Saturday morning is Izzy’s morning. We go for breakfast and then to ballet and then to the library. This past weekend the library was having an Arbour day poetry reading. Books with poetry related to trees and the forest were laid out for anyone who wanted to read. Well an open stage is hard for me to resist so I read first. It was a pleasure to read stories about the forest and the trees. It seems we never talk about them anymore unless we are discussing global warming, rampant deforestation to make room for McDonald’s cows and the like. Reading a poem about a quiet walk through the woods is a beautiful thing and I hope it is something Izzy will be able to do when she is my age.
Art lasts longer than your Hummer.
Art is everywhere, it is true, but art in the way we normally think about it is not everywhere. That is because we have been trained to believe that art is only to be seen in formal locals. Bullshit! Art should be all around us and not just the art that is in advertising or in the beautiful design of a door handle or an article of clothing. In this shot one of the parasite prints has taken the place of an ad on the Berlin subway. When I was teaching at Pratt a student who had lived in East Berlin decided that she wanted to take art work and place it in the Berlin subway. She asked people for work and came back with pictures of where the work had ended up. It was a real interesting project that encouraged a lot of other students to think about how the boundaries, that are set for art, can be viewed.
Make art and make it be seen. Art is changing our world!!
sporozoan cavities is a suite of Intaglio 15 prints, which are 18×24 and printed on 22×30 Rives BFK Tan. All of these prints revolve around the origin and evolution of the sporozoan image as the primary object in all my work. The sporozoan is derived from the chest cavity of the human form, which is my favorite thing to draw in figure classes. I visualized the form underneath and slowly modified it until I discovered the sporozoan. sporozoan cavities shows the sporozoan in many states of being and is drawn in a way to show its anatomy and its exterior features. The suite has been printed in black and white and in a la poupee, editions of 25 of each print are to be printed. I have yet to finish the suite due primarily to its size, when all prints are made there will be 800 of them. My obsession with the sporozoan is growing exponentially as it has quickly been taking over all of my imagery.
I have always believed that painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and all other forms of visual art were forms of communication. With that being true they all must have a viewer, hopefully multiple viewers, in order to be called art. Until they are viewed and digested by people they are just things without a purpose. Here is the interesting part of the equation I make art for me, to tell a story that I want to tell. I can only hope that when it is viewed it is savored and the viewer leaves feeling. Art can and should create feelings in viewers, it should make them excited in a way that makes them want to come back to see and feel more. This is one of the reasons why I started making objects that were interactive. By combining body and art I add a theatrical aspect to my work that demands attention. By making art that requires a viewer to interact with it in order to fully understand it I go out on a limb. Art is not suppose to be touched. It is suppose to be hanging on a wall or sitting in the middle of a room with red velvet rope around it. In “The sporozoan’s shrine to the mapping of the parasite.” I ask viewers to not only walk around and into the shrine but to open the box and remove its innards. It is not an easy thing for viewers to do, to get beyond what they have learned from years of art viewing – “DON’T TOUCH”. Because much of the work that I make is made with paper and delicate materials damage is inevitable and fixing these damages adds to the history of the objects. The objects change and evolve from one performance and showing to the next.
Art never ends.
Making art should be the first thing that comes to our minds when we wake up. I know the baby is crying, gotta get to work, it is true we are all busy. But that is all the more reason to continually make art. It is the thing that makes us who we are and it requires a certain amount of sacrifice. And I am not suggesting neglecting the kids or forgetting to go to work. I am suggesting making the time required to make our art finding ways to make art a part of our daily lives. It doesn’t always work but I try to go to the studio for at least ten hours a week, I spend four to six hours a week in the ballet studio and then whatever it takes to maintain this blog and my other online outlets. Granted it is not easy and I do not know if all the work will pay off in a way other than just for my own edification. All I know is that I have no regrets about anything I have done in my life but if I do not follow this calling I will look back, in 30 years, and hate myself. I also know I can’t stop. I have to make art. I have to communicate.
Art is the purity that makes us who we are.
I have been drawing for a long time. I was skipping class junior year in high school and Mr. Palmer, the junior high art teacher, told me that if I was going to be using his classroom to skip class I’d better be doing something. He gave me a drawing board with a sheet of good drawing paper and a pencil. He set me down in front of a still life that contained a wicker basket, wine glass and an antique hand mirror. He told me to make a drawing. 30 minutes later he came over and took the paper away from me gave me a new sheet and told me to come back tomorrow and try again. The next day he did the same thing to me but on my third piece of paper he came over and didn’t say anything or take the paper away. I skipped class a few more times until Mr. Palmer spoke to someone and then I was a regular in his art room.
