Tag Archives: Art

Color Drawing, Fall 2012

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching

We’re halfway through another great semester of Color Drawing. Below are just a few examples of some of the standout work from this year. Click for higher res!

Danielle Wallace, Chalk pastel of reflections.

Emily Brewer, Oil pastel study of colored and fluid filled glass.

Emily Brewer, Oil pastel large arrangement of reflective and glass objects.

Jessica Bremehr, Colored pencil study of a lamp.

Jessica Bremehr, Oil pastel large arrangement of reflective and glass objects.

Jessica Bremehr, Chalk Pastel study of reflective surface.

Ginny Algier, Oil pastel large arrangement of reflective and glass objects.

Kevin Moreland, Chalk Pastel self portrait in a reflective surface.

Julie Bennett, Oil pastel large arrangement of reflective and glass objects.

Click HERE to see more of my posts on my Color Drawing class glory!

Barry Gealt: Embracing Nature at the IU Art Museum

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching, Writing

Yesterday my wife, daughter, and I made an epic 17 hour round trip to Bloomington, Indiana. We left our home at 9am and returned a little after 2am the next morning.

It was a long, rainy drive, but it was worth it. We went to the opening reception for Emeritus Professor Barry Gealt’s retrospective exhibition Embracing Nature at the Indiana University Art Museum.

Barry was my main professor while I earned my MFA at IU and has continued to be a mentor and encouragement. It was the least I could do to be present for this opening and evening of celebrating Barry’s life and work as both a painter and an educator. Below are a few fragments from the night.

The text just inside the doorway to the Special Exhibitions Wing of the IU Art Museum.

Detail of Greenwich Beach, Prince Edward Island, 2009. The top layer of a living document.

Detail of Condon’s View of Corea, Maine, 2011. Brushmarks are alchemical – both entirely surface and entirely illusion; both/and.

Prince Edward Island, East Point (2009), commands a wall in the gallery. The works spill and splash; their air inundates viewers.

A detail of the majestic edge of Indiana Vista, 2001. Paint as light, matter, air, and presence.

A detail view of Owen County Vista from 1994 – compared to Barry’s more recent work this is pretty smooth. Even so, it’s tremendously worked and amazingly saturated.

Beautiful density in a detail of The Cave, 1994. This painting is incredible in its color and level of surface development. Evocative.

Robert Shakespeare’s Light Totem saturated the area outside Barry’s show with energy – my 2 year old loved it.

There’s Barry waving to me from across the Atrium during the post-reception dinner. A beautiful space and a beautiful evening.

Here I am (sporting my Indianapolis Colts Marvin Harrison #88 jersey) holding the book that was published in tandem with the exhibition. It is AWESOME. You can pre-order your own copy by clicking here. Do it! The essays are wonderful, the reproductions and details fantastic. I was able to have a significant correspondence with the author, Rachael Berenson Perry, in 2011 which resulted in many of my thoughts and reflections on my time with Barry being used in the book. I was extremely honored to be included in this text; it’s really more than I could have imagined. To get to be a part of this celebration of Barry’s life and work is humbling and truly a highpoint of my life as an artist.

If you can get to the show, DO IT. It’s worth it.

Barry Gealt: Embracing Nature will be on at the IU Art Museum from October 6 until December 23, 2012

Inspiration – Norleen Nosri

Posted on by under Art, Life, news

Norleen Nosri is a talented ceramist from Malaysia who is earning her MFA here at the University of Missouri. I’m privileged to work with her and to own several of her beautiful pieces. Her work is, to me, almost above comment. The compositions she creates are gentle and evocative. She says they are an attempt to “elicit harmony in duality.”

Above: Two images I took when I met with Norleen in her studio this past week. These groups of objects were there awaiting their placement in larger compositional arrangements and I was struck by the incidental beauty of their color, interrelated shapes, and intimate space. There was an amazing northern light coming in through a bank of windows; it produced a wonderful glow on the exquisite surfaces of Norleen’s porcelain vessels…

Here are two cups my wife and I have that were made by Norleen.

This last image is an example of Norleen’s awesome maker’s mark. The Nosri name is of tremendous importance to her, and is a connection to her family, her country, her heritage, and the meaning she understands of life. Having discussed this name with her many times, I always make it a point – whenever I hold one of her creations – to turn it over and look upon this honorable name.

