I recently sent out some pieces to my Twitter friend Tim Severson, who has photography, video, and design company he shares with his wife Melissa in Texas. I really enjoy their work and they were kind enough to send me 2 prints (it was supposed to be one, but I couldn’t decide and they surprised me with two) which I am looking forward to hanging. I have the spot already picked out.
and here is one of the mini magnets I sent them.
Why is it that all electronics decide to crap out at the same time? My Olympus, like my previous laptop, has been dying a slow death for the last year or so. It had gotten to the point of being so unreliable that it was essentially unusable, and now with all the problems the company is having along with my personal experience with their products I thought it would be best to go in a new direction. Lucky for me I have a few camera nerd friends and after a little consulting decided to go with this.
So far it’s great, a bit heftier than my previous ones, but it also feels more substantial. Now the only problem is that I have been without a decent camera for so long I don’t know what I want to take photos of…so here is a cat.
When in doubt always go with a cat, it is the default setting for internet communications.
as I started the new year, i felt it important that i have a disciplined small project to keep me on track. I bought a new sketchbook and commanded myself to draw something everyday. as the new year approached, i was excited and kinda nervous. drawing was out of my comfort zone. i’m a photographer. maybe my self imposed limits needed to be stretched. my good fortune came through twitter where @stelth opined “should I do a drawing a day?” to which I replied ”yes and I’ll join you”
i am using the iphone and paper based drawings in this project. it’s a terrific exercise for me to open up and play. it’s helping to be part of a group … accountability.
todays sketch has yet to materialize, however here’s a link to the project and yesterday’s sketch
just found out I’m in a little show in boston in January. if you’re in town let me know. I’m gonna try to make some art this week … not sure the vacation mode is conducive 
aviary gallery
so this is the day that good ole chris columbus invaded the native peoples lands, brought all manner of disease and claimed ownership of said property. sounds like our financial industry! so in honor of that, i’m going to close my bank of america account and find a credit union, get outside and embrace my liberation … and not celebrate columbus’s rapacious ways.
This is a piece I made using leftover parts for another portrait of Miles I made that is being used as part of a longer term piece. My vague intent with this was to convey the sense of an album cover from the early to mid 1950s.
It doesn’t imitate any exact label, but personally I’d place it somewhere in the Prestige or Columbia spectrum. Next to these examples, I’m afraid the piece doesn’t hold up as well as I’d like, but it got me studying it, so I’m happy.
Anyways, having done this research (after the fact), I thought I’d offer an informal guide to Jazz Album Art style across different labels. The site http://www.birkajazz.com/archive is absolutely invaluable in this, and I recommend studying their extensive collections by label.
When people think of jazz album art they immediately think of Blue Note Records, and for good reason. Designer Reid Miles and photographer Francis Wolff gave them a consistency of style and voice that allowed the full label’s stable of artists to present a unified visual identity.
This piece is representative of the early Blue Note style, which often fits the mold of photos fit into random shapes with text randomly arrayed aligned it.
This image kind of fits the same vein, but the parts are all simplified, and the sense of design is more confident all around, leading to a period when the photograph would be allowed to dominate the proceedings more freely.
This is the quintessential Blue Note cover from this early period. An expressive photograph is given the majority of the space, with an overlay of blue used to flatten it somewhat while the title shouts itself from the perimeter in a stand-out white that boxes the photograph in. It’s perfectly simple and yet also perfectly manipulated.
An early typography experiment that points towards the future.
An example of the line drawing you will find on some albums, in this case, if you can read the signature it belongs to a young Andy Warhol.
