Drawings as Sculptures?

I was cleaning up and rearranging my studio a couple of weeks ago, and I pulled out these large, rolled up works on paper.  I was thinking they were good fodder to cut up and rework.  But now I'm wondering about the roll as a display strategy itself.  Can a drawing be a sculpture?

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Maybe I'm thinking a little bit of this Polly Apfelbaum work from 2000, Bones:

Polly Apfelbaum, Bones, 2000, image from D'Amelio Gallery website

Possibilities?

Summer Studio

So, my summer residency dream did not come to fruition.  But I realized, hey, I can make my own change of scene.  So I set up a temporary summer studio upstairs, on our enclosed sleeping porch.  I still have to make my own breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but at least I only have to share a shower with one other person and two small parrots.  Not a bad trade off.

Hey, it's even got windows!

February Studio Pictures

Sometimes when I don't have any ideas, I give myself assignments.  Usually, those assignments are to paint from life whatever is around me.  For the last few weeks I've been using watercolor, inspired by the watercolor class I taught last semester at GWU.

Small watercolors of studio scenes, a new series from the last few weeks.

Studio watercolors detail.  On the right a work table is pictured.  A painting of a stack of paintings is on the left.

Hello again!

Hello blog, sorry to leave you dangling for all of 2012.  Here's to doing better in 2013.

Last year, these things happened:

Finished up my residency at Montgomery College.

 Was invited to be in a two-person installation show with John Watson at Carroll Square Gallery, organized by Shira Kraft of Hempfill Fine Art, during the summer.

 Basement studio remodel!  Ripped out all the drywall, added lots of lights.  Most of my summer was spent on this massive project.  So worth it.

Iceland!

 A solo show at Flashpoint, combining installation & painting, to close out the year.

MC Studio: What's Up Now

The state of things right this minute in my studio. Big things, small things, watercolor, screen prints, black gesso.

New Year, New Digs

I'll be serving as the artist-in-residence in the Cafritz Center at the Takoma Park, MD, campus of Montgomery College during spring 2012. Check out this beautiful studio I'll be working in:




I've also got a painting up in the George Washington University Faculty Show, in the Classroom 102 gallery. The show will be up for a couple of weeks as we settle into the new semester.

Fleshing It Out

i've been asked a lot recently (both on the radio and by others) about my newer paintings, what they are about, why so many of them contain kitchen scenes, etc. i'm trying to figure this out myself.

these paintings were all made within the last year once i got a studio set up here in washington. when we left LA, i was working in an abstract manner, using memories of my daily experiences driving around town....that meant i was looking at landscape, the outside world around me: neons, car crashes, wildfires, steep hillsides, tropical gardens, smog. once i got to work here in DC, i took that way of working that i had developed (really paying attention to visual experiences on a day-to-day basis and making an effort to file them away in my memory, then working from memory without outside references) and applying them to my daily life and studio work now. so, that's resulted in a greater attention to interiors and working from my memories of other dwellings i have lived in or had important experiences in. my focus has been on working on our house, and that has come out in my work too. i seem to be gravitating towards kitchens, maybe for the reasons i talked about in the audio clip. they are centers of intense work and creativity, just like a studio. they are rooms we associate with good things: nourishment, love, family, social connections. there are also just really complex places to look at, so many nooks, crannies, nobs, bells, whistles, etc.

the bold black lines and messy paint and patterns are a compositional device. i think they are also a way to convey the way memories are incomplete, incorrect, and very hard to get down on paper like they appear in your head.

so, that's me trying to articulate my thoughts as of now. i'm headed back to LA for the weekend and am interested to see how i will perceive that city this time around. ciao!

Studio Preparedness

Ready for anything, come hell, high water, ice storms, or studio visits.

Washerwoman

In advance of a project I will be starting at the Washington Project for the Arts offices next week, I have been washing my bed sheet collection. Yes, all 600+ pounds of it.

Turns out my washing machine and clothes dryer are pretty good sculptors in their own rights. Check it out:

Amazing twists and swirls! I'm going to have to figure out how to recreate some of this on my own.

Check back next week for daily posts about Fort Distraction, my Coup d'Espace at the WPA offices.

Studio Update: As It Stands Now

Here's what's up in the studio right now. These are paintings on paper, mostly finished. Commentary by Percy & Pete.

Wait, what?!

Why am I doing this? Where did this cartoony bad painting realism crawl in from? And why the sudden fascination with stoves? What?

