Starting this month I will be periodically posting a new series of portraits, beginning with the one below. The title of this series, Becoming the Student, is based on my desire to be quieter and learn from others rather than be entirely bound up in my identity as an educator. In Becoming the Student, I hope to present thoughtful, dignified portraits and use the time while creating the works as an opportunity to learn from the people who sit for me. With each post I will include some observation, quote, or other tidbit of glory that the subject shared with me.
The one below was created in 3 hours or so at a portrait workshop I conducted at The Columbia Art League yesterday. Pictured is my friend (and fellow CAL instructor) Shalonda Farrow. I was struck by how often she used the word “love” (as in: “Thank you, love” or “Do you need any of this, love?”) during the session. In speaking to her friends, she’s always intentional about communicating care and awareness. Shalonda seemed like a perfect initial entry into the Becoming the Student series. Here’s to many more. And thanks to Shalonda and the ladies at CAL!
Above: A sketch made from drawings and photos of a street scene in Guangzhou, China. This is an iconic tree to me, one that I walked past a dozen times, drew, took photos of, and have thought about many times since our trip in February of 2013. You can even see its foliage on Google images of the street corner where it’s located.
Above: A pile of the foam packaging inserts that accompany desktop Macs while in shipment. I use them as props in my Beginning Drawing and Painting setups.
Above: A post-it note sculpture that hangs in my studio at the university. One of our friends made it and I love it. I’m sure it will appear in many more drawings and paintings over the years.
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Sorry I’ve not been writing much/at all recently. Sometimes it’s best to be quiet.
As a freshman and sophomore art student I often made my paintings on the wall of my bedroom in Camden, NY. In this classic studio shot, my niece Cassilyn and I were painting away on an abstracted scene of Wolcott Hill Road.
It’s a great memory. Now that Cassi is a freshman in college herself, I figured it was time to share the joy. Love you, Cass! Here’s hoping your education and college adventures are as valuable and productive as mine were! :)
I have an exhibition that opens Sunday, September 29th at The Evanston Art Center. The show, titled In Three Moving Parts, is a three-person exhibition featuring nine of my own pieces alongside the works of Norbert Marszalek and Timothy P. Vermeulen.
I traveled to Evanston this week to help install the show. It was a very fast trip – I was only in town for about 12 hours – but it is always a joy to travel those streets. My wife and I spent quite a few years in Chicago and Evanston, and those cities are close to our hearts. If you’re from the Chicagoland area, please consider coming up for the show. The opening is Sunday, September 29th from 1 – 4. Below are a few gray scale shots of the show during our installation. To see it in all its glorious surface density and color, make your way there!
Click the images for a larger view.
I’ll be leading a workshop at the close of the show, on either November 9 or November 10. Stay tuned for information about that!
Also, I’d love to know what you think of the show – if you go, please leave comment here.
Above are two studies of light effects I made last week while traveling to visit family. Left is from sunlight glare through a window onto a wall/ceiling in the Fine Arts Building. Right is from a tableau of multiple light beams through an empty PBR case. Click the image for a large version.
I almost always carry a special art-making case of paper, gouache, collage material, and colored pencils with me on vacations to visit family. Got some good stuff this time.
I’ve got a solo exhibition coming up October 5 – October 25, 2013, in Hays, Kansas. The exhibition, titled ASEVENANDAWONADOE* will take place at the Moss-Thorn Gallery of Art on the campus of Fort Hays State University. Featuring thirty new works, the exhibition will unite the representational tondos and abstract mandalas that I have been creating simultaneously over the last few years.
Here is a brief statement about the show. A longer version will be presented during the closing reception:
ASEVENANDAWONADOE* – Paintings and Prints by Matthew Ballou
This exhibition explores the reality that a vernacular of meaning is constructed through our physical, emotional, and intellectual experiences. These experiences take place in the spaces that surround us, via the ideas that fill our minds, and through the objects that engage us. Meaning is imputed to these spaces, ideas, and objects rather than being necessarily inherent in them. This notion follows from the work of 20th Century Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who described how we “fund” our lives with significance through investments of time, emotion, and effort. These, in turn, come together to manifest the wealth of meaning we sense in our world.
