The next time you’re in Italy, make sure you swing into The Pinacoteca Nationale in Siena to see Beccafumi‘s massive cartoons. I’m posting a few images of them below, photos I took while visiting Italy in 2005 – click on each for a large view.
Siena’s Pinacoteca has a number of other great Beccafumi works as well. His strange use of color and idiosyncratic figuration set him apart – they’re well worth the time to see them in person.
I graduated from SAIC nearly 10 years ago, and I’ve got a lot of memories from there. At first, right after I graduated, I was pretty negative about my experience. I felt as if they’d denied me some aspect of my education necessary to my future, that they’d tried to indoctrinate me, that they’d treated me like a number, not an artist.
In ways I was right, but in a lot of ways I was wrong. I’ve since gotten over it and look back with fondness, thankful that I grew so much during those years. One of the ways in which I grew was in my attention to the things that drew my eye. I began to document heavily, shooting thousands of photographs in the last couple years of my undergraduate career. Below I’ve posted some of those images. These are all from SAIC hallways and environs circa 1999/2000. I was obsessed with the angles, passages of light, and transitioning spaces in the places I saw every day.
Above, looking through the peep hole of my dorm door, 112 South Michigan Ave, 9th floor. This space no longer exists. Below, the elevator I took so many times.
Dead birds (they constantly flew headlong into the bank of windows on that facade, then fell, in droves, into the water below), dead leaves, and my shadow in a pool outside the lake side of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Two stairwell views on the way to the Advanced Painting studios (above and below).
Another stairwell view, light on the landing.
Glass and light, looking up toward the Advanced Painting studios.
Sunlight glances through the shades of my 13th floor (the smoking floor) dorm at 162 North State Street.
This is an old favorite from 2005… painted over a dead-end from sometime in the late 90s. Lots of scraping. Click for large closeup of the whole painting.
My most recent completed work is an oil painting, 48 inches in diameter, titled Certainty. Because of the nature of the ideas involved in this piece, it was constructed in a manner that did not allow for an “up” orientation. I actually never painted it from the same picture-plane position twice. I frequently moved my model and altered my position of observation with each session.
The work has any number of “correct” reading orientations, but I’d like to settle on one or find a way to spin the work slowly so that many possible positions are presented to different viewers. Click the image below to see a large GIF of the piece. The GIF shows 14 different “stations” of the painting (give it a few minutes to load fully). What’s the best way to view it?
“How are you gonna remake that in another art?” – Francis Bacon, 1985.
“What modern man wants is sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.” – Bacon, quoting Valery, 1985.
“I’m optimistic about nothing. Absolutely nothing.” – Bacon, 1985.
“CHEEERIO!” – Bacon, to Melvyn Bragg, 1985.
The South Bank Show profile of Francis Bacon, filmed in 1985, is a classic document of 20th century art.
You should watch it right now.
I think this (and some other stuff) has been influencing me in various ways…
In the forms I make for students to work from (drawing above, painting below)…
…and in the forms that make their way into my own work. Below, an experimental brick-based sculpture and a mezzotint featuring an invented pentagonally-based structure.
A lot going on these days.
The show I’m in at MANIFEST in Cincinnati has just released the catalog (cover below, click it to order one – it’s volume 43, bottom of the page).
Also, I’m included in a show at McNeese State University. Click here for more info. If you’re near Lake Charles, LA, go check it out!
I’ve got an article in the Columbia Daily Tribune up as well (and keep on the lookout over at Neoteric Art for my upcoming essay on Art and Subjectivity!). Click here to check out the Tribune piece. Below is one of the pieces I talk about (click it to see more about the image at the Brooklyn Museum):
I’ve been continuing work on the Lamentations 3 series – see the latest work below (and an earlier note here). You can see one of the other paintings in the series here.
You can probably see that I am referencing Arnold Bocklin‘s famous painting Isle of the Dead – which he recreated many times – in this work. The connotations it carries with it seemed like a good basis upon with to embed my own reference and image.
I am also pulling from Nerdrum‘s recurring figure of alienation, seen in his Man in an Abandoned Landscape and Iron Law (center, distance).
I have a pretty good crew of beginning painters this semester at the University of Missouri. I’ve been teaching the course a little differently this year, jumping into making stretchers and stretching canvases, working directly with color from the start, and assigning many, many more preparatory works than I usually do. I’ve been showing them Diebenkorn, Tim Kennedy, Sangram Majumdar, Catherine Murphy, and Uglow. The students seem to be responding.
We’ve been talking a lot about the color and direction of light, focusing intensely on how value shifts over forms and through spaces. I’m enjoying a lot of what they’ve done. Here are a few of the current project (all are oil on canvas, each approximately 14 by 14 inches):
Sarah Burch
Arin Hennessey
Dannah Moore
Jesus Roman
Katie Westhusing
Alyssandra Wilkey
A shot of Certainty (or Pinned; I haven’t decided yet) in progress:
A shot of Know in progress (I’m working on developing the second figure in sketches, but you can see her ghostly frame there in the background):
eikonktizo 