Studio Re-do

Last week's studio clean up turned into a full blown studio revamp, including rearranging the wallboards, furniture, and building a table. I had been mulling over this idea in my head for a while, because there was a large support beam in the way of one of my painting walls. So, I moved my storage/desk area to the blocked wall, freeing up the rest of the walls for work. I added some leftover paint from our home office for a little snap and energy (who wouldn't want a studio like this?). And now I'm back to getting some good work done.

Before

After:



I plan to open up the blocked basement windows at some point (currently serving as book and old work storage). But that's in the future.

Treat!

I must be a professional since I just spent $200 on paper. Sweet, sweet, French paper. Mmmm.

Studio Update

So, I’ve been quiet here because I’ve been busy in the studio. I’ve started some new paintings and have not been looking at too much of other people’s art. My new work is lumpy and awkward, and is hard to make, but I'm gnawing away at it anyhow.

I recently had a conversation with an artist friend in which he said he was bored of artists/students questioning what it means to make a painting now. (In his defense, he comes from the position of feeling skeptical of painting’s continued relevance, which is cool. I feel skeptical about it too sometimes.) At the time, I didn’t really take up the other side of this coin, and the conversation moved on. However, I was thinking about this later, probably while I was working on a painting. Why do we need to continue to question painting’s legitimacy as a vehicle for artmaking? Haven't we been wondering about this since photography was invented? Yet I ask myself this all the time and seek out the commentary of others on the subject. It’s like we need to undermine ourselves before we get down to work.

Since there are so many media options for art making now, especially so many that are cleaner, maybe faster, and much easier to disseminate to a large audience, I suppose we ask this question as a kind of reassurance for ourselves about our choice to paint. By asking ourselves “what does it mean to make a painting now?” we are consciously engaging with the history of this ancient medium. We choose the richness of old over the wildness of the new. It seems like there are restrictions and freedoms and wonderful discoveries to be made down each road.

In Memory of Nam

So, I was going to write a post about the challenges of getting down to work in a new studio; about how I don't know where my brushes or pencils are; I occasionally bump into doors, lights, or tables; and I seem to have forgotten all my favorite color combinations and mark making techniques.

However, I learned last night that one of my grad school colleagues passed away a couple of weeks ago, making those new-studio concerns seem very small. Nam Clark entered the UIUC MFA program in 2005, during my last year. He was making funny, smart, politically charged paintings and drawings at that time. We were all amazed by his work; it was already so sophisticated and fully developed, we figured he had a lot more to teach us than he had to learn in our little backwater program. Plus, he was actually painting(!) and not listening to those voices in our faculty that continually cast doubt of the relevancy of this medium. It was clear that Nam had the chops and the attitude to go far.

He was initially given this weird, raw, semi-studio in the sculpture building, but clearly that space didn't fit with the work he was making. He soon moved into the vacant studio next to me. I really enjoyed having him as a neighbor for those last few months of school. I could sense all the hard work and good energy coming out of his studio, and he inspired me to work harder and dig in further to my own practice. I feel sure that as he moved into teaching at UIUC and later at ISU, he was able to inspire many many others.

If that in the end is the point of making art, then Nam was a wild success indeed.

See more of Nam Clark's work here.

First Day!

Lightness of Being

A few weeks ago, I went to (yet another) gallery talk by artist Andy Holtin, half of Causality Labs, about the duo's exhibition at American University's Katzen Art Center. (I guess I am making up for three years of almost never going to these things by now going to lots lots lots.)

I really enjoyed Holtin's talk; his presentation combined the best aspects of casual conversation with high academic discourse. However, what I've been turning over in my head ever since is one particular phrase he use at the beginning of his talk. He described himself as "trying to be an artist" rather than beginning with the assumption that he already was one. I am really enjoying thinking about the implications of this phrase: that this is an identity we can put on and take off; that identity as an artist is not fixed; that an artist is never fully developed, always growing more fully into his or her practice.

Dumbing down?

I have been to a couple of different artist talks over the past week, one by Mia Feuer at Transformer (this show closes Saturday) and one by a panel of Christian Benefiel, Michael Enn Sirvet, and Katherine Mann at Hamiltonian (show is up for another couple of weeks). All of these artists work in abstract forms that seem to directly reference natural or man-made objects, although they transform these forms via scale, placement, and strange juxtapositions into things almost unrecognizable.

Both Feuer and Mann talked about cultivating chaos in their practices, Mann by pouring random pools of ink, Feuer by trying to overextend her own physical capabilities with the scale and complexity of her work. They talked about their desire to create these chance-directed situations that they then have to clean up and respond to in order to create their work.

