Can you un-know this man?

Nancy Switzer, "Can Wall v.6 Violet Fusion",  oil on canvas, 60"x60" ©2009 Nancy Switzer

My reading yesterday, in Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World, both served as a continuation from the previous post and reminding me of an experience of seeing a work that informs the same topic .  While in Denver, I saw a painting by Nancy Switzer that embodies the the best balance between the recognizable and the un- mentioned on the previous post.  I couldn't find an image of the painting online, so I grabbed another from the artist's website which points to this balance, one of her "can wall" works.  For me, the works of her Can Walls are the most compelling because they ride the line of that duality, although in this case, it's to a lesser degree than the painting I'm remembering.   Switzer's work focuses on sundries from the pantry; tin cans, cutlery, fish laid out on a surface.  Her paint application  is thick and generally contours around the forms of she depicts. 
I don't know the name of the painting I saw in that residence outside of Denver, but, like the work seen above, it is large and square.   The square is a nearly all over painting of predominantly grey tone, except for a band of black, perhaps 8" talk along the top of the work.  The division between this blackish band and the rest of the body is a little uneven, making for a slightly irregular - and high - horizon line.  The first analogy that comes to mind is to that of a late grey Rothko, but the field of grey is actually a melange of colors, applied thickly - almost to the degree of a Freud, except less brutally applied.  The overall grey effect is also not alien to Freud's palette, there are dustings of pure hues,  but The swells of paint are applied more conscientiously, flowingly.  Thatched is a word to describe the body of this field, not unlike a Kiefer landscape.  I know it's gauche to describe any work through the similarities it to the works of others...but such are the difficulties of conveying a vivid description.
It's a profound work.  Heavy.  The painting is as arresting as a Rothko is.  It's more captivating and assured in its subtle presence than any other recently produced painting I can remember encountering. 

Unfamiliar with Switzers' subject matter when I first noticed the painting, I was surprised to learn that the work is a representation of a large array of silver utensils on a surface.  Similar in nature to the painting below, the work I'm describing renders the subject far more ambigously.

Nancy Switzer, Long Silver Scatter, oil on canvas. via claggettrey.com

The great effect of this work is that once one knows the subject, one can read (roughly, but satisfyingly) what's being represented, but this layer of recognition doesn't detract at all from the process of knowing this piece.  So often the learning what a piece is "about" (or what it "is") affects negatively that process of knowing a work for oneself.  Essentially, never being to unknow what you've learned in order to get back to that primary moment of introduction to a work.  Unlike most work, this work doesn't close that door on your experience.  It has the unique quality of allowing one to pass through that threshold  - in both directions.  It's a shame I can't show you.

In Trickster Makes This World, Hyde happened to offer up a few a passage on the very nature of recognition.  In describing Andre Serrano's Piss Christ, he writes:

Serrano seemed to me to be playing with the old problem of recognition.  How do we see what's really in front of us?  The swineherd meets Odysseus on the beach, but does not know him.  Why can't he see what's there?  How does the mind recognize the real meaning of what the senses offer up?  Conjoining an abstracted Christ and the human body, specifically the body we deny and turn away from, the blood and excreta from which we normally avert the eye, Serrano's image seemed to me to ask what the Roman soldiers asked Peter: "Do you know this man?

It's a real tortoise/hare race between our senses and our mind.  That the two are in competition - or I might say that it's the mind, full of all it's embedded agendas, which is in competition, the senses simply are - makes understandable the misinterpretations and inabilities to see what's in front of us.

In following some rabbit holes in writing this post, I came across this post on the Peripheral Visions blog which mentions the Lawrence Weschler book Everything That Rises: A Book on Convergences, a work I hadn't heard of, but will check out.  Convergence is much of what it's all about.

In the studio today

I returned home yesterday after several weeks out West.

This morning I experienced an instant of an almost Kandisnky moment  - an instant of non-recognition, of unknowing in which the sensation of seeing is made potent, refreshing and raw - an effect that is gone in an instant once the mind catches up with the eye.   While away, two pieces that I had on view in the lobby of the Beacon Theater in the Jennifer Mackiewicz curated exhibit "Fine Art", returned to the house.  The two pieces, Margin and Pegleg Potato are seen above on the right hand side of the picture.  Angelika placed the paintings on the floor as pictured.  The larger one, Margin, is seen on it's side, rather than in its vertical orientation.   I don't think it really translates through the photo, but that painting has some juice to it  It pops.  And seeing it in this orientation and with the addition of distancing of time held  a wave of exhilaration.   To unknow the known, even for a second.  it's a thrilling free fall.

