Monday, December 19, 2011

The End Part One

So, IP world.

Recently, I've been bad at just about everything in relation to you and I'm sorry about that. If I were into excuses, I would tell you that it's because of this short story that I had to write, illustrate, print, and bind, for this other class, and otherwise I would have been right on top of things, but I'm not into that so just forget about it.

The faculty consultation went well, I'd say. Key points that I'm remembering right now:

-I made the claim that faces and hands were the most expressive parts of the human body and that was why they play such a dominant role in my paintings and drawings. Robert Platt spoke of a performance artist (name to come) who is able to give tremendous life to every part of his body. The point being, that maybe I shouldn't be too quick to dismiss elbows, and feet, and ribs, or other less noticed parts of us, and that perhaps they too can have great emotive power.

-The fracturing and distortion can be happening a lot more. I need to be more willing to let go of parts of the human form. I have so much information on the canvas that I can afford to be less specific at times and it won't necessarily affect clarity of the figures.

-Splattering and dripping is easy but it's also not easy, because it's easy for it to look quite contrived. Maybe the splatters should look as if they are simply the result of the painting process. Maybe they should just be the result of the painting process.

We talked about many other things too, but the points listed above I hadn't thought of, or at least had not been considering them recently. I think addressing these issues will help me move forward.

In all, my faculty group was very constructive and encouraging. It was a good experience and I'm thankful for their time.

I'm looking forward to next semester when I will have only 13 credits and 0 of them will be Logic courses.

Over the break I will begin the process of applying to residencies and will also continue portraits of my family that I began last summer. I am feeling happy and optimistic :) Though, I have a dentist appointment tomorrow :(

*Happy Holidays*

Thursday, December 1, 2011

The Presentation

So every once in a while an artist is asked to do this horrible thing called "explaining his(her) work." It's a torturous tradition and the worst part about it is that it's good for you.

In order to prepare for this I usually write a lot, and often about the things in my work that I'm most insecure with. I'll try to explain myself, to myself, in the most direct way I can. I'll start writing about my process or something and when I finish a point, I'll ask myself a question that might logically rise from the previous statement. I try to be direct and call myself out on my own shit (If I catch it). The point is to learn something. I do this until one of my selves is defeated, or I just can't go anywhere. It's this sort of schizophrenic exercise, but I find it really helpful.

So, I did this the other day, prompted by my insecurities about the role films play in my work. The result was, I defeated my insecurities, and so, approximately very little of what you're about to read actually made it into my presentation. . . That is, I no longer felt the need to explain myself, which was a small internal victory for me.

Okay, so.

In an effort to explain what I've been doing (something I feel I haven't been doing much, at least not here). Here is my unedited schizophrenic dialog with myself. I didn't write it intending to share it, so please excuse me if it is poorly written or not interesting. (If you get bored, skip to the end, there are pictures :D )


Emerson, What exactly are you doing?

I’m making paintings of people, mostly children, whose only connection to me is that I’ve seen them in films. I take hundreds of screen shots of obscure films and then I alter and combine them through painting.

How do you choose the films and how do you choose the images you take?

I will often choose a moment in a film with an interesting motion. Something quick, and I’ll take maybe a dozen shots within a second of that scene. This will give me a good idea of the structure of that motion. Along with that, I get the distortion that’s created through the digital filter. I do this because I’m interested in how people move. How we occupy space is something that fascinates me. We exist in our own bodies, yet our bodies are never still. My experience is that our minds actually work the same way. It’s in constant motion. What I’d like to be able to do is express this inner-motion, say an internal dialogue, an inner struggle, or just the combination of thoughts and feelings, through this external motion; The external movement that we see and experience all the time.

Other times I take screen shots to fill in the gaps. I use this method to capture faces or bodies or moments. Usually a painting will start with the sort of moment of motion that I described before, and then I will alter it with other bits that I’ve accumulated. I’ll change or alter faces or bodies, and add other characters or other information as seems necessary. The process sounds sort of Frankenstein-like. As if I’m sewing together different people to create something new, and that is what I’m doing, but I’m not trying to create a monster. I hope they will look slightly wrong, as if something just isn’t quite right, but hopefully it is more subtle than a Frankstein monster. I had a teacher who told me once that everything you find to be extraordinarily beautiful, you also find to be slightly disturbing. I really connected to that statement. It’s hard to be moved by something if there isn’t an edge to it, or something darker beneath it.

Why are you painting children?

Because they fascinate me. I think it’s often the case that there’s something more human about children than adults . . . In that they haven’t given up as much yet. They haven’t quite compromised who they are in order to fit into the adult world. There’s something equally fascinating about adolescence. Because they’re caught in the middle. They’re trying to negotiate between those two worlds, the one of childhood, and adulthood.

What interests me about people is who they are when no one’s looking. Underneath the pretense. As we get older, I think we build up those layers of pretense and it becomes harder to see who someone really is. It’s the same reason that I generally paint nudes, because clothing says more about how we want to present ourselves than it says about who we actually are.

Ok, but if you’re interested in how people are “underneath the pretense”, how can you justify painting from movies? Isn’t it fair to say that this when people are most self-conscious, when they’re being filmed? Also, how can you paint about who someone “actually is” when you’ve never met them?

Emerson, you’ve successfully put your finger on all of my insecurities about my process. Firstly, I would say that I don’t think this is the best way to do what I want to do, but it’s the best I have right now. I use this method partly for convenience. In theory, I could set up my own scenes, hire people to act, or pose in them, and then film or take photographs of them, and then use those images as the starting point for my paintings. And I may end up doing something like that someday, but the reality is that I don’t have the time to do all that right now, and I’d rather spend my time painting.

But that doesn’t even answer your question, because even if I did all of that myself, it wouldn’t change the self-consciousness of the people. I would make the argument though, that most of the methods we have of painting people are equally artificial. If a model poses for you for a drawing, s/he is certainly self-conscious. I don’t know of a way to get rid of that yet.

In films though, there are so many little moments that you can find the accidental ones. Especially in scenes with a lot of movement. You can pick the moments in between, the ones that you wouldn’t normally notice, and these can be really interesting.

And maybe I paint strangers precisely because I can’t ever know who they really are. The reality is, currently, I’m not painting about other people at all, I’m painting about myself. I project my own insecurities and inner-struggles onto the faces and bodies of these strangers. The emotion is my own, this is just the way I filter and express it. So when I say, “I’m interested in who people really are underneath the pretense,” I’m really talking about myself. This is my way of expressing things that I don’t express in any other way. (If you know me, you may note that the feelings created by my paintings don’t generally coincide with how I normally behave. This is not because I am somehow being dishonest, it’s just because it’s not socially acceptable to be constantly expressing that kind of emotion. I mean, if I acted like one of my paintings I would be a pretty exhausting person to be around) My hope would be that my own thoughts, emotions, and insecurities are not unique to myself, and by trying to honestly express something about myself, I will tap into something universal.




ah okay sorry, but timekeeping got all messed up . . . Will be back on top of that by next week.