Chamber 51

Since my grandmother passed away recently, my folks have been clearing out her old apartment and finding closets full of art supplies – pristine boxes of oil paints, bundles of brushes, and a number of rolls of canvas. There were also two stretched canvases – I decided to tackle one of them while I was visiting family for two weeks in Bombay. The painting ended up being a perfect example of the way I love to develop my compositions.

I really had a desire to fling red paint at the canvas (yeah, red again – go figure). Since that wasn’t an option at my parents’ place, I decided to paint a splatter. It was relatively free-form and loose (just short of actually flinging the paint). While I was developing the splatter a female form started to take shape, which eventually ended up being a dancer. I went with it, and then covered up the parts of the splatter that I didn’t like with some dark blue-black paint, going with curved lines to enhance the form of her movement.

After playing some more, the curved form took shape as a wave – mainly because I started mixing some white paint in with the blue-black, and turned it more blue. I’ve been itching to paint more “flung” liquid since I painted the wine flying through Chamber 51, and that ended up being the most fun part of painting this one too. I really love those liquid textures – I’m sure I’ll be doing that some more.

I was staring at a photo of the painting so far in my phone in a taxi late at night when I realized that the whole thing was starting to resemble a flower. Probably wouldn’t have made that connection without seeing it in miniature. Went at it the next morning and it worked – and now the whole painting suddenly became all about the flower. Love it when that happens.

I was mostly done – or at least I thought I was, and my parents had an artist friend, Delna Dastur, over for tea. We started discussing my painting and she said she thought it wasn’t done yet – the background needed to be something other than white. I agreed, but I was hesitant because it would be hard to lay color down so late in the game – the paint splatter especially would have been hard to negotiate. Plus, I would be leaving in a day. She said “It’s always worth the risk”, and as soon as she left I used a rag dipped in watered-down paint to roughly dab a thin wash of indigo over the white. Took around 5 minutes and it was done – thanks Delna!

I was recently invited to join some incredibly talented artists and musicians at Conception III. Since it’s a group show, there’s limited wall space for my paintings and most of them won’t fit, so rather than just put one or two up, I decided to try to get some new, smaller works ready in time. I’ve had a few smaller canvasses that had been abandoned lying around, and this was one of them: an improvisation that went nowhere – originally titled “Improv in F”.

I started by flipping it, paintin the parts that I didn’t like blue, and adding a violin’s F hole. Still not much happening.

The big inspiration came when I realized that the painting needed heart.

Heart looks like an Octopus. Hmmm – this needs a tentacle.

Somehow the violin made a reappearance in the end of the tentacle. Came up with the title “Playing by Heart”.

Now the blues started to look too plain so I started messing with them. That seemed to carve out an upside-down ear shape on the left.

So I went to work on the ear, but to do that I flipped the canvas over. Now I like it better this way up. Maybe I’ll call it “Playing by Ear” instead.

…or maybe it should be the other way. I’m not sure. I guess it can go either way. When I show it tonight, I think I’ll label it both ways.

WOAH! This looks cool. Pity I can’t do this with paint.

Come check out the painting tonight at Conception III

My friend Alex wrote a poem for this painting.

The Kiss

A bold abstraction of love–
An embrace in time.
Suspended in our colors,
Both ourselves and yet apart.
But bring us together
     Just for this once,
Before the hanging abstraction
Of the future
Pulls us from each other
Forever.

     –Alex Arcone

Toccata is one of my earliest works, and also one of the largest canvases I have ever attempted. It was started and completed on a dreary winter Saturday in 1994 and hasn’t really been touched much since. While I love it conceptually, I’ve never been completely satisfied with the execution of it, and to be honest I’m a bit embarrassed by how raw it is – never had a chance to refine or clean up the rough edges at the time, and it’s a bit too late now.

Toccata was an attempt to paint a piece of music – a seven and a half minute instrumental by the same name based on the Fourth Movement of Alberto Ginastera’s 1st Piano Concerto, arranged by Keith Emerson and performed by Emerson Lake and Palmer. It’s a very complex, meandering, experimental track – packed with synthesized sounds and loops, morphing from dramatically violent passages to calm spacey sections and even features an epic drum solo that starts with gongs, tubular bells and timpani and ends with electronic drum loops. I listened to it on repeat while painting until the batteries ran out on my discman, then took a break for lunch, bought new batteries, and went back to listening to it until I was done late at night. Needless to say, I haven’t listened to it much since then. I started with a very violent and explosive underpainting – in synch with the music. As I refined it, I inserted elements that I was hearing. I wanted it to have depth and deep space, and to invoke sounds in the ears of the viewer. I did some questionable things like stick pieces of dried paint from the inside of paint cans to the canvas. I didn’t stop to think much – the music was too overbearing to allow for it. When I left that evening I didn’t return to the studio until Monday afternoon, when it was to be critiqued by the class.