As if there needed to be any further illustration of how little it takes to thrill me.

Together, the arrangement, the placement, the accident of orientation are a gift.  A humble one, granted.

And to have the proximity between that painting and the work on the left hand side of the photo is an additional happenstance that warms me.  The green and blue checkered form on the left is actually a sheet of latex paint draped over a wooden rod which I left prior to departing to allow the paint to stiffen.

Trix is for all god's chil'ren

My initial response to the reading of the Gospel of Luke for the Who Do You Say That I Am exhibit coming up at Beacon's First Presbyterian Church has focused on the notion of translation and the pressures brought to bear on a text or experience when it is put through the process of interpretation.  More recently, I've been looking at the reading through the lens of another concurrent reading I'm doing for our Art Book Club;  Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World.  The trickster, the figure, of many forms, that plays a role in so many belief systems around the world, which uniquely moves between the realms of heaven and earth.  The trickster is a connection, a liaison between mortals and immortals.  He's an amoral benefactor to mankind, in many cases breaking decorum and convention and gifting to mankind treats once were only fit for the gods.   

Drawing, 2012

So you have Jesus Christ, the chimeric man/god hybrid that moves twixt the two realms.  What was Jesus but a liaison between the mortal and the eternal, and what was his mission but to disrupt the status quo on the human plane?  So this reading of Jesus as Trickster - I've intuitively been misspelling trickster using an x - undoubtedly the subconscious influence of that rabbit always trying to get himself some of that fruit cereal meant only for kids.  And how appropriate to be mashing up a bunny-based marketing campaign with the trixster lamb that drove so much of the development of Western culture, this being Easter weekend - or as some know it as Zombie Jesus Day.  

Drawing, 2012

A dinner discussion about Easter from last week brought to mind, suddenly, that the story of the resurrection of Christ but a Zombie story?  Certainly not the original zombie story, but an Original Zombie....Jesus Christ; the redemptive O.Z.  This revelation was just that;  I had never framed the view of the New Testemant in this way and it seemed novel and obvious...Of course I should have realized that this thought was not the the first time someone had thought of it......Chad, resident zombie/undead/slasher expert assured me that there indeed are cinematic treatments of this story that exist and which will be coming out.  And in fact, it's possible to see the random O.Z. Jesus-es participating in your local zombie crawl.

And where better to consider the multitude of natures of Jesus' exploits than along I-70 moving through Kansas where He lives among all the other roadside messaging.  I even saw a Luke-specific, anti-abortion (I believe) billboard, featuring an image of baby hands and a reference to Luke 1:41, which reads "And it came to pass, that, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit:"

Jesus' Pimp Hand (after El Greco), 2005

Just today, reviewing old images, I was reminded of two of a series of sketches I did; studies for two sculptures from 2005 inspired by El Greco's depiction of Jesus activating his pimp hand in one of his famous disruptive exploits.

Jesus' Pimp Hand (after El Greco), 2005

Cocked 2005 - 48x20x16" wood, plaster, metal

Pimphand 2005 - 84x48x30" wood, metal, plaster

This place would be great if only...

Going Hoam, 1993 collage.

Dinner last week with my dear friends Summer and Chad, of the MonkeyAngel clan.  At one point, we were speaking of time, change and their effects on us and our locations, which went more broadly into the topic of  gentrification of places. 
As Chad said, the most sure fired way to make sure that a place will turn hot is to "get us to move out of the area." 
What drives us - just us - folks the likes of me and Summer and Chad, not the majority of folks - to a place and what drives us away?.
I began considering the possibility of taking Lucien Freud's comment on from the previous post and alter its application from the making of paintings to the notion of place-making or home-making.  Make such a substitution, and the statement very nearly sums up my feelings of place, and what the real level of attraction is held by a place when it actually becomes nearer to the place it can be.

A moment of complete happiness.....

