Promedikation

This arrangement of feline medications was sitting on a cabinet shelf for a year and a half.  I recently moved it to the window, and I love seeing it every day.  Whenever I look at it, I immediately think of Blinky Palermo's Projektion of 1971, below, a print of which was included in Josiah McElheny's exhibit at the Hessel Museum, which was running concurrently with the Palermo Retrospective. 

Blinky Palermo Projektion, 1971  via: Airform Archives

Geneve Journal: The Rewards

There are 8 days remaining in my Geneve Journal Kickstarter campaign.  Join in the fun and reward of supporting this project...thx.

If you've been reading this blog recently, you may have picked up on the fact that I've got a Kickstarter campaign currently running.  

The goal? To raise $5000 to fund a working residency in Geneva Switzerland that will result in a body of work including artworks and documentary components that comprise a multi-form, multi-media memoir.

In keeping with the Kickstarter program of offering rewards to project supporters in exchange for pledges of support, I've lined up several which are available exclusively to funders of the Geneve Journal project.

Here's a rundown of the rewards available at different levels.

For everyone who pledges, I will transmit my thanks via an actual person to person telephone call. Yes.  In person.  You and me - talking.  Me saying "thank you", you saying "Oh you're so welcome, I'm happy to be part of such a worthy and creative endeavor."... or something like that. Real heart to heart stuff.  If however, this is to much, no pressure...I can send you an email of thanks...But, if you do want to give me your number, then game on!

At the lower end of reward offerings most Kickstarter campaigns of the art variety offer up emailed images or digital prints.  This quite nice, but for me, it's important to offer up something made of my own hand at all levels along the spectrum of rewards.  Something material and tactile.  Physical.  Something of this sphere.


Hand manipulated or handmade postcards are among the rewards.  The first will be off-the-rack tourist postcards of Geneva that I then paint on, carve our or generally deface in an aesthetic way.

 Also, I'll be creating a special numbered edition of my Missive postcards - The Swiss Missives.  These will be postcards created by collaging photographs from 20 years ago and photos I took this year, along with whatever paper paraphernalia I encounter out there; ticket stubs, found paper, brochures etc.

Missive #182

By the way, if anyone is interested in periodically receiving a regular Missive from me, just email your address to me, and I'll add you to the recipient list.

Missive #190

Elliptical Drawing 55

I began making my Elliptical Drawings solely for the purpose of an article of exchange, specifically for this aim of presenting hand made examples of how I work as rewards for this Kickstarter project.  On most occasions when I go to the gym, I take a small drawing pad and a random handful of colored pencils.  While trodding along on the elliptical machine, I draw. Or scribble.  I don't always make Elliptical Drawings at the gym, but Elliptical Drawings are only made at the gym.

Elliptical Drawing 53

Not all the drawings are equally effective, but there are a lot of them and there are some real gems among the bunch.  I really love many of these drawings.  They're a very true reflection of my approach to my work.  And if not entirely automatic, these are very porous drawings, absorbing fragments of what I'm hearing in the gym, seeing on the tv screen in front of me, along with thoughts or ideas I bring with me into the gym from the studio - all of this while I'm in a slightly altered state, sweaty and bobbing along.  It's amazing how quickly the time goes by when I'm working out/on these things. Of course, I could possibly vanquish those pesky last 10 lbs if I just focus on the work out on hand, but.... .  Some elements born in these drawings have begun percolating up into some of the studio works, too, which is a reward for me.

Elliptical Drawing

Why do I make things?  For the experience of chaperoning thoughts through to some physical form AND to share things.  The Elliptical Drawings fit both purposes.  Although I didn't originally list it in the various reward levels, I'm including the choice of an Elliptical Drawing on all levels above the $30 level.  Also, selection of drawings will be given in the order in which the pledges were made.

There are a couple of production pieces that are part of the rewards; a "documentary" magazine and a DVD.  Similar in form to my Annual publications, the magazine will serve as compendium of this entire endeavor, with images of artwork - from then and now, text of my reflections and photos of my time in Geneva.

Similarly, the DVD will contain the audio and video tracings of my time in Geneva, including interviews with artists and other fascinating folks I encounter.  Portions of this audio will be included in a future episode of the Dead Hare Radio Hour.  I envision the DVD as being somewhere between documentary and expressive collage in motion....we'll see how that shapes up.

Both the magazine and DVD will serve to delineate and map the terrain of this project.  Examples of the artwork I create while in Geneva - as the working session in that city is the central mechanism of all of this - will also be offered up as rewards for support.  What will this portion of the reward system look like?  I'm not sure.  Partially representative, part abstract and impressionistic - undoubtedly expressionistic - but that's one of the great open ended "life's a box of chocolates" variables that lie at the heart of what I do.

