I have never trusted ideas. In preparing this exhibition several ideas seemed a ‘solution’ to the show. It would look good. It would look intelligent. I would look good.
From experience I give those ideas space and let them settle, do they withstand the test of time, I would forget them? What do I think a week later about it?

So those ideas look less convincing after a while and I know that there is no way to out-smart anybody.
This feels more real to me.
I think it has to do with how the spontaneous connects with hidden lines of thought.
Themes that are almost not in the conscious realm and when I start formulating thoughts spontaneously they pop up as if they have always been there and they were.
It is probably a way to hide myself from myself.
It might be a technique to out-smart myself.

I was going to put the painted canvases in relation to other handmade things. Maybe with a hint to Mingei - Korean folk art - and maybe also the contemplative aspect of, let’s say embroidery or polishing a wooden surface and how that relates to mixing and preparing paint. And painting. And those hours before, where my mind drifts, maybe drifts toward a more contemplative, or is it just a more decided state of mind.
I was thinking of adding an element that deals with woodworking in the exhibition.

I was considering to put saw dust on the ground and a chain saw. That or even more a sewing machine, an old-fashioned one, from Singer, on a stand. That would bring sewing to mind, but also the only time I smoked DMT and hallucinated for 10 minutes, that in particular, the machines that where in the studio came to life like praying mantis oversize insects, that were all sitting there and watching me. Later someone told me that William Burroughs used DMT a lot and I remember reading Naked Lunch and those strange reptilian creatures and it made sense.

I think this would be a good show. Handmade things. And engines. And then I would put the French flag in,
as a reference, I mean three paintings, blue, white, red, spread out over the three gallery rooms, and I would not need to speak about color, color layers and how you see what you want to see.

Memory moments open up when I mix a color, the specific hue even a change in color directions, I let that happen as an intuitiv memory guide, where some thing stop the drift and I know that this color I’m coming up with, is the color my inflatable mattress had when we were going camping.
I just wish to say everything with total sincerity and without imposing my point of view on others.
Blue, white and Red, the French flag, is what I wanted to bring up.

I think I have ideas that loop or reflect an other idea. I mean, I have those, I classify them as advertisement ideas, and they seem quickly shallow, and then there are other ideas, that don’t come with a traceable reference, and those ideas are more mysterious and more fertile to confabulation.

I’m writing this several weeks before the show. I met a Russian actor that history has completely forgotten.

This phrase is helpless in quotation marks: “Spiritual perfection is not going to happen any time soon.”

Simplicity, structure, reality, breath.
I found those four Korean paradigms to art to be superb.
The large paintings in the exhibition resemble curtains that are in front of the mirror. They are a complete factual account and at the same time a true communication of feelings. They are not a flag.

And what are the contestants in the head paintings looking at?

Handmade, hand thought.
Like addicts, we have reached the point where the present is the future, we recognize this and yet we can do nothing to stop it happening.
If materialism is going to win, I want to be a French writer.

Orient, Long Island, NY
July 2015