Category: Blog

I am hitting another moment of transition with my work.  Anyone who has known my work for years knows that it changes dramatically.  Typically in the art world, this is not a good thing.  It is difficult to build a reputation as an artist if the work is inconsistent.  I acknowledge this, but have also known many successful visual artists with multiple bodies of work spanning many mediums.  It is part of my personality to move forward and to do it quickly.  I get bored easily and love trying new things with my work.  If anything it shows the level of passion I have for what I do.

I did the piece seen in this image yesterday in my studio and am very happy with it.  I plan to do more like this in the near future.

Everything can’t be art, or art won’t be anything.

-David A. Smith,author of “Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy”

I listened to an interesting interview with author David A. Smith on the radio (KERA’s “Think” with Kris Boyd out of Texas)

Smith commented on how government in its attempts to support the arts has to set parameters that define what art is.  He also discussed whether art funding should go toward society and art accessibility, or if it should fund individual artists and their visions.  Smith is of the opinion the elitism is necessary for art, because it sets the bar for good, serious art.  As the quote above implies, if we let art be anything it destroys its own credibility.  I suppose a good analogy would be that if we have the freedom to be anything and everything, then we are nothing without the structure of reference.  I have to agree with Smith.  Even the most ground breaking “anything goes” art was only great for its rebellion, and once that boundary was broken it could not have any further power in defining a work or movement.  We need history and context as much as we need institution.  Art ultimately is a meaningless human construct anyway, so we need our own society and culture to give it purpose and meaning

I have not read Smith’s book yet, but plan to, as the radio interview alone was excellent and thought provoking.

I worked on an oil in my studio this morning, which is coming along nicely.  I took the sunshine, however, as an excuse to get outdoors this afternoon.  I had hoped for warmer weather, but it was still a beautiful day.  I worked with a recent gift of chalk pastels to create this piece, of a grouping of trees in Humboldt Park.  I felt I had to relearn how to use the different greens.  I had also forgotten how, depending on color, some chalk sticks can be much harder than others.  I had fun bringing in flecks of color, and I am overall very happy with the drawing, which is about 11″ x 17″ unframed.   I plan to do many more this summer!

I am rereading some of my college texts, including Jacques Barzun’s “Use and Abuse of Art”.  I just finished reading the section, “Art the Redeemer”.  This section goes into a long conflicted discussion on how art has historically been tied to religion, how it is immaterial and often transcendental, etc.  I want, however, to comment specifically on the last paragraph, which can apply to my own work.  At the end, Barzun says that art fails at redemption, that it can simply not go deep enough into us.  He quotes Van Gogh,

There is something else in life besides pictures, and that something else one neglects, and Nature seems to revenge itself, and fate is set on thwarting us. (96)

In his very last statement, Barzun makes the connection,

That my be in our time why art has been tempted to borrow the panoply of science. (96)

One could argue, though Barzun does not go this far, that in modern times as science has replaced religion as our hope and salvation, art has simply followed the leader.  My college thesis could have used this thought.  In any case, it is certainly an interesting point.  I do not know that anything can truly redeem us, or if there is such thing as redemption, but I have always believed that art, like science and religion, can take us to a place that is bigger then ourselves.

I went to Chicago today to drop off “Leaning In” at the Morpho Gallery for a show.  I took this opportunity to visit Chicago’s River North neighborhood and gallery hop a bit.  The drive down there consisted of bumper to bumper traffic, severe storms, and hail.  When I finally did arrive, I was able to view a half dozen or so galleries between downpours.  The highlights of the day for my were the Ann Nathan Gallery and The Roy Boyd Gallery.  The work at these two galleries in particular really drew me in.  I usually don’t get a good vibe from the Ann Nathan Gallery, but Deborah Ebbers work is definitely up my alley so I had to investigate.  Her colors and handling of surface are beautiful. I like the texture she is able to create for her trees.  Also, I noticed, she paints around the branches similarly to the way I do in some works.

