As a follow-up on the subject of the insecurity and vulnerability that comes with making personal works, I think this quote from Daniel Benmergui, who makes independent video games, is appropriate. He was responding specifically to the question of video games as art, but I think what he said applies just as much to all forms of art:

“If you don’t feel personally exposed when publishing the game, you did not make art.”

This was posted last week in one of the artist blogs I follow: “May I ask whats your obsession with naked women?” asks one of his readers.

It’s funny that I’ve never been asked that same question, since I also paint a lot of women in various states of undress. I’m probably covered (so to speak) with my watercolor pieces — since those are all technically life drawings and thus fall under the safely acceptable umbrella of “artist study” — but I don’t have the same excuse with my acrylic pieces, which were all done from my imagination, and thus I had to choose that as my subject matter.

To my friends’ credit, none of them have ever gone and asked me, straight up, “What’s the deal with all these naked women?” I think maybe they understand what an uncomfortable question that is. Or maybe it’s just not a big deal to them. I have no idea.

But I’ve thought about it a lot. These feel like very personal pieces for me, but I couldn’t really tell you why. There’s nothing autobiographical about them. There’s no message or statement I’m trying to make. What makes them so personal? I know that when I sit down and just paint for myself, these are the paintings that come out of me, but are they really personal, or are they just paintings of naked women? Do I fall back on the standard excuses — that the female nude has been a favorite subject of artists for thousands of years? Or, even better, that I’m just your average heterosexual male and so of course I like painting naked women?

I don’t know. Maybe. But I think there’s more to it than that.

For one thing, I’m purposely painting these pieces a certain way. I tend not to like painting in an obviously “pin-up” style, and I try to avoid all the usual pin-up tropes, like deliberately sexy poses or staring seductively into the camera (in fact, whenever I can, I usually try to paint them looking away from the camera, or just off-camera). My paintings still feel a little suggestive, sure, I’m not trying to avoid that. But I think my intent is to make it seem like the subjects aren’t aware that anybody is looking, and so maybe they’ll seem a little less fake and posed, and a little more relaxed and natural.

Another thing is that because I’m painting these from my imagination, not from reference, I think it gives them a more personal quality than the ones painted from live models. I don’t know exactly why, because, again, what’s so personal about painting a naked woman? Maybe it lets the piece be closer to my natural drawing style, more stylized, like something out of my sketchbook. Maybe it turns the piece into more of an abstraction, like I’m painting the idea of a woman, rather than any one specific individual. Or maybe it’s that, by creating the entire piece from my imagination, I’m showing you exactly what was going on in my head, and, well, there’s just something very personally revealing about that.

But why is that the image in my head in the first place? Why not flowers or landscapes or people with their clothes on?

Well, I don’t really have a good reason, because I’m honestly still trying to figure it out. I only started this series a year ago, after a long hiatus from traditional painting. And at the time, I was at something of an artistic crossroads, with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my art. When I started painting again, it was because I wanted to see what would happen if I just painted for myself for a while.

But I think maybe sometimes you don’t get to decide what a piece is about, even when you’re the artist. Sometimes you just paint what you feel compelled to paint, and only when it’s finished does it reveal to you what it’s about.

This series hasn’t quite revealed its purpose to me yet, but here’s my best guess so far, which is maybe just a variation of the “straight male likes to paint naked women” excuse, but here it is anyway:

I think I’m just trying to paint something beautiful. And maybe this type of female nude — this stylized, abstracted, anti-pin-up woman — is what I think beautiful is.

If that doesn’t make these pieces personal, I don’t know what does.

There’s a new game, called Love, just released last month by one-man indie developer Eskil Steenbert. If you have time, you should check out the gameplay demo video, it looks very cool and interesting and unlike anything else out there. Like with most indie games, it’s also astonishing it was created by just one person.

About a month prior to its release, its creator wrote a post explaining his reasoning behind, god forbid, actually charging money for the game, and in the middle of it all was this quiet indictment of the conventional wisdom:

“… The idea that we can produce more things, with higher quality, and fund it with smaller payments seems unrealistic to me.

“The smart money is not the ones trying to survive on microscopic payments, but the ones creating a platform to skim money from them. Apple wants the games on the Appstore to cost next to nothing, so that people buy more iPhones even if its not sustainable for the vast majority of developers. Google wants to you to think that you can become an overnight millionaire when everyone suddenly flock to your lolCat page with google ads on it, when they really make money on having millions of websites with their ads on that get a few hundred views each.”

And it makes me wonder whether this brilliant internet business model of giving your work away for free and then making money off the eyeballs is going to work when all the eyeballs are doing it too.

Saw an article tonight, via Metafilter, on the Six Myths of the Art Market. All six are essentially variations of the same thing: it is incredibly foolish to buy art as an investment. You’re just asking to lose money. Seems like the subtext could easily be interpreted as don’t buy art — troubling words, to say the least, for someone like me who makes and sells art!

Seeing as I currently have a number of works available for sale, allow me to set the record straight on my own views:

I want you to buy my art. I’m happy to sell you my art. And I would love to sell enough art to make a living from just selling my art. But please don’t buy my art because you think of it as an “investment.” That’s not what art is for. That’s not why I created it. If you’re going to buy my art (and I really would like you to), please do it because you really like the art.

If you only buy art that you like, you’ll never end up with art that has no value.

These are comps for the next paintings I’m working on (and an older one I already finished). Most of them are currently in what I and many other artists refer to as the “ugly phase.”

The ugly phase is a phase every picture has to go through, it’s the phase right after putting something on the blank canvas (because you need to put something there or you haven’t started) but before any of it is in the right place. The ugly phase is essentially fixing everything after that first stupid move, when you decided to sully that nice pristine canvas with your wretched markings.

Thanks to my new procedure of recording every bit of my process, you can actually watch me go through the ugly phase on some of my own paintings. You might not even notice, it goes by so quickly in timelapse. That’s accurate; the goal is to get through the ugly phase as quickly as possible — because, for the duration that a painting is in the ugly phase, its artist experiences lasting physical pain until it stops looking ugly.

And while the video makes it look easy, what the camera doesn’t show is all the time spent between sessions, not painting, just staring at it, thinking to myself, “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Now what am I supposed to do?”

During this phase, it’s rare that I’ll spend longer than twenty minutes before stopping, setting it aside, coming back to it later, working another twenty minutes on it. I spend a lot less time, but it’s much more staggered, and all of it is agonizing. Compare this with the rendering phase, which is long and boring and monotonous, but easy. At that point, all I have to do is finish it. And when I get to this phase, I’ll often work for hours at a time, and it may take a while, but at least I know what I’m doing.

And that’s the thing about the ugly phase. It actually doesn’t occupy that much painting time. The bulk of the time on a painting is really spent on the rendering needed to take it across the finish line. But while the ugly phase may account for maybe only 10% of the time spent, it easily occupies a good 90% of the anguish.

The ugly phase is what makes starting a new drawing or a painting so difficult. It’s not just the tyranny of the blank canvas, as some say, though the two are related. After all, you had a perfectly good canvas there, it looked fine before you decided to draw on it. Now look, all it took was a single mark, and you’ve ruined it. It’s too late to take it back. You have to live with it now. You can only go forward.

Ruining the canvas was your crime, and now the ugly phase is your punishment.