It’s been wonderful to see my artworks getting some new homes recently. I got a picture today from a recent sale, showing the new piece in place.
Awesome! And there are 5 more of that print left if you’re interested…
Tag Archives: Art
She Draws!!
My daughter draws. See for yourself:
Working hard on the Magna-doodle.
A tableau with a foot and the finished work…
The facility of a Twombly!
Her mother interprets the ineffable script.
The work table is itself a work of art…
A swift, sure hand speeds over an uncertain surface: glory!
Statement, January 2012
I create paintings, drawings and prints in an attempt to address – through archetypal themes and symbols – the fundamental questions, ideas, hopes, and concerns I have about being in the world. I write texts in an attempt to integrate rational conceptions and reflections with my passionate, sometimes illogical, image making. In tandem, these avenues of expression form a multifaceted arena of investigation and inquiry that I use every day to – hopefully – understand and make sensible the miraculous reality of being.
The statement above relies on the fact that I am deeply interested in three main aspects of the human condition: being, symbol, and body.
I am intrigued by the state of evocative subjective experience that Gaston Bachelard described as “the astonishment of being.” Thus, though I am interested art of all kinds, I take particularly to those forms that connect with our embodiment or sense of being. This means the physical world, the objects we use and love, and the bodies we inhabit are particularly important to the sort of art I want to see and make.
It follows then that I find the expression of meaning through symbol – that is, the potential for objects to accumulate and resonate with meaning – to be a central interest of my art-making practice. Anything containing meaning has been, as John Dewey wrote, “funded” with importance through the physical interaction and intellectual contemplation human beings have invested in it over time.
The body is the zone of incident where being-ness and the structures of significance coalesce. Therefore, I foster a deep appreciation for the human body as a container for and calibrator of meaning and knowledge. As a maker of images – be they painted, drawn, or printed – I function as a symbolist in the traditional sense; I create tableaus for the relational contemplation of that which is beyond the facts of appearance. In doing so I hope to stimulate an evocative, transformative experience in my fellow human beings.
Making My Work Mean So Much More
My wife, Alison, and I are beginning the process for an international adoption. It’s something we’ve thought about for a long time and something we’re excited about.
Above: me and my daughter drawing.
There are a lot of reasons we’re interested in this and there are a lot of logistics and options to consider. There’s tens of thousands of dollars to raise, most of which we don’t have just laying around. My wife is much more skilled than I am at holding all of these different issues in mind. She’s able to plan and strategize at a level that I can’t really even understand. So in the midst of this process I really just want to be able to DO something, to add something to it, to help make it happen.
As I think about this huge thing we’re getting into, I really just want to make sure that one of the other huge things in my life – my art-making – plays some role. I want to make my work mean more than perhaps it would on its own, more than it would do just hanging on a wall. I want my work to actually do something about the nearly 150 million orphans in the world. If, by some miracle, my artworks could help us bring one or two kids to a life of love and intentional care, then I want to do whatever I can to cause that to happen.
Above: Seven Mandalas for the Murky History of Beginnings and Endings, #5. One of the pieces for sale to help fund our adoption. My daughter Miranda helped me make this one.
So I’ve opened up a little etsy shop that features about 50 different artworks, with more to come. My hope is that I can have these works – images that I love and worked very hard to craft – become part of the means by which Alison and I do a different kind of work in the world… something that can make all the difference to a child who needs a mom and dad.
If you resonate with this sort of thing, I hope you’ll consider going to my etsy shop and purchasing a work. If you don’t see anything there you’re interested in, please check out my flickr and my main website as some of those works are still available as well; I’d be happy to hear from anyone who’s interested in any of the works.
Art Installation at Hobby Lobby
As seen the week before Christmas outside Hobby Lobby in Columbia, MO.
Remembering Dancer in the Dark
The last time I saw a Lars von Trier work in the theater it was the single most devastating experience I have had with a film. My wife (then girlfriend) and I saw Dancer in the Dark in late 2000, and had to travel to see it since it had a limited theatrical run.
The movie stirred the sort of emotional tension to which most films can only remotely aspire. Bjork’s performance was so direct and full; a true lived-in reality for her. It was a performance for which she won best female performance at Cannes. It was also one she reported as being extremely difficult emotionally, uncomfortable intellectually, and nearly torturous overall. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what I mean. Bjork has been widely quoted about her experience with von Trier and her feelings about the film, but one thing she has said sticks with me: “Lars doesn’t consider it his responsibility to make sure people are psychologically stable after he’s worked with them in such an intense way.”
