Storm from the rooftop 15 July 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Northwest Arkansas, Photography, Siloam Springs.add a comment
Posting as I’m able this week. Glanced at the radar after still more packing this evening — we’re pretty close to done now, so hopefully we’ll be able to enjoy our time with company and social engagements of the next few days — and noticed a little action immediately south of town.
From our roof it was probably the most photogenic storm of the year for me. I didn’t watch it all that long though. Low hanging clouds crept in front of it and obscured my view, beside the fact it was almost dark.
Susie Ibarra, Mako Fujimura collaboration 12 July 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Collaboration.add a comment
I watched this video with rapt attention. I was, honestly, skeptical it would be all that interesting at first, but it ended all too soon. Ibarra’s drumming reminds me a little of taiko here, and watching Fujimura paint in the tradition of nihonga was mesmerizing.
As I watched I also realized that such an event would be much less interesting with a ceramic artist next to Ibarra. The clay process is much different than painting, and even if a person were to finish the form of a pot or a sculpture the work isn’t past it’s teen years. More shaping and finishing will come as the clay turns leatherhard, firing, glazing, firing again . . .
Show, don’t tell: Round 1 9 July 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Art and faith, Christianity, Criticism, Illustration, Painting.4 comments
Round 1 in the Show, don’t tell showdown: Patty Wickman versus ubiquitous Christian painting hanging in most every American baptist church.
Above is Patty Wickman’s surreal A Thief in the Night. Wickman, an art professor at UCLA, is a master (in my opinion) of turning beautifully simple subjects into powerful metaphors.
Which do you think is more powerful imagery? Which is more likely to cause the viewer to more deeply engage the subject matter? Which one employs imagination? Which one tells and which one shows? And (ironically) which one is more likely to change a person’s attitude or worldview?
Christians in the past 100 years seem to have forgotten how to be creative, use our imaginations, when communicating visually. For some reason we feel the need to reduce the Gospel (and any other theological tenets we hold dear) to what is more or less propaganda. We obviously aren’t reading our Gospels very closely. The parables are a prime example of using art — storytelling — to show people an idea or principle rather than just saying it out loud. Granted, the culture was different then than now, and we may not be able to do exactly as Jesus did, but the point remains: People won’t respond to a direct statement in the same manner as they will to something that is illustrated, painted, drawn out.
And, for what it’s worth, the painting of Jesus knocking at the door (of your heart as so many mistakenly believe) is based on a verse, as far as I know, that’s almost always taken out of context. The imagery is generally used to appeal to non-believers. In reality, the verse is speaking to the church of Laodicea in the context of repentance.
When it comes to art, show, don’t tell 8 July 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Criticism.add a comment
Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.
- Mark Twain (via my wife’s blog)
One of the things attendees to IAM Encounter 09 received in the obligatory bag of conference goodies was an audio CD with an interview of Steve Turner. Turner wrote a book titled Imagine: A vision for Christians in the arts. The interview is a stellar listen.
I can’t find the CD at the moment — in the chaos that is packing up a house — so can’t quote Turner, but the crux of what caught my attention in the interview is summed up in three words: Show, don’t tell. This is apparently a maxim of the theater world in particular.
In one sense, the idea is very simple. At the same time it’s probably worthy of a thesis. I tried and tried again over the past two weeks to turn this post into an essay worthy of this topic, to no avail. Instead, I’m going to follow up with a series of posts comparing images. One image will show, the other will tell.
Plastic as artistic medium, won’t last 7 July 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Sculpture.7 comments
Plastic is not an enduring artistic medium. Remember this image from a month ago?
I’ve always wondered about the use of plastic in sculptures; it didn’t seem like a material to be employed on a whim (not that any really are). Slate recently published an article, Does plastic art last forever?, confirming my suspicions. Museums are currently scrambling to preserve plastic objects and artworks that are yellowing, peeling, crumbling in their cases. Works by the likes of Duane Hanson are beginning to look like zombies (and were so even before his death in 1996). Slate also warns that modern works which contain plastics by artists such as Jeff Koonz and Damien Hirst will inevitably face a similar fate, unless research finds a way to preserve them. So far it has not. The research is being funded mainly by companies insuring the galleries.
I’ve been amazed at the polymer clay rage of the past few years. The popularity of this media has been driven home lately when I search Twitter for “clay sculpture.” Probably 1/3 of the tweets in the search results refer to polymer clay. I asked the Twitter community a few months ago why this product is so popular, and someone responded by suggesting it was an easy way for women to get their foot into a traditionally male-driven art market. That didn’t really make sense to me, but I didn’t know how to argue my sentiment.
