So about six months ago I started messing around with felt (still three-dimensional) and nihonga — a Japanese technique I first heard of about six years ago now when introduced to Makoto Fujimura — after my wife gave me a starter set for my birthday. For Christmas I received some powdered graphite, another new medium for me that has shown real promise in helping me portray the kinds of light and spatial nuances wood and clay may not be best suited for.

Prior to last year, it had been an unfortunate long time since I played around with a new media, since I let myself approach a piece of paper with no other intent besides learning. I felt pressure to produce something for a reasonable portfolio (a goal I had set for myself) every time I sat down to create something. I wasn’t setting out to create something Mighty Ugly while engaging in this recent playfulness, but if the paper ended up being ugly there were no worries.

As much as discipline is important to being a successful artist, so is playfulness. So here starts a new series of my recent ugly works, starting with this felted cloud from my very first foray into felt, four plus months ago.

Numb3rs seems to me a fantastic example of telling, not showing. The dialog in parts of the first season that I’ve seen with her is almost comically overt at times. It almost sounds like an advertisement for mathematics.

It’s somewhat appropriate that I found this clip for The Aesthetic Elevator. Despite being poor at math in general, the Golden Ratio has fascinated me as an artist and designer since high school.

Creativity is fundamental to our humanity and a beautiful space is fundamental to our flourishing.

Amen.

Via Transpositions.

“‘And what is a portrait of a woman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff after all. They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising them. Language is a finer medium.’

‘Yes, for those who can’t paint,’ said Naumann. ‘There you have perfect right. I did not recommend you to paint, my friend.’

…

‘Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere coloured superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment. — This woman who you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.’”

Gustav Klimt's The Three Ages of Woman

Intriguing dialogue indeed, and I find myself as a visual artist not attempting to defend the visual arts here but continuing the conversation by suggesting that writing falls short then of music. If we are talking about the woman’s voice, how can we neglect its auditory quality — the thing that makes a voice — by suggesting that the art most apt to describe it is merely ink on paper. Just like a painting, pigment on a surface. Music is both reverberation and story. Why isn’t it the best portrait of a woman? What about opera then, or theater, taking the element of story even further and giving us visual aids?

The crux of these arguments is that each artistic form, each craft has its own qualities different from the other. Every one has some weakness and some strength when pitted against its competitor. And all of them fall short, go figure, of representing an actual woman.

Work with the painter I’ve been helping out this year has been slow the past couple weeks, so I’ve busied myself with other things as much as I’ve been able (other things that are somewhat financially advantageous in these lean times, things not necessarily sculpture related as I’d prefer). I spent some time in my dad’s shop, The Milestone Gallery, painting walls, signs and staining furniture.

Our Sand Trap walls with a Marissa Lee Swinghammer print hanging on the chimney chase

Dad has noticed that people even want their antique furniture to look and function like new. Doors that are warped or don’t close all the way, the crazed finish of a tabletop or patina from age on a cabinet can deter people from purchasing the unique objects he collects. “I thought that patina was something people liked,” he said.

Indeed, why do we as Americans so often crave the new? The walls in our little house do just fine at what they were built to do, and as I spread “Sand Trap” — a taupe-y tint with hints of rose or purple in different lights — over the scuffed up old walls I began to appreciate their textures. In fact, I’ve concluded that perfect walls are actually boring in comparison.

By saying this I’m not necessarily advocating any kind of trumped-up aging process, no intentional distressing of new walls or surfaces. When you build a new building you should do it properly, straight studs and square corners. The history of a place must come organically; our little Nebraska bungalow may have more of an overall patina than most places, having been a rental for most of its years according to our neighborhood historian.

And now for an uncomfortable question: Does our dislike for the appearance of age or imperfection in our buildings hearken back to the same aversion we have to age in our own person, or in our American culture of human beauty where maturity is not esteemed as it is in other cultures?

My uncle, whose home also boasts whispering plaster walls, took advantage of the patina by exaggerating it, showing it off. I haven’t seen how he’s done this yet, but the idea is intriguing to me. If I feel like I have the time, I’ll probably try something similar.

A long while, actually. Probably since I graduated from college almost ten years ago now.

Julie's sculpture does not forget it's roots.

