You may or may not recall a post I published last fall with some fairly atypical (for me) work. Well, I’m still making that work, albeit sporadically. These are a couple of pieces from that series that I finished the other day. Both are acrylic on really nice, archival mat board.
When I have enough of these (in about thirty or forty years) I’m going to transform my under the front stairway closet into a gallery, plaster them all over the walls and have a party. Leave your address in the comments below if you’d like me to send you an invite. The postcards are sure to become collectors items in century or so. Trust me, you’ll want one. I’m not collecting addresses to sell. Really.
Two more postcards, both acrylic on all rag mat board. I’m going to have to use regular stamps to send these since the board is so thick. The thing I learned, or re-learned actually, from the second card here is that neon does not reproduce accurately in photos. I have these great neon acrylics that I just can’t get to look the same in pictures of the work as they do in real life, damnit.
I went on a bit of a painting binge last month. The result was a lot of used masking tape. Usually I use the tape to get simple line patterns like this:
But this time I also used the odds and ends to make patchwork stuff like the pieces below. I generally like the effect. These will end up collaged into some quilt some day.
I’ve had this piece sitting around, waiting for paint for months. This week, I started painting on it. There will be much, much more paint before it’s finished. It will likely end up with little resemblance to what you see here. But I thought it might be fun to share progress shots of this one along the way. You can see a photo of it at an earlier stage after the jump.
Here’s a closeup of another sculpture. Again, I’m being stingy with my art. I would apologize, but it won’t change anything. I still feel a need to keep this mostly to myself. But the detail pic is kinda pretty at least, isn’t it? It’s pretty or gross I suppose, depending on your perspective. In the interest of pretending to be generous, I will post a couple more photos after the jump. Read more »
I spent the weekend making 18 new Volcano collages as source material for the same project I made last week’s J Dilla collages (in addition to the 9 in this post, 9 more were drying as I was prepping these for posting).
In general these were more problematic than the Dillas. I used more elements that had already been collaged in these (see the concentric circles, wavy lines and Q-Bert squares in some of the pieces). Additionally, the design itself is a lot more detailed than the Dillas. Thicker materials plus more detailed cuts mean more headaches with the cutting machines. I had to throw out 1/4 to 1/3 of the materials I tried to cut. That doesn’t matter much when it’s a sheet of newspaper, but is a real pain in the ass when you have to throw out a collage that took a few hours in itself to create.
The results are generally worse than last week. I think 2 of these came out well, The rest range from serviceable with reservations to kind of terrible. Strangely, the 9 I prepped yesterday seem more successful despite being made of the spare parts from this. Anyways, I got the 1 or 2 that I’ll need for the larger project.
Another HD video of stuff I’m making. Here’s a link in case you missed the last one. The music in this one is by the band Tunng. I love Tunng. I wish they’d tour America so I could quit life which I’m not very good at anyway and follow them around on my bicycle. I have a helmet and a bell so all I’d need are handlebar streamers and I’d be set.
Also, this three minute video literally took hours to upload to Youtube. I’m not sure how many hours it took exactly because I had to leave it uploading overnight, but I started the upload at about 1:00 in the afternoon. This is a recurring problem for me whether the video is HD or not. It just seems absurd. I dunno if it’s a problem with the site or my connection or my computer machine, but I figure I’ll try a different site as a test. So now I’m wondering if anyone has a video hosting site they really like. I hear good things about Vimeo. Any other suggestions?
Also also, after it took so very long to upload, I feel I should urge you to watch the full screen version. It’s much more effective at that size anyway.
As so often is the case, today’s cartoon is not a cartoon. It is, however, art and eye-candy! This video of artist Holton Rower’s process has been circulating around the interwebs for a while now. If you haven’t seen it, take a look. If you’ve watched it but haven’t checked out his website, get clicking! He has a number of interesting projects to see there.
I may have finished something. Maybe. It’s not dry though so I can’t show you yet. I’m working on a few paintings that are functioning as sketches to try and find footing in a newish direction. The more I think about it and the longer I work on this new stuff, the more I find direct and not so direct references to the rest of my work. These links are starting to make more sense to me now which makes me feel more confident in what I’m doing. That translates to me feeling more excited about working. I like this part of the process–the part where I’m still figuring out what the big problems I’m setting up for myself are and what possible ways there are to solve them. As fun as this is for me, I realize it’s prolly pretty damn boring for you. Images are generally the most interesting part of a personal art blog. With that in mind, I’m posting a bunch of photos of details of my studio for you to look at. These are things I look at everyday that stay with me because there is something about them I find interesting.
I’ve had the old paint sign above since the mid nineties when I worked in a gem of an old art store that also sold paint and wallpaper. The store was located in a historic old theater building in Western Massachusetts. The art store has since moved and the theater has been restored. It took years for the restoration to gain enough support to get underway. When I worked there, Hilary Clinton came and gave a speech as part of her campaign to preserve America’s historic architectural treasures. I should dig out the funny photo of me and the rest of the staff posing with Hilary. That was a fun day! In person, Hilary was friendly, engaging, very pretty and VERY short. I remember thinking she was a great public speaker–better than her husband.