I’ll continue this at length after the jump. Read more »
that’s right … last week was work for pay. nuthin more, nuthin less and nuthin to show. i promise this time next week, there will be something worth reading and seeing. until then … here’s a picture of one of my images in a show curated by brian dupont opening october 6 in new york. here’s a link for more info extra gallery
as i’ve been moving my studio, i’ve come to realize just how much energy is infused into the space in which an artist works. my home studio enabled easy access and provided me with comfort and a sense of security. it also doubled as a guest room, so when friends and family arrived for extended stays, i quickly gathered my essential art tools and left my little room. i would peer in when our guests were out sightseeing to make sure my packed away materials were safe and no dog or small child had eviscerated anything.
when the opportunity to move into a shared space with a old dear friend presented itself, i jumped. i also did my homework. i looked at other studios in the city carefully measuring the distance/time component traversed on bike and whether there was public transport nearby. i factored in rent which needed to be within a budget that i could reasonably afford. after lots of visits and bike rides the original opportunity seemed perfect.
now for the move … what i didn’t know, nor could i have forseen, was the internal struggle. that struggle being the need to redefine who i am as an artist, how i make work, and the essential need for time management and discipline. i no longer have the luxury of “hanging out” in my home studio for an hour or so. i must place my studio practice into the arena of commitment. yes folks, commitment. it’s been an easy ride for these last years and now i’ve challenged myself to shit or get off the pot. i certainly have enjoyed the lazy jaunt to this place in my life.
i must now engage a new set of skills and inject my studio space with the energy of an artist ready to begin a new chapter … a deepening challenge and a commitment to break of out of the comfort and dive into that place where the best of my vision awaits. it’s kinda hard, yet i’ve paid my september rent and most of my stuff is there.
i guess this means no more going in to the studio with my pajamas on.
in this transitive period the iphone comes in handy:
Last weekend, I visited my mother-in-law in Springfield, Illinois, and she drove me around looking for abandoned buildings for me to photograph (who else has that kind of a relationship with their in-laws?). We found a couple of barns and a slaughterhouse, which made for a nice little outing.
All Nikon D300 with Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8G lens.
so … this being my first post and a rainy, dreary monday in boston, it seems appropos to sink into a long diatribe about art intended to bore and tire you all out … wait … no … there are plenty of others fufilling that niche, and so i’m just gonna add a little bit about me and my studio practice.
i’ve been a working artist/photographer for well over 30 years which puts me at the tail end of the baby boomer generation. my work is an amalgam of forays and yet, i always return to the landscape for inspiration and voice. i’m transtitioning from a home studio to a … er … uh ..studio studio. a place where all my supplies reside and where all the magic happens. it’s been a long time in coming and it’s almost here. i’m excited and terrified. i’ll no longer have the boisterous internet that can suck the life out of me for hours, no more dishes to load and unload, not even the prospect of a car filled with dog hair that desperately needs vacuuming. nope … none of that. just me and my stuff … right!
my life as a studio artist is a really messy affair, there are tons of fits and starts that might yield an image worth noting. there are the voices in my head screaming “wtf is that??” ”you need to keep your day job” and of course … “y’know, that load of laundry REALLY needs to be folded” as well as, the occasional (and quite welcomed) “whoa, sister, you’re really good” . however, all that aside, i’m opening up my artistic life to you the reader. so … be gentle fair folk … it’s just me here.
Here in the midwest, July brings with it scorching temperatures combined with stifling humidity. Here are a few of my offerings to this special time of year.
Some of you might recall a series that I started several years ago, and that was somewhat erroneously referred to as “Photo-Impressionism”. In any case, here is a slight expansion on that old, abandoned project; picked back up in the city where it began. Enjoy.
All Nikon D50 with Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G lens.
More after the jump–> Read more »
I am experimenting with trying to get a look that is close to the film series that I posted several weeks ago using digital equipment. The film prints were all hand-toned to get the color, which has been more difficult to match digitally than I would have expected.
What do you guys think; if you squint, can you tell the difference? I will be working a bit to try and get this closer (including trying to work in the film grain and getting rid of the bad, specular highlights which are a digital token).
Nikon D50 with Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G lens.
Well, maybe not quite, but I did use copper to tone these. This is a short series (meaning these may be it; let me know what you think) in which I attempted to reduce real birds to 2D “cutouts”. I have been playing with the illusion of the real lately, in my photography, and I think that these are a good example of that.
“In painting, the curve is a hill; in photography, the hill is a curve.” -Arnaud Claass
All Nikon N80 with Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D lens and Kodak T-Max 3200 BW film.
