Tag Archives: art

The Feast that Never Ends

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Thanks to our kind friend Joelle, I met fellow blogger XB tonight over dinner. Her blog, ‘In Search of My Moveable Feast’ at http://www.xiaobonestler.com/, is a wonderful melange of food and culture spiced with her delightful wit. I’m also reminded by both blog-mate and the friends around the dinner table tonight–composer hosting, saxophonist and pianist and conductor gathered around the table with me as we all enjoyed the meal and conversation–that shared love of culture and other naturally crazy things is an endless banquet of marvels and wonders.

ratatouille ingredients + blackboard text

To dine is divine, and among friends the conviviality never ends . . .

Is the conversation inspired by the food? The food by the gathering? The gathering by the conversation?

Of course all three happen. In the case of a tableau like tonight’s at table, there can be so many possible tangents to pursue. Avidly swapping bits of life-story over splendid bowls of creamy cool beet soup with yogurt leads to thoughts of yet other meals, stories, and gatherings. Discovering common interests with newly met friends over a glass of wine: how can that not lead to further tales (tall and otherwise) and onward to inspire more the pleasure of dolmas and Greek salad, these then becoming sustenance for other hungers for knowledge and enjoyment?

It is, clearly, an infinite table, this one where strangers sit down to untasted treats and rise up as well-filled and newly minted fellow sojourners. Art is the avenue where all of these fine riches intersect: thought and music and speech and history and language and hope and hilarity and the sharing of ideas in inspiring new ways.

I don’t doubt that the cats, from their respective corners, were moderately bemused by our various enthusiasms, but I for one found in all of it great nourishment.

Stories without Words

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I may have mentioned–some few blog entries ago–that the visual world is full of stories for me. It’s not just me, though. You’ve heard it plenty yourself: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” There’s no end of people inspired to find tales, ideas, inspirations of every kind in things seen, in the real world and in all sorts of visual images, and what we like to imagine they mean, or could mean. So have at it. I give you now a digital collage and know that no one else will see precisely the same collection of Stuff or relationships between the things collected here exactly the way I see them. You might guess why I put some of this together in a single image, maybe even could see some of my motivation more clearly than I do myself (you shrink you), but the fun of the whole thing is the same as what I love experiencing when I have an art exhibition: seeing my own work through others’ lenses and knowing that they always bring something different to it than I did either in looking at the finished piece or in revisiting any part of its birthing.

digital collage of Things

All these things together . . .

Every sighted person “reads” the world through his or her own filters, and for the most part, that’s good. It’s not only what helps us to be ourselves fully in the world but what gives us a large measure of pleasure in existence: we can create the world in which we find ourselves as well. Imagination and interpretation are colorful ways of coping with reality and reshaping it as we go. We can be horribly misled by our crazy or wrongheaded or under-informed explication and conceptualization, and that usually leads to trouble of one sort or another (not least of all making one be a chump, a dimbulb or even a full-fledged jerk). But really, isn’t there a lot of fun in just giving ourselves a moment of fiction to stretch our boundaries and enlarge our existence in some small measure?

Everything Old is Nude Again

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show poster

Old ideas can still stand naked in the light of a new day

What? Is tradition dead? Are the audiences for all-things-old-school mere cobwebbed shadows of the past? Thanks to a cycle of nature-induced and human-brewed disasters over the last decade or two and the sullen worldwide economy that has followed, every arts org and artist worth any salt has been kvetching and querying endlessly on the questions. At last glance, I haven’t noticed that fiscal fears and convictions of doom have done much more than renew what is, honestly, the eternally pessimistic or at least worried conversation of artists across the galaxy to its current iteration. We’ve always been convinced we were going to Hell in a Kardashian Kollection handbag.

That said, I notice that as ever, those who were operating opportunistically or on a whim are shimmying down the lines and flinging themselves bodily off the stern while the determined and/or stubbornly stupid prefer to let yet another wave of direness smash on by overhead and cling to Happy Thoughts. I share just enough DNA with Pollyanna to blissfully stick with my intended life-as-artist (meanwhile always keeping an eye peeled for safer income sources to support my habit).

The whole idea of dealing with insecurity by dumping the one part of my merely mortal skill set that gives me the most challenge and joy is ridiculous. Similarly, the last thing I’d contemplate is throwing out the foundational tools and techniques that press me to be more able and artful in my work. So while I’m always hoping to put my own spin on things, I’m happy to do so by retooling the classics: still life is–despite its cheery French name–not dead; landscape can be bland or it can open a window into enticing new worlds; and if the time comes when we lose interest in admiring ourselves enough to keep making marvelous artworks featuring the nude figure, I guess I will have to pack up my pencils. And no, despite my fling with “colorizing” myself in grad school, I’ve never lost my love for good old black and white and I’m currently going through a big spree of graphite-only stuff yet again.

This piece is an older one, too, but if you notice that it’s from a poster illustration for a production of ‘Arsenic and Old Lace‘ you’ll see that I chose to apply the old-fashioned approach of a still life to a long-known play’s promotion in what I hoped would be a slightly new and surprising twist. The idea was that people seeing the poster around town and thinking it at first glance a bland image would on approach find it a happily unexpected thing after all. I flatter myself that the number of posters that were subsequently stolen and required replacement before the production opened indicated some success with this surprise element. My life has certainly never lacked for elements of surprise for me, so why not share it with others.