Above are some detail shots from a few of the things I’m working on right now. I’ve been spending a good deal of time looking at images of food and other stuff with physical properties that induce some sort of something in me that probably adds up to more than would make sense if I tried to explain it in words right now so I won’t try. I have a slideshow of mostly food related photos I play in a loop while I’m painting, and foodgawker.com is fast becoming a favorite destination. As an unexpected perk of this image sourcing, I’ve discovered a few wonderful recipes. This tomato sauce/soup is probably my favorite so far. It makes a perfect sauce for so many meals! Hope you’re all happy and well fed this weekend.
-Steph
This week, for my daily drawings I’ve been concentrating on people instead of monsters. I’ll pry continue this theme next week too, although, I need to practice my perspective drawing. I’ve also been thinking about trying some paintings were I use my own drawings as I would a found image. I made these two digital colored drawings as kind of a sketch; one being a straight forward approach to color and the second a more arbitrary abstract approach.
I like the arbitrary one a lot and I would like to explore the idea in paint, as soon as I have time. Warrior & Warrior 2, ink on paper 8 1/2″ x 11″ scanned and colored on paintshop pro
In order to get to the post I want to make, I feel like I need to lay some background. So please bear with me for a few posts.
Earlier in the decade I used to experiment a lot with what I called “washes,” puddles of paint, ink, and watercolor that I’d photograph to capture the wet effects that only persisted before the puddle dried:
“Photograph of a Wet Painting” 2002
While this was a practical solution to a problem I had getting the image I wanted, it presented new issues of representation that my mind loved.
Paint is a medium of representation. It was used in lieu of photographs for hundreds of years, but here the paint can’t be counted on to represent itself. It requires the photograph to lock in it’s form. At the same time, the photograph couldn’t capture this image without the paint. Both media needed each other to be able to create this form of art.
Anybody who follows me on Twitter may have caught my spiel on Postmodernity on Friday and why this is relevant, but I’ll spare you that.
While this was the first time I delved into the subject, it’s definitely not the first time it’s come up (especially in the postmodernist age).
Whenever you see paintings in books, pamphlets or online, you are seeing photographs of them. Its necessary, but there is distance between the viewer and the piece. A few weeks ago I had problems because the photo of the piece I took gave a very misleading image of the piece in question. That is, the photograph poorly represented the painting. So the relationship in the previous post is actually endemic to our contemporary art experience. Its just that when done well, nobody recognizes it.
In photorealism you have the opposite relationship. The painting requires a photograph. When Robert Bechtle painted a station wagon, he was referencing the type of snapshot a family might take. He turned the throw away image into something more grand by painting the image much larger: his painting required the photo as much as the paint.
So there’s a long history of this relationship, beyond my entrance into the dialogue
For those interested in seeing what a man looking like an 80s male porn star would look like doing cheesy art with similar relationships between media, I give you:
Next I’ll go through the next level of representation.
I have two paintings on panel in the works right now which I’ll get to posting about soon. In the meantime, here’s a small gestural sketch I made with leftover paint at the end of the day. It’s related to these and these.
This, I started a few months ago and I just decided to put the finishing touches on it yesterday. I think its funny. the background got a little dark on me. I’m definitely running with this collage, acrylic, illustration combination. I think, I just need to get comfortable with it and loosen up a bit. communication, acrylic and collage, 11″ x 14″, 2010
a monster in crisis, 8 1/2″ x 12″, acrylic and collage on paper
here’s another monster. I was concentrating on the composition and using collage with paint for this one. He’s not very cute; I think he’s funny. I’m guessing people like cute more than funny, but whatever.
8.5 x 11″
gouache, acrylic, soot and wax paper on all rag matboard
Here’s a quick sketch from this week. I like working on this matboard. It has a great almost spongey density and a fine toothy texture. I think this particular board is 4-ply Alpharag which is made by Bainbridge. I made those vertical strips by incising parallel lines in the matboard with a knife, tearing out a layer or two of paper from between them and then rubbing soot into the fuzzy texture of the torn board with the backside of a spoon. The soot I collected by holding the spoon over a candle flame. Isn’t that how they used to collect the pigment to make Lamp Black paint? So romantic. I mention these things because they interest me, aka I’m a materials and process whore. I was considering just how true that is last night while leafing through an art supply catalog fantasizing aloud about finding exciting new materials that would inevitably lead my work in fabulous, new directions. My friend told me I had “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” or GAS, a condition from which he himself suffers. I think a more accurate term in my case would be “Supply Acquisition Syndrome” or SAS. Anyone else in the same boat? I’m not alone here, am I?
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