More after the jump–> Read more »
I know that you all have already seen the two paintings below, but I am still in the process of completing new companions, so they are getting shown again. This post is more about presenting my concept, then it is about presenting new art. The Memory Project:
We are at a point in human history wherein it has never been easier to overindulge our memories. The constant flood of images so far inspires a mood of nostalgia that it is sometimes difficult to extrapolate our own present from culture’s storytelling of it. It is in our public profiles, Facebook, etcetera, which exist at the intersection of our own, full, nostalgic memorization and the demands of a cultural fascination with what the present should be, where our immediate past becomes the present we ourselves missed when we passed through it. Our obsession with documentation is an obvious extension of our intension to live the fullest moment possible, precipitated by the demands of cultural melodramas, which we are all familiar to. A life with a soundtrack, so to speak.
However, the further that we zoom out from the people we are immediately affiliated with, the less interested we are in scrutinizing the pictorial details of those persons’ public profiles (that is, until we zoom out far enough that the people we see entice our sense of exoticism). In other words, the pictures that other people paste up for all the world to see, which are equal in significance to the ones we ourselves paste, lose their value for us the more unfamiliar they become. Once the people become fully unfamiliar to us, we have no choice but to evaluate the pictures that they populate based upon their compositional merit or design, and generally speaking, most of the pictures resulting from people’s desire to capture their fleeting present are universally uninteresting, esthetically.
For ourselves, it is equally as difficult to recognize the banality of our own imagery as it is to harmonize our picture-taking with the expectations of photographic art. This is partially do to subject and partially due to conditions present at the time. Not to mention, we are generally more interested in proving that we, or our activities, are interesting then we are in taking interesting pictures. Nonetheless, even when we succeed in taking an “artistic” picture, the people who we intend to share the picture with have trouble seeing both the subject (ourselves) and the esthetics of the photograph; one or the other must take precedence.
It is this realization which led me to the Memory Project. I am interested in ways of making my own imagery unfamiliar even to me, so that I can look at it from the dual perspectives of active and passive participant. In order to achieve this, I have applied a series of steps in post-processing to photographs of important moments from the many years that my wife and I have been together. These steps reduce the images to abstract compositions, some of which retain a vague sense of the former photographs and some of which do not. As a painter, I am compelled to develop a new attachment to the images through the act of painting them, which reduces the capacity of the memory of the actual events. The new paintings share something with the original images (which will be shown alongside them), yet are also entirely their own. The result is a harmonization of documentation and artful presentation, which deepens the emotional/intellectual response of the viewer. Philip Guston once speculated upon “ the impossibility of living entirely in the moment without the tug of memory”. My hope is to simultaneously resolve that problem through my process, while supporting it in my presentation
See examples after the jump–>
Read more »
I haven’t done one of these subway abstracts in quite awhile, mostly due to the fact that I rarely take the subway any more. Last week my boss called me into the office and I found myself back on the G line, my old home away from home. I was sorry to see that in the last year the city has finally taken an interest in the G and there were very few dilapidated billboards where there used to be plenty. I went home with a grand total of 5 images, none of which I was overly in love with while shooting, but in uploading I found this friendly face.
I like him alright, but in the process of looking at the images I realized I had lost connection with whatever process I used to use to make these. I felt a little rusty, so this may not be my best, but it felt like good exercise.
I decided that I would return to an old, photo subject for me on Darteboard, the ongoing construction at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Enjoy!
More after the jump–>
Read more »
This weekend I experimented with Bad Photographic Printing techniques. I’m calling the series of stuff like this “Bad Photos.” Towards that end I had issues photographing these in the reflective frames, so this picture isn’t great.
Here are the originals:
The other 3 and some discussion are after the jump.
Read more »
Mark Tansey may at first glance appear smugly ironic, but has a fascinatingly subtle subversiveness to his thinking. He is nothing if not an extremely thoughtful painter, as well as a technically superior one. He understands that representation and narrative are very complex things. His paintings are also as much about post modern criticism as they are about art and painting. Here is an illuminating text on his work by a professor of the arts and philosophy, Mark Taylor.
Tom Bennett
I am having a few communications issues, my laptop is in the shop, my phone is buggy, blah blah blah, it’s not all that exciting or important but I am glad I uploaded this last week and didn’t use it. It’s my first abstract for awhile.
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
