Tag Archives: odd nerdrum

Recent Publications

Posted on by under Art, Life, Writing

13725109_10154344363709491_3439759102298509937_oCollaborative digital artwork featured in the neotericART piece. See below.

I’ve had the great pleasure of having a few publications this year. I’ve always got 2 or 3 pieces in the works, so it makes sense that they’d come out from time to time. This year sees a brief but prestigious invitation and two wonderful panel discussions that I coordinated. If you’d like to check them out, see below:

Nerdrum Bio for Grove Dictionary of Art

Dr. Judith Rodenbeck of the University of California invited me to write a biography of Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum for the Grove Dictionary of Art, an imprint of Oxford University Press (online version is here). Dr. Rodenbeck is the lead editor of the 2016 Grove Art update. My piece will be published in the next couple of months. I’m pretty excited about this!

A Non-Verbal Debate: Digital Collaborations

This piece, created for neotericART (where I have contributed for many years), is a discussion of online, live collaboration tools – digital whiteboards – and how artists are beginning to adapt them into their work. Just the tip of the iceberg on this developing practice!

You Make The Work By Performing It: A Roundtable Discussion on Oblique Perspective

The Finch is an amazing online publication co-edited by Richard Benari & Lauren Henki. They invited me to lead a group of my graduate students in a panel discussion about some of the ideas that Dorothea Rockburne brought up in a recent interview. Our far-ranging conversation was one of the best I’ve had in a long time.

Beginning Painting, August 1997

Posted on by under Art, Life

In August of 1997 I began art school at Munson Williams Proctor Institute of Art. At the time the school was transitioning into the upstate extension campus of Pratt Institute. Bright, new facilities (the best I’ve ever had access to, anywhere, any time) were there for us to cut our aesthetic teeth on, and an energetic faculty with a sense of the coming transformation challenged a really great group of students during those transitional years. Recognized artists such as Sam Salisbury and Silas Dilworth, among others, were there in and around the same years I was.

It was during my first weeks there that I was exposed to two images that would define much of the next decade of my artistic life. There, spread out on a table in the large painting room were two books (among many others). Two images – one from each – caught my eye. The first was “Twilight” by Odd Nerdrum, the second was an iconic Ocean Park series piece by Richard Diebenkorn. I clearly remember the paradoxical exclamation that leapt into my mind as I gazed at the two works that seemed separated by a huge gulf: “I want to do THAT!” – meaning both.

I’ve spent the last twelve and a half years working to reconcile them. And though I’ve moved on to deeper and perhaps more legitimate inspirational sources and muses, I find that key moment during one of my first official art classes still hangs with me. I’m grateful for it.