The Ambitious

The ambitious nature of painting can be very overwhelming. Sometimes I want to work so largely on my paintings because it reads about space, meditation, and the sublime and other times the practicality of these paintings in a tiny studio becomes the reason why my paintings are created within a specific size ratio.  
Presently, I am working with image transfers and kind of find it difficult to create an archive of my momentary pause, which will be needed in the progression of my recent projects. I grow very unhappy with this challenge every day but this keeps me in the studio all day which is a plus. On days I got really stressed searching for images I just ignore the stress and read art books/magazines which mainly focuses on the contemporary art of today. Patience is key, a myth which I'm no longer pay attention to or maybe I am, clueless.

Jose Parla, Ashland to Baltic, Acrylic and plaster on canvas, 2015

This weekend, myself and some Colleagues took a trip to Savannah, a relatively close city in the state of Georgia. It's pretty much a tourist center and a place for the arts. More so, there is an art college situated within the city (SCAD) and also this college runs a museum know as the SCAD Museum of Art. It's a really inspiring location to get away from my studio drama -aka challenges with creating an archive of momentary pauses. One interesting work that got my attention was that of Jose Parla, a Cuban-American artist. Initially, I was familiar with his paintings but in a non-conceptual way. The non-conceptual way means my experience of his work was mediated through screens and books. I paid more attention to the artists surface through my conceptual experience of the artists work. I will describe it as a moment when everything makes sense, mostly especially the process in which Parla layered paint atop paint. It became a gratifying experience for me... wow! The monumental scale of  Parla's project made me ambitious again, this made think about the role of scale in sharing one's opinion of time and place- this is the fundamental idea of Mr. Parla's painting.
Obviously, I'm not going to spend my time being a cheerleader.
This is the content of Jose Parla's project as he states in his statement,
"I then embarked on a journey to search out in detail the dialogue of decaying walls, the marks on them, and what it all means to me.  This has led my paintings to become memory documents.  As a result, these works are time capsules, mixed documents of memory and research; part performance, as I impersonate the characters that leave their marks on walls. Time is a part of these paintings as their creative process simulates the passing of time on city walls and their layers of history with layers of paint, posters, writing, and re-construction.  This process, like meditation, affirms my everlasting devotion to art as a form of spirituality, which exists in the present and pays homage to those who leave their traces behind."
In my Opinion, I'm interested in the idea of how Mr. Parla's meditation-like process affirms his everlasting devotion to art as a form of spirituality. That is the key statement to comprehending his grandeur paintings. 
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Have a great week.