Tag Archives: painting

Matt Ballou: RANGE – Reception at William Woods University

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching, Writing

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My exhibition – Matt Ballou: RANGE – is still up at William Woods University until December 16, 2012. I hope you can go see it if you haven’t yet. Below are some photos of the space, both after the installation and during the reception. I want to thank everyone who came out – friends, students (graduate and undergrad, current and former), and colleagues – and especially Jennifer Sain for her help in making the exhibition happen. Special thanks to Jane Mudd for encouraging William Woods to host this show.

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Installation, back on November 12, 2012.

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Three panoramas of the installed work.

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Two of my all-time favorite works… Locus #77 and #78

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Beautiful angles and shapes during the reception…

At the reception I gave a brief impromptu talk that led into some interesting questions from the audience and my own musing on the work.

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Me during my talk – Photo by Kevin Larson.

Click here to download the talk and Q+A session (42 MB MP3 format, 50 minutes long).

Some notes about the talk:

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Photo of me at the talk – Photo by Eric Norby.

My First Classroom

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching

Click to see a larger view.

Here it is.

My first REAL classroom. I’d done a bit here and there. I’d done some substitution work. I’d done some minor short term stuff. But this was my first place of my own. Room 175 in the The Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University Bloomington. I taught some amazing students there. I cut my teeth, tested my strength, felt out the pace and scope and sequence of teaching. It was good to go back to that room recently – more than 8 years after – and spend time in that space. Snap a picture. Sense the light. Remember the slide of charcoal, the scratch of graphite, and the laughter of willing students.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember why this path I’ve taken is important. In the silent witness of this room there is proof of what I – what so many of us – have tried to express about awareness and presence.

I’m still seeking to be worthy of that task.

Barry Gealt: Embracing Nature at the IU Art Museum

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching, Writing

Yesterday my wife, daughter, and I made an epic 17 hour round trip to Bloomington, Indiana. We left our home at 9am and returned a little after 2am the next morning.

It was a long, rainy drive, but it was worth it. We went to the opening reception for Emeritus Professor Barry Gealt’s retrospective exhibition Embracing Nature at the Indiana University Art Museum.

Barry was my main professor while I earned my MFA at IU and has continued to be a mentor and encouragement. It was the least I could do to be present for this opening and evening of celebrating Barry’s life and work as both a painter and an educator. Below are a few fragments from the night.

The text just inside the doorway to the Special Exhibitions Wing of the IU Art Museum.

Detail of Greenwich Beach, Prince Edward Island, 2009. The top layer of a living document.

Detail of Condon’s View of Corea, Maine, 2011. Brushmarks are alchemical – both entirely surface and entirely illusion; both/and.

Prince Edward Island, East Point (2009), commands a wall in the gallery. The works spill and splash; their air inundates viewers.

A detail of the majestic edge of Indiana Vista, 2001. Paint as light, matter, air, and presence.

A detail view of Owen County Vista from 1994 – compared to Barry’s more recent work this is pretty smooth. Even so, it’s tremendously worked and amazingly saturated.

Beautiful density in a detail of The Cave, 1994. This painting is incredible in its color and level of surface development. Evocative.

Robert Shakespeare’s Light Totem saturated the area outside Barry’s show with energy – my 2 year old loved it.

There’s Barry waving to me from across the Atrium during the post-reception dinner. A beautiful space and a beautiful evening.

Here I am (sporting my Indianapolis Colts Marvin Harrison #88 jersey) holding the book that was published in tandem with the exhibition. It is AWESOME. You can pre-order your own copy by clicking here. Do it! The essays are wonderful, the reproductions and details fantastic. I was able to have a significant correspondence with the author, Rachael Berenson Perry, in 2011 which resulted in many of my thoughts and reflections on my time with Barry being used in the book. I was extremely honored to be included in this text; it’s really more than I could have imagined. To get to be a part of this celebration of Barry’s life and work is humbling and truly a highpoint of my life as an artist.

If you can get to the show, DO IT. It’s worth it.

Barry Gealt: Embracing Nature will be on at the IU Art Museum from October 6 until December 23, 2012

We Need Tears

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“Tears streamed down Guston’s cheeks as he spoke about the painting.” – David Reed, Soul-Beating

This is where I live, where I want to live, where I wish I was all of the time, where I hope to be when I’m not there, the place I seek when I’m distracted by maintenance and administration and logistics. The place of hopeful devastation. The place of eucaristic, sacramental meaning. The place of alchemical negotiation. When Guston wept over Piero della Francesca’s painting, he knew the work more truly than any of our theories or proliferating words could hope for. Those manifestos and ideologies and conceits so often deaden us to the transformative power of good work, so often distract us from sensing the potency there.

This week I’ve been weeping over Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In particular, his Great Gate of Kiev is so full and so amazing that it transcends analysis. I could go on and on with words – context, philosophy, history, theory – but the reality is that the wrenching torque created by that string of notes is MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE than any of that! My face is contorted and tears stream because of an intense inner hope/fear/joy/sadness brought to the fore by Mussorgsky’s music.