The Roy Boyd Gallery was a different kind of surprise.  I wandered in by chance and was greeted very warmly (not in the usual stuffy gallery sort of way).  The works were not something I would instantly be drawn to from a subject perspective, but these organic abstracts by Richard Gibbons were too rich to brush off.  At first glance I thought they may be gimmicky,  However, the rich surface, colors, and shimmering forms knocked me over.  The thing I puzzled about, however, was the fact that most of these works were done on multiple panels, in some cases displayed with spacing and in other cases not.  The choice of separate panels, and the placement of the edge felt intentional compositionally.  However logically, in regards to the subject, it felt  over complicated and unnecessary.  None the less, I tried to envision the work as seamless, without the breaks, and somehow it lost power.  I am utterly perplexed, and that is great.  I highly recommend seeing these.

To get into the mindset of abstraction for an upcoming class, I picked up “Abstract Art” by Anna Moszynska.  Moszynska writes a very thorough and analytical history of abstraction and how different movements over the last century or so have implemented it.  I enjoy the ways in which Moszynska compares and contrasts different forms of abstraction.  In an enticing preface, Moszynska says,

“…to many artists, the distinction between representational and abstract art now seems meaningless, because their work daily brings them face to face with the fact that in certain essential ways all art is abstract; and equally, all art is representational, in that it represents something-if only an intention.” (9)

I suppose I have always found myself looking for someone to say this out loud.  As obvious as it may seem, in real practice it is easy to overlook.  Art often gets categorized by our attempts to describe it.  In doing so, “abstract” has come to be a term used for art that is a field of color, or simply shapes and colors.  This type of work, like Mondrian’s paintings for example, is now in a genre of “pure abstraction”, which is still arguable.  My point is that when I use abstraction to describe some of my own work I do so knowing that they are representational of trees, but I am searching for image and color beyond the subject, which I believe makes it both.

I am getting a lot of painting done these days, and have tons of new work to show both in Plymouth next month as well as in Milwaukee in July,  However, I a keeping my show season to a minimum this year.  With the economy being what it is I have found people investing more in personal experiences and enterainment rather than objects.  Thus, sales are down.   I feel that now would be a good time for me to build my teaching skills and class experience, so as my calender shows, I have a lot of classes in the works!

As for the new work, expect to see a lot more posting soon!

I did not really have anything too serious to blog about today so I decided to comment on the fact that spring is actually here, and though it has not felt like it lately, today I noticed the trees budding and was struck by the fact that soon I will loose access to much of my subject matter.  I prefer, artistically, the bare trees.  To me leaves hid the figure of the tree much like a clothed model to a figure artist.  So, I have been snapping as many photos as I can.  Of course I would prefer to work from life.  My dilemma is that when the trees are bare it is often too cold, and when it is warm the trees are concealed by masses of leaves.  Who knows, maybe I will adopt foliage into my work.  Things change and evolve so quickly with me that I have trouble anticipating what I will be doing a few month from now.

At the moment, however, it is just the skeletal structure that fascinates me, and I have been painting it against a flat abstracted ground that uses the paint as subject and the negative shapes around the tree.  The tree, then exists in a void and that void has no depth.  The tree sits even with the paint.  It has a very contemporary look to it, but I am trying to find ways to may the ground more interesting as subject itself, rather than just filler.  I have been experimenting with brush stroke and subtle hue variation.  Color is everything in these pieces.  The colors of the tree are often in stark contrast to the colors of the negative space, and that relationship tells the whole painting,  The subject is definitely also color.  But I still struggle from letting it get too wild and contrasted.  I constantly have to go back and tone things down, otherwise the noise of everything cancels everything else out.

Just some ramblings.

I just want to make mention of an artist I have stumbled upon recently.  Katie Holten does life sized tree installations called, “Excavated Trees”.  Here trees appear with both branches and roots as if the had been ripped from the ground (hence “excavated”).  What makes this more interesting is that the trees are made entirely from materials found on site, and therefor have a sort of organic natural relationship to their surroundings.  The materials are not necessarily organic, Holten often installs in institutions and therefore easily find raw building materials, paper, art supplies, etc.  Yet, we get a sense of the home grown theme of her work.  I am interested in the concept of how tree reflect the environment in which they grow.

