Friday, January 27, 2012

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Einstein

Anyone else catch Einstein on the Beach?

. . .

Whoa.

. . .

-

I remembered today that you can paint with other things besides a paintbrush. I started using card stock, x-acto blades, and paper towel.






My first painting teacher told me never to mix paint on the palette. He said all the mixing should happen on the canvas.

My next painting teacher told me that you should only mix paint on the palette and when applying the paint to the canvas it should be done in a single stroke, thus, no mixing should take place on the canvas.

I haven't had a painting instructor whose brought it up since.

It's funny how some teachers instruct in absolutes, because of course, to make a really good painting, you should really be doing both. It's a good way to teach though. Act like your way is the only way and really make your students learn it. They'll figure out that you're wrong eventually, but they'll gain so much before they do.

Timekeeping:
Painting: 14.5
Writing thesis: 2

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Zak Smith

Here's an interesting perspective on the art world from painter/drawer/illustrator/writer/pornstar Zak Smith. I'm reading his book, We Did Porn. It's a memoir about his foray into the adult film industry. It's most interesting when he talks about art though, so I think in his next book he should just leave out the porn bits and tell us about art. I'll suggest the title We Did Art. (Not that porn isn't fascinating)


            In obedience to ancient traditions designed to reassure the wealthy, art is, unlike porn, not evaluated solely according to whether you’d want to look at it or not. Critics judge the work according to the messages it communicates to the culture at large and the intelligence of the artist doing the communicating. This involves the critics in two hilarious fictions: that maintaining some arrangement of objects in a remote white room in an upscale neighborhood for a month is a way to communicate a message to the culture at large, and that someone who thinks it is could possibly be intelligent.
            The job requires rare powers of cause-and-effect denial. Give four art people a banana and they will say: It’s wonderfully yellow, it’s too yellow, it’s not yellow enough, I’m so glad it isn’t yellow, and then say it’s wonderfully squishy, it’s too squishy, it’s not squishy . . . And on and on until the banana gets so famous that they start getting paid to agree that the banana is yellow and good.
            My work, they say, is sexy, and not sexy, and too sexy, and fringy and edgy, and neither fringy nor edgy, and too fringy and edgy to be relevant, and colorful and not colorful enough, and on and on.
            So it’s very hard to care or think any of it matters. Every artist’s press release says the artist’s work “raises issues of . . .” as if a visual artist’s work in the zeros ever raised any issue. What people say is not as important for business as the fact that they say things and get paid to say them and the things they say them about get paid for. It is not an environment that incentivizes people to say or make things that make any sense. It is a living though, and one of the better ones.
            





Friday, January 13, 2012

It's been a good week.

I kept drawing. With these about 3/4 through the drawing I painted over parts with linseed oil. Then went back over parts to bring some of the lines forward again. The linseed oil softens the edges, so there's sort of a blur effect. You probably can't see this very well with these scans. (I don't like the scanners in the IP studios. . . The only way I can get it to work is to scan it in as a PDF, but then I have to convert it to a TIFF which I then convert to a JPEG to post here and by that time image quality gets pretty weak . . . Anyway I will start using the scanners upstairs because I now have access to the print studio. Wow, long aside. sorry) Also painted with gesso over parts of these.








I'm not in a position to give advice about painting, but if I were here's what I would say:

!Pay Attention!

It's the same advice I have about life. It's happening all around you, don't forget to pay attention.

Okay I'll shut up now.

Here are my paintings. I think they are getting better.




Time Keeping:
Painting/drawing: 22 hours



Monday, January 9, 2012

Odd Nerdrum Interim





He strikes me as someone who must be completely insane. A fine quality for a painter.

He paints like Rembrandt might have if he had survived and documented the apocalypse.


Also,

I'm having a show with 2 other artists in my hometown Holland, Michigan. It's up right now and will run through Feb 25.





The artists I'm showing with are


Thursday, January 5, 2012

Back to Work

Hi everyone,

Time to get back into the blogging routine. Today was my first day back in the studio. I tried to paint for a while and that didn't go so well so I switched to drawing. A big part of me really feels like I'm forcing oil painting at this point . . . We've been fighting so much this semester it's starting to get stupid. For awhile (again) I think I will concentrate on drawing and acrylics on paper. Why not do what works? Right? Right.

I'm going to start doing these drawings outside of my sketchbook, as they may well be a larger part of what I put into the IP show than I originally thought.











In the oil paintings I'm in this weird place that's somewhere in between figurative and abstract. I'm having a really hard time negotiating those two worlds. When I work on paper it becomes all about the people. Abstraction and distortion come from movement and layering, but all (well, most) of the elements are observed and not made up.

Timekeeping:

Painting (YARG) 1.5
Drawing: 4