Last year saw the end of several significant artists, three of which have had a particular importance for me throughout my development.; Lucian Freud, Helen Frankenthaler and Cy Twombly.

Freud was the first of these three artists that I encountered, and as I've been reviewing old journals and sketchbooks, I found this quote by him which I jotted down in my sketchbook on this day, 20 years ago:

A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art.  The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work.  For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture he is painting.  Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life.  Were it not for this, the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire.  It is this great insufficiency that drives him on.  Thus the process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture.  The process in fact is habit forming. 

I have a distinct visual memory attached to this quote: the studio of my Painting 1 class with at CSU.  Perhaps I transferred the quote to the sketchbook in that room.  Nevertheless, I have a mind-image of my location and the location of my easel within that room that is specifically tied to these words of Freud. copying this quote into my sketchbook in that studio.   I remember the impact it had on me vividly.  It seemed to be a very true statement.  It's a nugget that had lodged itself deeply within my consciousness.  Even then, in my state of inexperience, this quote lent a glimpse of understanding to what it was that drove the impulse I felt to engage in this activity.  Inexperienced though I was, I felt something of the dissatisfaction and futility that are endemic to parts of that cycle of creative beginnings and completions.
When I finally started traveling and seeing Freud's work in person,  I remember being amazed at the level of "accuracy" he could attain with such thickly knotted knarls of paint.  I remember, in particular, a large portrait of, I believe, three men.  Perhaps a father and his sons.  The father sitting in a chair, his hands gripping the chair's armrests.  It was the knuckles of this man that drew me in completely.  Physical and real. Real in their presence and real in the obsession they inspired in the artist.  The dimensionality and physicality of a Freudian paint surface is not something I've carried in my own work (my cheap nature has long made me an inveterate miserly doler-outer of paint.)

Freud's death came two weeks after Twombly's.  I was so intently focused on Twombly (as I spent a week creating a Dead Hare Radio episode dedicated to him) that Freud's passing ... passed - with only a small amount of consideration, comparatively.  I think I had forgotten how much he was in my consciousness those many years back.  It's true that my sensibilities transferred from him to Frankenthaler to Twombly and I ceased thinking about him so much but finding the quote above once again has allowed me to do that.

I remember having a thought at the MoMA exhibit The Painter's Etchings held in 2007-2008 (I thought it was much more recent), I just don't remember what the thought was.  I wish I did remember.

One of: 12 Portraits of Lucien Freud Seated on Bed, London by Walker Evans, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The photo above is a particularly great one of Freud - one of 12 - taken in the 1950's by Walker Evans.  The Met Museum's website has all 12 image for your viewing pleasure.   He looks like a handsome Lyle Lovett in these photos....not that Lyle isn't a handsome man himself.

Geneve Journal: Par Avion

Per the previous post, I checked, and there is yet a faint perfume hanging over just a couple of the letters all these 20 years later.
But the point of this revisitation is not to rehash the romantic misfires of youth, it is about what that diversionary hath wrought, which is much of everything that's come since.

Geneve Journal: Swiss Chris

At about this point in the year, the twenty-year-ago me was contending with the confusion and desperation a broken heart in the making.  I guess the heart had already been broken (although, from the scant few journal entries from this period, I seemed mildly unaware of the prognosis) but the hope surrounding the situation yet had some life - but it wouldn't last.  

Her nationality: Swiss.  Her name; Sonia.  She was one of a group of students on a Summer (the Summer before) exchange program.  My parents signed on to be one of the host families...for one (Ms. Magali Aubert).

She was crystal greygreen eyes and a coiled sea of black hair.  It was that black mass of hair paired with black leather jacket that drew me through the parking lot of Arapahoe Community College.  The prospect of international co-ed ambassadorship appealed to me and a handful of my compatriots.  That first day of this saga, we collected a group of the students gathered in front of the college to take in the Denver Black Arts Festival. 

Her time in Denver - some five weeks -  is marked on in my journal with just two entries:

My attention was ignited by her as I drove through the parking lot of the community college that was the academic home away from home for the students.  I had met my exchange sister. ....As I pulled up to the group of students lounging on the lawn, her black nest of hair captured my attention at 30 yards and closing.  Crystal eyes set deep in a bronzy sea and .......coils of black hair.  I was transfixed.  She was in Denver for about a month, I think.  It was intense.  Her time in Denver is marked on in my journal with just two entries - from which I'll spare you. 

