“How are you gonna remake that in another art?” – Francis Bacon, 1985.
“What modern man wants is sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.” – Bacon, quoting Valery, 1985.
“I’m optimistic about nothing. Absolutely nothing.” – Bacon, 1985.
“CHEEERIO!” – Bacon, to Melvyn Bragg, 1985.
The South Bank Show profile of Francis Bacon, filmed in 1985, is a classic document of 20th century art.
You should watch it right now.
I think this (and some other stuff) has been influencing me in various ways…
In the forms I make for students to work from (drawing above, painting below)…
…and in the forms that make their way into my own work. Below, an experimental brick-based sculpture and a mezzotint featuring an invented pentagonally-based structure.
Sloane Snure Paullus: making Texas proud with glitter since 2007. Click on the above image for a more full-screen experience. See her work here.
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
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
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
Me and MU BFA graduate Jake Crook at the MU Senior Exhibition on December 17, 2009. We had a donation of beverage cups from Culver’s… brought a new meaning to the phrase “get culverized!”
Me with one of my favorite art students, Shannon.
She earned honors for her work in Psychology at MU. She minored in Art, which is obviously where I worked with her.
Honor students often name a faculty person who walks with them in the procession to the ceremony where they receive their honors regalia. I was humbled when Shannon asked me to attend the festivities with her.
She is a dedicated, thoughtful, conscientious person. I’m looking forward to seeing the trajectory of her continued success as she looks toward Graduate School and combines her love for people with her love for art. Good job, Shannon!
My students always do good work at the Cast Gallery of the Art and Architecture Department at the University of Missouri. I created a post on Art and Architecture’s Blog, Musings, explaining why I continue to take my students to work from the casts. Check it out.
Above: my demo drawing from this semester.
In my Drawing 3 (basically Life Drawing) course at the University of Missouri, we have a series of projects that focus on developing drawings that have a dynamic, shifting arrangement of bodies and spaces. The goal is for students to hone their ability to combine observed form and light with a knowing, thoughtful editing of the overall structure in order to create/direct the psychological environment of the picture. In earlier projects, students are asked to create a drawing of a model who, after a certain period of time, shifts part of his or her pose. Students have to adapt their drawing, learning how to react the experience of seeing rather than freak out that everything isn’t the same (as if anything stays the same anyway). Later on, we work on a longer series of poses over the course of 8 or 10 class periods. Using up to three different models who strike a couple different poses, the class develops larger drawings that incorporate the combination of the different figures in some kind of invented, yet observation-based, pictorial framework. Below are a few examples of what students have done. Keep in mind that none of the models posed together, and often very little of the stage arrangement was the same. I could go on and on about how I believe these projects really strengthen the students to have an EXPERIENCE of art rather than simply executing an exercise, but I’ll let their work speak for them. Click on each for a larger version.
by Lindsey Cole
by Dan Jimenez
by Roxanne Kueser
by Charlie Hostman
by Jared Fogue
by Marcus Miers
by Mallory Parsons
by Derek Frankhouser
eikonktizo 
