The Wooly Mammoth's Mighty Absence

John Bell
Position Paper
Spring of 2009 Mid-Program Review

Intent
It is the point at which a system creating meaning is forced to resign to the inevitability of meaninglessness where I feel like I can come the closest to seeing something real in a picture. With this sympathy in mind, I have set out to create a practice based on a seeming contradiction; I want to try to build a living presence out of evident paint. For me, “living presence” means something which seems to possess its own subjecthood-- something which seems to look back at you. “Evident paint” is paint which never gets lost in illusion. It is always more or less honest about its physicality and unremarkable nature.

Content
There are broad existential questions which frame the way I see these paintings. They are moments which exude, above all else, a temporariness such that death seems to always be tied to the present. There is no assumption of an implicit meaning within this world, which is something I can’t help myself from assuming in my life otherwise. What I think these creatures evoke, then, is the passionate acting out of feeling in the face of meaningless negation. They act and react with tenderness, violence, and necessity without ever seeming to expect an escape from their physical and temporal failings.

Subject
I choose to paint these natural subjects because they seem to me to be the specific manifestations of the broader questions and contradictions that lurk beneath them. I am fascinated by groups of birds and the way that dogs behave in a pack, for example. I can’t help but anthropomorphize; they seem undeniably alive like I am, barking, chirping, and flailing all over. But for all of this, they are also always irrational, inexplicable and alien to me. This parallel contradiction is what made them ideal subjects.

Visual and Technical Explorations
I began trying to developing ways of creating natural things, such as birds and wood, in a way which emphasized their presentness. The ups and downs of the painting process ended up determining most of what the image looked like. While I may have rough ideas as to where I want a picture to go, either from a conglomeration of outside sources or from a composition entirely of my own conception, more often than not I try to facilitate the occurrence of accidental marks. I have accordingly found myself editing figures into being more often than I have found myself deliberately rendering, and have tried to treat each mark that I make as something independent in thought from the others already on the surface.

Influences and Context Within The Field
The visual language of natural history has been extremely helpful as a formal and conceptual parallel. There is a competition in this language between scientific taxonomy and aesthetic appreciation, and because of this neither desires are completely satisfied. I have spent a great deal of time with natural history dioramas and illustrators such as John James Audubon, Charles Wilson, and Carl Linneaus. I have also been attracted to the watercolors and ink paintings characteristic of Japanese Zen Buddhism in the 18th and 19th centuries. What I am attracted to in these piece is the emphasis on the living essence of the painted subject over the depiction of one that is “real”. Kao Ch’i- Pe’i’s set of “hand paintings” on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art was especially influential. Other artists whose influence is pronounced in this project include Elizabeth Neel, Katy Moran, Luc Tuymans, and Gerhard Richter.