Post-pareidolia

So. . . I've got this beautiful Boston pencil sharpener with a slight disfigurement across its back. It is brilliant. All you need to do is insert the pencil and pull back on the ears of the spring-loaded-headpiece in order to pinch down with a perfect pressure-carved pencil tip every time. I would like to up-the-ante, or riff on a tangent of Jacques de Beafort's highlighting of our face-seeing mechanism. I mean faces are good and all, but really, there are entire universes to be seen in the algorithm that we see.

Elucidation, 2

Are there any questions?
To be continued. . .

Four more bookmarks cleared

• Two Artists Talking is a blog tag team by Chris Ashley and Joanne Mattera. Two fine writers and artists. A little while ago Chris wrote about the Gee's Bend Quilts. "I hope that every artist who complains about their day job and how little time they have to make art saw the Gee's Bend quilts that have been travelling around the US the last three years. And then I hope that all those complaining artists just shut up. Like me. I've had my comeuppance." He continues for ten more paragraphs. I found myself thinking of artist/blogger/quilter Lisa Call.
  

• This blog link is probably only for Seattlites. It is the Snoose Log blog. Billed as "Non-hierarchical improvised music for your life." It came to me from Leighton Beezer. He wrote in an email:
  
  "First, there’s this music scene happening up here focused around The Chai House in Ballard and instigated largely by John Foss and yours truly, plus a couple others. It’s the same old thing you and I used to do ... strict improv. But finally, it’s starting to catch on and there are more people showing up each week for our regular Monday night gigs. In particular, a lot of great musicians are showing up. Reminds me of the old days ... a whole lot of little scenes overlapping and merging into something bigger. Foss has named the Chai House gigs Snoose Junction after the old nickname for Ballard. So ... there’s a blog that one of the guys writes on occasion documenting the Snoose Junction scene and he wrote something I thought was pretty funny about our mutual friend Whiting Tennis. It’s the second article on this link dated 12/22/06:
  The funny thing is that Whiting is a genius of improv lyrics, probably the best there is ... so it’s amusing that he came by Snoose a couple months ago and apparently the cognoscenti had a debate about whether he was cheating or not. He wasn’t ... he was just doing what he does, but it was so good nobody could believe he was improvising. So ... I’ve been wanting to expand the Internet presence for this whole scene and one way to do that is to get linked in the blog world. Since you write about Whiting on FOCB sometimes, and since you are an accomplished practitioner of the art in question, it occurred to me that you might want to link to the article. Not a huge deal, actually ... but there’s more. Once I started thinking about you and Snoose Junction, I decided that you basically must make the trip to Seattle and participate. We spent so much time doing this back when nobody gave a shit about it, you really should come up and experience and contribute to the current state of the art. Here’s what it sounds like these days:

• I stumbled onto the Some landscapes blog awhile back. It is a blog that is concerned with "landscapes evoked or depicted in the arts: painting, literature, music, film etc. It also discusses the creation or alteration of landscapes by architects, artists and garden designers." Lots of cool stuff, but at a nice slow pace, like his link to blogger Chirs Drury who is an artist working out of Antartica.
  

• There is this web site called Grand Unified Theory: Wave Theory by Dr. Chaim Tejman that he illustrates with these fantastic marker drawings. He also has everything figured out, so it is fun to read, if a little esoteric. This is from his introduction (the emphasis is mine): Finally, all creations, both organic and inorganic, go through phase transitions that are powered by the loss of energy. Observations have shown that matter enters a Kerr swirl where it is processed in singularity. It is subsequently expelled in the form of an energetic path that reaches the next Schwarzchild swirl. There it is processed yet again and moves along an energetic path back to the main swirl, which is the heart of the formation. All creations are thus predicated on their ability to preserve and use energy to proceed along the various stations of the life cycle. Every energetic formation is thus dependent on the amount energy at its disposal: the more energy at its disposal the more vibrant the entity. For example, the brain’s heightened energetic content endows it with its spiritual capacity.

It is time to clean up my bookmarks. Here are the first four keepers:

• Dennis Hollingsworth pointed me/us to Jacques de Beaufort's blog. I am amazed at how few blogs have stayed in my daily dose list. In fact, as I glance over at those links, there are a couple of them that haven't been updated since November. There has got to be more blogs out there where the painter proclaims: "As an artists and thinker, my message becomes more and more clear..to point out that although nature is not a mirror..we are nature..and the universe is us." I'm expecting a lot from Master de Beaufort.
  

• Photographic Byways. . . is a blog created by Douglas Miller who is Tracy Helgeson's husband (Tracy's blog has stayed on my list you might have noticed). He has about six photos up right now. They look like paintings to me.
  