I don’t know why I’m writing this other than to say that this paradoxical emotional state is why I am an artist. The razor edge between enforced humility and exultant pride, between tragic fear and triumphant happiness, between deep sadness and rich, confident hope – these are the things great art gives us. The paradox is the liminal zone, the threshold between true feeling and mere conjecture.

We need tears in the face of these things, not jokes or theory or attempts at certainty.

Above: Viktor Hartmann’s design for the Great Gate of Kiev. Click the image to listen to a great performance of the piece.

The Coat

Posted on by under Art, Life

When I turned 18 in 1994, my mother gave me a Swiss Army Trench coat, also called a Greatcoat. If you poke around on eBay or other vintage and/or Army+Navy stores you can often find these high quality coats for $75 or $80; mom got this one for something like $10. They’re all fairly old – mine is around 45 or 50 years old. It’s definitely been the most enduring body-covering item I’ve had, robustly surviving throughout the years with only some minor modifications. Gotta love those official Swiss cross buttons!

Here’s my coat hanging on the door of the Alaskan Oil Konvenience store where I worked for several years before and during my undergraduate time. This shot is from 1997, just a few years after first getting the coat, taken with my father’s ancient Minolta SLR.

Above: Self Portrait with Halo, acrylic on canvas, 8 by 10 inches, 2000. There’s that coat again – obviously I’ve built some sort of persona around it. Forgive my self-aggrandizement. I can still remember the day in my dorm room at SAIC when I began this piece. It was the last in a line of undergraduate self portraits featuring the coat.

Here I am at Salmon River Falls in upstate New York, in a photo taken by my cousin Chris. This image is from 2002.

Jumping forward a few years here – This photo was taken in the winter of 2007/2008 just after I moved to Missouri to start teaching at Mizzou.

And now today in my studio with a dodecahedron below it.

This coat has been a great companion for me. I’m going to celebrate it by following in the footsteps of Diebenkorn, who famously created a series of etchings based on his own old coat for a special volume of W. B. Yeats poems (If you’ve got a few grand, you can purchase an edition – there’s one left – here). I want to dwell on that coat and where it has been with me. Keep an eye open for some paintings and/or drawings to appear soon.

And HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!! #36years

Current Shows and News

Posted on by under Art, Life, news

It’s been a full summer so far… plenty to be excited about in spite of the 107 degree heat!

I’ve currently got work up at PS Gallery in Columbia, MO. It’s a solo show – titled Adding – in their secondary gallery space, the Hallery. It’ll be up through July 28th. The Reception for the exhibition takes place July 14th at 6:00pm and we’ll be around for that. Also, stop by on Artrageous Friday, July 20th. Artageous Fridays are always epic cultural events in Columbia. Below are a few images from the installation.

Already making sales!

I have a piece of work at First Street Gallery in NYC until July 14th. First Street is a quality stop if you’re out there!

I am in a show (exhibiting a collaboration with Marcus Miers) at the 930 Art Center that runs through August 12th, called Phoneography. Check it out if you’re in Louisville!

I’ve got a work – already sold! – up at the Columbia Art League Annual Member’s Summer Open Exhibition. It garnered a 2nd place ribbon even…

I was the juror for Figure It Out! at the Craft Studio Gallery on the campus of the University of Missouri which was up from June 14 through June 28. I was delighted to select some amazing work and have a piece of my own there as well. See some shots below.

A detail of Catherine Armbrust’s amazing “The Titillator”

Ryan Johnson’s Crisis (on the pedestal) and Morgan Hobbs’ Self Portrait – which won an Honorable Mention.

Detail of John Schneider’s Do These Stripes Make Me Look Fat? – Oil on panel.

Detail of Jane Jun’s Journey.

My own monotype print titled Extend on the back wall, and a front view of Armbrust’s The Titillator.

Detail of David Mazure‘s Habakkuk, a luminous ink and marker on translucent paper that won Best in Show.

Wow… quite a bit going on since the spring semester ended. I’m trying to get my studio really set up and am enjoying time with my wife and daughter. I’m teaching a summer session of painting at Mizzou, which is quite a lot of fun, and working on a few odds and ends here and there in our new place. I made some hanging polyhedral sculptures for the front porch, a first for me. But perhaps the most effervescent developments of the last few days are my first brews – both IPAs – a Chinook and a Double. I’m using Northern Brewer equipment.

Beer Room…

ACTIVE FERMENTATION!

 

 

 

Surrounded by the Hours

Posted on by under Art, Life

I’m moving into a new studio. One of the best things about this new space is that I can see so much of my work at once. Today, as I unloaded my work and began the process of organizing things, I was struck by all of the hours that surrounded me. Hours painting, thinking, trying, failing, moving down one path, trying another, etc, etc… So many works have left me, but I’ve got this amazing representative sample around me right now. I’m thankful to have spent that time. It’s been worth it.