In my architecture classes, in my graphic design classes and some of the time in my ceramics classes I watched aspiring artists and designers, myself included, forget the basics of design. We’d go after an assignment with passion, with dreams of being featured on the front cover of Architectural Digest, and forget that there are certain building blocks to every visual and spatial solution. They were overthinking the problem.

I suppose this is a symptom of the genius mentality, the drive for stardom usurping the desire to make useful and beautiful contributions to our surrounding environments.

In developing his general theory about how humans decide what they like or dislike, he lines up evidence to show that what people believe about a work of art is crucial to the way they feel about it. He goes on to suggest that modern art collectors are partly motivated by the way they wish to be seen by the rest of the world.

And then this.

Humans are incapable of just getting pleasure from the way something looks, he argues. “The history of an artwork is absolutely critical, although you might argue that it shouldn’t be. It is just the way our minds are built.”

Mammatus overhead from mid-June.

On first read I have a very hard time — thinking about myself — believing that humans are incapable of getting pleasure from the way something looks. However, I regularly talk about the importance of associations in how works of art are interpreted, how they’re viewed. Does that mean, however, that something can’t give pleasure on viewing without certain history does it? The associations I refer to are more or less the same thing as making history a prerequisite to pleasure.

It’s hard for me to imagine not liking the structure in a storm over the prairie, the colors on it as the sun sets, the many shades of purple the clouds are tinged with as lightning courses through it after dark. Yes,I have a history with storms but going back to my childhood it isn’t a positive one. I was scared to death of them until I was about twelve years old. How I came to love them is a mystery even to me.

What about flowers? Why do we consider, pretty much universally (right?) flowers beautiful? We may not all like the same ones, and guys may claim to not like them at all in a pretentious and ignorant show of masculinity.

I suppose Bloom’s book explains a good deal more of his research and theories than the article lets on, but I’d also guess that it won’t necessarily quell in me what suggests that there is some sort of innate [Divinely appointed] basis for beauty.

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.

• I don’t know. Maybe through some false, Puritanical idea that work should be cheerless drudgery? That if you’re enjoying it too much, it’s not really “work”?
• I think it depends on whom you’re talking to. Great societies need art as well as industry and politics (Actually, do we really need politics?). I, for one, would love to quilt or knit, but I’ll apparently have to wait for Heaven to succeed at those arts.
• Arts and Crafts aren’t considered “work” because people can do them as hobbies or in their spare time and don’t realize that (perhaps) there is a great amount of craftsmanship and skill in what you do than in (perhaps) what I do, when I’m not punching a clock. The correct answer is, “Paul, we’d all love to do what we love to do but have to punch a clock and it’s more fun to mock you than to say, ‘I’m jealous.’” I’m not jealous of your vocation but I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to do what I loved either.
• Probably for a similar reason that being a “homemaker & mother” is not considered “real work” — because it doesn’t bring in the bread.

Through the course of these responses, I began to wonder if part of this cultural sentiment might also result from the underlying and powerfully subconscious underpinnings of our mass producing consumerist culture. The value of handmade has, perhaps, been relegated to the status of hobby because such objects don’t make significant contributions to national statistics. They don’t pay homage to the god of the economy. They don’t create enough of the right kind of jobs.

The value of imagination, beauty, leisure, philosophy and so forth also fall short of the god of efficiency’s standards, all of which often tie into the arts. These things take time out of an otherwise productive life and are generally frowned upon by American society.

Those are the beginnings of my thoughts anyway, and I’d be interested in hearing more from readers.

That is the International Arts Movement‘s way of asking a question that has partly driven my artistic philosophy for ten years now. I was never able to put it in such succinct terms, however. I usually talked about original creation, what the world looked and acted like before the Fall. IAM’s more concise phrase is a much better jumping off point.

A few months ago I was thinking about photography, a media we all love as long as we’re the ones behind the lens, a technology that seems to capture every wrong moment in time if the lens is pointed towards us. Recently I’ve been working more and more with video. Interlaced in all of the footage lie a myriad of embarrassing gestures. Without this technology though, most of us never see the contorted nature of our countenance midstream. Before the advent of the camera, we were more in control of our image.

Is there something about our dislike of seeing ourselves, especially when we don’t look our best, that relates back to the way things ought to be? Do we possess some kind of internal aesthetic editor that is still faintly yet immutably calibrated to a world before the Fall?

Image by Derek Jensen from Wikipedia.