Details from my latest work, The Mysterious Geometries of Orientation.
Category Archives: Art
Certainty (Or Pinned) and Know, In Progress
A shot of Certainty (or Pinned; I haven’t decided yet) in progress:
A shot of Know in progress (I’m working on developing the second figure in sketches, but you can see her ghostly frame there in the background):
New Tondo Works
I’m ramping up for a large solo show next year. Have been in the studio working in gouache on paper, inventing and reinventing figures, adjusting colors, fiddling with shapes, etc. Two of the studies are below.
Pivot, 23 inches in diameter
Know, 23 inches in diameter
I’ve also been working on two large works – 48 inches in diameter, oil on canvas on panel. This one is called Certainty.
Presenting Context Details
Details from Matthew Ballou’s context
Details from Nathan Sullivan’s context
Detail from Catherine Armbrust’s context
Detail from Sloane Snure Paullus’s context
Detail from Derek Frankhouser’s context
Detail from Marcus Miers’s context
Craft Studio Gallery Show, Presenting Context
I’ve got an installation up at the Craft Studio Gallery of the University of Missouri in Columbia.
I proposed the show and brought in the additional artists and their works. See below for more shots of the installations and to read our group statement. Be sure to click on each artist’s name to see more of their excellent work.
The Reception will take place February 19 at 4pm. Hope you can make it. Check back here soon for some details from the installed contexts.
Work and Installation of Context by Nathan Sullivan.
Work and Installation of Context by Derek Frankhouser.
Work and Installation of Context by Sloane Snure Paullus.
Work and Installation of Context by Catherine Armbrust.
Work and Installation of Context by Marcus Miers.
Presenting Context Group Statement
Artworks are almost always presented to viewers far removed from the circumstances of their creation. The inspirations, research, sources, methods, and background information that form the basis for all artworks are usually unavailable to the audience. This amounts to a veil of mystery surrounding the finished work, masking and focusing it. Artworks appear to have simply sprung fully formed into the world, though we know this to be false. This exhibition proposes to change that – at least in some small way – by displaying singular artworks in tandem with the ephemera that lead to their creation. Alongside completed works, artists will show some background to the art: inspiring data, evocative objects, images historical and pop cultural, as well as the more traditional sketches showing trial and error. Taken together, these artifacts will serve to illuminate the experiences artists go through to process their ideas and actions into finalized pieces of art.
Exhibiting Artists
Visiting Assistant Professors Matthew Ballou and Nathan Sullivan
MU Graduate students Catherine Armbrust and Sloane Snure Paullus
MU Undergraduate students Derek Frankhouser and Marcus Miers
Beginning Painting, August 1997
In August of 1997 I began art school at Munson Williams Proctor Institute of Art. At the time the school was transitioning into the upstate extension campus of Pratt Institute. Bright, new facilities (the best I’ve ever had access to, anywhere, any time) were there for us to cut our aesthetic teeth on, and an energetic faculty with a sense of the coming transformation challenged a really great group of students during those transitional years. Recognized artists such as Sam Salisbury and Silas Dilworth, among others, were there in and around the same years I was.
It was during my first weeks there that I was exposed to two images that would define much of the next decade of my artistic life. There, spread out on a table in the large painting room were two books (among many others). Two images – one from each – caught my eye. The first was “Twilight” by Odd Nerdrum, the second was an iconic Ocean Park series piece by Richard Diebenkorn. I clearly remember the paradoxical exclamation that leapt into my mind as I gazed at the two works that seemed separated by a huge gulf: “I want to do THAT!” – meaning both.
I’ve spent the last twelve and a half years working to reconcile them. And though I’ve moved on to deeper and perhaps more legitimate inspirational sources and muses, I find that key moment during one of my first official art classes still hangs with me. I’m grateful for it.
Peter Voulkos on Technique
Seen written on a slate blackboard. In a barn outside of Glen Arbor, MI. In 2008. Click for larger view.
More on Voulkos here.
More Collographs
Click on each for a more detailed view.
Collograph Prints
I’m beginning a series of collographic prints based on the angles of the pentagonal sides of dodecahedrons. Here are images from the first few.
All are in a range from 6 to 12 inches in diameter. I’m conceiving of them as tondos or ovoids, but haven’t decided on the orientations or how I’ll use light with them, since it’s so important to how they’re seen.
None of these prints have pigment of any kind on them.
Click on each image for a larger view.
Pillars of the Earth
Above: “Shoulder (Grindstone Cliff, Fall 2009)” Click the image for more info.
I love the Grindstone Nature Area here in Columbia, MO. There are a series of cliffs located there, and several of them are within 5 or 10 minutes walk for me. I often go there to draw or read or think.
I’ve gotten some nice drawings out of my time there. One I did a while back can be seen here.
Good stuff.
