My writing time will probably be slim for the next ten days or more. We’re on track to close next Monday. We’re probably 60% packed, although the studio is still a bit of a mess. I started putting some tools in a box out there this evening, and then took them out after realizing I might need them still before packing the truck. I beginning to think artists serious about their craft have a more difficult time packing and moving than other folks, though my thought is certainly up for debate.

The week will be busy with things besides packing. We have family visiting Thursday and Friday and a farewell fling friends are throwing Saturday.

Image from Epodunk

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 . . .

From Rebecca Horton’s Passionately Alive blog, a Madeline L’Engle quote on beauty and mystery for this Sunday morning:

I do not want ever to be indifferent to the joys and beauties of this life. For through these, as through pain, we are enabled to see purpose in randomness, pattern in chaos. We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and the fascination there is love.

In the midst of what we are going through this summer I have to hold onto this, to return to the eternal questions without demanding an answer. The questions worth asking are not answerable. Could we be fascinated by a Maker who was completely explained and understood? The mystery is tremendous, and the fascination that keeps me returning to the questions affirms that they are worth asking, and that any God worth believing in is the God not only of the immensities of the galaxies I rejoice in at night when I walk the dogs, but also the God of love who cares about the sufferings of us human beings and is here, with us, for us, in our pain and in our joy.

From her book Two-part invention.

This will likely be the last update before we move on downtown Siloam Springs, at least made by me (hopefully my cobloggers will pick up some of the slack). While out hunting for boxes to pack up the house, I noticed stucco has begun to appear on what will very soon be Emelia’s restaurant.

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.

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 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 very good idea to me. 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 clay. 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. 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.

In my first college design class, as an architecture student, one of our projects involved researching of and writing about chairs. We read about designs by Eames, Bertoia, Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and so forth. Our professor pointed out that a chair, or somewhere to sit our sorry plebian butts after a long day in the field, is the first thing we will think of to buy or build assuming all of our other needs are met.

And I think she was right.

As we pack up the house we’re selling some things we won’t need in the foreseeable future, or won’t have room for in our upcoming living space. I used Craigslist, which I’m pretty new to, and easily sold our guest bed and couch.

We really miss the couch.

We own other comfortable chairs, but apparently they aren’t comfortable in the same way. The plan was to replace it with a svelte black leather couch that wouldn’t aggravate my allergies like the whimsical, eight year old model we just sold. However, I was looking forward to one less large piece of furniture to move.

So the past few days I’ve been on a hunt to find a cheap and temporary replacement, most likely a comfy chair for the wife to read in. There are a couple places in town that sell used, and I’ve been to a few garage sales as well. So far everything I’ve seen has been dirty or overpriced — or entirely hideous. The one exception was a blue recliner at a friend’s yard sale; unfortunately it formerly lived with cats, which I’m quite allergic too. Another vintage store in town, Amandromeda, purveys a number of well designed seats, though none are suitable for extended periods of time with a book in your lap. I’ve also inquired via Craigslist and the Facebook Marketplace to no avail.

Next up I plan to hit a vintage spot in Fayetteville called the Flying Dog. Moving is stressful enough without a decent place to rest your rump, so I hope I can come up with a chair on this holiday weekend!

Two things in the past few months prompted me to ponder the idea of contrast.

First off, I’ve taken note this year of the mennonites (at least that’s what we assume they are) shopping at our local Walmart. I’ve long had a fascination with Amish (and old order Mennonite, thus) cultures, probably in large part because of what seems to be their slower paced, more relationship and community based lifestyles. Another part of my interest almost certainly stems from the culture’s seeming affirmation of working with your hands.

There are two observations I’ve made with respect to contrast in observing the local mennonites. First of all, the men dress in such a way that you can’t pick them out of a crowd: Boots, jeans and t-shirts, but you know they are mennonite because of the lady on their arm in a very modest handmade dress, with a bonnet or cap in her hair.

Secondly, the women’s more conservative dress is often at odds with their footwear. I’ve seen them wearing tennis shoes for years now, but it was only a few months ago I saw some of them wearing flip-flops for the first time. This wonderfully jarring discrepancy scrawled a grin on my face that lasted all the way into the parking lot. The bright, nearly neon flip-flops next to pale blue, floral handmade dresses worked for me, and apparently work for mennonites too.

I wanted to take a picture with my cameraphone, but abstained from bothering the young ladies. Instead I searched through Flickr and found the fantastic image above, taken by Jizzon, showing a group of mennonite women, some in bright colored flip-flops (click on the image to go to the Flickr page where you can enlarge it). The clothing contrast in Jizzon’s photograph isn’t as stark as it usually is in the Siloam Springs’ Walmart. The girls in his capture are wearing much brighter handmade dresses than I’ve ever seen the group in Northwest Arkansas don.

If you’re craving even more paradox, look at this image of two mennonites in dresses and bonnets on a jet ski.

Secondly, after looking through an album posted by a photographer friend, Aus10, on Facebook I commented as follows:

Interesting to me how so much portraiture (including wedding photography) in the past five years or so has been about creating contrast — or so it seems to me as an observer. The well-groomed subjects are placed in rough and rustic environments: Against decrepit buildings with peeling paint, along derelict railway tracks covered in weeds etc. Seems to me this is a new trend for the media, and one that I like (unlike this everybody jump up in the air phenomenon). Is my observation correct in your professional opinion? And can you talk about why you think this is the case, if you think my assessment is correct?

The photographer’s reply was more or less to say that the high school seniors, in the case of the album I responded to, see their friends’ photos or advertisements for Urban Outfitters and want the same thing. Regardless of these teen’s, um, less than intellectual desire for this aesthetic, I must reiterate that I think it works and works well.

My own senior picture was from one of those gimmicky old-time photo rooms (which is what I wanted it to be, although mom had me submit a color image from a $10 Sears sitting for the actual yearbook.) However, I would have liked something akin to this popular contrasty style if I would have thought it was worth it for my parents to spend $400 (I’m sure it’s much more nowadays) for proper senior photographs.

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.