2010 Chicago Art Open

I'll be participating in the 2010 Chicago Art Open at River East Art Center.



This painting will be on display. If you happen to be in the River East area, check out this juried group show of up and coming Chicago artists.

California Dreaming

It's a rainy day outside, and I'm trying to keep myself lucid by listening to WNYC's Radiolab, drinking coffee, and using the internet for things other than Facebook.

I've just returned from a five-day stay in San Francisco, looking into grad programs and generally deciding if I want to live there. (I do.) Beautiful city, even more beautiful local environment, lively local culture, and an emphasis on 'green' lifestyles and local/organic food makes it pretty much heaven for a person like me. And the San Francisco Art Institute turned out to be very impressive, even more so than the California College of Art. It's a bit of a turnaround for me, as I expected the reverse to be true. This opinion came more from their websites, as it was the only real exposure I had to either of them from out here in Chicago. SFAI won me over with it's emphasis on theory and cross-disciplinary work, and it didn't hurt that every person I spoke to was eager to be helpful and informative. I was even able to meet Mark Van Proyen, one of the graduate painting professors, just by stumbling around with a confused look on my face.

That said, I look forward to spending the next several months in work mode. It helps me to have a goal, and this is certainly one. I'll be taking on more work at my job, which is a good thing both for experience and income, and I'll be working with a renewed focus and direction on both paintings and photography. I've got a few pieces now that are finished that I haven't been able to satisfactorily photograph, so hopefully I'll figure out my lighting situation before too long. SFAI wants a carousel of slides, and I'm looking forward to remembering how to accomplish that. I also hope to make a few proposal sketches for installations I've not been able to see through, and continue making drawings as well. I don't want to create an entire new body of work for my portfolio, but it may turn out that way. In a way, it's a good thing that I have three or so months of hiding indoors coming my way because I'll be a lot less distracted by petty things like fresh air and seeing friends who live more than two blocks away. Thanks, Chicago!

Around the Coyote Fall Festival 2009

A bit overdue, here are a few snapshots from my booth at the Around the Coyote Falls Arts Festival here in Chicago. I wasn't able to step back enough to get a shot of the whole booth, but here's the general idea:



With a close-up of one side:


And the other:


Here you can see that I was chosen one of the Curator's Choice's, the curator being Britton Bertran.

All in all the festival was a mixed bag. In general I felt let down by the venue. The poor (flickering) florescent lights combined with several empty booths and unpainted display walls left me with the feeling that those responsible for organizing the show didn't care as much about the presentation of the art as they ought to have. But I'm glad for the feather in my cap that is the Curator's Choice as well as the fact that I had the opportunity to sell a few pieces I've been carrying around for too long.

The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance

I have discovered the joy of painting on panel. I have discovered the joy of thickened linseed oil. Life in the studio is good, despite the plastic already covering the windows against Chicago's chilly onslaught.

I just finished reading The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance by Paul Robert Walker. This book tells the story of the artistic feud between Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi in Florence in the early 1400s. Using the competition to design the bronze doors of Florence's Baptistry (commonly regarded as the 'start' of the Renaissance) as a jumping-off point, Walker follows the creative development of these two artists through the completion of the dome of Florence's Duomo, in it's time the largest dome ever built (and still the largest masonry dome in existence.) The author ties in from time to time the lives of Donatello, Masaccio, Nanni di Banco, and other masters of the early Renaissance in Florence, but focuses his tale mainly on Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. He draws on Manetti and Vasari for anecdotes and general facts, but isn't afraid to refute their often glorifying relations of events.

The main flaw I found in this book was Walker's clear reverence of Brunelleschi. It's hard not to have affection and admiration for such a remarkable man; an inventor, sculptor, painter, architect when there were no architects, and a politician and adoptive father to boot. But Walker's narrative style loses steam when it gets bogged down too much in the feud between the two artists. In fact, it seems almost as though the feud was largely on Ghiberti's side, always trying to sneak his way in for a bigger slice of glory. The interaction between the artists is fascinating and relevant, but is given perhaps too much importance, when the personal drives of both men are so strong.

My only complaint behind me, this book was a great joy to read. I had a basic familiarity with this story from an early Renaissance art history class I was lucky enough to take during a semester in Rome, and I've had the good fortune of being able to take three trips to Florence to see a good portion of the architectural sites and art discussed in this book. This book has reminded me how much I love art history, and I've just purchased Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death by Millard Miess and Signs and Symbols in Christian Art by George Ferguson to read during these coming 'inside months'.

Catch(up)all

Greetings, negligible amount of blog followers!