However, both artists shyed away from the word “intuition” when describing their processes, and neither seemed to want to give their subconscious underworkings much credit. Instead, they talked about their efforts to regain control over the chaos in very pedestrian, physically oriented, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other terms. I have caught myself in this same kind of downplaying of my mental processes when talking about my work. Now that I hear what it sounds like, I am kind of annoyed. Isn’t being an artist having this really refined visual sense that allows you to create meaning through inarticulatable (is that a word?) means? Isn’t that skill what sets artists apart from everyone else? So why do we have a hard time giving credence to that ability? Why do we do the “aw, shucks, I’m just an ole girl who works with her hands and nice things come out of it, somehow” song and dance? Why do we strive to un-intellectualize ourselves?

A Response

Last night I attended the WPA-sponsored panel/town hall/free-for-all “Running for Cover(age)” with Kriston Capps, Isabel Manalo, Jeffry Cudlin, and Danielle O’Steen. This discussion was held in response to recent articles (WaPo and AiA) and a Facebook exchange about collector Mera Rubell’s whirlwind studio visit tour of the DC area.

Well, what did I think? I am a newcomer to our nation’s capital city, so I am loathe to step on any tender toes lest I cross myself off the local art list before I even get onto it. That said, the audience was full of a bunch of whiny-assed arts professionals!

Why such a combative relationship with local media? True, arts coverage is given few column inches and tends to have a national/institutional focus , but it’s not as if this situation is much different from that found in any other city. Our newspapers are under the knife, and arts coverage is an easy pound of flesh to give up. (For instance, the Los Angeles Times no longer has stand-alone book review or arts sections {much less a daily local news section!} despite being in a center of art production and display….it’s now all lumped together into a general culture section once a week.) Art workers here need to accept the power of the Post to direct viewers and audiences, and at the same time look to themselves to solve their own problems. Someone in last night’s audience suggested an artist run publication. Makes sense to me based on what I've seen elsewhere. Texas has Glasstire, Chicago has Bad at Sports, LA has Artillery. DC needs its own smart, local outlet, too.

Notice I didn’t put New York in that list. That’s because every other complaint I heard last night was directed at the NYC-art-media-money complex. Old chestnuts such as: Why do our young artists leave for Brooklyn? Why doesn’t our art scene have a Chelsea equivalent? Why does New York media treat us as unimportant and second class? Why didn’t ArtForum review my show?

As if these complaints are original, unique, or limited to DC. New York media treat us as provincial because they themselves are provincial. ArtForum gives only the briefest of nods to the other major art centers in this country, and barely acknowledges the West Coast or the South, so of course it’s not going to cover DC in detail. Young artists leave for New York because 1) maybe it’s closer than LA or Chicago, and 2) it appears from afar that it will be much easier to make and show work there. In reality, it’s really freaking hard to make and show work anywhere, including a cold, crappy loft in Brooklyn. Every city has its own special challenges for artists, and anybody who says otherwise is kidding themselves. DC art workers, realize that you are not in New York. You have your own thing going here, that is unique to here, with many jurisdictions, out of the way art spots, make-shift studio space, and the long shadows of museums of international stature. Use your special challenges as strengths and uniting factors, not as reasons to bitch and moan.

Raise your own flag, as Bjork would say.

A Whole 'Nother Country

I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the 1980s and 90s. I remember thinking of cities like Memphis, New Orleans, and Dallas as distant metropolises full of glamour, neon lights, and general excitement. These were the places where my well heeled classmates would be taken by their mothers to shop for new school clothes or one-of-a-kind cotillion dresses, or would accompany their fathers to attend action-packed sporting events. Dallas had a special place in this starry constellation because a picture of it entered my family’s living room every Friday evening (in the form of J.R., Sue Ellen, and company on Dallas) and sometimes, with luck, on New Year’s Day (in the form of an Arkansas Razorbacks appearance at the Cotton Bowl). To my mind, Dallas, with its distinctive lit-up skyline and Neiman Marcus catalogs, was the epitome of a city; New York might as well have been on another planet.

Well, now I have the chance to learn about the real Dallas, to replace this childhood picture of it in my mind. For the next two months, I’ll be living and working at UT Dallas’ Central Trak artist residency, in the neighborhood of Deep Ellum. I’m looking forward to learning about a new art community and reconnecting with my Texas ties. I’ll be posting about my adventures here. Stay tuned!