A number of years ago I saw John Dubrow’s painting Rephidim. It inspired – eventually, after some gestation – this painting:
The work is titled Taming the Tongue, Study #2. The Dubrow work inspired this sketch, not the previous or subsequent works. After a while I manifested the idea in this work, but I have always been drawn to this small work and its connection to Rephidim. Learn more about that painting and John Dubrow himself here.
Thursday and Friday, October 28th and 29th, 2010, painter and educator Matt Klos visited the University of Missouri Art Department. His talk – as much a short lecture on the richness of painterly exploration over the last 75 years as it was an elucidation of his art – was a vibrant and refreshing event.
After the talk, Professor Klos led a large group of Mizzou undergraduate students in a critique of works from art majors Derek Frankhouser, Marcus Miers, Danielle Moser, and John Schneider.
The talk and critique were well attended and really modeled the intense, engaged dialogue we are trying to foster among our undergrads here.
Thanks, Matt, for coming!
For more on Matt Klos, see here.
New essay on Odd Nerdrum’s students – and self-proclaimed followers – here (click the image)
Image: my face reflected in a Nerdrum lithograph owned by a friend of mine.
Some time with Miranda in the studio today… she eyed that Nautilus shell closely, seriously. She then turned her steely gaze upon my painting…
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.
eikonktizo 