It is only natural that when others view my work they come up with artists whose work may be similar to mine.  I want to consider for a moment what this means.  Part of being an artist is finding a unique expression for what interests us.  However, just as there are only so many combinations of words to make a poem, I think painting will always inevitably fall into groups, schools, or genres.  We are all people, after all, having the experience of our humanity and it is inevitable that some forms of our expression will be similar.  I am frankly proud to be apart of something beautiful and fluid rather than on an island, artistically.  Below I have two examples of artwork that my own has been compared to.  I cannot say I saw these works before I did my own, because honestly I did not.  However, both these artists are in general familiar to me and I respect both of them immensely:

Vincent Van Gogh’s trees: (As seen in image) I get this one a lot, and I definitely see the resemblance.  I also cannot hide the fact that I love his work and his use of color and mark.  He is very aggressive and reacts to his own canvas more than to his subject.  I get that.

Piet Mondrian’s trees:  This one was new to me.  I have always loved Mondrian, but for his later work and his writing.  I had never before seen his tree paintings, which are from an earlier period in his career.  I just recently looked them up, and all I can say is that I like him even more now.  I feel a strange affinity to him, wondering if he took a similar path as me, once, even briefly.

The power of influence and history in art is profound and I do not want the story to dictate my work, but I take pleasure in knowing that others thought like me once.

Image: Vincent Van Gogh , Branch of an Almond Tree in Blossom (1890)

In an effort to rediscover my work and focus, as well as to better understand my subject, I am spending much of the month focusing on gesture.  I am treating trees as I would the human figure in a figure drawing class and am using quick rough gestures that attempt to ignore the surface and focus on the movement.

In these drawings what I am looking to find is the underlying mainline of movement or the dominant shape running through the length of the tree.  In the branches I focus on dominant areas of direction or angle.  I also look for areas that feel stressed, such as a hard bend.  In a sense this humanizes the tree a bit, for I am suggesting movement beyond the trees actual ability o move.  Yet I believe the gesture to be there and I feel this exercise will bring my closer to my trees and hopefully create some interesting work as well.  I have posted a few, with more to come soon.  They w ill be in the “2009 Drawing” page for now.

Below is a link to an interview of Alex Katz written by Mark Rappolt for Art Review Magazine.  Personally, I have never liked Katz’s work.   I would walk through the section of the Milwaukee Art Museum that featured Katz’s work and would shudder.  I remember disliking Katz when I was young, which says something at least for the impact of his work as being memorable.  I dislike Katz’s work mostly because of it large, posterized, pop image look.  I often love work that uses a graphic, posterized representation, but it is Katz’s simple shapes and seamless marks that drive me crazy.  I want to see paint move and dance!

In any case, the interview is interesting so I thought I would add it in.  Rappolt does a good job of pushing some complex questions.  I particularly like Katz’s description of art as fashion and the bubble that is occupied by artists fortunate enough to be doing the right work at the right time.  Katz’s comments about the state of art and culture are great, but I would have liked to read  more about his paintings, and why he paints the way he paints.  I am sure I can find something, there has been a lot written about him.  He definately has been part of the fashionable art-star bubble that he refers to.

To read the article:

http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%3A680007

A contemporary artists that I recently came across and really like is Elizabeth Silver.  I found her in a magazine, I believe Art News may have reviewed her, and I was struck by her work.  Her work is figurative and very gestural, using line and color to create form and interest in a very gestural way.  I was impressed by the first words in her artist statement, “For me, the line’s the thing: the heart and guts of my art. My drawing and painting always begin – and frequently end – with line.”  I have always personally savored the quality of line in my own work, but in my recent oils I feel like I have lost that quality for no reason other than not having the patience or the brushes to do it big.  I am reminded that I would like to focus on line again in my own work and embrace the things that excite me in art, instead of painting toward expectations that are artificial.

To see Elizabeth Silver’s work, please visit:

http://www.elizabethsilverexpressionist.com/

Lives of the Artists, by Calvin Tomkins, is a fun easy read that offers significant insight.  Tomkins writes about meetings and interviews with several well known contemporary artists.  These are not the stuffy pretentious interviews that we often find in magazines.  The artists often let Tomkins into their home, into their studio, and into their life.  Thus, the interviews are more casual, real, and personal.  Tomkins also provides us with biographical information about each artist, so we read about them with a sense of understanding about who they are, what they do, and how they do it.  We learn about figures such as Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney, Julian Schnabel, and Damien Hirst.  The artists we meet in these chapters are not sensationalized art super stars but simple, thoughtful real people.  More importantly, I think anyone with any interest in contemporary art would find these stories compelling.

