The last four people sharing lock-down with us here at ArteSumapaz have left, and I now have both an exhibition space (el Granero) and the massive studio. Several years ago, I packed up all of my work that had been in the upstate New York studio, and shipped them to Bogota. I realized recently that …
Art
Talk at Studio Kura
In march 2019, I spent the month at Studio Kura in Itoshima, Japan, in an artists residency. During that month, I made two large pieces using ink on hemp paper, collaging the drawing together as I worked. During the exhibition, I was asked to make some comments, which are below. So in …
Painting as embrace
If there has been any one famous person I would have liked to have had over for dinner, it would have been the art critic John Berger. Throughout his books you get the sense that his love of art was that of a practitioner, and it flowed over into his love of life and friends. In one of his essays, I …
Anch’io sono pittore
The other day, there was an announcement in the news that the oldest figurative paintings, cave paintings in Borneo, have been identified as being over 40,000 years old. We´ve been mixing color with some sort of medium and applying it to surfaces for a long time. Someone once said something like …
My Humongous Audacious Dream
(For updates, please visit us at www.arteSumapaz.org) We couldn't drive up the road – it was blocked by a portone, one of the massive gates that Colombians often have at the entrance of their properties. But I skirted around a pillar and made my way up the driveway, past groves of bamboo or …
Marsicano
Transcript of a talk given by Nicholas Marsicano to his painting seminar at SUNY Purchase, circa 1984. The Dada act appears to be by, upon a situation. The man who put the moustache on the Mona Lisa did not put it upon Leonard da Vinci; he put it upon a lousy painting that they made …
Making and not making art
The art critic Jerry Saltz wrote an article earlier this year about his having been an artist when he was younger – and his decision to no longer be an artist. I´ve found myself discussing the article with friends, now and then, and see references to it pop up again and again on Twitter. I suppose …
Artist Warrior
Being an artist can be challenging. A lot of life shit can get in the way; the need to make money, put bread on the table, gas in the tank, and such. And then there's just the human penchant for distraction, which some of us have more than others. All sorts of people are afflicted with all sorts of …
Ink on Mulberry
I'd almost forgotten how it came to be that I've been making these large collages of ink on mulberry paper. Edom Hernandez had gifted me a fairly large stack of the paper before he died. The ream sat in my studio unused for many years, occupying its own drawer in the flat files. Edom had …
Dreams of Dreams
We sapients do something called cultural ratcheting. It’s when we learn something from others, and build on it. Apparently, not even our closest primate cousins do this. Yes, they can use sticks as tools to draw ants from their mounds, or use rocks to break open some hard-shelled food, but they …