Driving to the airport with Bri to see her off, there was some sort of solar phenomenon occurring,  It was probably simply a very heavy fog on an otherwise crisply bright Denver morn.  Bri: "dude, check out the sun."  Me: Oh man, that's wild".  The two of us staring in silence - for longer than a prudent moment..  Soon, sumthing like:
"My eyes feel funny"
"I wasn't going to say anything, but mine do too."

An unflinching unknowing stare rendering blindness and pain.

That's sort of an overarching, poetical, comment relating to the love and loss in a dream of Swiss. - our actual eyes ended up fine.  No actual blindness occurred that day.

She was in tears.  I, as was to be more fully expressed in later years and in later relationships was emotionally unaffected.  unfazed.  I was hit by it later.

What ensued was a flurry of written correspondences.  Multiple letters were arriving per week.  Each one fragrantly recalling her being.  I can't recall the scent now, although I don't doubt catching a whiff of it would hit a nerve.  The scent clung to her letters some years later when I was reorganizing my storage.  I imagine it's passed on now.  I'll give you an update as I'll be carousing through my storage in the coming days.

That twenty-years-past Spring met up the threatening end of a utopian fantasy.  It was the first time I remember regretting death.  Not fearing so much, but regretting that the life I dreamed I'd have with her would one day be cut short by the death of one of us.  I was scraping peeling paint and the tendrils of a vine from a white picket fence when I first came upon this particular death anxiety.

If memory recalls, slightly before this point in that year, the revelry of visiting the mailbox turned to yet another source of anxiety.  What new confirmation that she had moved on would be her reply to one of my begging missives.  Seeing that red/blue half-chevron bound envelope caused my heart to drop to my knees.  So focused was I, so intent on attaining the goal ....and so on edge was I that I swore, that even though my reason for scrimping and working multiple jobs around my class schedule with the intent of saving money to travel to Switzerland had ceased to exist, if I didn't actually leave this country, something drastic would occur.

I went to Geneva after that Spring semester.  I spent the Summer, largely wandering the streets, visiting the Art & Architecture Library.  Although my thought initially was that I would go to Geneva to live in love, I never really thought about the future.

I only saw her a couple of times during the several months I spent there.  I never returned to school.   The entire experience helped make that decision clear.  But the deal I made with myself that Summer that as long as I was engaged in a pursuit that felt as enriching and enlightening as college might purport to be, I would not return.  Not to study art, at least.
I can't say that at all times I've entirely lived up to that oath.  The attempt to quantify one path over the other is difficult.  But I know for sure that that entire experience twenty year back was a pivot.  Every action, every step along my path since is marked by that season's brand.   It's very possible that I may well have ended up in a place and a mind similar where I am now, but there's no doubt that this situation I'm living in at this moment -and every day that's led up to it- owes it's shape and character to that Summer.

That this is now 20 years hence feels significant, and worthy of an observation.

The idea is to return to Geneva later this year and revisit many places and peoples.  More on this soon.

A PRIORI POSTALE

a priority mail

I was excited to receive a Berlin a priori postcard from Angelika the other day.    It's not unusual for me to receive postcards from her when she's in Germanlandia - we are like two love birds in a cage, after all.  I'm I'm not just her lovey dovey, I'm also a funder of her a priori project, which is the reason she has been in Berlin this past week +.   This special funder status has garnered me the special limited edition postcard you see below instead of the usual topless kraut maiden-laden postcard (photo pending) I might otherwise receive.

NYFA (the New York Federation for the Arts) is a fiscal sponsor of a priori, lending the advantage of tax deductable-ness to donors who wish to donate.  Angelika has also incorporated a kickstarter-like menu of incentives for those wishing to fund the project at modest levels.  Additionally, since the a priori project will be an extended one, there is an option to "subscribe" as a funder with regularly scheduled payments through the a priori Artspire page. 

I'm also eligible to receive a 5"x7" print taken on this Berlin trip - *excited*.

