Details from Matthew Ballou’s context
Details from Nathan Sullivan’s context
Detail from Catherine Armbrust’s context
Detail from Sloane Snure Paullus’s context
Detail from Derek Frankhouser’s context
Detail from Marcus Miers’s context
Tag Archives: painting
Craft Studio Gallery Show, Presenting Context
I’ve got an installation up at the Craft Studio Gallery of the University of Missouri in Columbia.
I proposed the show and brought in the additional artists and their works. See below for more shots of the installations and to read our group statement. Be sure to click on each artist’s name to see more of their excellent work.
The Reception will take place February 19 at 4pm. Hope you can make it. Check back here soon for some details from the installed contexts.
Work and Installation of Context by Nathan Sullivan.
Work and Installation of Context by Derek Frankhouser.
Work and Installation of Context by Sloane Snure Paullus.
Work and Installation of Context by Catherine Armbrust.
Work and Installation of Context by Marcus Miers.
Presenting Context Group Statement
Artworks are almost always presented to viewers far removed from the circumstances of their creation. The inspirations, research, sources, methods, and background information that form the basis for all artworks are usually unavailable to the audience. This amounts to a veil of mystery surrounding the finished work, masking and focusing it. Artworks appear to have simply sprung fully formed into the world, though we know this to be false. This exhibition proposes to change that – at least in some small way – by displaying singular artworks in tandem with the ephemera that lead to their creation. Alongside completed works, artists will show some background to the art: inspiring data, evocative objects, images historical and pop cultural, as well as the more traditional sketches showing trial and error. Taken together, these artifacts will serve to illuminate the experiences artists go through to process their ideas and actions into finalized pieces of art.
Exhibiting Artists
Visiting Assistant Professors Matthew Ballou and Nathan Sullivan
MU Graduate students Catherine Armbrust and Sloane Snure Paullus
MU Undergraduate students Derek Frankhouser and Marcus Miers
Beginning Painting, August 1997
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.
Neil Gavett, Model Extraordinare
The Columbia Daily Tribune is running a feature on Neil Gavett, one of the primary models I’ve used in my work over the last couple of years. He’s a pretty cool guy, has an interesting back story, and a staggering plethora of tales to tell. Neil is also a professional art model; he’s posed for nearly 10,000 hours and has been working consistently for over a decade in the Mid-Missouri area. Below is the first painting I ever did of Neil (Fall 2007).
I’ve been honored to get to know the man. In working with him, I have tried to create images worthy of the symbiotic relationship we’ve developed, a relationship that could never happen without his deep intention and purposeful action as a man and a model.
Here’s to many more pictures, Neil!
UPDATE: Here’s a related item from the New York Times today: “In the Altogether.”
Short Essay About Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth, Sea Boots, tempera on panel, 29 b y 19.5 inches, 1976.
I’ve got a new short essay up over on Neoteric Art. The piece is called “A Few Days With Wyeth” and is about the trip I made out to Philadelphia for the Wyeth retrospective there in 2006. Read the piece at Neoteric and let me know if I got too sentimental or overzealous.
eikonktizo 
