I finally finished the Baudelaire related project I’ve been toiling at the last few weeks last night. I’m not quite ready to post the final images of it though, so here’s just an example of the type of crap I’ve put myself through with it.
This is a crappy stencil of one of the poem’s passages. It’s hard to read, but that’s not it’s only problem.
The other problem is that “Discontended” is misspelled. I made 10 of these stencils before realizing that. So I then had to create a new stencil just with the corrected spelling. I through in a few “redeems” because that was the hardest word to read throughout most of the stencils.
I ended up cutting everything apart and sewing the corrected pieces together, but now I have a pile of 20 misspelled “Discondendeds” that I have to find something to do with.
Last night instead of preparing art for today I ironed shirts. I have no regrets, but I also have nothing to post. I don’t know if I’ve ever posted this before.
“Woven Watercolor Cross” 2005 It’s like 30″ wide or something. Watercolor soaked through canvas, woven.
This is a woven piece made out of a dropcloth that I used a lot of watercolor on. I then flipped the dropcloth, where you could see where the watercolor soaked through. Toni hates me for this because it’s so light sensitive I won’t allow it out of my closet.
Finally getting these to where I can spell words. However, these are actually the only letters I have enough of to do so. This will be the background for a stencil to be added hopefully this weekend.
Clearly legibility isn’t this style’s strong suit, but I can live with it for a repeated phrase like this. If I ever do longer texts it’s something I’ll have to manage. Perfect for ransom notes though.
On average, the New Years weekend is probably my most productive of any time of the year. Decembers are usually spent finalizing Christmas gifts and rushing around trying to finish a variety of things. Then the Holidays come and I’m usually separated from the studio for about a week. By the time New Years comes, I am alone in my apartment without any near term responsibilities and all I want to do is play. Around this time last year I had just bought a new Sewing Machine and was experimenting with the form of quilt I played with all year.
This weekend may have been the most productive of my life. I started playing with stencils, and different colors of paint. Because these hues are ridiculously expensive, I started diluting them and creating my own mixtures. The result of these 2 things was a weekend of painting or preparing to paint (making stencils/mixing paint) near non-stop. I learned a lot in these 3 days, but may have to force myself to slow down to prevent burning myself out.
What I didn’t do much of was document what I was doing. So for now you’ll have to trust me and accept these 2 stencils of a passage from a poem by Baudelaire that I am working with to become accustomed with text:
(This one got cur off in the rush to scan it at midnight last night. Apologies.)
Every year I have the opportunity to run away to the middle of no where, take a break from daily life, weekly blogging, and any art making at all. I love making art but I love my sanctioned break from it just as much, there is a relief to being able to put it all aside and not feel it hanging over your head. That time ends up being useful to reflect and consider the previous years efforts and loosely plan what might come next.
This year I had some time to work with JD Hastings, where we thought about ways to team up using my marks and his quilting. One of the things we tried was using some of his pre-painted sheets and layering the same design repeatedly. It’s not something I can do with my usual materials because of the thinness of magazine paper, but the thickness of the painted paper means I can trace and reuse the same squiggle as many times as we like. He took over the color choices in these while I took care of the mark making and cutting. The enduring challenge in working on these came in the form of a very numb index finger, a consequence of the pressure applied to get through the materials. It took 3 days to wear off.
This last week I’ve been collaborating with co-Darteboardist Toni to combine some of my collage methods with her collage forms. Here’s a couple results. These are still very early in the process, but I think they have promise.
A similar, second version of this couldn’t be finished on time. We decided this is good enough, but the color choices obscure the form. Fortunately, you can see the form better in this smaller experiment with collaged fabric:
Here is the initial design (shifted into stark black on white):
Before starting these I had been having trouble getting started with these types of quilts. For a few weeks I’d had several false starts, or completely partial pieces that I wasn’t comfortable using on their own. Finally one night I began idly working the green part of this piece:
Each piece is 26″ x 26″, acrylic and paper collage quilted together.
I actually got a good 18″ x 18″ of it done. The next night I realized it was too green, as I mentioned last week, but the process had put me back in the flow of the process. The form in these is one I’d been meaning to return to. What followed was a relatively rapid process of completing the 3 pieces, cutting them up Friday night and finishing them Saturday.
Lately I’ve been trying to do more of the types of quilts I started the year working on, but I’ve been having issues with color schemes. I have Piles of canvases lining my dropcloth divided into rough colors (Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Neutral) that are supposed to help me with this, but this actually just tends to limit me to a single hue. When I try to start combining the colors together, the combinations start getting too complicated to control.