I expect he probably operates the same way in regards to his audience as well.
After the epic final scenes in Dancer in the Dark, so charged with emotion and a visceral sense of anger and hopelessness, Alison and I openly wept for minutes on end. Feeling the horror of what was to happen, our eyes streamed, but the silent tears were transformed to loud cries and groans as the credits rolled. Many others sat there in the dark as well; they were crushed and crying, too. I’ve never been as emotionally undone in public before. It was an unforgettable experience.
Kirsten Dunst in a still from Melancholia
So it is that I am filled with some trepidation… tonight I’ll be seeing von Trier’s Melancholia with friends. Will I find myself as torn, as moved? Will I have such an unforgettable reaction to this film as well? Great artworks are like this: so pungent, so evocative, that they literally precede themselves with palpable force.
An iconic, alchemical image from Melancholia
I’m looking forward to this experience.
Inspiration – The Crusty Accumulation of Paint and Effort and Love and Meaning
Fall 2011 Color Drawing
Every semester I have to make more posts about how awesome my Color Drawing classes are.
Above: Marissa Valentino’s amazing Colored Pencil drawing of a head from our group project.
Students assembling one of our large group drawings.
Hannah and Vincent hard at work on a final figure work for the course.
Emily Armstrong’s 44 by 30 inch figure drawing in progress on the easel. You can see our parachute stage setup there behind. We love that parachute!
Above and below: A selection of drawings from the second half of the semester we pulled out for a group crit – some in progress, others complete. Overall a great effort by my students this year!
India Watts working on her Matisse master study.
The final group project installed in one of the stairwells at the University of Missouri.
What I’ve been musing on recently
I’ve been thinking about overtly shifting the direction of my work for a while now – perhaps a year. I don’t know that this shift would be easily discernible from the outside, but it represents a significant change of focus for me. As I look back over the last year of my practice and then cross-reference what I’m seeing there with some of the artists and artworks I’ve been looking at during that time, I can really see some connections forming.
For instance, check out these recent pieces:
The Teachers, Mandala for the Murky History of Beginnings and Endings #1, Portrait of Miranda at Thirteen Months, Two Bells, and The Seedbed #1.
Then compare their compositional formatting with aspects of the works of artists I’m looking at here:
Richard Diebenkorn, Miyoko Ito, Barry Le Va, Nicholas Byrne, David Rabinowitch, Julian Stanczak, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Marcelo Bonevardi, Frank Nitsche, Sharon Butler, and Vincent Fecteau.
It seems to me that my previous forays into more formal explorations – such as with the Locus Series (book here), and the conceptually interconnected Quintessence Series and Dodecahedron Series – are becoming more and more deeply apparent in my main body of work. In some ways I’m finding myself less drawn to the figure as a necessity and more drawn to the composition itself. I’m deeply interested in the perception of formal dynamics and the sense of haptic maneuvering that can take place within two-dimensional forces.
So it is that my recent miniseries, three of which are shown above in progress (9 inches in diameter, collage, gouache, acrylic and graphite on paper), have come about. They call back to previous works, such as this one from 2005, which was part of a side project I did while finishing up grad school (I needed a break from my thesis paintings):
First Bend, Oil on Canvas on Panel, 14 by 23 inches, 2005. Destroyed. Click to enlarge.
Anyway, who knows? We’re all moved and pressed and pushed, often by things we don’t entirely recognize. That’s why painting is so much more like getting lost in the woods than it is like jumping in a car and driving to the store for milk. It’s not meant to be that simple.
If it were that way there would be no discovery, no evocation beyond what we already know… and what good would that be?
Visiting Ocean Park
Recently I visited Fort Worth to experience the retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn‘s Ocean Park paintings. I have spent the last two weeks trying to process what I saw and what I think about what I saw. I’ve loved Diebenkorn’s work since my first encounter with it. I had to wait nearly 15 years to get the chance to really see the work in context. I’m in the midst of writing my reflections; they’ll appear over at Neoteric Art sometime in the next month or so. For now, check out some pictures of me and Marcus taking in the majesty of Ocean Park.
Marcus sketching from Ocean Park #30.
Marcus scrutinzing Ocean Park #135 – that’s the corner of Ocean Park #93 above his pencil.
Me taking in the glory of Ocean Park #40 from across the gallery.
Here I am considering Ocean Park #79.
And jump here and here to see some pages from my notebook written/scribbled during my time in the exhibition.
If you can’t make it to the venues the show will travel to over the next year, be sure to see this nice photo essay from the current iteration of the show.
eikonktizo 