Mostly Painting and a Little Bit of Photography

When people find out that I consider myself a practicing artist, the inevitable follow-up question goes something to the tune of, "what medium do you work in?" I invariably respond, "mostly painting and a little bit of photography." I realized recently, however, that this blog features only drawings and paintings, and no photography at all.

Aside from the fact that both painting and photography are typically 2-D, I experience them as being pretty different.  For me (I don't want to generalize), painting feels more expressive, while photography feels more journalistic. When I begin making art, I usually start with an idea or issue that I wish to probe, and choose my medium based on how I want to conduct my inquiry. When I paint, I combine memory, imagination, and observation to investigate an idea. In most cases, I am very intentional with my imagery, sketching out forms and compositions before articulating them in paint. Photography is more about finding and framing existing scenes that help me share my ideas and then picking the best image or images out of a selection of many, sometimes hundreds, of options.

Despite these differences, these two mediums have played equally important roles in my creative life, and each practice has taught me something important about how to approach the other. As a slow act of representation, painting has helped me learn how to look, to concentrate, and to see. It has inspired an acute level of visual mindfulness. When I picked up photography as my second art form in college, I found that this finely honed sense of observation helped me to identify photo-worthy moments and environments.  In return, photography taught me how to give up some of my rigid control over outcomes, and to embrace serendipitous mistakes as sources of new thinking - a lesson I try to apply to my current painting practice. 

I took the photos posted in this entry with my Holga camera. A Holga is a cheap brand of camera developed many years ago on the premise that all people should have access to making photographs. It feels like a toy camera - light and plastic, with just a few basic settings to choose from (near, medium, far). It leaks light and produces completely unpredictable images, and in doing so, it teaches me tremendous things about letting go. The trick with the Holga is figuring out when to use it. It gives images an ethereal, ghostly effect, creating a sense of nostalgia. This suits some subject matters well and others not at all. I took the images posted below in an abandoned cement factory outside of Allentown during the dead of winter. The decaying buildings, slowly being reclaimed by nature, are eerie and beautiful and powerful all at once. Perfect for a Holga.

Home is Where the ? is

I have two new images to post. Named Sublet 1 and Sublet 2, I created them this summer for Dear Fleisher, a fundraising exhibition held once every two years at the Fleisher Art Memorial. Each fits to the exhibition's required 4x6 inch (postcard-sized) dimensions. They are in a new medium for me--gouache--which I find rather challenging to work with and even more challenging to spell. I have wanted to try it for awhile now, mostly because I like its dusty opaque quality. I've since learned that that dusty opaque quality is the reward for a level of proficiency I have not yet obtained. Instead, I had to settle for a streaky watery quality.

At the end of my spring quarter, I left Columbus for a four month stint back in Philadelphia. I returned in order to work at the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program while also beginning to collect data for my masters thesis. The 50 lb or else baggage limit forbid me from bringing along my painting supplies, so I was forced to start over with new supplies for the summer. This struck me as the perfect opportunity to experiment with gouache, and so, after stocking up, I turned my attention to my typical subject matter: my space.

Except that it wasn't really my space. I had located a sublet on Craigslist, a big house filled with people in West Philly, the largest room of which served as my bedroom. When I arrived, a single suitcase of clothing in hand, the room was empty of decoration. A few things on the walls and a couple of books indicated that it had been lived in recently, but it was a mostly white, object-free environment. So, where I typically paint the things that clutter up my apartments, here I was challenged to paint exactly the opposite: the absence of things. I hoped, in my work, to capture the awkwardness that characterizes spending prolonged periods of time in a space not your own.

This is not to say that I didn't have a really wonderful summer. The house provided a friendly place full of interesting people and the streets and community organizations and coffee shops of Philadelphia fed my soul. I just never stopped feeling like I was sleeping in somebody else's bed and showering in somebody else's shower. I have rather the opposite problem in Columbus. In Columbus, I live in a beautiful, comfortable apartment that feels very much mine, but the city itself stubbornly refuses to cough up a sense of home.  And so for these two years, I am stuck with a bit of a crack in my identity: my sense of home derived from occupying a living space full of my things cannot co-exist with my sense of home derived from being within a city that I love.