So you too, can be the beneficiary of such goodness by choosing to be a benefactor of Angelika's project.  Of course, I can't guarantee your postcard will include her saying she loves you and misses you...but it's worth a try - of course, that might just cost you more.

You can stay abreast of Angelika's activities on the a priori facebook page.

Luke and You Shall Find

Lean and mean, 2010 collage

On Wednesday of last week, I sat at a table in the basement of Beacon's First Presbyterian Church.  I wasn't alone.   Around the table sat a small group of artists, both from within the church's community and from without.  The occasion was an initial meeting of folks who will be participating in a discussion group/ art project revolving around a shared reading and interpretation of the Gospel of Luke. 
This project, "Who Do You Say That I Am?" - so named by Pastor Ben Larson-Wolbrink is intended to be the first of a series of collaborative/interactive projects bringing together various members of Beacon's community to discuss faith, ecumenical texts, and to build a broader community interaction - creatively. 
One of the catalysts credited in the creation of this kind of interactive project was the controversy spawned by a few of Ron English's works featured in the 2010 Electric Windows project.  The work that raised the most hackles entailed references to Christ or Christianity including crucifixion replete with product logos.  Pointed satire of social, commercial and bureaucratic norms of this country is at the hear of English's work, and the work seen as objectionable by some was very much in keeping with this sensibility. In a search, I couldn't find the offending images.....I did snap this photo of the artist standing before one of his less controversial works that day of the Electric Windows.

Ron English in front of one of his works at the Roundhouse in Beacon, NY during Electric Windows 2010.

I think the way in which this instance works into the impetus to instigate a project like this one being hosted at the First Presbyterian Church is to open a channel of communication where sensitive subjects might be engaged with in a more thoughtful manner.

Elia Gurna introduced me to this project and I was immediately intrigued by the chance to share in a process that approaches a subject of deep meaning in an interpretive, discursive environment.

This kind of project seduces me every time - a chance to experience and interpret a text or a "constant" and then watch the variety of participants' interpretations that manifest.  It's a mainline that whisks me back to Mr Pickering's AP English class and the open forum projects (films, artworks, etc) that he fostered.  I guess I can connect my predilection for interactive creative processes back to Pickering's class - and perhaps it offers me the kind of hothouse environment I subconsciously feel I missed out on by not finishing college...But that's another story - one that is reaching it's 20th anniversary this year.

In addition to reading the text of Luke, I've downloaded an audio version which I intend to play several times over with the thought of what might squeeze out.  I've also found some audio versions in greek (one of them is painfully, but amusingly read by a non greek speaker) in which I intend to immerse myself.  Of course, I don't know a whit of, but why not at least try to get as close to the source as possible.

Finally, for folks who might come here and find the image at the top of the post as objectionable.  I agree.  It's a response to what I see as an objectional exploitation and idolatrous use of Jesus Christ as a kitschy shill for branding an organization's efforts -even non profit ones.  The images of JC used in the Namesake group are all culled from fundraising solicitation material sent to Angelika, since she's such a charitable soul.....and that charitable nature has been commoditized and traded on the Non-Profit-Solicitation-Market in the hopes that she might also contribute to any of the sundry organizations that view themselves as deserving as any other.

Happy Walentines Day

Happy Walentine's day, as we say in this household.  Actually, I'm the only one in this household that says it that way.

Over the weekend, Angelika and I participated at Catherine Welshman's annual Love, Lust, Erotica show at Spire Studios here in bountiful Beacon, NY.  I neglected to take any photos at all - except this one of Theresa Gooby's cootchie cupcakes, or more correctly, cuntcakes.

Everyone is an individual.  Everyone is different

Angelika presented two sculptures of deconstructed puti and faeries and such.  Again, I don't have any photos, save for this studio shot from a couple of years ago.  The blurry item in the foreground is a detail of one of these sculptures.

I served up one of a recent series of paintings I'm considering my Suprematist Paintings.  Unintentionally referencing Malevich by way of Blinky Palermo and those black rectangles used  to block out the nips and some eyes of patients in plastic surgeon newspaper ads.  The break room for the preparators at MoMA is always replete with daily newspapers.  Whenever I'm working there, I get my fill of newspaper consumption - something I never otherwise bother with.

Examples of plastic surgery ads that appear in NY dailies.

