Glass Painting

During the residency, one of my crits yielded the idea of accidental paintings. I've been contemplating this idea. I started painting on glass. I've done it before, but not with photography integrated into the process. I think the photographs are interesting, and might turn out to be the final product. We'll see. The tricky part about painting "through" the glass, is that as I apply the paint, I hide the view I'm looking at.

This first photograph is of a small transfer. I wanted to see if it communicated with the environment in an interesting way. Not as interesting as I hoped.

A practive piece of glass where I did a small study of transclucent acrylics (left) and oils (right) with colleged paper scraps.

Setting up to paint by looking through the glass. The set up worked better than expected.

A view of the painting in process.

Little Sun

Artist Olafur Eliasson created this optimistic project about bringing light to people without electricity. I just watched a video interview here.

Another exciting discovery today was Berndnaut Smilde. He creates clouds inside of a room, and photographs serve to record the display. During an interview with Avant/Garde Diaries, he said about his own work:

     "A lot of my work deals with the situation of duality: questioning inside and outside, temporality,
     size and function of materials. I’m really interested in work that exits between reality and
     representation in a way that it doesn’t really function in the end. So, as for the clouds, they’re just
     there. They’re building up, at the same time they’re falling apart."

I find myself returning to this idea of the temporal, that nothing last forever and everything is in a constant state of change. I started overlapping images of clouds and water, things that fluid. It's not getting me where I want to be yet, but this idea of clouds...it intrigues me. You can watch them shift and change. Smilde's images are elegant and thought provoking and certainly had inspired me.

Sea Cloud

First painting of the semester! Probably more of an exercise than anything, but it was enjoyable to paint. I used the time to mull over some ideas and I feel like I have a little more clarity now.

For this painting, I was thinking about perspective. Part of it is looking down at a sea weed cluster and the other half is looking up at sky. I wanted it to be a little abstract and a little confusing even. I like to trick the eye, play with the mind. I'm not sure this is quite doing that yet, but I'm working on it.

Get to Work

Studio day today. I've been feeling a little immobilized after the residency. The critiques I felt so inspired by while I was there are now haunting me. Each time I try to make something, I keep feeling pressured by the voices of future viewers, asking me why I'm doing this, why it matters, how is it relevant. So, I'm going to paint something for a little bit. I haven't done a pure painting for a while. I'm not going to ask myself anymore questions today. Right now, it might just be more important to make something, and it doesn't matter what. A favorite Chuck Close quote I like to think of at times like this says, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work..." So that's what I'm going to do.

A little kick start came from this article by Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Read it here and enjoy!

Jenny Holzer

At one point during the June Residency (how is already half way through July? Didn't I just finish the laundry from that event?), Jenny Holzer's name came up as someone to possibly look at. Her large scale projections and bold use of text is powerful. (I can't quite remember why it was discussed in relation to my work though. Perhaps it was because I mentioned using lights. Probably.) Anyways, I was really captivated by the images of her installations, and did a little reading up on her. I stumbled upon an article on the blog Aesthetica, that reviewed a 2012 survey of her work in London's Sprüth Magers. The author, Karla Evans, makes a point half way through that I think is very relevant to the current art world. She was surprised by the smaller works included in the show and says:

      "The initial disappointment, which although very quickly faded, nonetheless asks the question, 
      what do we expect from successful modern artists? And, are we only in it for the awe-inspiring 
      and the epic? The recent London exhibitions that have provoked queues and great hype are 
      undeniably bold; Damien Hirst’s gilded butterflies and severed cow’s head; Lucien Freud’s 
      thickly layered and uninhibited portraits. When it comes to modern artists, do we yearn for 
      them to be extrovert and when they’re not, see them as unaccomplished?"

I find myself asking similar questions when looking at my own work. I am awed in a sense, by work like Holzer's, that can make a point so strongly. At the same time, I know that's not a place I can take my art. Not because it's not allowed, but because it would be conforming to what's in style, or rather, to a style I have no personal motivation to conform to. It would be insincere. In order for art to stand the test of time, it can't be trendy. The problem with work that relies on shock value is that is like a surprise attack: once the surprise has been made known, it looses its advantage. Perhaps I'm holding to an archaic convention when I think that in order for art to survive its inception, it should offer the viewer a new perspective each time it it visited.

Holzer's work does that. When Evans continues to write about Holzer's older work in the eighties, she comments on how it is still able to make an impact, decades after its creation. To me, that is a significant signifier of quality.

Art at AIB

This was the work I brought to my residency. Better representational photographs can be found on my website, but this shows the space, and how I display the work generally, using a thin shelf.

Photography is so interesting. My work is strongly photo based, yet the photographs of it barely convey the presence the work possesses. A photo can never take the place of an actual experience. I think that's an idea I want to explore more. I just watched Hugo today. It's more of a children's film in some ways, but with very rich imagery. It was recommended to me during the residency, and I found it quite interesting. It shows some early film techniques, before the days of computers, and some of the ways illusions were created. It was interesting to me that the idea of cinema came up a few times in discussions of my work. It's something to consider.

I also just read an article on Jeff Wall published in the New York Times a few years ago. It was extremely interesting to learn about his approach, recreating events he sees in real life. He constructs his images in the way a painter would, and indeed, mimics the compositions and subjects of historcially important paintings. He was origanlly recomemended for me to look at because of his light box displays, something I might be interested in working with. Upon reading this article, I found many of his ideas resonating with my own. What I find most appealing about his work, however, is how it's accessable on several levels. A passerby can appreciate his work at face value, while an art historian could see the deeper nuances in the composition and subject matter. Photography in general has democratized art, and perhaps that's why it was inticially scorned in the art world. Because of this, photography has work harder to be sophisticated as art. The following quote by Wall shows his understanding of this:“Believing in the specialness of what you are photographing is a disaster,” he said. “Then you think the photograph will be good because of what is in it. Cézanne taught me that that is not true. An apple is not very interesting. He expunged any attachment to the subject matter, except what he brought to it. In the painting he would bring it back to life. Only by believing that his painting it is what would enliven it could he make it happen.”