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.
This piece has a photographic feel and Kodak is on its death bed. That’s a sad thought.
Ektachromoplasm, oil over monotype on paper, 20″ x 16″
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.
yes. it’s a lot more energy consuming than i thought. while i’ve been going to my new studio digs, getting in a groove is proving to be a wee bit tricky. not that i’d imagined it to be a seamlessly scripted tv show kinda event. y’know what i mean … show opens, something happens and by the 22nd minute (excluding commercial breaks) everything is resolved and folks live happily ever after. not so fast little girl….
what i have been consistiently doing is taking pictures with my phone, then over-proceesing the shit out of them and having some fun. it’s my one consistent attempt at staying in the game. the camera phone has proven to be a worthy sketching device. a handy tool to use when all you wanna do is keep your head in your art. i’ve even found a few worthy of printing and sharing.
so, let me start again… good day fair folk. here are some pics i made while waiting for the other artist side of me to get her studio shit together .
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.
In the last two weeks, I have switched from focusing on the small patch of woods in the urban park where I work to the more industrial side of St. Louis. My city is a strange place that still makes things, all kinds of things, from chemicals to jet planes. This reality means that there is a lot of space (most manufacturing centers stopped building up and started building out at least by the 1940′s), and since most of my city’s population had left for the suburbs by the end of the 1970′s, that means a lot of empty space. So “space” is what I have been concentrating on lately (with a few exceptions). Enjoy!
All Nikon N80 or Nikon n8008s with Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D or Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G lenses.
More after the jump–> Read more »
2010 has been a looonnng year, or at least it’s sure seemed long. This year, I have experienced innumerable highs and lows, which is strange because the entire time while they were happening, I felt sort of distracted. Realizations in hindsight… Anyway, here are 25 of my favorite pictures that I took this year (kind of a tradition now for me). Enjoy!
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–>
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I feel like starting a new series just for Darteboard. I definitely owe anyone reading this something a bit more than I’ve been giving for quite a while. So here begins, or rather last friday began, a black and white friday photography series.
I must say, I love Nikon’s, in-camera, monochrome function; it just gives a look that reminds me so much of real black and white (film that is), which is quite difficult to achieve through Photoshop, et al. The only downside is that it forces me to shoot in jpeg, but given that the monochrome function spits out a finished picture, including the sharpening, I can live with it.
Hope you enjoy!
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.
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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.
A few blocks from my house the old Berkeley Deptartment of Health Building is being slowly demolished to make room for a BP funded Green Energy Institute. Take that as you will.
The slow, I-Beam by I-beam demolition has unroled over a month or two and has been fascinating to watch. There’s constantly a few people with cameras milling about it. Personally I’ve made 2 trips.
All the images are fun to look at but I don’t pretend to be an expert photographer, so I’m using them more as source and reference materials for digital collages. Most of these are very quick sketches worked up the last few nights in an hour or less, working out some ideas.
More below 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.
Back in the 90′s when I was living my dirty New York City life I would occasionally pick up some modeling work here and there, and due to the social circles I was moving around in it was more or less inevitable the I would end up working with Terry Richardson eventually. Before anyone gets distracted by the almost fancy sounding phrase “social circles” let me clarify that it means I was living in a hotel with a bunch of cracked out club kids, working in nightclubs, and subsisting on a diet of opiates and sugar. The term “heroin chic” was on the verge of being coined for a very good reason, an attempt to justify our habits in a more acceptable context and keep working. It still amazes me that people got that to fly for as long as they did, but anyway, back to Terry.
When I met him Terry looked like he stepped straight out of a 70′s porn film, complete with pedobar mustache and cut off denim shorts. Actually he still looks like that, which I think may not be helping him out here because he has recently been accused of exploiting under age, or nearly underage models. He was well established when I worked with him, but certainly not the mega star he is now with a series of books released by Taschen, a host of campaigns for Gucci, Miu Miu, Pirelli, Tom Ford, and a million magazines added to his resume. I can say that when I worked with him he was always respectful and professional, but that was also on the cusp of everything turning really ugly in the scene and I know first hand how a combination of drugs, a position of power, and unlimited indulgence from those in authority can become a recipe for really bad things happening. I stumbled across his book Terryworld a few years later in some shop in London and remember flipping through it and not being able to really think past “um…wow”. I’ll just leave it at that.
For another take on it, one from an actual teenage girl (no direct contact with Mr. Richardson) I’ll refer you over to the very well produced fashion blog Style Rookie. She gets into the nuanced dynamics of power, in the fashion industry, the media, and between older men of influence and young women of little experience. Tavi’s pretty bad ass.
I had a hard time finding some of the images that represent the issue most pointedly because apparently he’s been doing his damndedst to remove them from the internest, though there are few explicit ones in the article I linked up at the top over there (I’m not sure I’ll look at a carnation the same way again), but here are a few that might give you an idea of where we are going with this.
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