 
These plastic surgery ads are a throwback to another era.  The black bar has been replaced by pixelation - both rough and refined-  which essentially erases the nipples (I recall this strategy being used in scenes of  The girls next door, rendering the real life centerfolds into even closer nipple-less approximations of the barbie dolls with which they are usually compared.

Holly, Kendra & Bridget from "The Girls Next Door", photo via: tv.ign.com

As with the taboo of cursing, this graphic censorship tends to do more to focus attention on what's beneath the black bar than anything else in an image.  Since I still have a stock of material (read porn magazines) dating from the Genesis Paintings in 2007, I thought I'd play with reversing this sorry state of affairs, blocking out everything but the nipples.

Suprematist Painting, 2012, acrylic on printed paper, 10"x8"

Suprematist Painting, 2012, acrylic on printed paper, 10"x8"

These are basic, dumb works, based on a simple system; obliterate everything in an image with acrylic paint, except a rectangular border around any nipples.  The number of nipples and their placement in any given page layout results in a chance operation in constructing the composition.  The first two I did immediately called to mind Blinky Palermo's Compostion with 8 Red Rectangles" which we installed in the artist's retrospective at the Hessel Museum last Summer.

Joshua Abelow's image of Composition with 8 Red Rectangles on view at the Hirschorn, via: art blog art blog.

 It was through Palermo's reference to Malevich that I saw the connection to Suprematism (at least a connection that I'm claiming here).  These are my Suprematist paintings. Nothing holds more Suprematist power than boobs in general and nipples in particular these days.

Kasimir Malevich, Black Square and Red Square, 1915, oil on canvas. via: wikipaintings

Lastly, I was inspired enough by the theme of Catherine's Valentine's show to create two new paintings over the weekend.  Mr & Mrs S, reworkings of two previous paintings that are now portraits of a coupled couple of stars, made Superstars by the addition of gender assignment.

Mr S, 2012 oil on canvas 24"x 30"

Mrs S, 2012 oil on canvas 24"x 30"

Finally, finally, I spent most of the day of Valentine's Day installing Gillian Wearing's artwork, "Secrets and Lies" at the Hessel Museum for the Matters of Fact exhibit which is opening on March 18th.  The work consists of a constructed "confessional" chamber in which the viewer watches a video depicting various folks confessing their deepest secrets and lies.  The imagery is creepy enough with the anonymous contributors donning uncannily real, and disturbing masks sharing some equally creepy, some sordid, and some heartbreaking secrets - most of which revolve around sex and "love".  Happy Walentine's Day, indeed.

The Artma benefit Auction returns to Denver, Feb 11, 2012

slough (Grande 1) 2006

If you happen to be in Denver this coming weekend.  And if you happen to dig art auctions, love children and hate cancer, you should attend the latest installment of the Artma Art Auction.  The biennial fundraiser to benefit pediatric cancer research.

This year's event is taking place on Saturday, Feb 11 from 6-10pm at the Denver Studio Complex.  More information is at artmaonline.org

I've participated by donating a work for each of the .....six installments of the event dating back to 2000.  This year I've donated a work from 2006; slough (Grande 1), it's oil on canvas, measuring 30"x24".  It's one of two larger works on canvas that grew out of the group of small paintings on wood I was making in 2005 and 2006. 
I considered this group of paintings as my "Morandi" works.  It's a ridiculous thing to say and perhaps an insult to the man who spent a lifetime exploring the vast universe embodied within a very narrowly focused subject matter in his remarkable paintings. I merely spent a year working on this group before my attentions were led in other by the possibilities presented by the very subject matter I was examining.   The invocation of the man's name is intended as a tribute.  For me, the tie to Morandi in these works was that they were a return a form of direct representation - something I had avoided for several years.  Even though they may look abstract and random, they are devoted renditions of real forms; forms that were intimate for me, linked as they were to my livelihood of several years.  For the decorative painting I would do for clients in their homes, I would mix a variety of colors in yogurt containers.  After I was done with them, I would let the remnants of the paint dry inside the yogurt cups which allowed me to easily peel the paint out of the container and then reuse the container for a new color.  For some reason, I started pinning these colored disks of dried latex to my studio wall.  I had quite an array of them. After sometime of not paying attention, I discovered that these disks became misshapen and distorted as gravity worked them over while they were pinned to the wall.  These weird forms became the subjects of the slough paintings, then later, the subject and core material in the blesse sculptures that were to follow.   