I am currently reading The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford. Based on research, letters, and art Gayford has written a very intriguing novel-like account of the months that Van Gogh and Gauguin lived together. As an artist, it is very insightful always to get into the mind of another artist. Van Gogh and Gaugain differed greatly on a number of artistic philosophies, and the dialogue between them is priceless. I have blogged about Van Gogh before, and I want to really recommend this book to artists and creative thinkers alike. It is intellectually gratifying as well as a stunning story.

The simple act of drawing these trees as frequently as I have been has brought what I consider to be simple clarity and focus to my work.  I believe that the paintings I am working on now will represent a dramatic shift in my approach.  Part of art is accepting the terms of the process.  I could not do what I do now without what I have done.  As I grow and develop as a person, so does my work grow along side me.

My artist statement describes in detail the fascination I have with trees and forests in my work. What I feel compelled to share are insights regarding my use of trees in comparison to the use of the human figure. Trees are figures themselves, presenting endless possibilities in pose, form, design, gesture, etc.  Therefore, I can explore painting more directly with them, which I have been doing more of recently.  In treating the tree as a figure in this way I have simplified my content and focused on shape, line, contour, and form.  These things have always interested me but now I feel this purpose is more clear.

I prefer trees to the figure because they do not come with the baggage, sentimentality, and human associations that are unavoidably made with figure painting.  There is nothing wrong with these associations and I think it makes figure painting very profound and critical to artistic tradition.  These feelings simply do not interest me in terms of my work.  I do not deny that there is baggage yet with the trees, as there would be with any representational form, and I embrace it.  The final most important thing to note is that trees do not move, at least not in the way the figure moves.   Even though a two dimensional painting only captures a still image, ( I know this point is arguable but not the purpose of my writing today) the potential movement in a figure painting will always be something very different from my tree paintings.  My trees are more finite, solid, and fixed.  The gesture comes from their growth and pattern, but their movement or any sense of it will remain limited.

I intend to explore this idea further, and continue to investigate the idea of the tree as a figure in both my writing and painting.

I just wanted to point out some new work I have uploaded to the 2008 Gallery.  Particularly, I want to point out “Tree Emerging in Color” and “Tree on a Cool Morning, because I think these works indicate a more subdued direction.  As much as I love going crazy in color and abstract shapes, I want to get back to the subject and make an effort to use subtlety rather than noise to create a more powerful image.

I am currently reading Theories of Modern Art by Herschel B. Chipp.  It is basically a collection of letters and writings by artists such as Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin, Kandinsky, Klee, etc.  This book is packed with lots of really good insight, discussion, and history.  I was most recently fascinated by Van Gogh grappling with the question of form vs. imagination.  In some of his letters, he insists that direct observation and study of the model is the only way to go.  However, after a brief visit from Gauguin, he is enticed by abstraction and working from his own mind.  He does later reverts back to his old beliefs but reading his thoughts while going through this process is inspiring.  Most artists, myself included, can surely relate to this common artistic dilemma.  I am savoring this book.

This passage was taken from the book:  Theories of Modern Art, Ed. Herschel B. Chipp

Imagination (a letter to Brnard, Arles, April 1888 (B3,p.478)

“The imagination is certainly a faculty which we must develop, one which alone can lead us to the creation of a more exhalting and consoling nature that the single brief glance of reality- which in our sight is ever changing, passing like a flash of lightning-can let us perceive….”

I chose to feature this quote because it is the essence of what I believe art should be.  I think that nature as a subject matter in painting can be a jumping off point for the human mind.  It is here that we can dicover our own creativity, purpose, and greatness. Nature, like us, is an organic manifestation that grows and transforms in reaction to the fluidity of the universe.  As being products of nature, we have that very same power in creativity, to see and redesign as we see fit.

The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands,but in seeing with new eyes.

-Marcel Proust

As artists, thinkers, and creators it is important that we never get too comfortable, or make assumptions in our exprience of the world.  In doing so, we filter out what could potentially be genius insights or life changing expriences.   It’s important to remember, but easy to forget. Our brains seems to want to somehow instinctively switch into autopilot.