Category Archives: Life

Beginning Painters, Spring 2010

Posted on by under Life, Teaching

I have a pretty good crew of beginning painters this semester at the University of Missouri. I’ve been teaching the course a little differently this year, jumping into making stretchers and stretching canvases, working directly with color from the start, and assigning many, many more preparatory works than I usually do. I’ve been showing them Diebenkorn, Tim Kennedy, Sangram Majumdar, Catherine Murphy, and Uglow. The students seem to be responding.

We’ve been talking a lot about the color and direction of light, focusing intensely on how value shifts over forms and through spaces. I’m enjoying a lot of what they’ve done. Here are a few of the current project (all are oil on canvas, each approximately 14 by 14 inches):

Sarah Burch

Arin Hennessey

Dannah Moore

Jesus Roman

Katie Westhusing

Alyssandra Wilkey

The Log Cabin, 1991-1992

Posted on by under Life

In the summer and fall of 1991 my cousin Chris and I constructed a log cabin in the woods outside of Camden, NY. Click here to see the area where the cabin existed.

Chris and I constructed a number of shelters and cabins while growing up. This one was perhaps our most ambitious attempt. The images below trace a path from my childhood home to the cabin. They start at the old homestead on Wolcott Hill Road (a home that no longer exists) where I lived between 1976 and 1995 or so.

…moving on to the Road itself…

…along the hills and ridges (the cabin is in the distance)…

…and right up to the front door.

As you can see, we we didn’t finish the chinking and other weathering materials before the storms of the winter came. Later on in the year the landowner found the cabin and instructed us to remove it.

We did… and built another one a few miles away. But that’s another post.

It was a great thing to be a part of, this cabin construction period of ours. Lots of life lessons learned, brother.

Dresses in 1967

Posted on by under Life

In 2003 I found a box of photographs strewn across the pavement in an alleyway in Evanston, IL. The box looked as if it had dropped out of a nearby dumpster, so I figured I could look through the photos, see what was interesting, and then place the rest back in the garbage where they’d evidently been put.

But I became intrigued with a series of portraits of a young woman. Always posed in some new dress in  various locations – out about town, in the bedroom, outside in the sunshine – she seemed full of life and hope. I found it troubling that these images of her youth were apparently no longer important to anyone. So I kept them.

As you can see in the example above, the time stamp shows “May . 67” – the rest have similar dates from that year.

Though they are banal and nearly 43 years old, I find them poignant and sweet, a lost record of a person’s experience of their life and time.

I have no idea who the woman was. Since she looks to be in her early 20s here, I expect she’s still living. Here’s hoping she’s had a good life… and continued to model her dresses with pride.

Beginning Painting, August 1997

Posted on by under Art, Life

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.

These Precious Things

Posted on by under Life

We’ve gotten a lot of awesome practical gifts from friends and family in anticipation of Miranda joining us this coming May. Everything has been wonderful and much appreciated; it’s always humbling when friends find a way to be particularly thoughtful in joining with me in some joy.

But two of the gifts we’ve received recently have felt strikingly beautiful to me. I want to share them below…

An artwork by Jen.

This piece, a printwork created from many layers of oil monotypes, is related to a group of works that Jen Meanley showed at Manifest in Cincinnati, OH over the past month. Jen sent it out of the blue when she heard Alison and I were pregnant. I love it and feel honored to have it.

I know Jen from grad school. She was such a strong presence at IU; her paintings and intelligence both intimidated and awed me during my time there. I’m glad we have continued to communicate over the years and I love that her’s will be among the first art Miranda will see.

A rattle from Connie.

Connie Gillock is a longtime friend of ours. I first met her at Ox-Bow in the summer of 2001. Connie has shown herself to be a master gift-giver; it’s a skill she’s fostered in her daughters. I can sense the great joy they get from giving, and appreciate how they keep it simple and genuine. This beautiful silver rattle is amazingly elegant… I can’t wait to see it in Miranda’s hands.

Thanks, Jen. Thanks, Connie.

Roberta Smith on Art and Time

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A great contemplation by the NYTs Roberta Smith from December 31st, 2009.

“Each piece of [art] is a concentration or distillation of ideas, inspiration, sensibility and craftsmanship into a frozen, obdurately physical moment that focuses our attention and then unfolds in the mind. Sometimes what unfolds is a chronological narrative conveyed by a single representative image or a series of them; sometimes it is an intense experience that seems to takes you out of time, yet persists and reverberates in the echo chamber of personal memory. Usually it is a combination of both.”

I couldn’t agree more. Read the rest here.