Color schemes like this work well, but are harder to herd than you might expect. Complements make each other brighter, so the pieces you thought was underplayed prior to adding it suddenly become stark when sewn together. At that point the rest of the quilt becomes a series of reactions trying to wrangle the color scheme back from noise. If you become too conservative, though, the colors wash out into uniformity. This can be good at times when you want to emphasize the pattern of a quilt, but in chaotic patchwork of a hundred tiny pieces, you lose your focal point.
My response has been to work in more uniform fields, which I can then combine in larger, easier to control forms later. That’s what these are. I need to finish another color or more and then will make 3-5 pieces out of them, with overall shapes defining them. They will each end up 28″ square, but I need to add 4 inches to the green one.
Whoever is in charge of setting up my scanner should really get on that. And buy me a new printer. This is getting annoying.
I’m not sure I’ve posted this before. This was originally created as a wedding gift for a close friend. Because of it’s dimensions, I’ll post a smaller version with a some bigger versions of 2 of the components after the jump for anybody looking for details.
Each part of the triptych is 10″ x 10″. While I didn’t really try anything radically new in these, it’s still one of my favorite pieces in terms of color relationships that I’ve made.
Yesterday was the first real rainy day of the season out here in California. We only have 2 real seasons here, so this more or less marks the beginning of Winter. With it I found myself looking under my bed for something. While there I found this scrap of an old drop cloth, squirreled away like an acorn.
These are always hard to display because of their dimension, so I’ll post one small that will fit in your browser and one larger so you see more of the details.
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.
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Blue Note
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 »
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 »
These are the remaining Volcanos I made last month. They probably aren’t as good as the originals, and I forgot to scan 2 of them better ones cutting them up again, but such is life.
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.
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:
At the end of a project like last week’s I feel good and productive. That feeling may lead me to want to finish something else quickly to keep that feeling going.
The rush to have something finished is unproductive in its own way, though. I see some artists who get so focused on having something new to show that they never slow down to produce something that might maximize their talents.
The way I work, this is a particular issue. My raw materials are pre-made things. Without them I can’t finish anything. In addition to that I’ve found that trying to predict the materials I’ll need for a final piece (and therefore working from step 1 to the finish in linear fashion) never works out. I need options. Messes like this happen because I can’t imagine the perfect piece to solve a puzzle before I see it and have to try out 50 before making up my mind (if then).
The result is that sometimes I have to commit myself to going nowhere. I have to decide to make things for which the end goal is hazy, if it exists at all, just to have something to file in the back of a cabinet somewhere to be found 2 years later.
Sometimes I have to make things to go into the things I make to go into things I make to go into the final piece. I don’t know how many times these things will be processed, which will get accidentally destroyed, which will surprisingly “make” a piece, and which will be thrown out because they just didn’t work in the context I tried to use them in.
This weekend, I consciously put aside the idea of continuing to work on stuff I might finish quickly because the last project depleted my stocks and I needed more fodder. Some of the designs I started using in the last month worked and I could see them being useful for quilts I won’t even start until next year or beyond. That’s what these are (not all of them are from this weekend, but all are pieces I made in the hopes they’d help something else).
I do NOT mean this as some sort of “the journey is a reward unto itself” cliche. Taking these breaks where nothing final gets produced annoys the living hell out of me. Not knowing where I’m headed with these makes me feel adrift. The point is that conceiving and pursuing a single, unified goal assumes a level of control I don’t think it’s natural to have. Some people can accomplish great feats by that method, but more often my experience is that those who pursue such things limit their own conception. Entropy is the guiding force of the universe, and working against it only creates heat.
My alternative is to embrace chance. Instead of trying to limit it, I try to work within it’s confines. I don’t know what I’ll need when I need it. I may not even recognize what’s going to work right up until after a project is done. Taking weeks or months to produce a wide range of “useless” crap increases the odds that what I need is where I need it when I stumble upon it on the route to a more certain end point. Taking risks and being willing to fail allows for probability, entropy, may ultimately work in my favor.
Ultimately, seeing those chances bear fruit is the most rewarding part of this practice to me. It’s what makes the finished product so rewarding and it’s why I put up with these half-finished, unpolished pains in the asses.
In the past weeks when I mentioned I was making collages as materials to use in other collages, these are those other collages. Ironically, of the 5 collages used in these, only 2 have been shown on d’Arteboard. All of these are 8.5″ x 11″, mixed media.
Along with the collages, there are also quilts and sewn paintings among the materials that went into these. Those that contain no representation but the formula “A ≠ A” are presented in landscape, while any piece set into a collage with portrait alignment was kept that way so that the intrusion would be more apparent. If it’s still not apparent, though, I’m fine with that.
Now would be a good time to post an artist’s statement for these, but I’m afraid I haven’t written it yet. I may try to write it once I’m better caffeinated, though. I’ll post an update at the top if I do. After the jump, 7 more.
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.
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