I have been incredibly lax in maintaining this blog, but I take solace in a statistic pulled from Harper's: “Estimated percentage of all existing blogs that have not been updated in four months: 94%”.

I have been spending my time starting and soon after aborting several large-scale paintings and drawings. Something doesn't feel right about the size. I think I'm going to pack them away temporarily and for the time being focus on pieces of art that are small enough to be held in my hands while I work. I'm certainly out of practice at large-scale image-making but I don't believe that to be the real root of the problem. I'm feel myself at a transitional stage as far as imagery is concerned and it feels disingenuous to be making larger, more confident pieces.

I'm also at a point where I'm looking to be less of a painter. To put it perhaps more accurately, I'm NOT a painter. I'm an artist who paints (occasionally) and doesn't do much of anything else at all. I don't especially identify with the history of painting, though I find it fascinating, and refrain from making work in other media largely because of the difficulty of working in unfamiliar ways. Through the help of a friend I'll soon have my darkroom set up and hope to develop and improve my photography skills. If not an end in itself, I've always found photography a good way to improve my visual thought processes and a good way to test out ideas.

I'm also making small steps toward audio work, though I must emphasize the smallness of these steps. Vocolo.org is an offshoot of Chicago Public Radio (my local NPR station) which has an open format where listeners and producers of audio occupy the same space. I've been playing around a bit, trying to be a bit more literal in my storytelling as I try to be a little bit less narrative or explanatory in my visual work. As a side note, I've also been listening to old podcasts of Radiolab, which I highly recommend.

All in all, the summer has been extremely busy and only moderately productive. Part of this is my own willingness to socialize rather than work, part of it is the seasonal nature of making one's money doing wedding decor. I find myself looking forward to winter. After this comparatively chilly summer, it doesn't feel like it will be much of a transition (though, of course, it will). But I hope to make a trip to San Francisco to look at grad school options there and (though dreading the lack of income) look forward to working less and having more time to focus on creative endeavors.

Also, here's this:

The internet works! An anonymous internet donor (hi, mom) has funded some art supply buying! New canvases have been stretched and primed, and await paint. At the Art Institute of Chicago last week I saw a painting by Brice Marden which had some beeswax mixed into the paint. When I used to use encaustics (pigmented beeswax), the texture of the paint was always somewhat distracting. But this painting was smooth, the paint beautifully matte and opaque. I think this could be something to consider in my own work, as I tend to paint in thin layers and the texture of the canvas shows through.

The animation is slugging along, and I'm thinking of taking advantage of the printmaking studio that opened up in my work building to make a set of screenprinted 'ex libris' labels. Mostly just for fun, but fun is good, too.

a few of these for now.

I feel like I'm getting better at the Holga, although I can see how the accidents of the film (especially the blocks of tone shift in the first few) make it more interesting in a way that I can't. I like the alchemy of a Holga photo. It's a somewhat disorienting thing to take a photo without really focusing or metering or timing the exposure. It's always the shots that I'm not looking forward to getting back that are the best; the most surprising at least.

I would like to be able to see in a way more appropriate to a Holga. I think right now I see in a 35mm SLR way. I would like to have an eye with a bit of chaos in it.

I included that last shot (well, a little bit because it's silly) because when I looked at it just now, going through which to post, i had this moment of 'oh, my god. that's me'. And I don't mean my face. I mean, that's me, sort of half-visible and floating. Transparent. I'm moody lately, and homesick, it's true. But even more than that I feel this strange pull between being disgusted by the fact that I don't do anything that I want to do, and this weird stagnation/lack of interest in doing those things.

I feel like that's exactly what I would say to a psychiatrist in order to get a very interesting prescription.

But I'm trying, I guess. It's more accurate to say that I'm trying to try. I'm reading Slavoj Zizek's The Parallax View, and it's re-connecting some neurons. [I always hear the word parallax pronounced in the Russian accent of the girl in my college physics class. pah-rhah-lahx.] It's inspiring me, but I still feel so dwarfed by everything. I also checked out recently a book on German history, which should help me start to contextualize Gerhard Rohlfs a little bit. What I'm doing is sort of like trying to explain to someone the history of Chinese grammar, only I don't speak a word of Chinese.

I like the idea of making a movie that's about him, but simultaneously about my making a movie of him and about that movie. That's the loosest possible way I can explain this, I think.

In the meantime, I've more or less stopped painting. I've been dragging my heels to finish one particular canvas, but I haven't taken the time to stretch any more. It just doesn't feel right right now. I can't honestly say if it ever did/does. I enjoy it, but a life's work...? I don't know. Thinking feels right. That's all I've ever known. And lately I've let myself get out of the habit of even that.

No more.