By concentrating my artistic contemplation on objects that I have funded over the course of my life, I draw attention to not only their significance but also the modes, methods, and extents to which others have done the same. Conversely, by exploring issues that previous generations have investigated, such as the mandala form and geometric abstraction, I participate in the legacy of their contemplations. In a sense, I have borrowed from the storehouse they built while adding an investment of my own. The works on display here play on the distance between representation and abstraction, between the iconic and symbolic, between the organic and geometric, and between the received and the constructed.
*ASEVENANDAWONADOE is a word my young daughter Miranda invented during the time she was learning “real” words. It combined the structures of the new words she was encountering but was also, to her, connected to abstract concepts such as mathematics, pain, comfort, and security. An entirely made up word – yet one that relied on the received information and influences my daughter experienced – ASEVENANDAWONADOE is an example of something seemingly “meaningless” taking on meaning through experience, context, and subjectivity. In adding to the history and lineage of this word by including it in this exhibition, I further shape the contours of its potential meaning and more deeply connect it to the story of our family.
Click above to watch Hollie McNish’s spoken word recital about the appropriateness of breastfeeding and the inappropriate stupidity of the western world for having a problem with it.
Recently I’ve become more and more annoyed with the fact that women continue to be presented as eye-candy for men, while legitimate explorations of the body in art are consistently challenged. Writer Amy Wilder interviewed me a few weeks ago about this very issue.
These issues won’t go away. It’s happening right now in our culture. A few months after Robin Thicke’s idiotic and misogynistic music video went viral, Justin Timberlake entered the fray with his own. Both of these videos pair the fragmented display of women’s bodies with the rape-language of “you/i know you want it”. No, I won’t link you to the material I’m talking about. You’ve probably already seen it.
What it amounts to is millions of people apparently buying into the lifestyle and vision of the likes of Thicke and Timberlake (fully-clothed men who parade the bodies of women just to make a buck, who parade the bodies of women around for the delectation of and consumption of other men, who parade the purposely fragmented and de-individualized bodies of women around and pretend like it’s just a matter of “blurring lines”) while simultaneously shaming women for nursing their children in public.
It’s pathetic. It’s frustrating. It’s wrong. It’s wrong for specific profit-producing demographics (be they people or industries) to drive the cultural position and presentation of women’s bodies in this world. That’s exactly what’s happening here. It’s been happening for generations.
Part of what is playing into my anger about this is that I watched the documentary Girl Model, which really disturbed me. If you haven’t watched it, do it. It’s streaming on Netflix right now and is eye-opening.
On top of this, going through the adoption process over the last year really disabused me of the rose-colored-glasses ideas I had about the progress of women in the last couple of decades. Globally, it’s dangerous to be born female. In the west, where we think we can rest on the laurels of our “progressive” progress, it’s hard to make people understand this. I won’t recount the horrific stories that have been in the news recently. But it’s in THIS STUFF – where women are asked to APPEAR but not to ACT – that we continue to fail as societies. Our media continues to present a vision of women as young and as tight and as coquettish as men want them to be. The second their bodies resist the classification of appearance (for instance, when a woman breastfeeds her child or becomes too old to fulfill the wish-fantasies of 18 year old boys) they are simply denied. Hidden. Disappeared.
This is a major problem, and more people need to get angry about it.
I think about the world my two daughters are living in…
On May 22, 2013, I gave a public talk at the Boone County Chambers Room in Columbia, Missouri that addressed the question, “What is a great image?”
Below is audio from that talk synced up with the slide show that I used. If you’ve got an hour and are interested in how art, history, and human experience interconnect, you might appreciate this talk. Obviously it’s by no means exhaustive and has to skim over many issues, but I think it’s got some quality observations. I would greatly appreciate any questions, comments, or observations you might have after watching through.
Shalonda, 13 by 11 inches, pastel on paper. 2013.
eikonktizo 
