Archive for J.D. Hastings

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Variations on a Theme By Toni Tiller take 2

Posted in Art, J. D. Hastings, Photography, Toni Tiller with tags , , , , , on June 10, 2009 by jdhastings

These were actually created before the batch that made up the last post. The first was a test on my Pazzles cutting machine to see if I could take 2 copies of the same photo and cut them in such a way that they’d align when I merge them together.

The gaps in this may make it look like the goal didn’t succeed, but they are actually more due to my lack of precision pasting the pieces together than pazzles incongruity.

The funny thing is that while trying to print the two photos needed to make this, I accidentally printed them on the photo paper upside down, on the wrong side. The results were very interesting, so I kept playing with it. Almost like a faux monotype. In fact, I’ve since started experimenting with using basic print techniques to absord the wet ink before it disperses too much. Is there a point to all of this? Yes. It amuses me somewhat. That is all.

2 more after the jump!

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Variations On A Theme By Toni Tiller take 1

Posted in Art, Drawing, J. D. Hastings, Toni Tiller with tags , , , on June 10, 2009 by jdhastings

Lately, for some reason I’ve been using the image Toni posted earlier today to test a number of new methods. There was no one reason for this, it just seems to have turned out that way. And maybe I just liked the idea of blatantly stealing an image about intellectual property.

Anyways, here’s a few I have scanned. I probably have more unscanned at home, that I may add later tonight.

So first are a series of ink drawings on paper. There are 2 more, plus a version I made by cutting these apart and gluing them back together, after the jump.

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So Where Did I Create Them Artworks?

Posted in Art, Drawing, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , , on June 9, 2009 by jdhastings

Back when I was creating the early pin and scrap pieces in 2005-2006, people in our myspace art group began posting photos of their studio space so everybody could gtet an idea of where they were working.  These are my photos from that time.  The set-up has actually changed since then, but the apartment is the same. I have a better tv and computer though. And a PS3 and a Wii.

To the left of the first pic would be my bed.

And then there’s my bed again. Here’s a close up of the full desk/drawing area and my stuffed pirhana:

This is a bird’s eye view of my drawer of blue scraps (with black/white/canvas colored below it). The blue one used to filled to the top. There’s been less since I used them. Shocking.

I may or may not post more today. Let me know if you’re dying for it. I do need to save some material for those weeks I accomplish nothing…

-JD

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Loose Ends part 2: (Almost) My First Cascades

Posted in abstract, Art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , , , on June 9, 2009 by jdhastings

Shortly after creating the piece posted earlier, Christmas came and I needed some art to give out to family members.  This was around the time that giving art at Christmas morphed from a cost saving strategy to being way harder than just buying something.  So that december I pulled out all my extra scraps, from several pieces I had put together then decided weren’t good enough, and set about making a few pieces.

After separating out all the pieces, I took the earth tones and decided to hang them loosely off the top of the frame.  I had done something similar once with leftover pieces of a regular woven piece (which is no longer extant and I have no photos of online…), but this took the concept further.

Unfortunately, at the time I gave it away I only had a cheap 2 megapixel digital camera to record it, so the photo is far from even my low standards.  And I have no details.

Dean2

I call this “Dean Cascades” (my uncle’s name is Dean). I believe it is 18-20″ wide. Acrylic and watercolor on canvas with safety-pins. Circa 2005.

I am attending a seminar on Green Building Practices at lunch, after which I’ll post something else. Maybe some background on where these were made or my process. We’ll see.

-JD

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From the Archives: Squid

Posted in abstract, Art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , on June 2, 2009 by jdhastings

So this piece was the next logical step once I’d finished Holes and a few Cascade pieces. Combine the two to get a piece with both the strict formal aspects and the loose anti-form bits. And in purple to boot.

This version is smaller, to fit on your screen vertically, but there’s a larger version and a separate detail after the jump:

squid

12″ x 60″ Acrylic on Canvas w/ Safety Pins

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Rectangular Target

Posted in abstract, Art, J. D. Hastings, mixed media, Painting with tags , , , , on May 26, 2009 by jdhastings

As promised, this is a new piece I made for a friend who had stated that he liked this piece. He may have been referring to the color, but I went ahead and referenced the form instead. I had been meaning to make one with differing colors since I finished the blue one, this just gave me the excuse.

