The impulse for this video “Restless Portrait: A Disappearing Painting” stems from the realization of the static nature of traditional portrait painting.  The half-smile of the Mona Lisa is frozen forever, and Juan de Pareja gazes out at us, as nobly as the day he sat for the portrait.  I realize that I will never see Juan de Pareja blink, and it seems to me that that is the power of these paintings- their enigma and steadfastness.  In painting myself, I have a sense that I am an altogether more neurotic person, living in a more unstable time, more twitchy and jittery.  The video captures the painting of a self portrait on single canvas, as the image is painted and repainted continually.  There is a sense that a painting is never finished, that the act itself is somehow futile and that the end result is a blank canvas, simply more pock-marked and scarred than at the beginning, but just as uncommunicative.

The world simply does not need more self portraits from me, and yet I am compelled to make them.  My solution is to recycle the paintings, to paint over them once they are finished.  This all-paintings-on-a-single-canvas policy proves exceedingly economical and perhaps lessens my carbon footprint.

There is a grand tradition of this searching, reductive style of portraiture.  We know that Giacometti painted and repainted his portraits endlessly.  The stalagmite encrustedness of the canvases tells the tale and if we use our imagination, or squint at the palimpsest-like brushstrokes on the canvas, we can envision this gloriously existential process.  Lucian Freud’s canvases reveal heavy pentimenti, where limbs, flesh, and sometimes entire bodies are moved around after having been thickly painted.  We can see these ghostly appendages and wonder at what caused the artist to change his mind.  Finally, Susanna Coffey paints self portraits endlessly, in unceasing variation, and evinces this urge to continually recreate oneself in paint.

This video simply aims to make all of that painting and repainting, all the searching, corrections and dried paint visible and explicit.  We can see the process before our eyes, and draw our own conclusions.  Using the medium of video, it is possible to capture the blinking of the subject.  It is possible to capture the shifts and tilting of restless human beings and there is a sense of animation, where once all movement was only implied.

Although painting is thought of as a medium which celebrates permanence, and paintings live in museums and attics for hundreds of years, we are living in altogether more uncertain times and this painting video speaks of an era where paintings are destroyed immediately after they are created.  I still have the canvas that is visible in this video, and I continue to paint new paintings on it.

The audio heard in the piece, a work entitled “Rain On the Motherland” by Kazuki Mishima (used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License) was selected because the instruments used, including the sitar, reference my Indian heritage.  The syncopation of the frenetic beats mimic the pitter patter of the brushwork as the canvas is covered in a drizzle of paint strokes.

Still from the video: Restless Portrait: A Disappearing Painting

]]> http://www.gautamrao.net/restless-portrait/feed/ 0 http://www.gautamrao.net/iaac-erasing-borders-2009/ http://www.gautamrao.net/iaac-erasing-borders-2009/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:07:21 +0000 Gautam http://www.gautamrao.net/?p=491

My video “Restless Portrait: A Disappearing Painting” was selected for inclusion in the exhibit:  Erasing Borders: Passport to Contemporary Indian Art of the Diaspora 2009 organized by the Indo-American Arts Council.  The opening was this weekend at the Dowd Gallery at SUNY-Cortland.  I’m thrilled to be a part of this exhibit!

Nylon, nails and acrylic on wood.

I think I like the details better than the painting…

I’ve been anxious to put together a website for sometime now, but I was stumped by the design of it.  I wanted to put my work into neat categories- paintings, videos, design etc.  and subcategories- digital life, blocks etc.  but some videos were of paintings, and works about blocks were done in both painting and photography.  The tidy buckets I’d hoped to build were broken even before I’d made them.  In frustration I went to my friend Jon Sorenson, a genius Computer Science professor at Butler University, and within ten minutes he’d solved my problem.  He immediately advised me to use a category system whereby items could easily reside in more than one category.  This multivalent approach really helped to break the narrower view I was trying to impose on the work.  The suggestion I most valued was where he pointed out that for future work, I shouldn’t have to worry about which category the work would fall in.  Under the approach he suggested the new work could find its own categories organically and without predetermination.

This conversation jogged something in my memory, I remembered David Weinberger’s book, “Everything is Miscellaneous” and I read it immediately.  I loved it, and his discussion of tagging led to the tag cloud on the landing page of this site, and the tag collection in the sidebar.  I love his discussion of the three orders of order, and have been fascinated by his ideas.  I’m intrigued to think of the impact category-atomization might have on academia.

Anyway, that’s the story of how the current organization scheme of this website came into being.  It will be interesting to see how long this system works for this site.

As the saga of getting this website up and running continues, I’ve added another element to the design.  I’ve decided to release my work under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.  I did a good amount of research about this “some rights reserved” approach and feel that it’s appropriate for my work.  I hope others can share and benefit from the work I’ve done.  The only works that this does not apply to are those for which I’m not the copyright holder, eg. the logos and other commercial work I’ve done.

I’ve used CC licensed audio tracks for videos I’ve done and I’m excited to see if people find ways to use my work.  I’m a fan of Jonathan Coulton and Becky Stern, and both of them use CC licenses for their work.  Larry Lessig is such a compelling speaker and advocate for Creative Commons and videos of his talks played a role in the decision.  (by default the Wordpress theme I’m using (deFusion) adds a “Copyright ©” line to the footer). My CC attribution label is in the footer of this site, so share, remix and otherwise enjoy my work!

Yes, the text is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

A bit of exciting news!  I’ll be presenting at the 2009 Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities in Honolulu on January 9th, 2009.

My paper is entitled: Painting in the Digital Age: When Pixel meets Paintbrush.  Here’s the abstract I submitted:

This paper examines my paintings from the series “Digital Life”, comprised of computer screen imagery rendered in oil paint.  The paintings form a link between traditional painting and the contemporary digital world and as such, connect the past with the present.

As an avid museum-goer, I am startled to see how little time viewers spend looking at paintings, but will spend countless hours staring at digital screens.  My idea, in order to bridge this divide, has been to turn the screens into paintings: to inject the texture, brushwork and physical quality of oil paint into the virtual, technological realm.

The subject of these paintings is the UI (User Interface) design of computers, the icons and symbols that characterize the digital experience.  This interface is familiar to millions of people, often as a mundane feature of their work-lives.  By making paintings of them, I am memorializing an experience that millions have on a daily basis; in a sense finding art within everyday experience.

This paper examines these paintings within the context of both contemporary painting and the historical oil-painting tradition.  Additionally, this work is influenced by innovations in the fields of computer science and graphic design, and these connections are highlighted and examined.

Finally, since digital images of these paintings are scattered all across the Internet, I examine the recursive nature of making paintings of computer screens and displaying them on the Web.

In an era when there is fierce competition for people’s attention, and digital screens are often examined far more closely than paintings, my work forms a bridge between the two, breathing new life into the dialogue.