1.11.11 -> 1.11.12

In 2008

2011 mash up

A wee sampling of some painting endeavors from this past year;  a painting on a fragment of fruit crate from late Spring, and a very recent painting on a found bicycle seat.

I'm seeing a rhyme, if not a theme.

Oh Christmas Thing 2011

This year's Christmas Thing was late in developing, but alas, it has come.  Inspired by the depiction of the holiday classic Hollywood films, this piece is silvery black and white....save for a string of paper balls that feature the hints of hues from the weekly store inserts which clog our mailbox every Wednesday.  The original versions of films like Christmas in Connecticut, The Bishop's Wife, and Meet John Doe embody such a warmth and lushness of the xmas moment in their monochromatic renditions that the colors of the greenery, ornaments and baubles are realized in the viewer's own perception of the scene.

I'm not claiming that this monochromatic Thing has any of those powers....it's really just an homage.

One thing that it does have going for it is that it has a kinetic potential, as is demonstrated in the video below:

Another thing that this year's Thing has going, is an audio component - in the form of a special Christmas Thing/Holiday Special Episode of the Dead Hare Radio Hour, which will be airing on WVKR in Poughkeepsie, NY on Dec. 27th. The podcast version should release on the 28th.

kork Advent Returns

After three years of exhibiting artists' works on a bulletin board in a Poughkeepsie, NY accounting office, kork is packing it in.

I'll have more on this soon.  'Til then, details are over at kork.  And if you don't want to miss out on getting a special delivery in your inbox everyday this month - from 31 great artists - then get over to kork and sign up for the advent email list.

Let's not assume...

I've been absent from posting for quite sometime.  It's not that I have had nothing to post, nor that I've had nothing to do, nor that I've had nothing to post.  I've simply had too much to do and not enough "space" to get it posted. 

Ahh, but very SSoon....

]twenty-six paces[ : What the Room Saw Part III

The Windows on Main St exhibit has ended, but I'm still catching up on ]twenty-six paces[ related stuff.

From the point at which I first paced out the ]     [  between Artisan Wine Shop and Beacon Pilates, and first really took notice of the tar patchwork "scrawled" along the center of the street, I was immediately interested in it as a drawing. 
In the video below, I try my best to mimic the work on the canvas before me.

 I had the idea of delineating details seen through the window by drawing on the window early on.  That intention led to the thought that I might be able to create monoprints using the window as my printing plate.  Last week I made my first attempt at pulling a print from a side window.  It's crude, but it's a start.

 The yellow on the paper was preexisting, remnants from another effort. 

The exhibit is over, but many related projects I planned for originally have not been completed, and new ideas born out of those early thoughts have yet to be followed up on, but with the indulgence of the Tim and Mei at Artisan and Juliet at Beacon Harvey, I hope to continue working to resolve some of these ideas.

Eye Candy Friday: Making Sausage

This week's treat comes via Arthur Hash's blog The Art Escape Plan. I'm not sure what the origin of this gif is, but It's pretty cool, particularly the reverse view. Lovin' the animated string.

Breaking News: Pinhole Photographs of Hurricane Irene

We were spared the torment that Hurricane Irene wrought upon many across the Hudson and up in Vermont.  A couple of inches of water in the basement, loss of cable and internet for a good part of a day and the loss of a day of work was as much of a cost we at Kamp Maykr had to pay.
It seems possible that since the impact on that megalomaniapolis, NYC, was less than feared, Irene will be remembered as a dud of a storm even as the devastation it wrought upstate in New England resulted in homes and entire villages being destroyed by storm related flooding.

Inspired by my new found fondness of pinhole camera shots as part of my ]twenty-six paces[ endeavors - and since I had several sheets of photo paper on hand  - I decided to document the effects of Irene in long exposure black and white images.  These are the resulting images of setting Mabby 1 and Mabby 2 in the windows near the porch and the back yard and seeing what they would capture.

After the deluge.

A post-storm, pre-wind-gust shot of the garden and shed, neither were any worse for wear when it was all over