• Exquisite Exhibit Blog is a blog that is conceived and organized by Yong Soon Min. "During my appointment as Visiting Artist/Scholar at the A/P/A Institute in 2007, I will be organizing an exhibition that commemorates the 15^th anniversary of the Los Angeles civil disturbance of 1992 and I invite you to be a part of this project. Your contribution will be part of a wide and multidisciplinary array of creations that pursue the necessary dialogue about the vibrancy and issues that characterize the cosmopolitan contact zones (a la Mary Louise Pratt)." My teacher and friend M.A. Greenstein concludes her recent contribution with: "That said, let us hope for days, months and years of renewed daring and thoughtful interpretive reflection, the sort that matches the inevitable radicality of civil disobedience, and let us further expect equal vigor from our artists who, after being made to read Kantian aesthetics in grad school, are surely ready to remark on our “terrible love of war.”" This is a different kind of blog than mine of course, it has an agenda and several contributors
  

• My sister and brother-in-law introduced me to the work of sculptor Patrick Marold, in paticular his Windmill project in Iceland which involved "placing a mass of light generating windmills in specific outdoor locations. The wind forces each windmill to produce a relevant amount of light, in a sense digitizing the wind. This work of art converts the energy of wind into a responsive visual choreography, exhibiting the rhythm of a mechanical process that is collaborating with the harmony and chaos of wind." I think we got there after talking about my drawings, or at least, I see a connection now.
  

Elucidation

Any questions?
To be continued. . .

System spores

I've started on some paintings and I noticed that I enjoy being precise about my colors. If I don't get it right the first time, I will glaze over the color in order to shift it towards my desire. I use a glaze so that my first choice will show through. I don't want to bury anything. All my choices should be apparent. I like matching paint color to the "real" world. There seems to be some original pleasure in this. Some sort of joy that is rooted in my first experiences with drawing and painting. The creation of "likeness" is thrilling. At this point I get tangentially interested in an article written in 1894 by Charles Sanders Peirce, What Is A Sign?. I got there because I had a vague memory of Plato talking about "likeness". But, I was barking up the wrong tree. There really is no explaining the joy of replicating the beauty of the Green Arrow's mask when you are an adolescent. Pride in Craft is what got me hooked. Repeating something many times with interest, not realising that it was practice. I don't think that that is being an artist. Here are four drawings in order of their execution. Each drawing has scanner burn on the left hand side.

Spiral Feature

Am I being irresponsible for adding my version of Beauty into the mix?

Hooked

As I was making these drawings, phrases popped into my mind. Pre-blog, I would write these phrases on the wall and use them as possible titles later on. I'll try posting them here. I even see this activity as a way of thinking about an all encompassing title for the up-coming show.
Fight Fire With Water
Chaotic Symmetry
Wetware

Lust

Titles are important. They help me think about my paintings as poetry.

Pushing the Clouds Away

I'm not coming up with marks, as I thought I was, I'm coming up with systems.
With the paintings (which you will see soon, possibly this weekend) I don't spend time mixing a color without having a system in mind for applying the color. It might be a stipple or a scumble, a glaze or a spatter, a brush or a roller. Any system requires not only the pigment to be right, but the consistency or viscosity to be appropriate as well. Being willing to adapt or modify a wrong system is crucial.

Starting

I feel like I've lost my momentum. I haven't been in the studio since before Christmas. Crap was piling up and it was becoming less and less appealing to even walk into the space. I've got a show coming up at the Kristi Engle Gallery in November of this year. When you have no momentum, ten months can sneak up on you. A panic compelled me to clean the studio.I don't feel connected to the images I was working on last year. The flow is gone. But, remembering lesson number one, just do it, I broke out the Tough Prime,and I started prepping some Masonite panels. I like to work in clusters. It is efficient and the images feed off one another. Also, clusters encourage mistakes. I have no fear that I can "mess" something up, because, I assume that at least one of the images will work out. Over the years I've also learned to never give up on one of the images. So much can be learned from pushing a wonky painting through its hard time. Preciousness is bad. While those panels were drying, I walked around my studio and looked at the works on paper that are hanging on the wall. I remember that I was trying to reduce my vocabulary down to some unique Steven LaRose marks. What those are, I was trying to discover, and then once understood, the plan was to grow those marks into paintings. I found a lupe and got lost for a while in watercolor gardens. I pushed the camera up to the eyepiece and was enchanted by the minutia.


But, didn't feel ready to jump back in where I had left off. I think I need to take one step back before I start running to this show. I need to revisit those marks of last year and maybe even add some more, if I can invent some. But, even that seemed too hard. I was frozen. I had to keep reminding myself, "Just do it." So, I set up a perfectly safe exercise. Just draw something. Anything. I took two items off my book shelf and started to draw.