Parallel Livres

Parallel Livres.  This reward consists of full sized reproductions of the two 11"x14" sketchbooks - one kept during my trip to Geneva in 1992 and one I'm keeping now which corresponds to the time frame of the first.  These will be hardcover digitized versions of the two sketchbooks and together they form one work that more accurately denotes the disparities and similarities of my basic creative impulses.  It's here within these two books, I think, that I personally will be able to gauge whatever "progress" I've made as an artist over 20 years.  I've always enjoyed seeing the origins of other artists' processes, in the forms of sketches and journals, and I think this pair of books will be of interest even to folks who are not me....

The Happy Ending.  At this level, you can have me...ME visit your home, community center, neighborhood park - wherever - and be treated to a captivating and hopefully witty account of this adventure and it's beginning 20 yrs ago...I promise to keep it a concise, sweet and non-nod inducing barrage of vacation slides.  Think of it as SORT OF having a Spalding Gray or Ira Glass speaking to you live....Notice the emphasis on SORT OF.  This is a great reward to chip in on with your friends.....I'll likely come bearing souvenirs for everyone.  We'll just make a night of it.

I, Chris & Thee:  Why slap your corporate name on a cold, bland athletic park, when you can co-opt a year's worth of one fellow's blood sweat and tears?  That's sort of what I'm offering up in this reward - only less harsh.... At this level, you get the naming rights to a year's worth of studio production.  Everything, big, small, incidental....whatever I make, you can put your name on or name it as you like.  Follow your creative impulses and indulge your own sense of the poetic - on my work.  It's sort of a collaboration.  It's sort of a mash up of two minds....even if one of those minds lives in a corporate body.
If you have a company and want to have fun - open it up to your employees.  Everyone gets to name a piece or pieces.  Name these things by popular vote - however you want to do it.  Even as I write this, I'm seeing novel ways the Namer can push this forward.  And you don't need to be a company either....just a bloke with some coin jingling in your pocket and an urge to name your world.....and I tend to churn through a lot of work in a year, so there will be lots of intellectual territory you can claim in the name of your king....And henceforth, all such named works will remain so named.....

So those are my rewards in exchange for support of the Geneve Journal project.  I should mention that all the rewards will be made exclusively for project supporters, and (with the exception of whatever artworks I create in Geneva) the numbers of postcards made, magazines, DVD's and sketchbook repros will be limited to the number of supporters who sign up for the corresponding levels.

Thanks so much...and by chance, if you hadn't found any links to my Geneve Journal Kickstarter project before ..there's one right there.

 

Geneve Journal: 2 Views

There are 13 days remaining in my Geneve Journal Kickstarter campaign.  

Iconic views of Geneva feature the Jet d'Eau and smart buildings on the bord du lac with the Prealpine Salève rising in the background. 

However, the vista that registers most prominently in my memory of Geneva is that of the Rue de la Cité as it descends in a bend from the vieille ville and essentially terminates in an area where Lac Leman transforms into the Rhone. 

None photos I snapped of it offer a clue to the many visions it provided me on occasion.

The first time an image of the street appears in my sketchbook is on June 19, 1992.   

From my sketchbook, June 19, 1992

From my journal in early Aug, 1992

The view portends a spiral.  An in the memory of my experience, it exists as one - or at least the tail of one. It retracts in an inviting way, like the opening of a  conch shell.  Like a conch shell, too, there's a uniformity to this vessel's walls - marked as they are with the various architectural details and portals of the cheek-by-jowl buildings.  But there's always the question of what alteration may lie in wait just beyond that bend. I have the recollection of an amazing effect of light radiating from the source within.  At other times, the lighting scheme would be reverse, drawing one's eye in, gradually darkening out of sight behind at that fold.  

Nabokov said "The spiral is a spritualized circle..."  In reality, this street is not a spiral, it doesn't really bend that much, save for that portion just at its mouth.  With the aid of Google maps, an overhead vantage gives a truer notion of the street's posture.  There's just a bit less poetry from that perspective, though.  As I'm writing this I'm inventing? or recalling? memories of making the descent along the street, and my memory traces the truth of that satellite image.  

But the bend is the thing and it is what has lodged itself into my experience-memory.  The striking vantage point, as I remember is from across the river where the streets begin to rise again.  I believe that is where I saw the burning bush luminance from that bend which I subsequently tried to render on paper...unsuccessfuly, in a series of reductive attempts at drawing out the vision from memory once I was back in the states.  Thinking of that fleeting ghost image now has set its embers aglow just a bit. 

sketchbook:  July 21, 1992

sketchbook:  Aug 6, 1992

I was consciously transfixed by this street.  I know there exist other drawings that continue the direction of the one above in compressing the vision of the thoroughfare.  

Engraving, dated Aug 21, 1992

The engraving above, one of two done on copper sheets given to me by the artist Henre Presset  and which I printed on the press in his studio is based on the fountain that sits at the base of the Rue de la Cite.

