Native American pottery shards

14 October 2009 by pcNielsen 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.

Tang jar

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.

Pottery shards

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.

Filed under Ceramics, Found objects, Handmade

Rust, restore

26 June 2009 by pcNielsen 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 - Paul Nielsen

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.

Rust restore detail - Paul Nielsen

Filed under Art, Found objects, Mixed media, Painting

New Work: Arkansas series

18 June 2009 by pcNielsen 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.

Arkansas series

Dogwood buds

Filed under Art, Ceramics, Found objects, Sculpture

Anna Keiller smoked ceramic sculptures

27 April 2009 by pcNielsen 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).

anna-keiller-smoking

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.

anna-keiller-abduction

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.

Filed under Art, Artist profile, Ceramics, Found objects, Salvage, Sculpture

Mad potter in Arkansas

8 April 2009 by pcNielsen 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.

arocks

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.

georgeohr-pot

Image from Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art.

Filed under Abstract art, Art, Art vs Craft, Artist profile, Ceramics, Craft, Found objects, Handmade, Sculpture

Show entry, new statement

26 January 2009 by pcNielsen 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.”

    — C.S. Lewis

    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.

iam-encounter-works

Filed under Art, Art and faith, Ceramics, Found objects, Mixed media, Sculpture

Friday Fare: Instant art grants, installations

10 October 2008 by pcNielsen 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.

Filed under Art, Artist profile, Business of art, Fiber, Found objects, Installations, Modern culture, Photography, Sculpture

New Work: Storm at night

3 October 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

Here’s a new mixed media work combining the the smaller and more abstracted clay forms I was working with earlier in the year with the carved wood platforms that I started giving attention to during the summer.

I’m calling this Storm at Night on account of the dark blue glaze on the top. White low-fire clay body, salvaged cedar with a red oak stain. Probably about 14 inches long.

Filed under Abstract art, Art, Ceramics, Found objects, Salvage, Sculpture

New Work: Hanging funnels

25 September 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

These have actually been hanging in my studio for a few months now as I get a feel for them. They don’t have names yet, but I like them. I have more funnels and more wood, although I wasn’t nearly as satisfied with the compositions of the remaining pieces so haven’t assembled any more than these two.

I’m quite fond of the one above. The funnels are finished with a cobalt glaze and a smoked terra sig. They were formed from a block of clay and hollowed out, leaving a bridge to hang them from. The piece of wood is from a salvaged antique chair, quartersawn oak finished with beeswax. The rest of the chair parts aren’t nearly as dynamic (i.e., they’re straight). This piece has an aesthetic that reminds me, for some reason, of Japan.

The second one is nice as well, but not quite as interesting. The wood is myrtle, which my brother picked up on his honeymoon in Oregon, again finished with beeswax. There is a nice crevice of sorts in the block which adds visual intrigue. The funnel is glazed with some of the leftovers from my line blends. The dark brown is a manganese gloss; the other is probably titanium, but I don’t remember for certain off-hand. The latter finish crazed like crazy which was nice.

My friend Joel suggested I hide the knots. I do this on my strung out works whenever possible, but it didn’t work like I hoped on this one. I will, at some point, tuck the knots on this piece away by seating them into holes in the block.

Filed under Art, Ceramics, Found objects, Mixed media, Salvage, Sculpture

Genius Grants 2008: Weaving straws and grass

24 September 2008 by pcNielsen Leave a Comment

I suppose I should mention this year’s genius grants, awarded this week, since this blog contains a category called Artist-as-genius. Regular readers know that I hold a certain disdain for the term. I haven’t entirely fleshed that disdain out properly, but a very good example of where it came from can be seen in the somewhat raunchy film Art School Confidential.

Looking at the list of winners yesterday afternoon I was a bit surprised. They’re all over the place. The stage-lighting designer, music critic and architectural preservationist were pleasant surprises.

Two artists will be taking home the $500,000 purse, a sculptor and a fiber artist.

The fiber artist is another surprise. Mary Jackson is a basket weaver. How wonderful that such a traditional and humble craft is included in this list, a list that might commonly include the rocket scientists we so like to mock.

In contrast to that is Tara Donovan. I mentioned Donovan with some skepticism in this January post. Donovan’s work is sometimes mass-produced and makes use of common household objects.

I like the above work by Donovan, titled Haze. It’s made from drinking straws. I wonder what Mary Jackson could do with drinking straws. Weave them, I imagine, as she does with grass. An interesting connection between two very different artisans.

Filed under Abstract art, Art, Art vs Craft, Artist as genius, Craft, Fiber, Found objects, Installations, Sculpture

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