I even talked on the phone while I was drawing. I don't remember making any judgements. I smiled a junior high smile at the Alpha toy. I had left each marker from the drawing on the table and without thinking, a burst came next.
These seem to come fairly naturally. The burst/flower things. I'll try and paint them. I also imagine I should do a bunch of them because maybe they can reach another plataeu if I do. It also looks like I need to scan them, instead of using my camera. Oh well. You get the idea. Let's see if I can pick up the pace. Or quality.

I'm finally done digitizing my slides

Agnosia, 1991
48" x 36"
Acrylic on wood
I've just updated my 1991 cluster and have to smile at how intrigued I was by psychology.

Turkish Band, 1992

In 1992, a small liberal arts college in SoCal was getting rid of all the matting for their drawing collection. I came across this loaded dumpster of empty mattes that had all the holes cut and titles and dates written on the fronts. I had hours of fun riffing on those titles and drawing into the holes. It was an activity that set the standard for the Art for the Masses activity. Some (36) of the hundreds of drawings can be found at this new location.

The painting above was done in 1992 and am happy to have found a slide of it. It is 8 feet tall and five or six feet wide. I traded Todd Johnson for three of his paintings. It is an interesting spore or synthesis of many of the themes that I distilled over the years. I wonder if the behemoth is still around?

Exploit, 1992
This is another one of my favorites from 1992 that I've lost track of. Its funny, I seem to either have recorded the titles and dimensions, or who owns the painting, rarely both. In this case, neither.

Scarlet, 1993
24" x 20"
Acrylic and Varathane on canvas
This is from new paintings that I've added to my 1993 archive.
I made two of these paintings called Scarlet. I made them at the same time and tried to mimic all my accidents and I switched back and forth between the two so that neither was the original.

Quiet Mind, 1998
11" x 11"
Acrylic and Varathane on wood
(I've added 18 more paintings from 1998 to my archive.)

I have lost the title to this painting from 1999.
I do know that all the paintings from this cluster were 40" x 32" acrylic and Varathane on wood. Here is a detail:

There is also 16 paintings from 1988! These are pure. Including my first and only self portait, a painting of Jeff Hansel, and tikis. That's all the slides I have.

I'm finally done with my past.

Slides and Ladders

Wikipedia:
In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes or Argos (Άργος), brother to the nymph Io, was a giant with a hundred eyes. His epithet means all-seeing, reflecting that he was a very effective watchman, as only a few of the eyes would sleep at a time; there were always eyes still awake. Argus was Hera's servant. His great service to the Olympian pantheon was to slay the chthonic serpent-legged monster Echidna as she slept in her cave (Homer, Iliad ii.783; Hesiod, Theogony, 295ff; Apollodorus, ii.i.2). Hera's last task for Argus was to guard a white heifer from Zeus. She charged him to "Tether this cow safely to an olive-tree at Nemea". Hera knew that the heifer was in reality Io, one of the many nymphs Zeus was coupling with to establish a new order. To free Io, Zeus had Argus slain by Hermes. Hermes, disguised as a shepherd, first put all of Argus's eyes asleep with boring stories. To commemorate her faithful watchman, Hera had the hundred eyes of Argus preserved forever, in a peacock's tail (Ovid I, 625).

So, in one sense (not the boring story part), Chris Jagers is like Hermes. His Slideroom has slain the old order.

I have been digging through all my old crap. I may have to open an eBay account. I'll keep one of the the Argus Previewers because they have a beautiful design and handsome packaging. They do require batteries however. That is why the Realorama is so cool. It works on ambient light.
Here we are looking at Francois Boucher's Toilet of Venus (1751). Boucher became the kind of painter that some painters found revolting.

I'm going through and digitizing my slides. Last Friday, Jennifer at simpleposie serendipitously started asking these questions:
Are you disciplined about documenting your work? More often than not.
Have you ever made a work of art you didn't document and wished you did? Yes.
When you think about documenting your work as an artist, do you think more about its value as a promotional tool or as a personal history of your activities - part of a larger art historical picture? I see it as stabilizing activity. Grounding. I suppose that that is a personal historical picture. Sharing my painting shadow is a vanity that I'm willing to live with.
Has a review of older works ever provided an unforeseen insight about your current artistic activities ? Yes.
How would you characterize your personal artistic history? Peaks and valleys? Greased lightning? Strategically planned or full of happy accidents? Has it propelled you into the present moment or would you say say it's been more of a wrestling match the whole time? It has been a greased wrestling match.
Are you the same artist you were when you first got into it? No.