Keeping and Giving

My last post was in February. I am disappointed in myself. My excuse of relentless school and/or travel is also disappointing. In any event, last week, I found myself with two plan-free days on my hands, and, after wiping the dust off of my paint supplies, I got to work.

This is the time of year when I get angsty about my wardrobe. It seems overly large, overly uncoordinated, overly unprofessional, or overly something. So I go through the annual purge, where everything finds itself in a large heap on my bed. I then spend several hours playing dress-up until I end up with a neatly folded pile of clothes that I feel ready to dispose of in one way or another (rags, Goodwill, consignment). I have developed, over the years, strict criteria for this process. 1) Do I own something similar that I will, in every conceivable circumstance, choose over this item? 2) Is it just a little too small or way too small? Is it just a little too big or way too big? 3) Is it stained, misshapen, or in some other way unsalvageable? 4) Even if it's incredibly beautiful/cool/interesting and I enjoy glancing at it in my closet on occasion, have I worn it in the last five years?

I use this system (a set of policies, if you will) because I find this process incredibly painful. At risk of sounding like a flaming materialist, I find that objects, and clothing in particular, take on

identities shaped by the stories of how they came into my possession, and what they have borne witness to over the course of my ownership. Breaking them or giving them away involves reconciling myself not only to the loss of the functional part, but to the loss of the emotional part as well. A few years ago, somebody (accidentally, I hope) walked off with my generic-looking black wool coat at a big New Year's party. I did not feel violated, as some people describe that experience, nor did I worry that I had lost something of monetary value. Instead, I found myself thinking, "I didn't get to say goodbye to it." I guess this is probably what is happening during my annual purge. I'm saying goodbye.

I paint objects because I find them a fascinating study in contrast. They are inanimate but they tell stories. They are inert but they have lives. They are inherently meaningless but inscribed with significance. They have longevity but they are fragile. My paintings usually depict still-lifes, but are also a form of self-portraiture, and they give me the chance to negotiate my relationship to object and to memory as I work. Additionally, they allow me to create a record, so that I still have something by which to remember the things that end up in the give pile.

From a formal stance, I attempt to contrast a painterly representational style used to depict the space/object against a more hyper-realized abstract style used to capture the patterned surface of the object. This duality in style creates, for me, an interesting parallel to my dual experience of objects as both functional and emotional.

Keep/Give, oil on gessoed paper, 8.5 x 11"

Genealogical Comic

In a slightly out-of-the-ordinary post, I am sharing some artwork that I created for my Policy and History Perspectives on Art Education class. I have yet to post images of drawings on this blog, partially because I draw with less frequency then I paint, and partially because my drawings tend to be a bit more aimless than my paintings. That said, I love drawing. I love how it feels, I love the kind of precision it enables, and I love the challenge of translating color imagery into a gray-scale. So I jumped at the opportunity to create a comic for an open-ended class assignment to share my "academic genealogy." The term genealogy is taken from Foucault, and can be understood as the process of troubling textbook versions of history. Conducting a genealogy means going backwards in time, imagining different pathways, and considering the way that supposedly "true" structures are in their own way constructs. This process of troubling is, according to Foucault, the best way to avoid falling utterly under the sway of the powers that be in the present. I apologize; this is an oversimplification of a complicated idea, but I think it gives some sense of the basis of the assignment, which was designed to help us understand the term better by applying it to our own histories.

The below images were accompanied a presentation, so I was able to explain much of the symbolism. I'll give a brief explanation here, so that they are a bit more decipherable. I divided my genealogy into three categories: thought, lived, and imagined. "Thought" includes the philosophical and artistic influences that have guided my academic and career choices, and in many cases, helped me wade through bigger questions about identity. "Lived," encompasses the jobs, actions, and tangible decisions that have directed my life, and "Imagined" includes the discarded possibilities (including college majors in set design and art, plans for immediately after college [boat building or studying textiles], and applying to architecture programs). I chose botanical/natural imagery to symbolize this discard because the process of setting aside possibilities played an important role in my intellectual and emotional growth. And because, as more casual interests, the discarded choices continue to nourish my life. Finally, the tangles on the 2nd and 3rd pages symbolize periods of confusion and hazy direction. I know this all sounds a little hippy-dippy, but this turned out to be an interesting and thought-provoking project, and it was a nice reprieve from the more technical assignments that I have for my Public Finance and Nonprofit Management classes.