Rectangular Pin Target

24″ x 36″, Acrylic on Canvas w/ Safety-Pins, 6 layers

Details after the jump Read more »

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From the Archives: Blue Concentric Rings

Posted in Art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , on May 19, 2009 by jdhastings

I had hoped to have a new piece here today, and that piece is theoretically more finished than not, but it does need a few minor adjustments that would have been hard to accomplish along with photographing everything.  Rather than rush through that I thought I’d post this old piece from 2006.

Blue Concentric Rings

26″ x 26″ x 5″, 6 layers of Acrylic on Canvas with Safety Pins

More info and a detail after the jump. Read more »

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From the Archives: Green Cascades

Posted in abstract, Art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , , , on May 12, 2009 by jdhastings

I’m hoping I’ll have a new safety-pin piece to post next week, but until then, walk with me down memory lane. 

The year is 2006, the world is marveling at the silly name and silky sounds of Gnarls Barkley’s first record, Superman Returns was moderately entertaining people in the theaters and Edmund Phelps was winning the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy. While I had leftovers from this thing.

I took those pieces and built this:

Green Cascades

60″ x 12″, acrylic on canvas with safety-pins.  There is a full sized detail after the jump.

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“Sunny”

Posted in Art, contingent art, J. D. Hastings with tags , , , , , , on May 5, 2009 by jdhastings

This piece was started during the first really hot spell of the year here in Berkeley. By the time I finished it this week it was raining again. But I think the original impression stuck with me.

Sunshine

16″ x 16″ Acrylic on Masking Tape on Paper, then collaged (aka Mixed Media) 

So I decided to call it Sunny for obvious reasons. But  whenever I think of that word I think of this song:

Detail and another, related piece after the jump.

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NOISE

Posted in Art, Collage, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , , on April 28, 2009 by jdhastings

This piece and I have had a wrestling match on par with the endless fight scene between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David in “They Live”. Which is ironic, because the original impetus for the piece was a reaction against the super-deliberation in many of my other pieces.

I usually work hard to strike a balance in the color schemes of these pieces. I don’t want them to be too uniform, but neither do I want to stray into too much chaos. The result is an agonized back and forth that usually isn’t worth the final result.

This was my reaction against that tendency. I wanted to embrace the chaos, and let it reign over a noisy, unbeautiful mess, if only to show how much work it is to avoid such things in other pieces.

Noise
“Noise” 36″ x 24″ Mixed Media with Safety Pins

Click for access to larger photos. Detail after the jump.

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From the Archives: Glued Scraps 1

Posted in Art, J. D. Hastings, mixed media with tags , , , , on April 21, 2009 by jdhastings

I almost had new art to post today, but the revision process took too long, so hopefully that’ll come next week. Instead, I’m posting this old piece, from 2005, maybe early 2006.

Glued Scraps 1

31″ x 31″ Acrylic on Canvas w/ glue.  Click for access to larger version

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Woven Weaves

Posted in abstract, Art, J. D. Hastings, mixed media, Painting, Textile with tags , , , , , , , on April 14, 2009 by jdhastings

When I first started wrecking canvases for reassemblage, I mainly wove various paintings together. At the time I didn’t know it but this is a fairly common practice, springing as far as I can tell from the steady merging of fiber arts into the traditional, paint-dominated “fine arts” canon. This piece is made of woven paintings that I’ve stabilized with acrylic medium, then cut up and wove a second time.

Hopefully the detail after the jump makes it clear what’s going on here.

The blue bar and red square are my standard saefety-pin style. They and the vertical black bar are stretched to separate bars that are mounted atop the main canvas and frame, giving the piece a three dimensionality tht is probably impossible to convey here.

WovenWeavesWeb

24″ x 24″ acrylic on canvas, with safety-pins. Click for access to larger versions. Detail shot after the jump.

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Tiny Little Archives

Posted in abstract, Art, Individual Scraps, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , , on April 7, 2009 by jdhastings

Its always frustrating to post photos of my safety-pin paintings because even with details the individual scraps that make up the pieces get lost like a tree within a forest. In person I work hard to make the individual scraps worthy of study over time. In fact the tiny scraps are the main focus of the series. Their nature and how they’re used is the motivation to pursue this direction. The overall compositions is ultimately just the framework to fit them into.

Because of that, I like to save some of the better individuals to blow up and show as their own pieces. Hopefully its easier to put the photos of entire pieces in better perspective with more knowledge of what the pieces making it up look like.

