Should artists learn a trade? 6 February 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Art education, Business of art, Ceramics.2 comments
Been pretty quiet the past few weeks here on the blog eh?
Bloggy buddy and painter Jim Janknegt has suggested in the past that art students should be taught a trade while earning their degree. I like this idea. It makes use of artists’ natural ability to work with their hands while acknowledging how difficult it is to make a living as a painter or sculptor, especially right out of college. Even if the overly idealistic students don’t want to acknowledge the fact. Furthermore, trades generally pay more than other jobs aspiring artists often end up in. And we all like a little more in the paychecks.
The absence on the blog is thanks to a new full time job. I’m working in a trade again. I have a little bit of experience in quite a few different trades: Landscaping, offset printing, woodworking, a variety of building trades including framing, wiring and painting. My new gig is with a painter, someone I actually helped out for a couple of summers while in college.
I’m also still working for M-DAT. Between the two I have very little time left in a day. The plan at this point is to focus intently on my sculpture on the weekends. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how soon I can build myself a soda kiln, and if I can make it somewhat portable. I don’t need a large one, and I already have some salvaged brick that can help out.
A friend recently counted the friends he has who are currently without jobs, and they numbered ten. So, regardless, I’m grateful for the work.
On place, moving, living incarnationally 31 January 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Living incarnationally, New Urbanism, Personal reflection, Siloam Springs.add a comment
It’s been just over six months since we moved back to Nebraska from the little town of Siloam Springs, Arkansas and
You just don’t know how connected you are to a place until you leave it.
When we moved to Siloam Springs I didn’t expect to become attached to such a small community, in Arkansas, nestled into them thar hills.
What I learned is that it’s easier, in some ways, to become a part of a smaller community. And that it’s the people that make the community what it is in large part. This is no revelation to me or anyone else who’s considered the topic, but living in Arkansas was my first adult experience, so to speak, far apart from a culture that I knew.
Granted, there were some ups and downs in our relationship with the place, but the same can be said for every relationship. And there is a little more to it than just the people, especially to a visual geek (what’s the visual equivalent of “audiophile?”) like myself. For Siloam, it helped greatly to have a liberal arts university, a quaint downtown in the midst of restoration, centrally located parks with a creek running through them etc.
So at this point I’m wondering how quickly a person can become an integral part of a different — and larger — community and by what means. I have an advantage here in Grand Island having lived here for a couple years during high school, but the same could be said for the move to Arkansas, going back to the town where my wife graduated from college. However, we’re not all that convinced we’ll be here for much more than a year as we wait for certain doors to open (or not open).
What we are convinced of is that we miss Siloam Springs — with the exception of the allergens.
The iPad: Another step away from tactility 27 January 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Modern culture.2 comments
Don’t get me wrong, I want one. The wife and I just got new phones — AT&T’s service up here in Nebraska was sketchy, so we switched to Verizon — that use touch screens. I like the touch screen technology. And I like Apple products as a general rule.
But the iPad looks to me like one more step towards a world of untactility.
Barbara Nicolosi on beauty 21 January 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Beauty.add a comment
This is another excerpt, courtesy of David Taylor’s blog, from the up and coming For the Beauty of the Church. She applies a few terms from a Thomas Aquinas quote regarding beauty that I’m still processing.
THE ARTIST & THE TERRAIN OF BEAUTY
THE NATURE OF BEAUTY
Thomas Aquinas gave a definition of the beautiful that is still helpful and relevant seven centuries later. The beautiful, he said, is “wholeness, harmony, and radiance,” and these define the terrain of the artist.
WHOLENESS
Wholeness means nothing is missing. All parts are present, suggesting completeness. No one looks at the Pietà and says, “You know, Mary needs just a little more fringe around her veil. Oh well.” Or, people don’t listen to Mozart’s Ave Verum and say, “Needs another high G in there. Oh well.” There’s something about these works that suggest completeness. Wholeness also means there is nothing extra, nothing gratuitous that isn’t an essential part of the whole. Isn’t that one of the primary complaints about so many movies? “Gratuitous sex and violence.” That is, too often there is no context for these things in a project, so it feels to the audience like they were just slapped in there to try and distract from some flaw in the storytelling. A beautiful work has nothing gratuitous . . .
WHAT THE TERRAIN OF THE BEAUTIFUL IS NOT
POLITICAL
The first thing we’ve done to wreck art is make it serve the political instead of the beautiful. I don’t necessarily meaning left or right, but statement-making, which is an utter perversion of the concept of radiance. The goal of statement-making is to manipulate, to coerce, to get people to vote a certain way, to propagandize, to merely change behavior.
