The Square, Choices and Scanner
Recording 8
HH - Is there a difference for you so far working with a square?
EN - It feels small
HH - In space?
EN - Feels like I’m missing sides. Because I have been working so far with the canvas horizontal. So horizontal it has always been 30 x 40 or 36 x 48, so I had 40 or 48.
And now I have 36. And even though it’s same height as the larger one and a bit bigger, six inches bigger than the small one, it’s like I’m concentrating everything in this area and I feel like there’s no room in the other direction…
Maybe it’s time to turn the canvas around…
I don’t know. If I flip it like this it will give me the option to turn it and work here. Yeah, I guess…
It’s funny because there are artists that will turn the canvas without even thinking about it, no problem and there’s others where it’s like, forbidden. It’s not something you do. If you are working on something in some orientation, it’s not a good thing to just turn it…
EN - I was very excited about the greens in the oil sticks that I bought the last time they worked really nicely last time and this time it doesn’t and so I’m thinking, you can buy the same color but the oil stick is just not going to work the same way as it would work. Maybe that’s why they are discontinuing them at this store. In a sense it’s frustrating because I’m expecting some color out of it and it works differently and at the same time it pushes me into being like, ok, what else can I use that I have here to create what I’m after. See what I can do with what I have to work what I’m not so happy about.
HH - And using what you have at hand in a given moment, to do what you can.
EN - In a way it’s a good thing. It pushes you something that you don’t know. Grabbing a new color that you don’t know how it is going to will react. Because generally you will go for what you know. Now I want this color because i will ether consciously or unconsciously do what you need it to do. But then when it doesn’t you need to let go of what you know and problem solve.
Because it’s still problem solving, in a different way. It’s good.
I don’t know if I want to turn the canvas, because if I do it will… it would be different.
HH - Choices.
EN - I know. So, you chose this new music. It sounds familiar, this one
HH - It’s by this artist I have been listening to. His name is Scanner. Like a printer scanner. And from time to time he will insert gibberish of human voices and an atmosphere of moods and sometimes recordings of missed phone calls. Hey I tried ca ca call you.
HH - As I’m moving, are there times too where you make choices to omit? To not follow the whole movement? Or not record it at all, or not interpret it at all?
EN - Well, I can’t record everything
HH - Definitely
EN - But then, I guess your question would be, am I ready to put a mark down and then what you are doing does not satisfy so I don’t put it down?
HH - Say the music is funk and I can be with the music or there is a certain part of the music that I hear and I chose to not move to it and chose to not follow it.
EN - In that way, yes, of course. If the canvas asks for something else and for example you were doing something here and I’m following that in this part of the canvas and suddenly you shot off in the other direction but I was already headed in the other, I am going to continue my movement and then catch up. So, I either decide to do the line that I missed of you running in the other direction or just decide to go where ever you are and continue with your new movement.
I am not perfectly recording everything you are doing. Sometimes, many times, either the materials will want to do something else and will be like, I put this here because I’m following you but now I need something here that might have nothing to do with what you are doing so I go there and then I catch with you again.
Because it is a conversation between me and you, and also the canvas.
HH - That is intriguing to hear. What the canvas needs or calls for.
EN - And so in a way you also converse with the canvas when you hear the brushstroke you told me you heard or the scratching or when you stand up and look at the colors or things like that I would imagine. You listen to the canvas and I visually talk to the canvas. What do you need now? So that’s why, oh, I need to turn it around and then it’s like what’s happening is interesting and if I turn it around it would cancel it. Sometimes you need space and absence of space. Negative space, positive space. Figure space, one against the other and then if everything is covered with the same weight, there is no going through it because everything is just this…am I making sense?
HH - Yeah
EN - So, you need some different weights, you need one thing against the other. So it’s like Oh, there’s nothing happening there, but there is and that less happening there is working with the more happening here and I think I am going to continue with that rather than turning around and create opposition and now that I’m looking at it again I’m thinking maybe I’ll turn it around…
HH - I like hearing that internal…
EN - Yeah, that’s why my mental process is generally not said out loud, because it’s this back and forth.