Still Alive and Painting

It's been a dry summer, creativity-wise, and I feel lazy and more than little bit guilty.
I've been playing with some of my paintings that still needed some work, as well a a very few new paintings. Not much to show for so many months since my last post.
I think the main problem is that I have so many finished paintings leaning against the walls of my second floor hallway...a little like having too many puppies...they need to go to good homes, so I can feel freed up to paint new ones.

When life intrudes on art...

It's been an eventful several weeks, and I'll confess that I've only been able to do a tiny bit of painting between the show at the Hallway Gallery, the day trip with Liz to NYC to catch the Abstract Expressionist retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art two days before it ended (more about that later), and crazy busyness at work, trying to get two federal reports out on time. There was also Lizzie's concert the other night, (where she sang two very well received solos), and just the day to day stuff that happens and needs attending to. Sometimes  I can't even fathom how I've gotten as much painting done as I have over the past two years.

Life has a habit of intruding on the perfect zone of concentration and creative productivity that I envision as ideal and necessary for art-making. In truth, much of my best work has been done during snatched hours and under less than ideal conditions. The phone rings when my hands are covered with sticky glop. Liz needs to eat. The animals need to eat. Sometimes I need to eat and remember to drink water. All of this requires clumping back down two flights off stairs, then back up again to work while I still have the light. My concentration gets broken, but it gives me a chance to reassess what I have been working on for the past several hours, and that can be a very good thing.

The blank white canvas

The blank white canvas is exciting—there is every possibility in it—like the component colors in a beam of white light. When I put the first paint on the canvas some possibilities are lost and others begin to reveal themselves.

The painting process is like pulling meaning from complete swirling chaos. Sometimes I dream a painting, and maybe I set out to bring it into reality on canvas. Often, the painting that comes into being is not the one that I set out to paint. If a painting wants to assert itself, it does, and I feel that I guide it into being.

The (latest) Artist Statement

From my earliest memory, I have been curious about the mysterious force of electricity, from the wall socket--at three I dreamed of a wall-sized Redi-Kilowatt as god of energy--and as lightning from the sky.

Having lived through a tornado at a tender age, I obsessed over the power of the tornado in the "Wizard of Oz" that could carry a whole house and its inhabitants to a completely different world.

In spite of my fear, I felt a kinship with these forces of nature.

Later on, I would gaze for hours at the night sky, traveling in my mind to the farthest stars and feeling as huge as the universe.

My investigations extended to the invisible worlds of the microscopic and sub-atomic, and like my hero Alice, I wondered what creatures might live behind the mirror-surface of still water.

In my current work I've attempted to cultivate a visual language that gives form to these fascinations. This language grows out of my ongoing dialog with key painters of the 20th century, yet, it is also primal, arising from a place of mystery and dream.

Masks of Origin: On the Paintings of Deni Ozan-George

Masks of Origin: On the Paintings of Deni Ozan-George: "By Brian George 1 The breaking of the golden egg Deni, Most often, I see your paintings as cosmologies—in which the eternal present moment ..."

The trouble with writing the artist's statement

Whenever someone asks what and why I paint I always end up telling them how I paint...I'm so much more comfortable with talking about the process of creating my images than what inspires them or what they mean.

Many artists have a hard time talking about their work in an articulate way. We stammer and blush or ramble on and on, and most of us fall back on an excited discussion of materials and methods. People who are natural writers don't understand the visual artist's natural verbal reticence when faced with putting into mere words what is a deep, visual and physical experience. But never mind, we still have to do it.