Beki Borman

Come work in a creative environment with a professional artist for one-on-one sessions that will help you develop your skills, direction, and focus. Beki Borman graduated from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2004 with a BFA in painting. She has worked for years in both painting and drawing mediums and is well versed in tools and techniques as well as design and composition. Beki has taught classes and workshops at several locations throughout Southeastern Wisconsin.

No matter your experience, Beki will develop a plan and schedule with you to work with your goals as an artist. She will work with you side by side in her studio, offering guidance, feedback, while providing lessons and learning plans uniquely designed for you. There is no obligation, you pay by the hour and can cancel at any time.

Beki’s studio is located in Bay View, south of downtown Milwaukee, at the Hide House. This a community of studios and houses many wonderful artists! The Hide House is located at:

2625 S. Greeley Street
Milwaukee, WI 53207

Lessons start at $15/hr, students provide their own materials. For a travel fee, Beki can come to you as well. This fee will vary depending on distance.

To learn more about Beki and her work, please visit her website:

www.bekiborman.com

or contact her at: bekiborman@gmail.com

I did a second day of plein air at Pere Marguette Park yesterday.  I met some interesting folks and created, what i feel is a more successful painting than the first.  The is still not really my thing, and I am not really thrilled by painting buildings, but it was a good challenge for me.  The experience got me out of my studio and into the city where I felt like part of the community.  There will be a reception and auction on Friday night at 6pm for all the artists who participated.  The address is 610 N. Water Street.  I am looking forward to it.

As a member of Wisconsin Visual Artists I am making every effort to be involved in this years plein air competition taking place this week in downtown Milwaukee.  I have done plein air drawing, but not really painting.  I went out this afternoon, on a beautiful day, and did a watercolor painting,  I was at Pier Marquette Park, overlooking the river.

As the sun moved around and encroached on my shade it got a little uncomfortable after  a while.  None the less, I was able to put out a painting I am pretty satisfied with.  More rewarding than the painting perhaps were the people who stopped by to see what I was doing,  I had a few nice conversations and spent the rest of the time in the peaceful surroundings.  I will post the pictures soon, I haven’t painted architecture since college, so this experience poses new challenges.  It was a nice change of pace.  I plan to be out again on Tuesday!

Currently in my studio I am working on the painting of a tall, vertical tree colored in browns with a lively green and blue background. I am considering this painting seriously, because not only do I know if I like it, I do not know if I do not like it. It just is. It does not yet feel done and I am unsure why. It is not comfortable, and complete in the sense that all of its parts fit together harmoniously. But why is that important and to what am I painting it if it is not?

Compositionally, I can discern that it needs thinner more intricate branching around the top to balance it a bit more. This would also make it feel a bit more three dimensional an entwined in the space. As with all of my works, the tree feels slightly surreal in its relationship to the ground. I do not mind this, as I do not strive for a real space. I want the experience of the viewer to be slightly surreal, imagined, and dreamlike. I believe this to be essential to it being anything more than a nice painting of a tree.

I have written before how I treat my trees like figure drawings, focusing formally on gesture, line, and shape. Unlike paintings of people, trees carry no intrinsic emotion or meaning. So what are they then? They are just shapes against the sky. This carries a lot of existential weight for me. I do not paint the sky, or nothingness behind them. Rather, what I paint is a weighted negative space that is very much something. The painting itself is also something, both as an object and an image that I have created. It is an image of a tree that both looks like a tree and is not a tree. I hope perhaps it can be something more.

I am currently reading “Seven Days in the Art World” by Sarah Thornton.  Thornton gives descriptions of different art world experiences, one per chapter, such as a fair, a grad school critique, a biennial, an auction, etc.  These experiences are enlightening, but also disheartening.  It breaks down the romance of what it mean to be an artist and makes it sound as exciting as a day of stock trading on Wall Street.

I suppose this means I must admit that I succumb to the romantic ideal of a tortured artist, in the throws of self expression, passionate and wild with little concern for money or fame.  Well both are true, because the art world is not really composed of artists, but a secondary string of “art professionals” who make the money.

So where does that leave the artist?  A victim of consumerist culture and contemporary business?  I suppose, in a way  none of us can escape what and who it is we are if we want to be known, acknowledged, and respected for our art.  What does the artist ever really want, other than to make great art? So the art world exists like galaxy revolving around the artist’s black hole center.  Maybe this is a slightly egotistical and dark place to put the artist, but I had to use a cosmos analogy.

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.