We Need Tears

Posted on by under Art, Life

“Tears streamed down Guston’s cheeks as he spoke about the painting.” – David Reed, Soul-Beating

This is where I live, where I want to live, where I wish I was all of the time, where I hope to be when I’m not there, the place I seek when I’m distracted by maintenance and administration and logistics. The place of hopeful devastation. The place of eucaristic, sacramental meaning. The place of alchemical negotiation. When Guston wept over Piero della Francesca’s painting, he knew the work more truly than any of our theories or proliferating words could hope for. Those manifestos and ideologies and conceits so often deaden us to the transformative power of good work, so often distract us from sensing the potency there.

This week I’ve been weeping over Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In particular, his Great Gate of Kiev is so full and so amazing that it transcends analysis. I could go on and on with words – context, philosophy, history, theory – but the reality is that the wrenching torque created by that string of notes is MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE than any of that! My face is contorted and tears stream because of an intense inner hope/fear/joy/sadness brought to the fore by Mussorgsky’s music.

I don’t know why I’m writing this other than to say that this paradoxical emotional state is why I am an artist. The razor edge between enforced humility and exultant pride, between tragic fear and triumphant happiness, between deep sadness and rich, confident hope – these are the things great art gives us. The paradox is the liminal zone, the threshold between true feeling and mere conjecture.

We need tears in the face of these things, not jokes or theory or attempts at certainty.

Above: Viktor Hartmann’s design for the Great Gate of Kiev. Click the image to listen to a great performance of the piece.

The Coat

Posted on by under Art, Life

When I turned 18 in 1994, my mother gave me a Swiss Army Trench coat, also called a Greatcoat. If you poke around on eBay or other vintage and/or Army+Navy stores you can often find these high quality coats for $75 or $80; mom got this one for something like $10. They’re all fairly old – mine is around 45 or 50 years old. It’s definitely been the most enduring body-covering item I’ve had, robustly surviving throughout the years with only some minor modifications. Gotta love those official Swiss cross buttons!

Here’s my coat hanging on the door of the Alaskan Oil Konvenience store where I worked for several years before and during my undergraduate time. This shot is from 1997, just a few years after first getting the coat, taken with my father’s ancient Minolta SLR.

Above: Self Portrait with Halo, acrylic on canvas, 8 by 10 inches, 2000. There’s that coat again – obviously I’ve built some sort of persona around it. Forgive my self-aggrandizement. I can still remember the day in my dorm room at SAIC when I began this piece. It was the last in a line of undergraduate self portraits featuring the coat.

Here I am at Salmon River Falls in upstate New York, in a photo taken by my cousin Chris. This image is from 2002.

Jumping forward a few years here – This photo was taken in the winter of 2007/2008 just after I moved to Missouri to start teaching at Mizzou.

And now today in my studio with a dodecahedron below it.

This coat has been a great companion for me. I’m going to celebrate it by following in the footsteps of Diebenkorn, who famously created a series of etchings based on his own old coat for a special volume of W. B. Yeats poems (If you’ve got a few grand, you can purchase an edition – there’s one left – here). I want to dwell on that coat and where it has been with me. Keep an eye open for some paintings and/or drawings to appear soon.

And HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!! #36years

New Mandalas

Posted on by under Art

I’ve created nearly 30 new mandalas in the last few weeks. Each is primarly oil or oil pastel on paper with colored pencil, crayon, or other mixed media added. Most are about 9 inches in diameter. Below are two of the group. Click for more detail.

Both Sides of the Brain

Posted on by under Art, Life, news

Mr. Aaron Coleman, mezzotinter extraordinaire, has been coordinating this traveling exhibition for quite some time. And now the first shows are coming soon.

Cover for the folio cases: GLORY! Photo by Aaron Coleman.

And here’s a listing of the locations for this traveling show – click the highlights for more info about the specific exhibitions:

2012

August 13 – September 18, 2012 ~ Basile Gallery, Herron School of Art. Indianapolis, Indiana

October 3 – October 28, 2012 – Washington Printmakers Gallery. Silver Spring, Maryland

TBA – Gallery 215. Northern Illinois University School of Art. Dekalb, Illinois (link when available)

2013

May 20 – August 29, 2013 – George Caleb Bingham Gallery. University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri (link when available)

TBA – Lamar D. Fain School of Art. Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, Texas (link when available)

The edition is in the permanent collections of Herron School of Art and Northern Illinois University School of Art. BOO-YEAH!