Growth Spurt

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Shades of Remembrancedetail of oil pastel drawing (face)

Mural detail

I’m going to see if I can’t put up a post every day for a while now. Some days I’ll just post an image or two (old, new, any medium) and other times, if actual thoughts or ideas occur to me I’ll make a supreme effort to get them into text before they vanish utterly like so many puffs of pixie dust. In honor of that concept, today’s drawing post is an older piece that represents a period of welcome growth that was spurred by my disappointment and frustration when I met with my chief studio adviser in grad school after a counterbalance of deadly dry time left me with little to show her beyond a handful of insipid scrawls that were mere ghosts of old ideas rehashed. In response to her admonition to ‘try something different’ I had a semi-hysterical bout of throwing out baby, bath water and tub all in one fling, deciding that the desperate measures I desired were a school of opposites. I’d been drawing 16″ x 20″ and smaller fussy (and excruciatingly slowly executed) surrealist still lifes in graphite pretty exclusively, and the exclusions came to include imagination and fun as I spiraled into frustrated ennui.

My solution: work large, explore a multitude of drawing media, work faster than is comfortable, draw subjects unfamiliar and intimidating, and quit critiquing unproductively midstream. It’s one thing to make small adjustments along the way, another to be immobilized by constant critical interruptions obsessing on the imperfection of my technique and execution–practicing past which was really the whole point of my doing graduate studies, after all. The result was that in the same several weeks it had taken to do the previous sad-sack batch of four or five drawings, I filled a gallery with walls about 5 meters in both directions from floor to ceiling with drawings, any one of them filled with greater energy and sense of adventure than the previous set combined. Not necessarily championship material every time out, mind you, but the mere act of pushing my productivity was a healthy kick in the keister for this would-be artist.

It’s entirely possible that my family and friends would have appreciated my taking a slightly less exaggerated approach to the change-up, since it resulted in massive amounts of large-scale (including a number of up to 9′ x 15′ and 4′ x 20′ murals) works that led, at the end of their assisting me with the installation of my thesis exhibition and lugging said works hither and yon, to whispers among them wondering why I hadn’t opted more kindly to become a skilled miniaturist. Or found less overworked relatives and friends, at least. But in the end they were all incredibly supportive and enthusiastic about my starting to learn how to manage my life in art production, and I learned perhaps the most important lesson I’ve fallen into yet, which is that the Muse requires equal ass-kicking; inspiration rarely happens without the regular pressure of constant and assiduous practice. If I think I’ve gotten to the point of needing no more practice to improve, I’ve clearly lost my last brain cell and should just lie down and rid the world of some ‘surplus population’. The mass-production approach to making art is, while a great boost via mere numerical odds to the number of possible “keeper” artworks, also an expensive enterprise, one that made me a much more devoted recycler in the process, to be sure.

Still, I wouldn’t trade this one essential atom of wisdom for all of my other education–anything worth learning and doing is worth practicing. I’ve had fallow periods aplenty since then, of course, but when I get the itch I know full well that the best way to scratch it is to dive back in and practice on a constant and vigilantly pursued basis. So many have written and spoken so eloquently of this in the past and continue to publish brilliantly on the topic, but until I stumbled on the experience in my own naive way I had no real appreciation for the power of this one prized truth.

This mural is one of several of the 4′ high by 20′ wide oil pastel on paper pieces that were part of the big life-changing project I tackled in those enlightening days of yore. This post is the first of my attempts at every-day blogging to bring the next degree of change to my life as an artist. Onward!

mural of faces

Oil pastel on paper, 4'H x 20'W

Inspirational Moments

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Digital collage of brains, hands and other fun stuff

Ooh, I just thought of something!

There’s nothing more scintillating than having a bout of true inspiration. But it’s so ridiculously rare in real life! That’s what good work habits and persistence are for. Me, I am decidedly against hard work and persevering in general–but I have at least learned that not only are those the only ways by which I can summon the muse if I don’t happen to have a boatload of inspiration dumped on me at random. Further, I’ve discovered that the actual process, the journey, can be a pleasant one if I let go of the assumption that labor is inherently nasty and only the end product makes it worthwhile. After all, if that’s the case, and the product turns out to be a disappointing flop, then I really feel like I’ve wasted my time in Sisyphean grinding. So I’m learning to find my fun in smaller increments and take all possible pleasure from the everyday parts of being who and what I am. It’s my amygdala, and I’ll spoil it as much as I please.

Out of the process-as-entertainment approach sprang a new medium and form for this artist in the last year: learning to play with my digital images as collage elements [thank you, Photoshop]. The image here is from a series of such experiments and represents a little of both my artistic and my mental processes, appropriately enough. I didn’t throw any pencils into the mix, but you can see that I’ve not entirely shaken old habits by learning new ones.

Drawing Conclusions

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Much of what I share on this blog is likely to be my artwork (drawings, paintings, photography, digital images, mixed media work, and so forth) and writing. Here’s a sample of my graphite drawing, from what my fans know as my ‘fish and pencils’ period. As in so much of my work, the fish and pencils, both individually and in conjunction, became thematic merely because they interested me and kept me entertained as objects themselves, as subjects to be drawn or rendered, and as a bonus, as agent-provocateurs by the mere eccentricity of their coinciding in images. That, in fact, is thematic in my life as well: the falling-into or happening-upon that leads me to link previously unrelated thoughts and items and creates the flicker of initial interest that takes me down yet another tangential path.