for long periods is that I forget I’m an artist. I forget I have a creative language and I forget to articulate this language, as evidenced by my lack of anything to share. this is quite alarming. plus I leave tomorrow for a mini vacation …. I also know there’s an element of laziness involved. I’ve made mention of the need to do something everyday … advice I need to be more in line with, clearly. all this said, at least there’s a phone picture to post!
I am taking a sketch book and my oil sticks/graphite case with me. I’m intend (operative word “intend”) to sketch. I hope to forget that I’ve forgotten how to be an artist. I hope to forget that I’ve not practiced my creative language and I hope that this time next week, I’ll have a sketch to share. til then … bon voyage
spending a couple days in the studio this week has refreshed my soul. even though i didn’t really make any art on one of those days, i was able to putz around and feel that creative movement is steadily chugging along. it’s really about the little movements towards making work that eventually end up with work getting made. huh? well … you know what i mean. just something everyday eventually gets a big pile of art made. i have a few drawings done and some canvas on the wall in the studio with a first pass of mars black … where it’s going? not effing clue
jeesus … it’s the end of the day and I’m finally posting. I don’t have access to the Internet in the green mountain state of vermont, but I’m back in the fair city of boston so here we go. as you know, I’ve embarked on a project of drawing something everyday. often it’s on the phone, yet I do actually take pencil, oil stick and ink to paper, it’s just that it’s a bit easier to post the digital drawings. I highly recommend this as a way to stay in the game … to make sure your studio practice goes with you so you’re never able to say ” I couldn’t draw because …..”. the notion of the artist block starts to recede when you do something everyday …. it really does make a difference to keep moving along. so here’s my daily drawing ->
Photos of the first stages of the process I’m exploring with these current reworked monotypes-to-paintings.
The monotype is an ancient relic from the early 90′s. Drawing over the image and reintegrating the underlying forms with the new marks, I then bring in paint of varying viscosities with brush and knife. The recontextualization of form may be overtly reconsidered or more likely metamorphosizes ‘organically’ (for lack of better pompous phrasing). Here much of the original is obliterated yet structurally the new image is recognizably built on form that is now rendered abstract. I’m away from my studio this week and won’t be reworking this until I get back, so this current unresolved stage will have to ferment like a soft wheel of gouda, also known as my head.
i’ve concluded that there’s a substantial part of me that has always wanted to be a painter/printmaker. the move to a studio has allowed me to open up to other mediums … and i’m eager to investigate. the generative process of printmaking is especially appealing as it requires me to fiddle around with a mechanical component (which i love) and it provides multiples (which i also love). drawing is also calling to me as it enables me to play and be spontaneous. it’s all very unnerving having spent so many years as a photographer. what is apparent, however, is that i’m still working within a frame. that’s the photographer in me and that’s ok as it provides some sort of platform.
this is acrylic on paper and ink. image is approx 7″ x 7″ .
Last week I was having energy and anxiety issue. Finally, one day at work, I forced myself to draw this:
As I said then on tumblr, “When the world seems particularly stupid I get an obsessive urge to make perspective drawings to assure myself order still exists, even if it’s just the illusion of such.”
Since then, my computer has refused to acknowledge my printer/scanner combo, my cable television cut out and as of this morning, my building’s water didn’t work. Possibly due to a crackhead stealing it’s pipes. Clearly, a fancy cube wasn’t going to cut it. Thus I present you, the “rhombicuboctahedron,” a term I had to look up on google this morning. I had been calling it a 3D octagon, but will now pretend I knew it’s real name all along.
(I apologize for the appearance of these photos. Due to my scanner being out I used my camera and apparently messed up the entire enterprise.) This version was inked with drafting pen on vellum (the vellum I’m using is basically high quality tracing paper). This allows me to preserve states of the original so I can go different directions later if I choose.
This is an earlier state of the same drawing showing the completely transparent rhombicuboctahedron. It may take a while to understand it as such, but I assure you it’s true.
The next 2 drawings are blurry. I apologize, but they help give context to the above 2 drawings. Read more »
In this series, like all of my recent collages, I’m experimenting with issues of context and representation. The subject of any art piece brings it’s own context and background to that piece’s interpretation. Andy Warhol’s portrait of Mao Tse Tung is highly informed by the charged identity of it’s subject matter. His Marilyn Monroe portraits are created in a very similar style, yet produce an extremely different effect because of the huge difference between the perception of her and Mao. The viewer can’t help but bring their pre-knowledge of either to their viewing.
At the same time, however, how the works are made is also charged with context. Those same Warhol screen prints were as notable for the quick form of reproduction used, and what that said about modes of production and the consumer object. Taken together these formalist qualities interact with the qualities of the subject matter to create the general identity of the piece. (Over time, the Warhols have also gained context specific to themselves, their own history and existing within the public consciousness in their own right.)