So here are some of my collection of select scraps. Each is between 1 or 2 inches by 1 or 2 inches. All are acrylic on canvas.

Multi-Colored -Arches

19

3 more after the jump.
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Archives: Holes

Posted in abstract, Art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , , on March 31, 2009 by jdhastings

These are from 2006. One night, while walking the 5 feet from my desk to bed, I wondered what it would look like if I used safety-pins to pull open holes in the surface of my paintings. I thought the idea was hilarious, to have the focus of a piece be a void, so I ran with it.

Holes
Click for access to a larger view. Detail after the jump.
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Archives: Red, White and Dark

Posted in Archives, Art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , on March 24, 2009 by jdhastings

Sorry I’ve been incommmunicado this last week but I’ve had to deal with some unfortunate family issues. I will be back with more of my in depth ramblings sometime soon, hopefully.

This is a piece from 2005 or 2006, when the whole pin weave method was new to me and I was experimenting with getting designs within the chaotic arrangement of the scraps.

Dark, White and Red

Click for bigger (including access to a large version that can serve as a detail). I think it’s 18″ x 24″, acrylic on canvas with safety pins.

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The Levins

Posted in abstract, Art, J. D. Hastings, mixed media, Painting with tags , , , , on March 17, 2009 by jdhastings

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. At this time of year, like most people, I like to drink myself green in tribute to an Irish Pied-Piper rip off. Towartds that end, here’s a piece that deals with green. As it turns out, green and orange are closely linked in my mind.

This is the second wedding gift I had to make last autumn. This time for Aaron and Sarah Levin. Like the last wedding gift, I stuck to forms I already understand well and tried to focus more on color relationships. They actually hung it differently, maybe even upside down. But I think I told them to hang it as they wanted.

Click the image below, to go to flickr where you can viewer larger versions.
Combined

Each piece is 20″ x 10″, acryclic on canvas w/ safety pins. Detail after the jump.

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4 Dropcloths

Posted in Art, contingent art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , , on March 10, 2009 by jdhastings

These 4 pieces began life as a single large dropcloth I used for 6-8 months last year. I painted a lot of canvases on it that resulted in a lot of finished pieces. At the end of the year I cut it into these. I considered working further with them, weaving them together or somehow editing them together, but decided for this time at least, to let things lie where they fall. I can always make more if I need materials for more involved works.

I think each is around 24″ x 36″ or vice versa, acrylic on canvas. I used masking tape to get the stripes.

Click the images to go to Flickr, where you can see larger versions. (especially recomended for the horizontal ones, since our format limits the width we can display)

DSC_0258

3 more after the jump! Read more »

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Synthesis

Posted in abstract, Art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , on March 3, 2009 by jdhastings

I made this piece for my friends’ wedding last year.

fullWEB

Click to enlarge. Each component is 10″ x 10″, so I suppose it’s around 34″ tall. Detail after the jump.

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Gustav Klimt: 2008 Dancehall Remix

Posted in Art, art on paper, Collage, Interview, work on paper with tags , , , on February 10, 2009 by jdhastings

Klimt used a lot of abstract patterns to assist in his representational paintngs. I decided to use Klimt’s representational paintings to make some abstract patterns. Thus the cosmic balance has been restored.

Click on them for a bigger view. Each of these is about 14″ inches wide, I think. They are physical collages of posters.

1

2

Four more after the jump!

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Tape Circles, Squares, Lines and Such

Posted in Art, art on paper, Collage, contingent art, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags , , , , on January 27, 2009 by jdhastings

When I save the used masking tape I collect after using it to create patterns on canvas, I often collect a lot in a short amount of time. If I’ve used tape to mask out a dropcloth, I could end up with 10 sheets of tape from that alone. To say nothing of all the sheets from the paintings that resulted in my dropcloth being covered in paint.

Maybe that didn’t make sense. The point is, when I’m working on other things I pile up enough masking tape to overwhelm my ability to store it unless I relieve the pressure by making art out of it.

Thus the inspiration for this bad boy:

Tape Circles. Squares, Lines and Such
Click to enlarge

“Tape Circles, Squares, Lines and Such” 24″ x 14″ Acrylic on Masking Tape on Paper.

Yes, I celebrate the esoteric spirit of the creative spark. Art as a way to clean your closet. Detail shot after the jump. Read more »

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