Recent Playfulness: Mighty ugly felt

8 January 2012 by Leave a Comment

I love working three-dimensionally; I’ve prefered it to drawing or painting for the past 10 years plus. However, when it comes to portraying certain aspects of one of my few favorite subjects, storms on the prairie, I’m starting to wonder if certain two-dimensional media will serve me better. Actually, I’ve been wondering this for more than a year now.

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.

Filed under Abstract art, Aesthetics, Art, Art for art's sake, Beauty, Drawing, Fiber, Handmade, Inspired by, Painting

unHurry yourself

4 April 2011 by 5 Comments

Research has shown that people think more creatively when they are calm, unhurried and free from stress, and that time pressure leads to tunnel vision . . .

The greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting the mind into low gear. Charles Darwin described himself as a ‘slow thinker.’ Albert Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University. In the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes weighs up the evidence from crime scenes by entering a quasi-meditative state, ‘with a dreamy vacant expression in his eyes.

From Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (page 121)

Via Notes from my unhurried journey

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Filed under Imagination, Inspired by, Intentional observation, Modern culture, The contemplative life

Process: Reaction and improvisation

12 March 2011 by 2 Comments

For the foreseeable future I’ll be working 50 hour weeks — more depending on freelance work — most of the time being spent at a desk in front of a computer. It’s all good work with good people that I’m very thankful for after a couple of very lean years.

Lately I’ve wondered how and if this job situation will effect my sculpture. I think it will. I envision bringing more energy to the process in comparison to the past couple of years where I’ve focused more on refining my craft, working more meticulously. My craft is not where I want it to be yet, but after long days at a desk I want to expend physical energy. I want to move around, be active. It seems to me this will translate into more expressive sculptures, especially when I’m working in clay (compared to when I’m working with wood).

In college I was told, in my first ceramics class, I worked like an expressionist. A grad student observed that I worked quickly and followed the will of the material to a large degree. I haven’t forgotten this critique, even though I don’t think my work in general looks much like that of the Expressionists — despite a similar process.

In relationship to working more actively and expressively, I’ve also been thinking about improvisation. I don’t know what prompted the thought, but listening to a Helen Sung station on Pandora earlier this week I heard a piece with Lee Morgan that furthered the thought (can’t find which song offhand). It contained a beautiful and improvisationally inspiring trumpet solo.

So we’ll see where the work goes in the next few months. I want to continue with the figurative works, the heads, but storm season is approaching. I won’t be able to suppress the inspiration that is the billowing storm over the Tallgrass Prairie.

Adding: My wife and I recently cruised through the first seven seasons of NCIS, marathon style. While we watched I took note of how Gibbs goes home to his craft, to building his boats. This might have been where the thought for this post originated.

Filed under Art, Central Nebraska, Imagination, Inspired by

Nikko Mueller: Paintings from Google Maps

8 February 2011 by Leave a Comment

Get Away, 2009. Acrylic on canvas over panel.

Nikko Mueller is probably up there in my top five favorite painters at the moment. He works from Google Maps, which isn’t entirely unique, but he seems to do it with an unexpected expressive sensibility. Composition and use of color are also fantastic, and there seems to be some incredible textural elements in the paintings as well — although I can’t tell on-screen if the texture is palpable or trompe l’oeil.

I’d love to own one of his works. You can see a fairly extensive gallery at the Angles Gallery. My favorites are the more desolate landscapes, such as the one to the left. Other interesting subject matter includes the U.S/Mexico border crossing and African refugee camps. He doesn’t seem to have a dedicated website.

I first saw his work featured on the oh, what a world, what a world blog.

Filed under Art, Inspired by, Painting

Amy Smith plates at Lincoln Berean Church

15 November 2010 by Leave a Comment

I saw these plates yesterday in Lincoln, Nebraska at the Berean Church. There wasn’t a tag for any of them, but I’m confident in saying that they were carefully crafted by one of my favorite ceramic artists (maybe my favorite potter), Amy Smith. I’m sharing the photos even though my cameraphone blew them out multiple times.

There is a glaze on the white plates, a fabulously delicate one with matte and crystaline qualities — from what I could tell where I stood anyway. The plates stood on a shelf over my head, out of the reach of church children racing through the hallway.

Filed under Art, Ceramics, Inspired by

The unmarketing socially benevolent artist

20 October 2010 by Leave a Comment

Not that I dislike the idea of being an artist on and of the Great Plains, but this would be the life. It seems to have all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster. (Is that a good thing? Since it’s starting out in real life, I’m using it as a good thing in this context.)

Create for yourself a persona and carry out creative acts of artistry to bring awareness to social injustices around the world. JR, a French photograffeur, was awarded this year’s annual TED prize with accompanying “One wish to change the world.” The artist is very protective of his true identity, at first wearing sunglasses and a hat pulled down over his face in a Skype interview with TED.