Last week I followed a link in one of these tweets to an Ebay auction of a polymer clay sculpture, of a faerie (not a very modest faerie, FYI). I don’t understand people’s fascination with faeries, but that’s beside the point. This particular sculpture, about eight inches tall, was well-crafted. It sold for $2,683. I was very surprised. The artist seems to be fairly prolific, and sells quite a bit of her work on Ebay, although that’s about all I know. The “About the artist” section of her website is “under construction.”
Polymer clay is, coincidentally, plastic. The Slate article teaches us a little bit about plastic:
At a molecular level, plastics are long chains of a single molecule repeated over and over. Such long chains would be uselessly brittle on their own, but chemists realized they could add chemicals, called “plasticizers,” whose molecules work their way between the chains and soften the plastics up. This greatly increased malleability, and virtually all plastics today employ plasticizers. Unfortunately, plastics will squeeze the plasticizers out over time. This process pushes the chemicals to the surface of the object, leaving the underlying plastic fragile. Different plastics deteriorate in different ways under different conditions, depending on what plasticizers or dyes were added. But the end result tends to be forms of matter rarely seen outside the reject piles of industrial chemistry labs. You can recognize “bleeding” or “weeping” plastics by the slimy plasticizers pooling on their surfaces. Other plastics push powder to their surfaces and feel sugary to the touch.
Just because plastic degrades over time does not make it a poor medium for sculptures. Personally I prefer more natural and enduring materials in general, partly because they are more natural and enduring. The use of more temporary materials such as plastics can add meaning to an artwork, but I wonder if sculptors who use polymer, or plastic of any kind, realize their works have a fairly short life-span.
LinkLuv: On beauty and art 30 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Abstract art, Beauty, Modern culture.4 comments
I’m pretty caught up in the logistics of moving/selling the house and don’t have much time to be blogging right now, but a few things in an article titled Beauty and Desecration: We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness seemed to be worth excerpting.
At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form.
At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes.
In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it.
This last quote is interesting to me mainly on account of many previous bloggy discussions with friend and artist Timothy Jones, who finds abstract (or, more specifically, non-objective or non-representational) art to be decorative. Read the article in it’s entirety via this link.
I haven’t finished the article, but printed it off in hopes of doing so later this week.
Pete Pinnell on fine art that functions 26 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Art education, Art for art's sake, Art vs Craft, Ceramics, Craft, Handmade.1 comment so far
Pete Pinnell was one of my professors at the University of Nebraska, one of three very strong individuals in a fantastic ceramics program. The following video (external link) is a stellar talk about fine art and function.
Pete is a very good speaker and draws a number of simple but very powerful metaphors as he discusses cups, drinking vessels, in this video. Below I’ve paraphrased some of the portions that really caught my attention:
Art acknowledges and actually talks about life, but there is one great taboo still in the art world, and that is that art still does not take part in life. Art thinks about life, but it does so from the role of the critic, from the observer, from the outsider. I like to joke that art will peek in our windows and rummage through our closets but it won’t sit down at the dinner table with us.
The fine arts world has chosen to forgo touch, but it’s a very powerful means of human expression.
Does having to deal with function limit creativity?
A little bit of dissonance is really required to have something that will hold our attention for a longer period of time.
For the most part I think he hits the nail squarely on the head, but I’d love to hear other’s responses to this 30 minute talk.
Rust, restore 26 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Found objects, Mixed media, Painting.add a comment
The following is an entry to a show at Fort Drum titled Reflections of Generosity. This is an older work, probably done in 2006.
Entropy and restoration are two recurring themes in my process, and thus my sculptures. When I use the word entropy I’m referring to the inevitable deterioration of both the physical and social world around us. I most often observe this phenomenon in the built environment. Buildings crumble, mailboxes rust, roadways buckle and gape with potholes.
Restoration, conversely, implies the ability to rectify or reverse impending decay. In my sculptures this usually takes the form of found objects, repurposed as a canvas (as with Rust, restore) or sculpture. Some of the time these salvaged items serve as raw materials, sometime as accessories so to speak.
Rust, restore comments directly on both entropy and restoration. Whlie the use of text seems, at first, very blunt, symbolism remains. My hope is for the viewer to begin considering both the inevitability of decay and hope with the possibility of restoration.
Wire drawing of espresso machine 22 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Abstract art, Art, Drawing, Northwest Arkansas, Sculpture, Siloam Springs.add a comment
My friend Joel Armstrong recently created the following wire drawing of an espresso machine for the Cafe on Broadway in Siloam Springs, Arkansas.
New Work: Supercell sketch 20 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Ceramics, Sculpture.add a comment
This one is also from 2008. The smoke didn’t take all that well but it’s a nice little piece regardless. At one point I thought of attaching this (and the cumulus tower from yesterday) to a carved wooden base, but decided they are finished they way they are.