Common Carrot, etc.

New images! These are two images that I conceived of together and created one after the other. They derive from the Klimtian pieces I did earlier in the fall, but they are a pretty wild departure from my original inspiration. They go with the image posted in "Blow-Up" (below). They do not look similar, but they are connected, for me, by the process of their creation. Both required obsessive concentration, meticulous attention to detail, and quite a bit of time. They both made my hands hurt. Klimtian Copy/Squares is acrylic on gessoed paper, and Klimtian Copy/Common Carrot is cut paper on gessoed paper. Both are probably about 5" x 5." It is hard to capture white cut paper against white gesso, so I included an image that is back-lit.

Feedback is especially welcome! These more abstract pieces are a new direction for my work.

Klimtian Copy/Squares

Klimtian Copy/Common Carrot (back-lit)

Blow-up

This post is going to be brief because I am in the midst of writing a paper and studying for an exam. This is a larger version of one of the Klimtian Copies posted below (8.5 x 11 rather than 4 x 6). It's in acrylic paint with white and colored paper cut-outs. The two versions look quite different in life, but not so different digitally, which I find somewhat interesting.

Color Tunnels

In September, a colleague gave me a book of poetry by Wislawa Szymborska because, he said, my artwork brought it to his mind. I'm usually a rather tepid lover of poetry--sometimes it strikes just right, other times I throw it away in frustration--but I do love this collection, and I would like to believe that her literary style can be related to my visual style. So here is an experiment of sorts.

I have recently returned to an aspiration to paint highways. I've skirted around this subject matter for some time now, doing a few, mostly unsuccessful, paintings over the past couple of years. The very first, which was successful, can be found in the initial post on this blog (Northeast Extension). I am drawn to the monochromaticity of highways during winter: gray roads, gray-ish salt- and dirt-encrusted cars, gray trees, gray skies. These dull shades are punctuated by sudden interludes of intense color from construction signage (orange), rest-stop signage (blue), directional signage (green), and finally, the lights from passing cars. At night, too, there is a monochromaticity, but with added dimensions of blue, black, and purple.

I spent a good chunk of time over the Thanksgiving break driving in the wee hours of the morning as well as in the middle of the night, often surrounded by thick fog. I was struck again by how the world takes on a beautiful, indistinct haze; it is a tunnel through grays and blues, and ground and sky become inseparable. This serves to sharpen the moments of color, rendering them fierce and aggressive reminders of a world away from the highway.

When creating the below piece, From Pittsburgh, I also looked to the following poem by Szymborska for inspiration:

Sky

I should have begun with this: the sky.
A window minus sill, frame, and panes.
An aperture, nothing more
but wide open

I don't have to wait for a starry night,
I don't have to crane my neck
to get a look at it.
I've got the sky behind my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.
The sky binds me tight
and sweeps me off my feet.

Even the highest mountains are no closer to the sky
than the deepest valleys.
There's no more of it in one place
than another.
A mole is no less in seventh heaven
than the owl spreading her wings.
The object that falls in an abyss
falls from sky to sky.

Grainy, gritty, liquid,
inflamed, or volatile
patches of sky, specks of sky,
gusts and heaps of sky.
The sky is everywhere,
even in the dark beneath your skin.
I eat the sky, I excrete the sky.
I'm a trap within a trap,
an inhabited inhabitant, an embrace embraced,
a question answering a question.

Division into sky and earth--
it's not the proper way
to contemplate this wholeness.
It simply lets me go on living
at a more exact address
where I can be reached promptly
if I'm sought.
My identifying features
are rapture and despair.

Szymborska, Wistawa. "Sky." Poems New and Collected 1957-1997. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1998.



There are more of these to come, I think.