IU’s Fine Arts Student Association recently solicited postcard sized works from alumni, like myself (MFA, Painting, ’05). Below is what I sent them.
Water From a Stone (Ballou, 2011 – For IU), ink on moleskin page.
Here’s a link what a fellow IU alum, Stephen Cefalo, submitted. The whole thing is to support FASA’s “Making Art Work” symposium on careers in the Arts. Click here for more information about it.
April 2011
Natalie Hellmann, a wonderful ceramist and person, is holding her MFA Thesis Exhibition this month. She has been an absolute joy to work with over the last three years, and I know I’ve learned much that I would never have known if not for our discussions.
Aarik Danielsen talks to Natalie about her trajectory as an artist in this feature in the Columbia Daily Tribune.
And here’s a link to a shorter article about her and her show.
I was asked a number of questions about Natalie and her work for that short article. Obviously space didn’t permit them to publish all of my thoughts, so I want to include them here as a way to honor Natalie.
Interview Question: “What do you enjoy most about her growth as an artist since you’ve met her? How has she grown?”
My response: “I am most impressed with how Natalie has held onto the core things she has cared about for many years while at the same time found ways to grow in her understanding of the materials and integrated relationships of form, content, and emotion with which she has worked while in grad school. Practically, this means that she has made numerous attempts to invest her project with fresh investigations, often working with different forms, structures (and orientations of these two) in order to determine what felt right. In many ways what she presents in this Thesis work seems inevitable, as if it all just had to be. But this is not the case. Natalie has studied her own work and intuitive expressions while also looking to other artists, writers, and philosophers who seek poetical understandings of human experience rather than just rational, direct, closed meanings in that experience. Natalie’s work is thus not meant to function as didactic communication first and foremost. Instead, it has grown to become a kind of emotional sounding board, wherein viewers may, if they are inclined, examine themselves via the suggestions of the forms. The work is more about awareness of being than declaring some specific message. I enjoy the fact that I got to participate in her exploration, be around her welcoming spirit, and grow in my own apprehension of what art can do through my time with her. ”
Interview Question: “What do you think her viewers are going to enjoy most from her exhibition this coming week?”
My response: “I think that viewers who allow themselves to intuitively consider the objects and arrangements in Natalie’s show will find a resonance in their own past experiences of feeling, seeing and being. What I mean is that, to me, the strength of Natalie’s work has always been in its gentle invitation to participate in awareness and emotional connection to shapes, colors, and surfaces. Being with Natalie’s artworks is something akin to standing by a stream and looking at the smoothed stones beneath the undulating water – if you’re in the right frame of mind, your emotional and psychological experience can become one of calm awareness. I think that’s the “repose” that Natalie suggests in the title for her exhibition. I hope that viewers will both experience and appreciate that quietude and tenderness; it’s something not often seen in art.”
Thank you, Natalie, for your work, your spirit, and your presence.
My latest essay, On Intuition and Analysis, is up over at Neoteric Art. Click HERE to take a look… and leave a comment there if you’ve got thoughts to add to the discussion!
“The ways that the human mind manifests itself in creative activity are vast and various. People have theorized about and argued over modes of creative impetus for millennia. Artists and lovers of art are constantly attempting to plumb these depths, always looking for some elucidation of the mechanisms and maneuvers our minds utilize when we are in that universally recognized but seemingly undefined state that is creation.” Click the link above to read more…
George Tooker died this week. You can read the New York Times obituary here. There’s also a wonderful short documentary that captures his gentle spirit here. And here‘s a short survey about the artist.
His work was evocative, awe inspiring, and it deeply affects those who explore it. He’s a part of the artistic lineage that I claim, particularly since I see myself as a symbolist.
““Symbolism can be limiting and dangerous, but I don’t care for art without it. The kind that appeals to me the most is a symbolism like a heraldic emblem, but never just that alone: the kind practiced by Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca.” – George Tooker
Sleep well.
Drawing is the literal manifestation of corrections, adjustments, and negotiations made during its own construction. A drawing (regardless of the manner of the image it displays) is always a representational work depicting the activity by which it was made. As we build a work, we self-correct. As we self-correct, we leave a trace of real observation and negotiation, declaring our willingness to leave behind what has not worked in the service of the total work and in anticipation of something that will work better. The final drawing is not a snapshot, not a slice of time, but a track record of integrations attempted, iterations discovered, and disparate elements syncretized.
Untitled (Beautiful Collision #3), Graphite on paper, 20 inches in diameter, 2008.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi created an amazing series of prints called Le Carceri (the Prisons). I recently found out that the Saint Louis Public Library has an edition of the prints, so I’ll be over there to see them soon.
The Prisons, Plate VII: The Drawbridge.
In these works the master deftly shows the ability for etchings – and really all of printmaking – to transcend the sense of a single, locked image that is a stereotype of the discipline. Using an inventive, intuitive action, Piranesi works the various states of the prison plates in dramatic fashion, transforming their contents, scale, and mood. The Dover publication of the first and second states of the plates is well worth the price.
I picked that book up in 2004 and it has inspired a great deal of my perspective on line work and current interest in printmaking as a malleable medium – as seen in the image above, titled The Weight (etching and mezzotint, 2008). Click on the image for a larger view.
As seen in Color Drawing, 2010. Click to enlarge.
At 7 seconds and 22 seconds into this short clip you can hear my daughter Miranda make the cutest lip vibrations ever. Around 24 seconds in she starts laughing. It’s like the Music of the Spheres: angelic, transcendent, excellent.
Photo above by our friend, Janelle. My shoes, Miranda’s teeth: perfect.
There’s a great piece up on the Guardian UK website showing a film of famed painter Sean Scully talking about working, being a father, and other topics. Though I’m not a huge fan of his work, I love what he says here:
“You’re trying to, in a sense, imitate God because you’re trying to be creative. And I can never make anything better than Oisin (his son). That’s my greatest creation.”
and here:
“I’m not sure that I have a destination in mind. I’m on a journey. I don’t expect to arrive.”
and here:
“If you’re plotting art, and trying to make something to get something, you’re not in a state of creative innocence. You’re not making art. You’re doing something else.”
This last bit is fantastic. I find it quirky for an artist like Scully – who has exhibited such consistency and clearly defined formatting for decades – to make that statement. But it is really something I believe in. I tell my students constantly: I couldn’t care less about products – I want experiences. I think that’s part of what Scully is saying there.
I don’t want my students to merely execute skills or master techniques; I want them to live out the sense of being that’s wrapped up in obtaining those skills or using those techniques. Making artwork is physical philosophy… it’s a musing on what it means to be miraculously conscious, purposefully aware, intuitively engaged and intellectually stimulated by a range of actions and tremendously important conditions of the human body/mind.
Above: Sketchbook drawing from 2006… it keeps coming back to me. Some day it’ll resolve into an image.
I saw the Scully story via Two Coats of Paint. Check out that blog.
eikonktizo 