Alison and Miranda before Diebenkorn’s Interior with View of Building (1962)
Miranda crawling around beneath Corot’s Don Quixote (1868)
Miranda with Robert Henri’s Patience Serious (1915) – looks like Miranda’s got a painted doppelganger.
Category Archives: Art
Sense of Place
There is a great Bad At Sports interview with long time Ox-Bow cook and Director of Chicago’s Roots & Culture gallery Eric May. It’s awesome. Check it out here.
Above: Eric in his grilling glory, summer 2001.
A lot of what Eric talks about in the conversation with Claudine Ise reminded me of my favorite parts of Ox-Bow life… it creates its own micro-cultural climate, its own peculiar and special sense of place. Here are some of my thoughts on it…
“It is interesting that the wonderful mixture of scents is always with you: air, fire, dirt, grass, and water. There is the staleness of cigarettes, the pungency of weed, the hoppy brews left after the parties. There are dinners of steak, shrimp, pork chops, Portobello mushrooms and ever-present feta and peas. There are soups, fish, teas, deserts, additions, and all; delights each and every day. All manner of body odors redound. The lesser animals also make their presence known, as does the mildew. Rain always works its strange rejuvenations to counter the constancy of the Lagoon. There is the rotting wood, the wet leaves, the morning mists, and my hair with its own unwashed, unkempt glory.” – – from A Mnemonic of Longing, an unpublished essay, 2002-2009.
Studio Visit From Keith
The talented and dinosaur-loving Keith Montgomery visited my studio last week to shoot some video and take some still images. Keith is a good friend and a former student of mine who has made tremendous strides in his photography over the last couple years. You can see a bunch of his work here, but also click on the images below for larger versions (there are also a number of other shots). You can also see our collaboration piece in The Larry Show, up at the University of Missouri’s George Caleb Bingham Gallery through August.
The Grand Studio
At Work…
Looks like I’ve got some new “at work” shots for my website, eh? Thanks, Keith!
Miranda at 13 Months
Click the image for more information.
Painting, like language…
“Painting, like language, is not a progressive medium. Its vernacular changes over time, but its fundamental concerns will always assert themselves. The basic, the human, and the timeless find voice – as do the trivial, the vapid, and the passe – in painting, just as they do in language.” – from a note scribbled in 2003.
Transpositions Feature
My work has been featured on the Transpositions website.
Transpositions is a collaborative effort of students associated with the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The site has vibrant discussions going on among PhD students and post-graduate commentators (as well as contributors from around the globe) on a variety of topics. If you’re interested in the intersection of Art, Theology, and intellectual inquiry, I suggest you check them out.
Talking About Tondos
Talk by Matthew Ballou at The 930 Art Center, June 10, 2011
I gave a talk at the 930 Art Center in Louisville, KY last week. If you’d like to listen to it (it’s only 16 minutes long), click above for the mp3 file. To see some of the work I was thinking about in this talk, click here.
FINALLY
Historic Diebenkorn exhibition, years in the making, will finally go up in Fort Worth in September 2011!
Here is the itinerary for the touring exhibition:
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
September 25, 2011–January 22, 2012
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California
February 26–May 27, 2012
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
June 30–September 23, 2012
Who’s going with me!?
Also, here’s the catalog. I just ordered mine.
Inspiration: Sandra Ramos “The Mirror Poems”
Last week I was in Louisville, KY for my show at the 930 Art Center. While in town I took a drive to 21C, a contemporary art space situated in a posh hotel. 21C blew my mind, but there was one work in particular that I spent a good deal of time with: Sandra Ramos’ Unknown (The Mirror Poems – Toi Derricotte). The work, an installation of image and text on vinyl and using mirrors and inverted imagery, is very beautiful and evocative. Here are a few shots of the work in situ, but be sure to click the link above to learn more.
A few of my favorite lines:
“The eye in the mirror is the mirror of the eye.”
“If you ask it to show you the world it will show you the eye of your mother.”
If you get a chance to go to 21C, JUST GO DO IT.
Pyramid Song, Summer 2001
“Alone in the cabin, two in the morning… “black-eyed angels swam”* in the murk, delivering tinkling songs of love and death to our sleeping ears” – from A Mnemonic of Longing, an unpublished essay, 2002-2009.
“It has taken me years to process this experience. It was something that could not be known in the moments of living it, only remembered as a fleeting figment seen with the mind’s eye, felt like a dream but never realized fully. It was all ashes and phantasm, crystallized cataracts in the eyes of understanding. To aim for understanding of the ethereal encounter – to know it, integrate it, and interpret it – is the essence of foolishness; its distance from this world is so far as to confound all reckoning.” – from A Mnemonic of Longing, an unpublished essay, 2002-2009.
eikonktizo 
