OOOOOOOO / _k_tolch_

Stop lying to yourself and start lying to other people

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Are you a content producer or are you an artist?

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Emphasize Irrationality

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Paint in the dark

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Willfully blind yourself to known outcomes

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The more you know about your paintings, the less interesting they become

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It’s about expressing a possible outcome out of incalculable amounts of potential

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It’s about becoming a producer of form, but more specifically about how one can express an unfamiliarity and expose a process that communicates something arbitrary yet specific about how painting contributes to people’s perception of their own irrationality and their blanket denial of it.

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If hierarchy is gone, then that opens the door for alternative timelines.  As a result, the idea of time evaporates all together

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Painting as pipe organ in a space of your own making.

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Paintings are a visual system that needs itself to affirm itself as a system (reflexivity)

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Act decisively, that’s all.  Act. Define the problem, then act.  Don’t become a victim of your gift.  It’s not a burden, perhaps you just don’t know how to manage it.  Get out of your own way. 

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There is no failure

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Art is vital to your welfare

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It’s a stand-in for all those things: inexplicable, ineffable and impossible

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The generation of a form must engage with the process.  Nothing can be arbitrary.  The forms have to be generated by those principles of the framework.

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The moment a painting begins to reveal its identity is maybe the most difficult point to get to.  It’s just never clear what the painting will become.  It’s very spontaneous.

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How might you introduce a new space?

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The forms of a painting are a language of varying degrees of subjectivity

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Values:  Dislocation, Disregard for logic, Irrationality, Desire for freedom, A feeling of limitlessness, Light, Space, Conflict/Ambivalence, Pathos/wistful, Impending failure/breakdown, Labor/Touch, Body Hand Painting, God Mode → IDKFA / IDDQD / IDBEHOLD, Noise/Corruption

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Rather than limiting oneself to conservative and safer practices of formal invention, consider your habits, identify them and develop strategies to demonstrate a willingness and desire to resist unnecessary restraint.  For example, if one habitually covers an entire painting with one color, rather than approaching this as a defect that needs to be adjusted, introduce a formal strategy that says, “I know and IDGAF”.  In this case, use more contour lines to show your willingness to completely ignore the assertion of their presence.  It’s an ironic gesture.

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Painting as desire to communicate an exchange regarding the unidentifiable, inexplicably mysterious process of the production of meaning

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Explain the character and texture of the self-consciousness your painting provokes in yourself and others.  This will have to be answered while looking.

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Painting as access to one's consciousness

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The disregard for codified systems results in dislocation.  That dislocation results in a fulcrum between what has been done and what is possible.

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Perpetual Motion, relational mechanics

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Grid is an authority.  It should be disrespected, undermined and made fun of at all times and at all costs

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A painting talks about it’s own limitations: A flat surface, A picture space, a site for formal invention

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Painting seems to want to question what it means to actually know something for sure.  You definitely don’t

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It’s about its own inherent desire to understand what it is without interjecting a kind of rationalism

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An unanticipated resolution will have you considering very old paintings

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Rules for painting on any given day:

  • Act before you think
  • Be willing to risk loss without subsequently trying to recover loss
  • Color has value, remember contrasts
  • Establish a rhythm first, then start to show the painting respect
  • Don’t respect the painting too much
  • Don’t look at finished paintings while painting something new
  • Don’t care. You really shouldn’t care.  Things fall flat when you care about it
  • Don’t fall back on old habits when you’re unsure where to go
  • Leave bigger shapes. Open space can be good
  • If red is home, then do you remember the day you left home for the first time?
  • Scale is everything
  • When you’re lost, just yell
  • Act before you think
  • Think repetition. It creates rhythm
  • Shapes and marks need to work together, even if they hate each other. It’s much bigger than any single one of them.
  • Live in one space, then leave it. Don’t go back.  Embrace departure
  • Be decisive

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Painting should reveal to you the future

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What aspect of my work is mine and not just redundancy?

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What is totally emphatic about my work; what can I not change?

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What is necessary?  What isn’t?

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Don't overpaint. Don't give your viewer too much. Don't give them too little

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Deny the viewer the experience of looking

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There's this idea of seducing the viewer into an artwork.  Once they're in, it's about making them uncomfortable in a way, not allowing them to move around and giving them very little

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I think it's possible to create a situation where one might experience a sublime moment or at the very least, a simulation of what they might describe as sublime.  “It’s what dreams are made of…”, she said.

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Keith Tolch, Guinea Pig, 2021; Courtesy of the Artist; Los Angeles

Ideas to think about on any given day:

  • Production
  • Making
  • Density
  • Weight
  • Dominance
  • Mark Making
  • Structures
  • Interior
  • Interiority
  • The Body in space
  • Backlighting
  • Photonegative
  • Severe weight with a hint of levity
  • Sexuality
  • Humor
  • Cartoons
  • Annihilating the logic of particular moments
  • Asuka Langley Soryu
  • An abstract vocabulary
  • Megaman’s head as an armature to hang marks
  • Annihilation of logical spatial relationships
  • Sex
  • Expansiveness?
  • Claustrophobia
  • Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon
  • Ambiguity
  • Precious Moments
  • My father’s death

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It’s a total slog working this way.  Dark like Bacon, ambiguous like Goya.

