I) Concept

What the hell is art?  What to do with silence?  What to do with an empty cup?  Ordinary compared to relevance, ordinary containing relevance, and relevance can sometimes be quite ordinary.  What to do with the ordinary?  Sometimes we strive to make it extraordinary, and some sit with it as is.  To make things relevant can be a great motivator, yet it can also be a divisive controlling force.

I do not know a lot about a lot of things, but, oh well.  When I paint, I realize I am painting from an internal place and I am pretty certain it is a place of emotion.  As an artist, sometimes I wish this wasn't the case, but the more I do it, the more I realize that I have to accept that I probably paint from an emotional place.  It is reoccurring.  As many of you, I am also a sponge for information.  I sometimes find myself overwhelmed by the amount of stimuli my mental hard drive is taking in.  And at the expense of sounding silly or trite, my art is the result of what I produce -- as though I am a computer printer.

The exploration of this concept, Ordinary Relevance, is a reoccurring theme in my work.   I have an earlier body of material, somewhere in the mid 1990's, that was the inception of these ideas.  I use animals, including homo sapiens, as metaphor.  I see animals, including homo sapiens, as great teachers, amazing guides for ideas on how to live a life.

As I began working I found how challenging this study of ordinary relevance, depicted in a narrative form through painting, would be.  The human instinct to strive is a very large, vague subject.  "Striving" probably stems from "survival"  -- it is what we do beyond survival that fascinates me.  This huge vague, general subject, has so much intricate detail that is almost impossible to follow, much less understand.

So, the further I got into constructing some of these paintings about ordinary relevance, the more I realized how ludicrous this feat was.  I did learn something though.  I learned how to work with my curiosity and my original idea.  My approach became loose.  I held the concept of ordinary relevance and the plethora of ideas it entertains, as loosely as possible in back of my mind (kind of).  The concept itself had a buoyant quality, but a definite presence.  My paintings came from a what I felt as a flow from the core concept, but without the limitation of having to literally link to it.  There were plenty of rational decisions and observations being made...but also a good share of what I would hope to be subconscious action as well.  My hope and intent is that these vignettes of this larger conversation will help lead to further questions.

The feeling of relevance, in which there can be many degrees of, is a wonderful thing.  I find it fascinating that sometimes the most ordinary and even banal of things can be extremely relevant.  On the other hand, our society has a tendency to celebrate the most conscientious, sought after, affected relevance.  Which is okay i suppose, perhaps this is the ordinary.

After all, I do have paintings hanging on a wall in a gallery partly in search if some kind of relevance.

Thanks for taking the time to check out my paintings.

Gil Corral, September 2008

II) Inspiration                                                       

CONFUCIUS AND THE MADMAN

Chuang Tzu

When Confucius was visiting the state of Chu,
Along came Kieh Yu
The madman of Chu
And sang outside the Master's door:

" O Phoenix, Phoenix,
Where's your virtue gone?
It cannot reach the future
Or bring the past again!
When the world makes sense
The wise have work to do.
They can only hide
When the world's askew.
Today if you can stay alive
Lucky are you:
Try to survive!

"Joy is feather light
But who can carry it?
Sorrow falls like a landslide
Who can parry it?
"Never, never

Teach virtue more.
You walk in danger,
Beware! Beware!
Even ferns can cut your feet-
When I walk crazy
I walk right:
But am I a man 
To imitate?"
The tree on the mountain height is its own enemy.
The grease that feeds the light devours itself.
The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down!
The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it.
Every man knows how useful it is to be useful.

No one seems to know
How useful it is to be useless.

III) Technical

Most everything I do in life is askew.  When I learned to skateboard as a kid, the technique I used was known as "goofy footed."  Kind of backwards or opposite the conventional form.  This pretty much stands true for how I paint as well.  I'll spare you the details.  The great thing about art is that it aspires to be a creative endeavor.

A point of interest I would like to comment on about this body of work is my interpretation of "space" in these paintings.  My intent is to convey an ambiguous sense of "space" that sometimes serves as an added dimension while serving as an environment for the subject of the painting.  You will find that at times the negative space is recognizable or tangible, and other times adds mystery or hopefully evokes curiosity.

I came across a passage in Mark Rothko's book, "The Artist's Reality"  that touches on the subject of plasticity and space.  Observations that I certainly can relate to and aspects of a style that I have similarly cultivated.

Rothko states:

"Modern painters will generally deny that Dutch genre pictures are plastic.  They will say that, in these paintings, the picture as a whole has no weight, the space is not real and is treated as a vacuum rather than as substance, and that both textures and space are are illusory rather than real and tangible.  Academic painters, on the whole, will deny that modern paintings achieve any sense of plasticity in their use of space.  They will deny that things move in space at all and that the textures give them any sensations of actual existence.  We will find that the discrepancy between these two positions basically from how each views the nature of reality.

Both groups of painters are interested in the sense of existence which a painting achieves.  they wan to feel that the painter had given his picture a conviction that makes it convincing as defined within their own conceptions of reality.  The notion of plasticity therefore implies that the artist has convincingly imparted the feeling of existence to the picture." 

Rothko then quotes Mr Bernhard Bereson in his discussion of Giotto, in The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance.   He says:

"Psychology has ascertained that sight alone gives us no accurate sense of the third dimension.  In our infancy,  long before we are conscious of the process, the sense of touch, helped on by muscular sensations of movement, teaches us to appreciate depth, the third dimension, both in objects and is space.

In the same unconscious years we learn to make of touch, of the third dimension, the test of reality.  The child is still dimly aware of the intimate connection between touch and the third dimension.  He cannot persuade himself of the unreality of the Looking-Glass Land until he has touched the back of the mirror.

Later we entirely forget the connection, although it remains true, that every time our eyes recognize reality, we are, as a matter of fact, giving tactile values to retinal impressions.

Now, painting is an art which aims at giving an abiding impression of artistic reality with only two dimensions.  The painter must, therefore, do consciously what we all do unconsciously,-- construct his third dimension.  And he can accomplish his task only as we accomplish ours, by giving tactile values to retinal impressions. His first business, therefore, is to rouse the tactile sense, for I must have the illusion of being able to touch a figure, I must have the illusion of varying muscular sensations inside my palm and fingers corresponding to the various projections of this figure,  before I shall take it for granted as real, and let it affect me lastingly." 

Rothko then comments:

"Mr. Berenson is only hinting at an idea which is the foundation of plasticity in modern painting carried to its logical conclusion.  It is this same notion of tactile reality as championed by modern painters which allows us now to better accept the space of the Egyptians or Chinese."