted to know about me was "what I was passionate about". The answer is easy. Although I've not been consistent about doing it myself, art -- and painting in particular -- has always been one of the things for me that makes life worth living. I was an Art History major in college. These last few months, I've been taking a painting class. It's the first painting class I've ever taken and is wonderful and frustrating at the same time. I feel like someone who's meeting himself for the first time.

It's difficult because in the few drawing classes I've taken -- I never took art formally in high school or college -- I managed to develop some extremely rigid habits, mostly having to do with focussing a bit much on proportion an anatomy. Somewhere in those lessons, I lost the ability to feel something as I created images on the paper. The passion was missing.

There was a lot of fear that stood in the way of me taking this class. I've taken design and photography courses in a half-serious way since graduating library school, but never before have I felt myself immersed in any of them. The decision to make this important now is big because with it comes the risk of looking more deeply inside. It is uncovering in the expression, the parts of my self that have been buried by the many layers of social and cultural guidelines and accepted behaviors. My teacher now has been good at reminding and urging me to focus on that part of the expression. Sensing the apprehension in my work, he says to me, "No one will get hurt here". I'm unsure whether that's true or not.

Incidentally, he's also very good at constantly reminding me to step back and paint as a unit. He's asked me to write him a letter telling him what art means to me. I'm still writing that letter and am not sure entirely what I will tell him, but somewhere in there, it must have something to say about being free and comfortable with who I am.

We haven't gotten to oil painting yet and have been focussing on drawing with charcoal and cray pas. As I learn to draw and paint I'll be posting some of my work on flickr.

What's also interesting to me is how much I've gotten interested in expressive artists that I didn't particularly gravitate towards in the past. I've recently been seeking out good books (with lots of plates) on Egon Shiele, Lucian Freud, Edgar Degas. This is a far way away from what I've normally liked looking at. I have a very different appreciation for artists who paint figures expressively now. The nice thing is I can go to museums and galleries with a whole new eye and interest. Everything will be new to me again.

I've been going to Chelsea galleries lately. When I worked in an art gallery, I wold go to gallery openings once or twice a month, usually on Thursday nights. I would often zip through 6 or a dozen galleries and only linger in the ones with work that spoke to me.

Yesterday I visited about 6 galleries, with the intention of mainly going to see Ellsworth Kelly's shows at the Matthew Marks galleries before they came down. Although I liked the green and orange painting, I came away feeling unmoved and cold, as I often do with with such linear work. I like color field painting and minimalism for the intellectual reasons, but Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, for instance, can evoke an emotional reaction for me. Kelly does not. So I went gallery hopping and found Damian Loeb's photo realist paintings at Mary Boone and Jean-Luc Mylayne's large format photos at Barbara Gladstone.

Loeb's cropped renditions of cells/screens from movies were so realistic it took me a second to realize they were painted. The cropping and realism reminded me a little of Anthony Petracca. The cropping and the subjects are so dynamic in some shots, moving abruptly out of the frame to reveal a leg, a wheel of a bike. Coupled with the saturation of the colors, the effect is so energized, it was captivating.

Contrast this with the quiet reserve of Mylayne's photos. What I liked most was the interesting depth of field. Some phtos capture a focused subject in the foreground, may have some blurriness in the middle ground and then become focussed again in the background. Mylayne is apparently a self-taught photographer who spends incredibly long hours trying to shoot his subject matter. Birds in this case. I imagined him sitting patiently like a wild life photographer, waiting for his shots. Something about that spoke to me.

Saw Francesco Clemente in Gaggosian's enormous gallery as well. Enormous scale, but the play of religious and sexual subject matter didn't interest me (bored me?).