I can’t think of a better example of this than in the awful statue of Mary that stands over the outside door of the $200 million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. It’s just dreadful. The statue is of completely uncertain gender, with a female torso, but harshly cropped hair and distinctly masculine arms and hands. In fact, my students call her, “Man-hands Mary.” But it’s worse than just androgyny. The image has black lips, Asian eyes, a Latino face, and other scattered Anglo features. When I first went on a tour of the new Cathedral, our guide said, “This statue was conceived so that people of all races would see themselves in it and feel welcome in this place.” And I said, “But it’s kind of ugly. I don’t know about you, but if you saw that kind of freak inviting you into its house. . . .” Well, the tour guide sniffed at me, waved her hand, and said, “The church is not about that anymore.”
It begs the question of whether Japanese people really do look at the Pietà in Rome and shrug, “Well, that’s okay for the white people.” But my point is that the goal of the statue was not to make something that would deliver the beautiful. The goal of the statue was to communicate a political message. The fact that it is ugly and makes my students mock it indicates that it has been a failure as a political vehicle too. In politics, you lose wholeness because the political only tells its own side of the story. As a result, people lose a feeling of rest.
Pre-order For the Beauty of the Church on Amazon.com.
How Business can stifle imagination 20 January 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Imagination.add a comment
Roger Martin, writing for the Harvard Business Review, talks about how common American business practices often get in the way of imagination.
How often do you hear these old saws repeated: “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count”; “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”; “If you can’t measure it, it won’t happen?” We like these sayings because they’re comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it . . . If an institution is all geared up for a future that is like the past and the future changes radically, then the institution becomes an anachronism, like a Motorola or GM.
The late 19th and early 20th century American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was the first to point out that no new idea in the world was ever produced by inductive or deductive logic . . . “If you can’t imagine it, you will never create it.” The future is about imagination, not measurement. To imagine a future, one has to look beyond the measurable variables, beyond what can be proven with past data.
He also mentions in the article something called abductive logic as an alternative to more restrictive deductive and inductive reasoning (the process by which a company or individual arrives at the idea that “If you can’t measure it, it won’t happen.”). Abductive reasoning is “the process of inference that produces a hypothesis as its end result” according to Wikipedia. Without it companies run the risk of going out of business.
Martin uses Motorola and GM as examples of this. Motorola, for instance, assumed the feature phone was the end-all of cell phone technology. Smart phones weren’t on their radar. However, while Motorola settled into this status quo, others continued to innovate.
Imagination often seems a forgotten facet of our humanity in the midst of all that makes up the fast-paced machine of our cultures. The process of imagining looks unproductive (“If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count.”) to much of the business world, but it isn’t just for officially creative types such as artists, designers and authors of fiction.
Imagination is for everyone.
Article found on Makoto Fujimura’s Twitter feed.
Contemplation and artistic realism 18 January 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Realism, The contemplative life.add a comment
In the context of the contemplative life and art there is something I’ve wondered about. I’ve wondered if artistic realism does a better job of drawing a viewer in, creating pause. In the past I’ve chalked up differences in viewer attention span to personality, and I believe there’s still something to be said for that. For instance, as I write this I’m drinking from a mug my wife gave me for Christmas. The mug is decorated, and the decoration appeals to me. It makes me stop and think about how it was made, the materials it was made from and what the embellishment means. If anything.
It’s not what you’d call realism.
However, Roberta Green Ahmanson, in an article titled Art Through Thick and Thin, argues for realism in relationship to contemplation.
But the realism is not in service of the self; it is in the service of bringing the viewer closer to the divine . . .
But such gore is not the only theme here. Contemplation demands realism as well, whether it’s Pedro de Mena’s “Virgin of Sorrows,” tearful over her son’s death, or his ecstatic Francis of Assisi . . .
But the artists on display in “The Sacred Made Real” bring the sacred into our world. The grief-stricken Magdalen contemplating the Cross, the Christ of the “Ecce Homo,” and the “Virgin of Sorrows” were not alone — for the display was crowded, and the visitors were in no hurry.
Am I simply more interested in the decorated and abstract mug than most people would be because clay is my craft? Were the visitors to the “Pop Life” exhibit, which Ahmason contrasts to “The Sacred Made Real” in her article, less likely to linger on the artworks simply because each show attracted a different demographic to begin with? Or is there something to the idea that realism is more likely to draw a viewer in and keep their attention than abstractions or non-representational pieces?