I called the drawing “Life in a basket” Mr. Palmer loved the drawing and as soon as I was done he put me in front of another still life only this time with a rapidograph pen. This still life had an old lantern and some cruddy wood in it. I did a stippling technique on the lantern and cross hatching on the wood. Both of these drawings were super hot for still life pieces and made me realize that I wanted to make art forever. I thought then that art could change the world and I do now. Mr Palmer said it over and over again we can make the world a better place through art. He would be the first of a string of teachers who would influence me on my way to becoming the artist and person I am today.
Education can change the world.
Red tape, red dots, red rope: the things the system are made of. Who’s system is it. When I lived in Seattle I was a member of a coop gallery called Oculus. There were six of us. We had a consensus system as to decisions and showing. We showed a limited schedule but were always open on the nights of art walks. Commercial galleries always get more traffic and respect than coop’s and other venues. I am not sure why. Who says that one person is more capable or qualified to decide what art should be shown and what shouldn’t? Is it that one person is more educated? more experienced? more…? The truth is that the people running the galleries are probably no more experienced, educated on art than most of the people who are sending work to them. What separates us is money and happenstance. One individual chooses to be an artist one chooses to be an art connoisseur/dealer. It takes a lot of money to run a gallery. And because of that the dealers and art galleries need to keep the power in their court.
We can, like many other artistic fields can break from the gallery strangle hold on how and what art is seen. Like musicians on myspace we can use the internet to our advantage to connect with former admirers of our work and to make new ones. Places like personal blogs, flickr and etsy allow us to show our work to a huge variety of individuals and to sell our work in a place designed for artists. All we have to do is take the initiative to work for ourselves. It isn’t easy, requiring a huge amount of time in writing and documenting work. At the end of the day one of the last things I want to do is write descriptions for photos, or load them to my etsy page or write a post. We are all tired but if we wish to stop working for someone else, in such a direct way, then we have to do it.
Art is a cruel bastard that will suck the life out of you while giving you inspiration to breath again.
The sporebox is a portable art piece. It was the beginning of my interest in performing art work. Because the sporebox is so small when it is closed I can easily carry it around with me in my messenger bag. For a couple months, right after I finished it, I carried it around with me and anytime I saw a place that looked interesting I would pull out sporebox and let it bloom and wither. In this shot I am in a gutted room in a building on Pratt Institutes campus. This particular time I had someone with me to take shots. Most of these performances I did not have anyone with me so many of these performances are just a memory to me and the people who were there to see them. I find this the most interesting part of the sporozoan performances. They are serendipitous experiences for viewers. And because no one knows when or where they might happen the viewers are random, usually people who would not normally go to galleries, look at my work or anyone else’s. My favorite place to perform sporebox was on the F train in NYC. On the train sporebox was able to tell its story many times in one evening as I would ride from station to station performing the bloom and wither.
Art should be part of our daily lives.
Beauty comes in many forms not all of which are pretty. The Tragic beauty book is a collaborative project organized by members of Booklyn and Artichoke Press. I am not sure how many books have been published but in 2005, when I was asked to participate, six books had been published. All participants were given dimensions and fold placements and asked to create 30 pages for the book. The book wishes to examine all that the artists who participate consider that which is beautiful and tragic. I used a design of the sporozoan on one side of the page and on the other I broke up the page into seven stories. I took pictures of death and destruction across NYC. I used the recent vandalism of on of my public sculptures as the center piece and framed it with images of dead animals in the street, dead houses collapsing and homeless people.
The page is a screen print containing around 30 colours. Some of the image is hand drawn and some digital with hand manipulation. It required 19 folds and hours of cutting to finish the piece so that it could be given to the book binder.
Art finds the best in us.
The belt sander with 50 grit paper was my first step after the wet saw. I worked my way down to 120 grit.
After the belt sander I used the router to round over the edge on both the top and bottom.
I used a random orbital sander with 180 and then 240 grit as the final step with power tools.
Terrence helped me a lot with prep work and moving of these heavy stones. In this shot Terrence is working on some surface detailing of the race way piece before we started on the hand sanding.
Hand sanding was the final step. I worked my way down to 600 grit. When all the sanding and polishing was done Terrence and I set the race way into an epoxy adhesive. The final step will be to seal the stone.