Toccata clips by khusroks

When I saw it again on Monday, I remember being impressed but at the same time disappointed by what I had created. The critique was particularly contentious. I was attacked on the grounds that a depiction of music shouldn’t have recognizable forms (clock, bell, etc.) but should be more abstract – indeed most people who tackled that assignment produced works similar to Kandinski’s compositions. I countered that recognizable sounds instantly conjure up recognizable forms (e.g. the sound of a dog barking makes you think of a dog) and my piece of music – a short section of which was played for the class – was rife with recognizable sounds that ended up being depicted on the canvas.  I don’t think the consensus was with me and I remember leaving that critique feeling like I might just dump it or start from scratch and paint over it. I’m glad I didn’t.

Regardless of its flaws, I do think Toccata is a particularly affecting piece of mine. There’s no doubt that its size has an impact on the viewer, and it’s probably the piece that I’ve heard more people cite as their favorite of my works.

An explosion of light comes crackling through the branches as a trumpet Lilly heralds the dawning of a new age.  Below, crumbling idols are the vestiges of the old, and above, the trees’ vibrant greens are the fountains of the new.  Yet while the reason of the new age supersedes the superstition of the old, it is built on what came before.  Roots tread a fine line between absorbing age-old wisdom from the ancient rocks that they depend on for support, and breaking apart their decaying remnants.  The flower carries within it a potent symbol of the new age, its stamens poised to pollinate the world with the new science of medicine that has doubled lifespans within merely a handful of generations.

As with much of my work, the inspiration for this narrative didn’t emerge until very late in its evolution.  A forest scene emerged after a quick improvisation, and as I teased out some gnarly tree trunks, I felt that ancient temples were an appropriate addition to the scene.

The sky over the canopy started out orange, but it was too jarring for me, so it became a calmer blue.  The blue inspired the sunlight and the lens flare, and very soon a long green vine twisted its way out of the canopy and into the bell of a flower.

It wasn’t until I added the stamens, which turned to yellow pills, that the inspiration for the name and the theme of this piece struck me.  Maybe it was in my subconscious all along, but it didn’t fully materialize until the end.

In many ways the revolution of evidence-based medicine is the age of reason’s greatest accomplishment – underscored by the fact that if I’d lived in the era before it, I’d either be dead or very close to dying by this point in my life.

“Ultrasound” my latest painting, has been an exercise in channeling group creativity through my facebook page.  Almost every idea in it’s development was contributed by people through comments on photos of the unfinished canvas.  I often say that my best work is a result of happy accidents along the way – changes in direction that are inspired by elements of the image as I put them down on canvas.  Having others chime in on the series of Rorshach tests that span my process expands the creative input significantly.  It’s not that I’m relinquishing control, I still have final say on what gets incorporated – “I’m the Decider” 😉 – but this way I’m the curator of a much larger pool of ideas that may not necessarily be my own.  Plus, it’s always fun (and funny) to see what images are conjured up in other people’s minds when they look at something nebulous.

This is how it went. Click on the images to see the original facebook threads.

It all started with a blob.

Someone said it looked like a baseball mitt, so I hollowed it out.

Now a couple of folks saw a baby, specifically: “baby wrapped in a blanket” and “a baby in the womb”. Another person got a “sound” vibe (probably because it looked like a shell). So I went with a baby…wearing headphones.

I decided that I wanted the baby-container to echo a madonna-with-child so I manipulated it a bit.

A friend had recently bought me flowers for my apartment (not something I usually purchase for myself), so I had flowers on my mind.

More flowers…sunflowers!

The woman needed some texture.

At this point I was wondering whether I should stop before I smothered the baby. A few people said I should stop, but I wasn’t convinced. Some said I needed more in the top left, I got suggestions for “one bird and one bee” and “A butterfly would look great!”. I went to work on the butterfly, eventually deciding that I needed a second one. Now I felt it was done, all that was left was to name it.

I got a bunch of really great suggestions for the name, but in the end “Ultrasound” was the best one. Quite fitting that the process that created the painting was responsible for naming it too.

If you feel like you’d enjoy being a part of this brainstorming in the future and haven’t done so already, please “like” the Shirzad Khusrokhan Art page.