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Paint like how a rabid raccoon sees

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Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in Ecstasy, 1480; Frick Collection, New York

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Approach the ground plane as if it were a proscenium on which to suggest narratives constructed with abstract marks.  There is always tension between the representational and abstract 

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Think of narrative potential as a seductive device. For the viewer, it's an entry point into the painting.  From there, stop holding their hand

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Excerpt from Neon Genesis Evangelion (Manga) P. 328

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The following is one unit of thought process, extracted from a span of 15-45 seconds of studio time on any given day.  This is the chatter that underlies a predominantly visual interior headspace:

BEGINNING OF THOUGHT PROCESS:

Painting painting painting painting painting paingint paiongiadognfa fdsafpaiopaidngiopnagnagpn gdagppainting No Drawing.  Is Drawing necessary right now? No. why? I feel that I'm fully invested in the properties of the oil paint sdjklf sdlkf jfkldsa fjdksl jfdsaFsad fjasdnkvl asfklsa sex fsfjsdf jsadfsad f'sad [sdsdaf HOT SEX With M████ ███████ jsdaklf jdsa fsdfasd'pf q-     =` 13

`3

4e

123

13 12r3t3q5r35r3 r23e=gwr5-=5yo 4 7 y[wrtyw54pyqe09t7ae kdas fdfjdsaffdF fjasidofjadsklfsd'pfsadasd\[fdasj fiasd fkldasjf'asd Fs its difficult without being with them face to face having the confrontation with the materials when I saw you as I walked out the door yesterday, it’s as if we had known each other for many years.  I wanted to tell you I’d be right back, but I hadn’t been introduced to you yet your smiles through the night told me you maybe wanted to know where I was going immersing myself in the spatial interactions narrative suggestions not fully developed really there's pink, pepto pink. what else? what else is there? forms in a state of transition from figures to figures decoupled from their conventional form where can I go with this? where would I go with this if I could go anywhere? nowhere narrative, nowhere logical that's for sure sweetheart How I miss your heart beating next to mine the right words were always hard to find well maybe that's not totally accurate (right) correct there is some logic to be found here are my parts: ground plane figures on ground plane pull toward abstraction maybe I shouldn't overthink this No, well I should at least think about this critically, formally where else can I go? these paintings resist coalescence or so says TM they refuse to congeal into a uniform visual experience and my marks are nervous but avoid falling into the trap of typical nervous paintings.  Gnarly.  Diffident?  How exactly did he mean this? modest maybe in size? Demeanor? I dunno Utopianism?  Failed, right? Contemporary culture is a series of symptomatic expressions when all our times was fine soul of my soul come back home.  If so, then are my paintings symptomatic?  They are symptomatic of detachment and distance How it Ends. The figures maintain a sense of anonymity, they're strange in the sense that they are unfamiliar, like they are new every time I see them.  The identities are obscured because I don't know them and feel that maybe I shouldn't impose my will onto them?  I'm giving you everything you need to know except the most important parts, and I love that about the painting.  They completely evade a narrative resolution. Is that valid? I'm a mark maker a spatial developer the huge head hatted with bird and flowers is bowed down over my curls, the eyes burn with severe love I offer her mine pale upcast to the sky whence cometh our help and which I know perhaps even then with time shall pass away Maybe I could think of it as destroying the continuity of narrative structures.  Let it all separate, all parts visible, floating, interdependent relational quantum bourgeois bathers bathing in their own piss while fields of figures detonate themselves I was thinking allegory painting, but I'm not sure if they're representing anything else.  What is painting beyond itself? What is painting anyway? the audience as enemy I lived through 90's angst and it's my responsibility to carry that into the present I am a cultural relay absorb, interpret, translate? When I saw you as I was walking out the door saturday I wanted to tell you I’m coming right back, like I had known you for 10 years.  My face turned red, I saw in you a future that hadn’t occurred yet. The events just hadn’t played out, but we were living in the unfamiliar present as if they had.  I think it was love or could have been love if you would only respond to my follow request I’m failing at describing the moment, but it’s almost as if on delay Information moves through me assimilation transformation translation Information moves through me and manifests itself on a two dimensional plane I can feel my heart beating so many questions unanswered DENIAL OF SYNTHESIS DOS DENIAL OF

END OF THOUGHT PROCESS…

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The dominant framework that distributes images supports/encourages/demands the continual production of content, much of which is as hollow as the O in Social Media

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Provoke cognition, not aesthetic enjoyment (affirming subjectivity).  Allow them to experience the crisis of their subjectivity.  I probably stole this from someone else

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Keith Tolch, Fire Cleanse Me, Feral Moans 2021; Courtesy of the Artist; Los Angeles

Words that come to mind while looking at “Fire Cleanse Me, Feral Moans”:

A stage, a vocabulary of language, a collection, forms falling apart, a surface, ok space, ok recession, advancement, digging in, it's an illusion, edges bound and squared, hello edges hello hovering pigment descriptions, a map perhaps, an objective, no meaning in this pixelation destruction, rigid structure, a platform, rupture movement, loose tight, fast slow, breaking apart, clutter, decoration, an environment, screams '92, procedural generation, stop, wormhole continuity, christmas tree, Asuka Soryu Langley, receding space, red, blue, the pathway moves upward, has gravity and weight, green, the birds

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Modernist embarrassment, can’t have that deep space

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Michelle: Walls.  Landscape is a perfect underlying structure.  I don’t think you're comfortable creating tension/edging framing marks.  It is that, that makes me hesitant.  It’s time to harness what you have, different speeds, popping around/play w/illusion in a way...

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There’s something interesting about the learning process. I think the idea of an object becoming a fetish is something to consider. How do I fetishize the learning process?

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Out of a panic, I need to build this thing but struggled with a learning disability

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Embrace the errors by putting them into play

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A painting has to give you something in return

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Black forms are interventions

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Antagonistic Painting

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Embrace Video Games

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Ignore the Sirens

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Willem de Kooning, Pink Angels, 1945; http://www.willem-de-kooning.org

For more information, please visit:

http://www.keithtolch.com
Instagram: _k_tolch_
Keithtolch@gmail.com