Monthly Archives: June 2010
Monkey Bike!
I’m Verso
Sharon Butler‘s great blog, Two Coats of Paint, carried an interesting piece today about how artists sign their work and what that might mean.
I’m a verso, pretty much always signing the back or in a place where it won’t be seen when prepped for display. It’s a specific choice… the signature is a formal element and a conceptually potent one at that. Putting mine on the verso sets identification but lets the image be image. It’s not a conceit of preciousness or faux-humility; I just don’t want the text of my name in the way of a picture I’ve constructed for certain reasons. Click each image to see the front side.
And here you can see a short review of one of my paintings Ms. Butler wrote, via the Thinking About Art blog. Thinking About Art was a project of J.T. Kirkland, a fantastic artist in his own right. Check out his site here.
Who Is The Gray Guy?
I’ve always wondered.
This guy always freaked me out. He’s in the parking garage at 1800 Maple Avenue in Evanston, IL. Go there and see him. At every elevator there’s a sign. A sign with an icon for a man and an icon for a woman. And an icon of a gray man. Is he an alien? Is it some sort of pre-integration/racist statement? Does it mean that androids can ride the elevator, too? WHY?
Seven Years
220,924,800 seconds; 3,682,080 minutes; 61,368 hours; 2557 days; 365 weeks; 7 years.
What a life. So far we’ve…
..gone through that sweet but pretty geeky early stage: meeting, falling in love, and making a start at life…
…did each others’ hair…
…and got building on the future.
We had fun, partying with tutus around my neck…
…or building forts together in the living room…
…then hanging with kids (like Roman here), teaching them about (among other things)…
…like art…
…and bratwurst…
We also had adventures…
…high atop the Duomo in Florence…
…and on the Via Michelangelo (with Barry).
Then we had Miranda.
Yes, what a life, what a love. I am so grateful, so full… and looking forward to the future.
Thank you for being my bride and my friend, Alison.
Ideal Forms
As if I didn’t have enough to do (60 piece solo show to prep for, summer teaching, fall teaching, writing, shows, reading, service to students and church, loving my wife and being a new dad, seamlessly integrating the domestic and the transmundane, all the while calling out to others on the mythic quest for a transcendent evocative intersubjectivity), I’ve also started a new series of works; guess I’m a glutton for punishment. I actually think it all keeps me on point…
In any case, I’m contemplating the notion of ideal forms. Some of this springs from my interest in the trans-historic and very influential Platonic Solids, which I’ve talked about a lot in the past. With these works, I’ve taken physical shapes I’ve created for my painting and drawing students to work from and begun investigating why I have my students focus on them. In the future I’ll enumerate some of the reasons why I’m (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) calling them “ideal.”
Ideal Form 02 (Mixed Media Variant), Mezzotint print and gouache on Hahnemuhle paper, 7 inches in diameter, 2010. Click to see large version.
Ideal Form 01, Mezzotint print on Hahnemuhle paper, 5 inches in diameter, 2010. Click to see large version.
eikonktizo 