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.

The Size of Eyes

My eyes are significantly reduced in size by my glasses. Here’s a comparison (photos taken from same position just a few seconds apart):

And here’s a tighter juxtaposition:

It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s actually huge – the smaller version is only about 75% of the larger.

I wonder what this alteration in the size of my eyes does for my interactions with students, colleagues, and friends…

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.

Chromatic Totality

I’ve got another amazing group of Color Drawing 1 students this semester. Below I’ll highlight just a few of the many who’ve distinguished themselves this year. Please click on each to see them up close.

A work in colored pencil by Marissa Valentino. About 18 by 18 inches.

A drawing by Lirong Gong. Chalk pastel, 24 by 18 inches.

Megan Schaffer has an amazing sense of material handling. Her oil pastel work here is 30 inches by 22 inches – it’s just one of 4 or 5 that are really stellar.

Carly Kurka working the chromatic shadows, 18 by 24 inches, oil pastel.

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Becca Wholey’s grid work fulfilled the project parameters expertly – 16 by 16 inches, colored pencil.

It’s been a privilege to work with these students – here’s hoping they continue on with me in Color Drawing 2!

Inspiration – Richard Serra

Just got back from a trip to Dallas/Fort Worth to visit the Diebenkorn Ocean Park retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. It was stunning, and I’ll be writing my reflections on the show soon. But before we even got inside, we experienced one of the best Richard Serra sculpture I’ve ever seen. Below are some shots from my visit – I’m with one of my best students and friends, Marcus Miers.

Marcus at the base.

A shot of the cor-ten behemoth against the sky.

A spire of light wedging into the interior of the piece.

Gazing upward from within.

And here I am against the space and light.

Serra’s piece at MMA in Fort Worth is spectacularly aural in its manifestation. There is the quintessential feeling of massive heaviness, the sense of the density of the steel, the way the work shapes the space and the sky and the light within its parameters – but the sense of sound is truly unique. In most of Serra’s semi-enclosed works there is a kind of stillness to the air and the sound, a weightiness similar to the feeling of walking through a forest heavy with new-fallen snow. In this piece, however, the sound is fast and expansive, and every slight movement or sound is magnified and compressed within the interior space. What happens inside is heightened for those within, but people outside have their sense of the interior sound scape dampened. This inside and outside duality of sound is integral to the piece and makes the normally ominous quality of Serra’s steel more whimsical and lightly-felt.

Transient Geometries at Antelope Valley College

Quintessence #10, multiple monotype and woodblock prints, with acrylic, graphite and gouache on paper, 2009. Click to enlarge.

I’ve been included in a small group show at Antelope Valley College, which was organized and curated by AVC Professor Christine Mugnolo. I’m honored and excited by my fellow exhibitors: J. Jordan Bruns, David Eddington, and Lisa C. Soto. Click here for the AVC Gallery page describing the show!

Full disclosure: I went to grad school with Christine and she was the subject of one of the shows I worked with Gillock Gallery to organize back in 2006. I wrote an essay about Christine’s drawings and Gillock published a small catalog for the exhibition containing the text and a selection of her work. I’m really proud of that entire project and hope you’ll take a look here.

Here’s one of the drawings from the show – Self Portrait on Olive Ground, Pastel on toned paper, 24 by 18 inches. Click to enlarge.

Two New Books

First off, I received my new Diebenkorn book this week. Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series is lush (in design), expansive (it contains many reproductions), and – best of all – it’s full of never before seen (in broadly-published form) paintings, prints and drawings. I’m doubly charged up by this book since I (and one of my students, Marcus Miers) are heading down to Fort Worth to see the Diebenkorn show next week!

Also, my own slim tome – 62 pages, 9 essays – just came out, published by Neoteric Art in Chicago.

It’s available in standard paperback version and in an ereader version. It should be up on Amazon in a few weeks as well.

All These Remainders

“The creation of legend is never known at the time of its genesis. Only displacement can imbue the past with the aura of sentimentality. Oh, to yearn, to stretch back with every fiber! To feel again that desire; the shrouded figures that play still on those lost, faded shores. Seeing ever so faintly the afternoon sunlight through old windows and recalling the impression of newfound knowledge in those dusty old books. Oh, to squeeze the eyes tightly, if only to glimpse for one moment that gone-ness – to feel it in the pit, to be in that pit, to stay: impossible. Knowing that it all exists only because I can’t stay there. Oh, to regress into my own idealization, to see myself again as I did then…”

“All these remainders have a keening tonality, a tinnitus of sounds, which we are unable to hear outwardly but which our hearts intuit. They are the silent sirens of what has gone before, and they call to us with accolades and accusations.” – from A Mnemonic of Longing, an unpublished essay, 2002-2009.

So ends my remembrance of Ox-Bow, ten years after. So much more could be said, be shown. I’ll leave it at this for now. The text I have shared in these posts is, perhaps (if only to me), my best artwork. It evokes for me the feeling of remembering and the instances that remembrance serves equally well. The words I’ve shared are as present to me as the times they transform and recreate. In turning them over, reading and re-reading them again and again, I sense anew so many true things. In them I know again the many secrets I held all those years ago. The creaking of the Inn, the internal affects of grasses and trees, and the whispers of the wind – which even now (this VERY second!) are stealing across the Lagoon and through the meadow, past the Mary K and over the dunes – are all as true now in these mnemonic words as they were when I wrote those words down. And they rest in me, speaking in me as to one who has glimpsed a deep but unnameable majesty. Darkness sits near (deathly close to) light.

– Matt Ballou, September 1, 2011.

Images from digital photos taken between May and August 2001.