Every aspect of an art piece (or possibly anything) has a level of context that informs it’s interpretation by a viewer.
My recent series of collages (and works based upon them) is an attempt to exaggerate that relationship to the breaking point. Each piece is representational, yet represents their subjects with other materials loaded contexts that compete with the represented. Whether appropriated printed materials or other artworks that I’ve made, each layer of each stencil can be isolated and interpreted in it’s own right. The overall effect of the added noise of the competing materials is to drown out much of the effect of the represented subject.
In the case of J Dilla and now this series that transforms this piece by Roy Lichtenstein, the subject matter is self-reflective: Lichtenstein and Dilla both specialized in the re-contextualization of prior works of art. The context they bring to these pieces is intended to reflect on these pieces themselves. How I reference the subjects with the source material is meant to be fluid, ranging from complementary to a feedback loop of pure noise (a plane wreck, if you will?..).
The source material in these varies from completely arbitrary (Sample voting ballot in the second piece down), to referencing the subject matter itself (the purple and blue dots in the 8th piece down), to ironic absurdity (the childrens’ illustration of the 7th down), to imposed relationships between different abstract patterns (patterns themselves being an intricate series of relationships between parts- 4th and 5th piece down). I’ve appropriated art publications, other artforms (music, quilting, literature), or non-art-forms (science publications) and even art making materials (used masking tape, cover of a watercolor pad in the 2nd down). I even appropriate the drawings of my own computer.
The point of this is that every component of each version of each image can be related back to the facts of the creation of the piece itself, to it’s subject matter, or to the intellectual history of that subject matter, or even to me, my personal history and the constant influx of information flung at me by society (the paper Trader Joe’s bag in the 3rd down didn’t need to be branded and populated with folksy ephemera, yet they felt obligated to impose themselves into my mental space, which ultimately can’t help but influence my interaction with the rest of the world in whatever minor way). The inclusion of each component is intended to make this web of relationships explicit- to force it to the surface as much as possible instead of allowing our brains to simplify it into a sensible silence, as they usually do.
Finally, all this explanation is meant to explain the pieces I posted a few weeks back, the “Irony” series.
“A does not equal A” is the literal definition of a logical contradiction. It is also arguably the modern definition of irony. When something is used figuratively to represent something other than itself, that contradiction is a form of irony. These series of collages, by focusing on the web of context everything in the universe exists within implicitly challenge the ability of anything to existence outside of context, which is usually how things are defined. Change the context in which something is presented and you change that thing itself. These images are not “about” a plane exploding. They are about being images, and specifically to the difficulties of images fulfilling the roles they are meant to fulfill.
The difficulty of understanding “things,” defined outside of context, can lead to intrinsic logical fallacies, yet our minds aren’t equipped to cope with the concept of A not equaling A. I definitely don’t want a structural engineer to start deconstructing his own work product to better examine the historical context in which he works. But in my recent work I am trying to find a new form of logic- or illogic- that can analyze the world with less focus on cleanly defined “things” to focus more on the relationships between those things.
The reason I want to do THAT, however, is a whole ‘nother story.
One of the many themes I’ve worked on over the years is the male figure; in particular the male back, often inspired by classical painting and sculpture. I find The heightened muscular forms and volumes of figures created by renaissance and baroque artists like Michelangelo, Bandinelli and Caravaggio great subjects for abstraction and distortion. Many of the details of figures from antiquity, when looked at with an open perspective create vast conceptual worlds of abstracted landscape and space.
Here I’m making loose color studies as an exploration for larger finished pieces. Its an exercise in balancing control and accident on the way to discovering expressive formal, emotive and metaphysical paths. I’ve included an older oil painting I created years ago in Spain as one of the first forays into this area. It was based on sketches and watercolors I had done from a sculpture of Neptune in the Piazza Signoria in Florence.
I remember reading the John Henry legend in second grade. It stuck with me because it was so weird. Why was anyone that proud of hammering? Does the fact that he won the race signify that no machine can conquer the human spirit or the fact that he died signify that an inconcquerable spirit is a long term negative?
I don’t know, and at this point in human development it’s probably irrelevant as we either won or lost that battle a long time ago. In most disciplines. Some artists still have opinions on photography, let alone digital art. Honestly, they already have computers composing music so if this is a source of anxiety for you, you’ll want to stock up on Ativan now.
In that thread, and relating to last week’s post about the need to stock up materials for future projects, I give you art drawn by my computer:
My Pazzles cutting machines are able to make things like this if you replace the cutting blade with a pen. The trick for me is then to design the patterns for them to draw using bezier lines.
