New Drawings

I wanted to post this on Monday, however, our Internet connection as been spotty at best. So, I'll take this rare moment of connectivity to throw this stuff up here.

These are my favorite of the new drawings. The images could be better, I'll replace them as soon as I get a chance. I've been really happy with the drawings that I've been churning out lately. I've been spending a lot more time on each drawing and they have become more complex in terms of mark-making. I found a really nice image in the Spanish version of "Bazaar" that has been yielding quite a few drawings. I intend on mining this image to death. Maye be I'll throw that image up here as well, once I'm finished with it. I've only done one large drawing, but I'm excited to do two more. In the finished one, I worked from a finished small drawing, which made the large one lack energy and it became boring for me to work on. So, in the next large drawings, I'll be working right from the image. I'll have to deal with the prospect of wasting a large sheet of expensive paper if the drawing doesn't work.

I'm pretty close to resolving my current two installations. Hopefully I'll be able to post images of them in a couple of weeks.

Recap

This is kind of a lame post, but I didn't really have anything new ready for today as Saturday was all about preparing for the party and Sunday was all about recovery. I thought I'd post my artist statement. Some viewers of this blog may never have read my statement and it is still pretty representative of my work even though it's a couple of years old. I'm going to start work on a new one very soon, however. Here it is:


Can the sublime exist in contemporary life; could it exist in something thought “low?” Could the act of dissecting that which enchants me, creating a new, mysterious experience out of my meanings help me to understand my reality and truths? I see the ideas of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment as analogous to a poetical image of paradise, encounter with chaos, fall, and redemption; these processes also being linked to a universal way in which humans adapt to the unknown.

Charles Baudelaire claimed that the infinite can be found in the nature of the transitory. My work arises out of mining artifice from themed casinos and fashion imagery. This investigation has much to do with my own attempt to identify that which beguiles and attracts me in various places and images; an attempt to divine the psychological projections I bring to my experiences or find mystery in contemporary life and its encounters. I yearn for hints of a world unknown to me, a romance and mystery that has been lost through the acquiring of knowledge and understanding of the world. In wanting to comprehend my experiences with specific ephemeral, fugitive places and images, I take them for the stand-ins that they are, but seek out points where they “bump up against” unifying principals, where the frivolous and the superficial has meaning.

Doing this, I create altar-like installations out of a distillation of my experiences with the artificial, the installations of course being fraught with artifice themselves. The manipulation of light and its play with color, scale, and space offers the tonality, the tincture of my sources to the viewer. Compelled by natural drives for ideals and a way of coping with the unknown, I am drawn to fantasy, to places and objects of artifice that function as stand-ins for the universal principals that I long for in a time when the idea of a universal has been sacked.

Reading List

I’ve been able to include a healthy amount of reading into my studio regimen lately. It’s the most amount of reading that I’ve been able to manage in quite a while and it feels really good. Pictured above are the books that I have been working on, some of which I’ve finished. “Blink”, by Malcolm Gladwell and “The Varieties of Scientific Experience,” by Carl Sagan are the ones that I have finished. Both were very good and the Sagan was amazing. “Blink" was about rapid cognition, which I have been thinking about a lot lately, especially in regard to deciding what to make, as I work from my instincts primarily. “The Fold,” by Deluze is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever read and is turning out to be very significant to my work. I have to re-read each chapter one or two times before moving on and I am reading the philosophical essays of Leibniz to go along with it. (The Fold is Deluze’s response to Leibniz, claiming him as being the grounding for a Baroque philosophy.) I'm re-reading/ finishing "Vatican to Vegas." It is a history of special effects and a theory of the new Baroque. I never got to finish it, but am starting from the begining.

I always read many things at a time. Some books are better for reading in different circumstances. For instance, I’ll read the Gladwell books or a fiction at the laundry mat or some place where I might encounter distraction, while “The Fold” I read before working on art as I feel as if I’ve been meditating after having read it for an hour or so. I’ll read a chapter here and a chapter there, switching between the books as I feel the need for the different information that they hold.

I try to look at a lot of stuff too. These are the spaces that I have been looking at lately. Two great bargain books. I'm especially blown away by the Baroque ceilings.

Go Time

I've decided that I am going to try to post something on this blog at least once a week. Probably on sudays or mondays. I'm starting the first push of hard work that is in preparation for a solo show. Hopefully this obligation to myself and to my readers (or imagined readers) will figure into the "discipline mix." I might not always have newest work, or find posting drawing after drawing to be boring, so some of the posts (many of the posts) could wind up being about stupid little details about my process and work habits. Enjoy.

Also...spell chech seems to be not working for the last few posts, so...

Reign of Dirt

If you look at the image above, you can see the rectangular outline of where one of my drawings was laying. Last week was the Reign of Dirt. (and the Rain of Dirt) On those two particularly windy days, every time the wind blew dirt would fall from between the planks of wood that make up our ceiling. I'm not sure what that means for the building. The dirt rain seemed to fall primarily over our drawing tables. I just happened to have all of my drawings spread out and Nicole just happened to have started a melt, which was still wet, of course.

Could be worse though. It put a kink in our artmaking for a day or two, but hasn't happened since. The dirt didn't leave any permanent marks on our work and we were able to just brush it off. Well, Nicole's piece actually became a colab with the ceiling and the wind.

This morning, however, I woke to find that the entire loft was exteremely humid due to the sudden temperature rise outside. All of my books, notebooks, paper, and drawings are warped and wavy. One of my magazines looked as if I had dropped it in a puddle.

Sneak Peak

Here's the current version of one of the installations that I'm working on. This image was taken a few weeks ago, so the piece looks a bit different now. Originally, I was going to light a large arched area above the brown part. I was playing with the foil as a tool for shaping the light and came upon this. I like this look. Something about this works. I'm going to try to make it hard to tell what is painted and what is light.

HDR

A neighbor of mine turned me onto this software for making "High Dynamic Range" images. This process seemed like exactly what I've been needing to do to the images of my installations. You basically take 2 or more (up to 6 or 7) bracketed pictures using a tripod and keeping the camera in the exact same spot. You cover the range from way overexposed to way underexposed. You get a program that makes HDR images or the plug in for photoshop. I got a very simple freeware called Qtpfsgui. This program makes HDR images for you. There's not much to it at all. With the more complex programs I'm sure you can get even better images and you have more control over the specifics of the process. Above is the HDR image I made of my last installation. It is made of the two images that I put on my post from September. If I had more than two images and more experience with the software, I could do better. As it is however, I was able to do in 10 min or less what used to take hours in photoshop. Below are some HDR images I found on Google.