More on part-time artistry 16 January 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Business of art.add a comment
Revisiting this topic since it’s fresh in my mind: I had a conversation a week or two ago with a central Nebraska artist about how difficult it can be an artist part-time, and how difficult it is to convey this to non-artists. She also mentioned that creativity doesn’t really function as a hobby in the mind of an aspiring artist. In the past when I talked about this I used the phrase hard-wired. Artists are hard-wired to pursue creative endeavors.
A useful idea related to part-time artistry from fellow blogger and painter Jim Janknegt:
That sounds like a good plan. I find that when I treat my painting as a job with regular hours I get a lot of work done. Have a set time to show up at the easel and don’t let anybody interfere. When you work for an employer you don’t let your family or household demands keep you from showing up for work on time. Let it be the same with your painting.
Music and the contemplative life 11 January 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Central Nebraska, Living incarnationally, Northwest Arkansas, The contemplative life.2 comments
In recent years I’ve lamented how music has less and less a place in my life, especially in comparison to my college years when I’d buy a new album and listen to it clear through within the first week. Headphones on, uninterupted. In some ways there were fewer distractions back then — no TV, no Wii, no blog or Facebook or Twitter — and more time to give to arts other than my own.
My wife voiced the same lament again, though, in the past month. We probably pay attention to music during the Christmas season more than any other time of year, so it was on her mind. She also comes from a much more musical family than I (my family tends towards the visual arts).
After she said that I had some music on, I think it was Christmas music playing on Epiphany while we took the tree down, and I made note of a link between the enigmatic art of music and the contemplative life. Music can help me focus. Focus will be different depending on the style; that is, Saviour Machine will produce a different kind of direction in thought than Bach.
Music is part of a contemplative life, whether played or listened to.
When we moved back up to Nebraska we knew we’d miss being around some of the musicians we knew in Northwest Arkansas: Traci Letellier, Fool For Now, David Farley, Jamey Clayberg (aka Herva). It was great having very talented musicians in our local circle of friends. Nebraska has its own including Rob Martinson II with The Hatchbacks. Also here in central Nebraska is Leesha Harvey, who I’d like to meet some day.
Intentional Observation: Cell phones and drivers 10 January 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Intentional observation, Live car free.1 comment so far
It’s funny how I can nearly always tell if a driver is on their cell phone. They’re half in their lane, half not. Realizing they’re only half in their lane and over-correcting. Sluggish to take off after a light turns green, or ignoring the light in the first place. The following is a friend’s Facebook status of gratefulness I noticed in my news feed this morning:
. . . is grateful for the ice on Happy Hollow. If it hadn’t taken my car about 10 seconds to get some traction after stopping at a red light, I would have been broad-sided by the moron talking on his cell phone that blew through a VERY red light. I don’t think he even saw that there *was* a light, he was so oblivious. Never thought icy roads would help me *avoid* being in an accident!
Approximately 90% of the time I observe a driver driving distractedly and I come up next to or behind them they will have a cell phone pressed to their ear. A month or so ago I heard a news bit suggesting Nebraska may soon enact a law prohibiting cell phone use while driving (or at least requiring a hands free device). That’s all well and good, but I’m skeptical at how well local authorities will be able to enforce such a law.
Intellect and compassion 9 January 2010
Posted by pcNielsen in Christianity, Imagination, Inspired by, Personal reflection.1 comment so far
I asked for and received a few C.S. Lewis books that I’ve yet to read for Christmas (I also tried to win a copy of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy at Urbana09, but my dart throwing skills weren’t up to snuff.). What this means is that the recently neglected stack of books — relatively short in comparison to my that of avid reading wife — awaiting my attention swelled when I was barely able to complete one read in 2009. Hopefully I’ll be able to pay more attention to my books in 2010. If I am so able, these give me access to reading material since most of our collection is still packed away in boxes.
I had reason, though, in asking for these books beyond just having “access to reading material.” Lately I’ve come to desire a faith, a Christianity, that is both more intellectual and compassionate than the one I’ve known or been exposed to and involved with for most of my life. I’m not exactly certain where this desire is coming from or where it’s leading, but that’s fine for now.
Lewis challenges me intellectually in a unique way. I used to read his writings regularly, but recently I’ve focused on writings on the arts, a lot of which are also intellectually challenging and steeped in theology. However, I’ve palpably missed his writing. This week I started into The Abolition of Man. It’s a short read I hope to finish quickly; my second reforay into Lewis will be Surprised By Joy.
