For a well-considered visual environment
2 May 2011 Leave a Comment
Reinhold Marxhausen, an innovative Nebraska artist of some renown, died last week. Here he is on Late Night with David Letterman in 1986.
Marxhuasen is known in part here in Nebraska for a mural in the Nebraska State Capital building. You can read a little bit more about this explorative sculptor on the Seward Concordia Neighborhood blog.
16 February 2011 Leave a Comment
Fiber artist Betsy Timmer rightly observes that “There’s a growing value on things that are handmade . . . and it’s almost a reaction everything being so mass produced.” She’s interviewed in this really nice little spotlight on the Harveyville Project in northeastern Kansas. Timmer continues, “It’s just a reaction against everything being so slick and, you know, assembly line, made in China.” Have a look.
26 November 2010 Leave a Comment
A Chesterton quote from Jeffery Overstreet’s blog:
“Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance… thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste… if a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare.”
— G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World, Chapter IV
14 October 2009 Leave a Comment
My parents are still moving into their downtown apartment — right next to the one we’re presently occupying — and last night, amidst a drawerful of seemingly unrelated objects, I noticed the vintage Tang jar in the photo below.
The jar is full of pottery shards my dad picked up near a rest area round about 1966. He was traveling with friends in the Pueblo, Colorado area.
Pieces range from about 3/16 to 3/8 of an inch in thickness. The black and red shards are very smooth, probably terra sigged and burnished to a shine while the lighter colored ones with decoration bear a quite dry surface.
26 June 2009 Leave 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.
18 June 2009 3 Comments
From left to right, smoked dogwood buds with a red underglaze, smoked raintree pods and dirt from my front yard fired to cone 04. The boxes were salvaged from an optometrist’s office.
27 April 2009 1 Comment
Via Twitter (and thanks to searches I’ve set up in TweetDeck) I’ve become internetly acquainted with ceramic sculptor Anna Keiller. The most recent post on her blog, Fire and Earth, details her smoking process, which is much more exciting than using an electric kiln (as I do).
She also has an older post that talks a little more about smoke firing titled Smoke Firing. I talk about my process in this post from last July. The following is one of her recent works titled The Abduction, after a Swedish fairy tale. I quite like the coloring on the piece, and give her props for the use of salvaged materials in the base and post.
I think I’m going to have to find myself a barrel and try this smoking method out. It looks much more fun and is probably cheaper than running the kiln to smoke. The only trick to barrel smoking for me could be locally enforced burn bans we suffer from in Northwest Arkansas on a fairly regular basis.
8 April 2009 1 Comment
A month or so ago I dug a hole in my front yard for a new mailbox post. The dirt looked a lot like clay, so I saved a few hunks and fired them in the kiln.
They came out a bit soft and quite crumbly, not surprising, but they more or less turned into Arkansas rocks. They look very similar to the stones found on a lot that’s just been graded for construction.
George Ohr, the Mad Potter of Biloxi, dug a lot of his clay locally in Mississippi. My father told me recently that Ohr sometimes took dirt out of the middle of the road. He’s one of a few historical characters I’d like to meet (another off the top of my head being G.K. Chesterton). The bisqued, scroddled Orh pot below shows off some of his raw materials.
Image from Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art.
26 January 2009 Leave a Comment
So I’ve bought a ticket New York for the IAM Encounter gathering, and since I still had a day I thought I’d submit a couple of works for the adjacent show. As part of the application, I wrote a new artist statement. I think it’s pretty good for me, but it is — undoubtedly — written for the two works I chose to submit. I’m posting the statement here, followed by the two works they refer to.
“We don’t want merely to see beauty . . . We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
The sentiment Lewis expresses in the above quote, a burning but enigmatic desire to become a part of what is beautiful, could spawn a thousand interpretations. If I were to elaborate on the quote, I might suggest that — whether we’re aware of it or not as humans — we innately pursue a Divine aesthetic.
This pursuit of a Divine aesthetic underpins my own artistic endeavors. Carving from a block of wood, modeling a lump of clay or assembling found objects I reflect on the original beauty of the materials in my hand. My hope, however futile, is to create something that speaks towards an unfettered beauty, beauty with a capital B.
Beauty with a capital B isn’t always what we expect. Something I pick up in the road — a rusted piece of sheet metal, a tangle of wire flattened by so many cars, half a shake shingle — generally elicits eyes and groans of disgust. A menacing thunderstorm on the edge of a prairie, with it’s potential to ruin a crop with hail or drop a tornado that aims to flatten a community, can levy fear upon a crowd.
However, there is also incredible beauty in a billowing storm. There is incredible beauty in the patina of crumpled, rusted steel lying in a roadway. Meditative poetry and contemplative metaphor hide in such entropy. I hope to extract just a little of this poetry and metaphor from my own intentional observations, infuse it into my work and share it with a viewer.
So there is hope.
10 October 2008 Leave a Comment
ThinkChristian points out a post at the Urban Prankster which elaborates on The Federation of Students and Nominally or Unemployed Artists’ instant art grants of $10-$60. From the Federation’s website:
The FSNUA aims to re-inspire creative thinking and action in everyday people by removing a small barrier and providing encouragement. We give small, unsecured grants in the form of $10-$60 for creative projects thought up on the spot by everyday people. In the past this has included a merchant marine, two 10 year old girls, a US soldier on leave from Iraq, an accordion player from Alaska, and around 40 others. We funded their new paintings, drawings, knitting, and photojournalism projects, and the repair of one accordion. Projects that may not have happened had they not come across 10 people in the park to support and inspire the thought.
Beyond the small amount of money, the project encourages people to see themselves as something other than workers or consumers even if it just for the length of time required to apply for the FSNUA grant. We also hope to re-inspire dormant desires to create while presenting an example of generosity without an ulterior motive.
I’m pretty fond of the idea, especially the last paragraph’s hope that they are encouraging people to “see themselves as something other than workers or consumers.” Here-here!
A friend forwarded me a link to photographer Magdalena Bors’ website. As much as a photographer she appears to be an installation artist, turning common household objects into miniature landscapes. The following image from her photo-installations is for my knitting wife.
She was born in Antwerp and has a photography degree from Melbourne, but there isn’t much other information about the artist on the website.
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