The lure of this rue was such that I approached it as a recurring motif for drawings in a way I hadn't done before.  As mentioned above, this was an exercise - one of my first in reducing a single subject to a singular primary element.  Of the the handful of drawings I remember doing, I've only found two remaining within my cache.  If I can't remember if these were done in Geneva, or back in Colorado...I'm now thinking they were done in GE.

But there's another view of Geneva that, as evidenced by the even more numerous interpretations throughout my sketchbooks and loose works, probably had an even more subterranean presence in my consciousness.  It's this view that I chose to be the "title" image for the Kickstarter project...(link added again here for your pledging convenience.)  It's the view of the interior of a block on Rue du Montchoisy, as seen through the kitchen window of what turned out to be a main home base while in Geneva. 

from the kitchen

The musician and, at the time, violin teacher of Mathias Aubert, Klaus Maurer offered his place to me while he was traveling.  I spent many a moment sitting at the kitchen table, making entire meals out of a baguette slathered with that damn good butter and strawberry jam - or eating spaghetti with ketchup as was the habit of the native young folk I encountered,  with this image projected through the window 

Going through my sketchbook, journal and various works from that time recently, I was a bit surprised to see how much this scene was quite obviously resting firmly in my mind and my eye. 

watercolor

The gaze of these works is trained on the distant horizon beyond the roof tops. None look down into the courtyard below - of which I have a memory, but no images attached to it....I just know it was there.    Looking at these pieces, it's clear, the view itself was an exercise in assimilating its planes and volumes.

sketchbook: July 12, 1992

As could be expected, there was a real Rear Window aspect to this conglomeration of buildings.  Laundry set out to dry on balconies or rack outside of kitchen windows and the clattering of noise that signals life behind the block are not present in my representations, though.  I think they well might be if I were to explore this kitchen table view again given my current penchant.

sketchbook: "From the kitchen", ink, July 6, 1992

sketchbook: July 29, 1992

sketchbook: Aug 2, 1992

sketchbook: Aug 12, 1992

sketchbook: Aug 4, 1992

This image of a photo of a sketch that I tore out of my sketchbook to give as thanks to Henri Presset for his generousity in availing me the use of his press in his studio.    I think this might be the most successful in embodying the volumetric reality of the scene.  Very Seurat-ish.  I did another such sketch subsequently, below, - a nighttime view - but find it less fulfilling. 

The one above, I really liked.  Mr Presset commented on how he found it the most interesting in my book.  Embarrassingly, I debated over the act of giving to him - the silly covetousness I can still feel for these manufactured things of my own hand, when in reality, do you really miss such a thing?  However, it felt like all I could give that had some significance.  When he slide the drawing into the bottom drawer of a cabinet already piled high with such tributes, a new form embarrassment tinged with the feeling of insignificance arose.   It's a funny scene I've never really gotten my head around, somehow.

sketchbook: Aug 2 or 3, 1992

 At night:  ink above and watercolor below.

tucked in the sketchbook:  receipt dated Aug 6, 1992

The scene, in ink, on the back of a tiny receipt.  I just found this today while thumbing through my sketchbook.  

One aspect that rests at the core of this whole Geneve Journal endeavor is set up a side by side compare/contrast of the hand and sensibility of the 20 year old artist with that of the 40 year old.  I guess I expected there to be more contrast than comparable-ness, but I'm starting to see this is very much not the case.

I think my drawing abilities - and my approach to the process of drawing - are much the same.  The mechanics seem little changed to me.  It could be that having left school, an aspect of my technical capacity was stunted.  I think what can be said to have changed is the focus of my attention - and whatever additive attributes can be said to been gained from aging...and maybe maturing.

Maybe I am stunted, but the arc that connects that past self of one who was rooted in a traditional scheme of representing the seen, but hard pressed to inject a modicum of personal, emotive content into his work without the use of stilted allegory to that someone who upon returning to the states was soley working to embody an emotionally charged, cathartic, visual grammer in his work, a la Ab Ex was indeed short.  So short, in fact the arc was indeed a pivot.  That notion of the pivot has been in my thoughts from the beginning of this reflection.  My lifecourse, if not changed completely, had been switched to another track of the same general heading.  

The arc that was engendered at that moment was the slow curving - possibly spiralic movement, -but who knows how it appears from the satellite's vantage- of awareness as moments distanced by years show signs of synchronicity and then are linked by the hand of maturity,  

That after 20 years, the planted myth of the importance of one iconic monument might be subsumed by another, more deeply felt one. This is all to say that there is that which we consciously embrace and that which grasps us slowly, softly and under our consciousness... like a benign analog to Mitch Hedberg's theory on turtlenecks.  And that might well explain the image I chose to emblazon on the Geneve Journal Kickstarter campaign.