The Serial Method in Painting

I am a serial painter in many ways. In other ways, I am perhaps not so serial. It began a long time ago. It kind of just happened. I happened to have been painting every day for a very long time. I often had 20 paintings drying at the same time in the studio.

You see, I have always been cursed - or blessed! - with great prolificness. It's a curse because I've had to leave entire Collections behind when moving. If you happen to have the misfortune of being "maxed-out" space-wise, as they say, and you are moving into a smaller space, what can you possibly do with over a thousand paintings?

There's only so muck IKEA furniture will do to solve your problems, especially when they are not problems easily solved by common sense. It's in fact un-common sense to be so prolific. So what do you do?

You work at a smaller scale, format-wise I mean. You make smaller paintings. When you make smaller paintings, you can make many more of them. You end up filling space, but they are more easily stored. When you run out of space, you start over, but on paper this time, or cardboard.

As you can see, the complexity of maintaining a prolific practise of this scale quickly causes intractable problems, like ones where you have to leave all your works in a Large format behind, next to the garbage by the side of the road.

What, you thought friends or family would bail you out, come take your paintings for you? Never. No one wants them. The galleries don't want them, your family and friends certainly don't want them. Besides, it's your freely chosen profession, you paid good money for the materials. These are valuable pieces, you can't be expected to give them away for free.

But you can throw them in the garbage. There's a huge difference. If no one wants to buy them and no one wants to take them, if you're only choice is someone taking it out of pity or else getting a free ride and a free pass to your decades-long art practise and ingenuous labor by taking it off your hands to hang on their wall or something.. Think again, you destroy them, deface them, throw them in the garbage. Have a bonfire.

But keeping a massive archive is laborious work. Works on paper need the right environment. Quebec winters and weather here in general are not good for any works of art. You can forget about keeping paper.

Keep them in storage. But I don't just have access to a museum here! Who do you think I am, Pablo Picasso? I'm just a lowly serial painter.

I have therefore been forced to bust my brains to constantly think of way out of intractable problems. You can do it all digitally, but I am an analog serial painter. I like to have real physical works, they last longer than digital ones. They are easier to preserve in that sense. But as you can see, the Large formats get thrown in the trash. The paper rots, turns yellow. Mold gets in, fungus. It can be a fire hazard. You're not hoarding, you're building neatly aligned, massive collections of works of the finest art. But you see, that's not how it works today.

The market died in Quebec. I can't export works in Large formats. I can't keep them, I can't store them. I make works in small formats. Easy to transport, send to people. I make limited series. I make interleaving and interweaving series. I have multiple series going on concurrently like threads in a processor. The trick is you make less. You resist the temptation to make art. You are a prolific painter, you take a few years off. You have to. You're allowed a vacation like anyone else.

You spend a few seasons working on setting up the archive properly. You organize the collections that are extant. You work on new processes, treatments, new methods, invent a few technologies, think about new manufacturing processes. You study theoretical computer science, computer programming, you start to build your own digital archives. Life is pretty sweet.

The trick though is to be able to crank out 100 paintings a day if you have to, but be able to not paint for years if you want to. It's painting on-demand, just like Netflix with movies and television shows. At any instant, you can stream fine art of the highest quality in massive quantities. But you keep an eye on your inventory. You stash caches of paintings in secret places, underground when possible, or in a vault somewhere.

You keep entire series, collections, project hidden for up to 10, 20 years. No one knows they exist. You release them on a precise schedule. You're already 10, 20 years ahead of the game. You can take your time. You release it on a tight schedule and you work on those processes, managing inventory, keeping up the archives, you spend some time working on your Succession Strategy.

You already have works that you know can withstand hundreds of years of history. You skip the market. If the market is dry, is weak, is broken, dilapidated, you donate works to national archives, museums. No one knows your name in this town, but maybe you're big in China with limited series in tightly orchestrated, coordinated mobile shows under a pseudonym.

What, if I choose a pseudonym, I can make him Chinese, can't I? A Chinese serial painter? You go where the market is at. It's not a crime to use the methods your tradition gave to you. It is your inheritance, your heritage. You use it to your advantage.

Donate to organizations, charities. Banks need art work, so do government offices. No one cared that you existed, now no one knows you exist, and yet you are everywhere and will be for the next several hundred years if all goes as planned.

Maybe someday you'll patent it all as a business method. Call it the Art Operation. But I still haven't told you about the serial method of painting. It's a trade secret. Make your own darn paintings and see. If you're any good, maybe you will make eyes turn. But if you're truly great, you might be fortunate enough to be invisible. Let everyone have their fifteen minutes. Go for the long haul and be in the archives for thousands of years.

But you have to be smart about it. You can't follow trends. Look what trends did! Picasso's papier-collé work, how's that going for his Succession? Come on, paper is no good, cardboard isn't any better. It's canvas you want! But storing canvases is a pain in the ass. So you innovate. But if people think you're just going to give them the business method for free when they didn't care about your art when they had the chance, forget about it. There's no collector or investor big enough that I will bow down to him or her. Wave your billions in my face, I don't care. I'm not that type of person. I actually care enough about my work to not let anyone have it. Not unless it's on my terms and solely on my terms.

But, again, you have to be good for it. You have to have a method. You're not worth your weight in cardboard or anything if you can't deliver the goods, if you aren't good for it. You have to be delusional or really great at what you do. I let others decide. There's nothing magic or mystical about it. I did my research, I did my homework. And I haven't even started. I was just polishing off the methods for the last 30 years. What were you up to?
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