The piece above shows the primary limitation of this method. While it’s pretty straightforward to tell a human “Use a flat tipped market to collor the shapes in” anything translating a digital command to a physical action by a computer is much more complicated (anyone who’s ever cussed out a printer understands). The machine only understands lines. Even if it could hold the flat tipped marker, it would still have to be programmed exactly how to move it in linear fashion.
The result is that if you want a block of color you have to teach the machine to block them in with a large number of lines. The piece at the top does that using all straight lines. Directionality of the lines distinguishes the different zones.
This piece (also included last week) has 9 different “fill” textures. Tiny wavy lines, circles, regular lines and a variety of those things cross hatched together. It probably could never be drawn by me at the level of precision the machine could get, but it now takes the machine less time to draw than it took me to put together online.
It’s not perfect though. The machine has a weird tendency to forget to pick up the pen between shapes, which leads to some of the random lines across the page in some of these. This is weird to me because of all the problems I attribute with computers, absent mindedness isn’t one of them. Regardless, I’ll take it in return for the advantages.
I drew this one by hand. It probably took longer than any of these and, while it has block color, still is kind of clumsy. Oh well.
In addition to these patterns I developed, you can also just plug a photo in and as the computer to interpret everything itself with interesting results. Here’s my computer’s drawing of a cat:
I uploaded images last night and now that I’m at work, they aren’t there. Fantastic.
Instead of what I had planned I guess I’ll post these drawings I did of a painting I also don’t have a photo of here. Maybe you can guess what it looks like.
I drew these a few years ago when my camera was broken so I couldn’t get real critiques on art online. In response I started to draw the paintings I was making in MS Paint and posting those. The people online got hilariously angry at me for trying this so even after I got a new camera I kept posting things like this instead of the photos. These drawings are of a masking tape paint collage that, as I said, I still haven’t gotten around to photographing.
Now if you pardon me I’m going to swear at my computer some more.
Greens were eaten that hot day at the neighborhood bar in Carroll Gardens. She was amused that he had ordered a Greek Salad as the Japanese team brought honor to their distraught nation.
mixed media: graphite, pencil, goauche, benzyl alcohol ink, india ink
Every year, the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis sponsors an event that brings the art viewing public directly to local artists. The premise behind City-Wide Open Studios is for St. Louis’ artists to open their studio doors in an organized fashion, choreographed by CAMSTL, so that art viewers, art buyers and art interlopers have the chance to peruse the local talent at hand.
This is the first year that I will be participating, so come out and show me some support. I will have dozens of paintings, drawings, and photographs on display. I will be showing on Saturday, July 30th, and my studio is located at 3434 Magnolia Avenue in Tower Grove East.
The event kicks off with a reception for the artists at “the Contemporary” (information from CAMSTL’s site below).
JULY 26TH. 6:00-9:00 PM.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, NO RSVP REQUIRED. CASH BAR. 3750 WASHINGTON BLVD.
To kick-off the week-long celebration of local art, CAM will be hosting an Open Studios Preview Party where visitors can visit CAM’s Main Galleries to see one piece of artwork by each participating artist. For that night, and the entire following week, each piece of art will be displayed with a label of the artists name and number that corresponds with the printed map – allowing the public to see the artwork beforehand and map out their weekend studio visits. Join CAM and over one hundred local artists for a night of celebrating the local art scene and all that it has to offer. Pi on the Spot – Pi’s mobile pizza truck – will be selling mini pizzas all night!
This is my stab at making art this week, please note the new surface of choice. I predict that this is the onset of a new trend and soon everyone will be drawing on stryrofoam left over containers, you just wait.
When I’m not busy revolutionizing the world of art trends I’ve been putting together boxes of goodies to send out to some of my friends from my vintage windfall. Fabrics, yarns, sewing supplies, and weird things I can’t identify will soon be hitting the post office and making their way to other parts. The woman I inherited these from was unique and prolific, and I am sure she would be pleased to see these things make their way out of the attic and into the studios of other artists. First I gotta sort it all though.
I’m tired and when I’m tired I throw stuff down on paper and slop it around, pretending that my subconscious has something to do with the chaotic garbage that is left.
I’m back in my midtown studio playing the court jester of drawing. While I was waiting on what is known as a “CD”, I started and abandoned this scratchy scrawl. pencil, ink, xylene, gouache and angst. yeah, right.
Agora Gallery - the proud sponsor of the Chelsea International Fine Art Competition, which offers contemporary artists the opportunity to show their original art at one the most acclaimed juried art shows in Chelsea, New York’s art galleries district.
darteboard
jdhastings
ssstephg
Tom Bennett
Toni Tiller
Jason Gray
probrucer
laelia e. mitchell
