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.

The first is that the “process of drawing is a really live process and not like a dead thing, ‘Oh my God I can’t change anything because I made that line five minutes ago.’” If we didn’t learn this from all of the gestural drawings we did in college, I don’t think we ever will. This is, I believe, what paralyzes a lot of people who do not have artistic training (or even artistic ambitions) when they think of drawing. They have this idea that your first line has to be perfect. Not so.

McMullan’s second interesting point is that people tend to want to compete with a photograph when they are drawing. From there he says “I’m trying to show people is that a much more vigorous way of seeing the body or seeing the head is to look at the big forms first . . . we tend to concentrate on the eyes and hairstyle and think that that is what gives people their visual personality.” He continues by pointing out that visual personality comes actually from basic visual forms — the slant of the brow, how much the nose protrudes from the cheek — and not so much the things we usually concentrate on.

I wish McMullan would have expounded on how we tend to compete with photographs as we draw (or sculpt in clay as well?). He may have been trying to do so with this important notation on how we perceive the human countenance, but there is something more to be said about how that perception is shaped in an environment canvased with such realistic human likenesses. Before photography — yes, there was such a time — how did we look at a portrait as a viewer? How did we approach an object, a figure, as an artist?

Regardless, these two points came at just the right time for me. Drawing (with graphite or clay) is a living thing shifting throughout the creative process — a responsive process drawn from observation of both the actual and perceived. Figurative countenance is defined by basic forms. Now off I go to sketch a few more faces from Flickr before putting those forms to clay.

Unfortunately the video seems to be hosted on the New York Times website and can’t be embedded. Watch it in its entirety via this link.

Cameraphone image of an untitled Eva Hess watercolor hung at the St. Louis Art Museum

I knew Hesse’s name prior to last week, but I didn’t know anything about her work. Interestingly, I don’t like a lot of it from what I can tell, with the exception of the untitled 1968 watercolor to the right and a 1969 installation titled Contingent, that looks a lot like an installation I did as a college student. The brief at the museum talks about how the two dimensional work was an exploration in light leading up to Contingent.

Both my wife and I were drawn to a beauty within the painting. The shapes reminded me of farm fields adjacent to one another, something I’ve been attempting to incorporate into my own works in the last year or two. But I also took note of her layering. Penciled lines unabashedly bordered and bled through the delicate watercolor wash. Such transparency and layering is something that’s eluded my fledgling attempts to convey the sense of space a person experiences when supercells roll over alfalfa on the Plains. Mmmm, I can smell that distant rain piercing the greeny-sweet alfalfa now.

Hesse’s painting seems to be just the kind of work I needed to see this summer. I’ve started to work on some small paintings, but there was an aspect of these works that was lacking. I was limiting myself to one media and method too strictly — despite referring to myself as a mixed media sculptor. I was only allowing myself to work within an overly basic idea of paint. I realized this before seeing the Hesse artwork, but her watercolor in essence gave definition to my realization.

Now let’s hope I can put some action to this inspiration in the near future!

The series is titled “Notice,” and it made me think of my continual harping on intentional observation. The above charcoal drawing is titled Donna. Hawkins says of the series:

What do people ignore? Why? What do they notice? Why?
Matthew 13 seems to reference this. It’s interesting to read why Jesus chose to speak in parables.

“Art is a lie that helps us to realize the truth.”
- Pablo Picasso

The Notice series is currently installed at the Mason Murer gallery in Atlanta.

Also added to the proverbial sidebar this week was a link to my good friend Joel Armstrong’s new website. Joel creates drawings and installations using wire and found objects.

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.

Failing hearts (above) is “a collaborative installation by two artists dealing with issues of the heart — one, an emotional and poignant set of unopened letters that are filled with words that speak of a failing relationship, while the other deals strictly with the presence and form of the heart itself.” Joel Armstrong hung a myriad of his wire drawings, intermingled with wire words taken from the aforementioned letters. The letters were written by his late mother, and gallery goers were encouraged to take additional words from his parents’ dresser — part of the installation — and pin them to the walls.

Neil Ward contributed the cast calf hearts, sitting on the small shelves in the photo above. Each heart is cast using a different mixture of materials; every one unique in form.

Two doors down hung a show by the same artists titled On the Line. Armstrong is seen in the photograph above pointing out some of the clothing on the line, again drawn in wire. It is a beautifully arranged work, best viewed after dark. Ward’s cast eyeballs line the walls, “perhaps here the understood tendencies of voyeur and nosy neighbor.”

Both installations employ sound and are meant to draw the viewer in not just visually and emotionally, but experientially. The shows are up until the 29th of January.