A number of JR’s monumental photographic installations are “unauthorised,” pasted on the sides of buildings as inconspicuously as possible while officials who will most certainly object to the message go about their socially unjust business. One such installation was going up in China when he was being interviewed by the New York Times; JR was worried they might get into trouble. “We went into the building next door, and it was empty, and we went up to the tower, and nobody stopped us, so we just started working,” he said in the article. “It’s crazy. This city is so huge and overgrown, the more you’re in the middle of things, the more you feel transparent.”

The money the artist garners from sales and prizes go back into more ambitious projects around the world acording to the Times’ interview. See the artist’s installations on his website.

Filed under Art, Artist profile, Business of art, Censorship, Graffiti, Inspired by, Photography, Public art

Inspired by: An Eva Hesse watercolor

13 August 2010 by Leave a Comment

On the way down to Nashville we stopped at the St. Louis Art Museum to look at a small showing of prints and drawings done by sculptors. A few of them were quite nice, but a watercolor by Eva Hesse really stuck with me.

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!

Filed under Art, Drawing, Inspired by, Painting

Is there a best location for an artist retreat?

23 March 2010 by 3 Comments

During the course of conversation with certain other interested types, one of the things that comes up again and again is that of the proposed location of this proposed mission mobilizing artist retreat.

Midwest or Great Plains

  • Contemplative (see Kathleen Norris’ Dakota: A spiritual geography)
  • Cheaper land and property, generally speaking
  • Central location (instead of obligatory coastal/metro location)

I touched on this in my last retreat related post, but it seems to be worth bringing up again.

I was clear in the last post that part of the reasoning for the Great Plains was possibly personal bias, although I’m still sticking to the reasoning above for the time being. My wife and I both find Norris’ observation very compelling. From her book Dakota:

Like all those who choose life in the slow lane — sailors, monks, farmers — I partake of a contemplative reality. Living close to such an expanse of land I find I have little incentive to move fast, little need of instant information. I have learned to trust the processes that take time, to value change that is not sudden or ill-considered but grows out of the ground of experience.

I suppose there is a chance I’m reading a little too much into Norris’ meaning here (the book is still packed and I can’t reference it beyond the above quote). I’d love to have the chance to ask her to elaborate on the tie between big skies and a contemplative life at some point, but I haven’t had the chance to do that. And in the mean time I will rely on my wife‘s certified super-power: reading comprehension.

I think I’ve said before that there are admittedly other natural settings that also foster contemplation, and that these places can be different for different people — which is the impetus for this post. I’ve chatted with several other people, artists and catalysts, who think the Rocky Mountains are the best place for artistic inspiration. Others suggest the wooded Ozarks, and we probably all know someone with an affinity for the beach. Is one place better than another?

Can there be a consensus? Or are multiple retreats, as I posited in the last entry, the best option?

Does there need to be a consensus? Or are artists simply eager for time and space to create regardless of location?

As an artist,

is there a particular natural setting
that best fosters a contemplative spirit for you?

What is it and why?

On a sidenote, I’ve probably dug myself a hole of sorts by using the word “inspiration” at all. Inspiration is not the same as contemplation. The point of this particular artist retreat, while in large part is to give artists the opportunity to have extended periods of uninterrupted studio time, is not necessarily to provide inspiration.

Filed under Art, Christian art retreat, Inspired by, Intentional observation, The contemplative life

Intellect and compassion

9 January 2010 by 1 Comment

I asked for and received a few C.S. Lewis books that I’ve yet to read for Christmas (I also tried to win a copy of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy at Urbana09, but my dart throwing skills weren’t up to snuff.). What this means is that the recently neglected stack of books — relatively short in comparison to my that of avid reading wife — awaiting my attention swelled when I was barely able to complete one read in 2009. Hopefully I’ll be able to pay more attention to my books in 2010. If I am so able, these give me access to reading material since most of our collection is still packed away in boxes.

I had reason, though, in asking for these books beyond just having “access to reading material.” Lately I’ve come to desire a faith, a Christianity, that is both more intellectual and compassionate than the one I’ve known or been exposed to and involved with for most of my life. I’m not exactly certain where this desire is coming from or where it’s leading, but that’s fine for now.

Lewis challenges me intellectually in a unique way. I used to read his writings regularly, but recently I’ve focused on writings on the arts, a lot of which are also intellectually challenging and steeped in theology. However, I’ve palpably missed his writing. This week I started into The Abolition of Man. It’s a short read I hope to finish quickly; my second reforay into Lewis will be Surprised By Joy.

Filed under Christianity, Imagination, Inspired by, Personal reflection

Autumn inspiration

27 October 2007 by Leave a Comment

One of the themes on The Aesthetic Elevator is what I refer to as “intentional observation.” In other words, take time to stop and smell the roses. In the early days of this blog I talked about how walking across campus in college afforded such an opportunity — a built-in time for paying attention to things most of us ignore.

I was reminded of this today as I began to rake leaves in the backyard. I remembered how influential spending time outside, particularly during Spring and Autumn, was to my artwork. And as I thought about it some more I realized how detrimental things like television and automobiles are to this process.

Computers don’t necessarily help either.

Filed under Art, Inspired by, Intentional observation, Personal reflection

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