This week: Mill Spring and 7 paintings in 7 days

Ok, so I only made six, but I tried my very hardest. Either way, this is something that is going to happen from now until I leave: one painting a day, if I can help it– 100 reverse glass paintings by sometime in February, hopefully leaving me enough time to then finish a few other projects that I plan to exhibit in our exit show.

If I haven’t already explained it, a reverse glass painting is exactly as it sounds: a painting done on the underside of a pane of glass, in reverse. When you look into the glass, there is nothing on the surface, but there is an image on the inside. If you turn the glass over entirely, it doesn’t look like anything but gobs of paint. This is because the things in the foreground of the image, details and so on, are all done first and the background is the very last thing to be painted. You have to draw and paint the image flipped horizontally, so that it will read correctly from the front. Get it? I know it’s a little bit confusing…

I was attracted to reverse glass painting because a lot of Eastern European icon painters use the technique and I have a few reverse glass painted icons in my personal collection. The medium can be frustrating. First of all, there was very little information available about the process. I basically taught myself by looking at the examples I had and doing a lot of experimentation. It is an unforgiving medium because to erase your mistakes, you have to scrape off the paint, and you cannot see the front while you are working on the back, so it is highly possible that you are going to scrape off the wrong spot. But I am so pleased with the product, that I cannot complain. The reverse glass technique demands a simplification of the subject matter and flat color, which is in keeping with the aesthetic I began to develop in my icon painting. The effect is highly illustrative, one suggestive of narrative, which is something I have always been interested in. I hope that the collection of 100 of them, drawn from photographs taken on dérives, on routes often traveled, and throughout my daily life in Spartanburg, will become a record of the things I have come to love about a place that I once thought I could never love. It is a documentation of my finding beauty somewhere completely unlike anywhere I have ever lived– in abandoned industrial architecture, street lights filling empty spaces, cars, telephone poles, and marquis.

This week, I took pictures on the route from Columbus (where you exit the highway) to Mill Spring, where Brian lives. It is the most rural place I have ever spent an extended amount of time in, and the sites of route 108 to route 9 have fascinated me from the first time I ventured out there. It is the South that I thought I was promised when I moved down to Spartanburg, which is almost 45 minutes away. I thought I’d be closer to a place like this. Instead, I found a middling city, stretched into suburbs– somewhat diluted by some standard notion of American suburban living.

People in Mill Spring were very suspicious of me and the camera. On two occasions, women came out to demand an explanation of what I was doing. Both conversations went almost identically. People from the North, vacationers, are buying up plots of land out there. They are happy with the cheap property in a bucolic, temperate setting, but unhappy with all the old dilapidated buildings and road signs. They are teaming up with the county and trying to get them torn down. People have been out with cameras, and then a few days later, there will be articles in the paper (more like ads) with pictures of the buildings and calls to have them destroyed. Naturally, the people of Mill Spring, who make use of these old buildings, and hold a financial stake in their existence, are defensive.

I tried to explain to them that I wasn’t a tourist or with the county. (It did not help matters that I didn’t have an accent.) I told them I was an artist from Spartanburg. “A what?” they both asked. I am no longer surprised when I get this response from people, and I get if often. I realize that most consider it a terribly silly thing– and it is. How can one justify art-making as an occupation in the face of the everyday lives of most people, of the necessity and concretely utilitarian function of everything they are involved in? “I want to make paintings of them,” I told them, trying to explain that contrary to wanting them removed, I found them beautiful– something else they seemed to find silly.
The first woman warmed up to me after that, and allowed me to continue shooting. The second was not entirely convinced. “Do you mind if I just take a few more?” I asked her. “I guess so, but if you see my grandfather comin’ round you best run away or else he’s liable to get real hateful on ya,”she said, as if she hoped he would. I couldn’t really blame her, though. I, too, found myself indignant at the outsiders who sought to change a landscape that they really had nothing to do with, to those who seek to gentrify even the farthest reaches of this country.

These were the two buildings, though not necessarily the pictures I plan on painting:

And some other sights on the route, though, again, not necessarily ones I will end up painting:

I especially love this old advertisement, painted onto the side of a building that sits just off the junction between 9 and 108. If you’ll notice, the tagline for 7-up is “It Likes You.”

I feel sorry that it has taken me this long to get into a rhythm of art-making– I keep wishing that I could go back to a couple months ago and start then. But as John Lane told me in August (when I was just beginning my “hero’s journey,” if you recall), the creative process is a fascinating and unpredictable thing, and you cannot force it, and it does not come when you call. I have direction now, so I suppose I should be thankful and work diligently and get it done as best I can.

P.S. I have been a little delinquent with my blogging, but I think the obligatory blogging that came with the box burnt me out a little bit, and when I forced myself to blog after Halloween, it made me feel yucky. The result, I’m afraid, was even more self-absorbed than usual, and generally stupid. Hopefully, now I am back in the swing of things. Thanks for standing by (assuming that “you” are).