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'.

Yesterday there was a free concert given at the Chicago Cultural Center by Evan Parker and Ned Rothenberg. This was part of the New Millenium, New Music series. Here is a clip I found on YouTube of a similar performance of theirs. Listen around 2:30 for some really interesting percussive bass clarinet work.



Inspired by this, I have picked up the clarinet again. This may not last.

ha-ha

Here are some really bad scans of some portraits I did for the My Face In Your Space show at Nexus in Philadelphia.


(An homage to Mollie's permanent hair-do.)


(this one suffers from lack of time spent. There were originally lots of teeth in the background and I had painted on the backside of Jenna's face, which was somewhat luminescent through the tracing paper. That version I destroyed, and was left with this lesser one.)


(Laura Lewis as a haniwa statue.)

Updating website; long overdue. Fatcow's new file-editing beta system is giving me no end of headaches. Argh.

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Going through the black and white negatives I shot with my Holga, it's frustrating how many of them are poorly printed. In a few weeks time I will have my darkroom set up and I will be able to (re)print them at a larger scale and with more attention paid than commercial developers can afford to pay. I expect to bungle the first few attempts, but I believe that familiar bicycle adage applies. It will be fulfilling to see the photographs that I intended to be more than snapshots exist as something more than snapshots.

The reason for postponing the set-up of the darkroom is that I want to wait until after my upcoming trip to upstate New York. Staying at a relative's beautiful farmhouse on 200 or so acres with nothing specific to do is going to be a wonderful opportunity to indulge in a bit of photography. I'm looking forward to doing some night work especially. Hopefully the weather will be clear enough to shoot star trails, but an eerie nighttime fog is welcome as well. I also intend to record a bit of family story-telling for vocolo.org practice, as well as record the shapes of objects on the solar-print paper I used to love as a child.



I didn't realize the solar print technique was used by the military to make quick copies of strategic maps drawn on tracing paper. This gives me a bit of an urge to use it in making drawings myself, or contact prints of photographs.

While coming out of a dream this morning, it occurred to me that these two objects might occupy the same space in their respective cultures.

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: