Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Art>business
During my second trip through the university experience, I've done pretty well in my management courses. So people seem to wonder why I would pick something like Visual Arts as a major. The answer is pretty simple, art is more enjoyable than business, but there is more to my reasoning than simple enjoyment, though that should be enough.
My primary justification for taking a degree in the Visual Arts and putting my management stuff on the back burner is rooted in art's overriding importance to our species. Before their was business or any need for management beyond managing our species' food and shelter needs, there was art. Our ancestors painted on cave walls thousands of years before consumerism became the species primary reason for existence. When the cycle resets itself and consumerism is replaced by some new form of survivalism, art will be there with us, communicating our ideas, our fears, our mundane existences.
Art is a human constant, whereas business is a human affliction, and ultimately, the arts will prevail. That is not to say art will save the world, it won't, but it will survive once things have collapsed under their own weight. There are only so many resources to extract and turn into useful, everyday porducts, just as there are only so many spaces for the human animal to insert itself, but any surface, any object, can be used as a component or means of artistic expression. Even the human voice and body can function as mediums in which to work. Art is a basic human endeavor as intrinsic to our species as the pursuit of food, water, and shelter. We can live without art, but we have chosen not to for eons, even under the most Hellish of circumstances. For instance, even when denied the bare necessities of food and water, Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz, one of Nazi Germany's most notorious death camps, found ways to make art.
And the idea that modern society has no use for art is an illusion. Everywhere you look and almost every thing you interact with has some form of design aesthetic applied to it. From items as utilitarian and mundane as staplers to the iPhone to nearly every building around us, art and aesthetic design play a role. There is a designer behind every product package, marketing campaign, and advertisement we see, hear, and buy on a day-to-day basis. Art is pervasive and universal. It transcends religion, politics, nation of origin, color, creed, even mental and physical health. Art, like most things today, may be cheap and easy, but it is still being made in mountainous amounts by millions of people every single day.
So called "high" art may be lost in the wilderness, though that depends very much on where you look and what you consider to be high art, and low art may be completely commmercialized and empty, but it is still being made in vast quantities.
Labels: art
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
10 Rules of Making
10 Rules lifted from an art school's website that I unfortunately forgot to note. These work well for just about any facet of life. Wish I had stumbled across these 10 years ago!
1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.
Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.
There should be new rules next week.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Shoulda, coulda, woulda went to Ringling
I took a trip to the Ringling Museum of Art last weekend and I must admit, it was inspirational. John Ringling is best known for his part in creating the world's most famous circus, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. What many people do not know is that he and his wife were incredibly active patrons of the arts. Their passion for the arts grew to the point that they established the museum and The Ringling School of Art and Design on a large stretch of land in Sarasota. As a would be artist, seeing works by the likes of Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Van Dyck, and El Greco is always a thrill. Seeing 200, 300, and 400 year old paintings is an amazing experience, as you realize just how potentially long a created image might remain viable, given the proper care and materials. You also come to understand how large some painters were working during the Baroque and subsequent periods.
Rubens' wall paintings, completed by a team of assistants under his direction for Church commissions, are HUGE! I'm not sure of the actual dimensions, but one of the Ringling's gallery rooms features several Rubens works that have to be at least 15' tall and nearly as wide. It's amazing to see paintings that size framed and hung together in a single space. Filling the walls of a cathedral with images this size seems reasonable compared to some of the private commissions by other artists hanging in the Ringling's galleries. There are portraits which have to be 10' top to bottom and side-to-side. When I think of the structure one would have to build to make such a painting reasonable to own and it seems absurd. Then, like today, extravagance and gluttony were all the rage and it shows in the art of the time.
Old masters worked on grand scales. Michelangelo labored on the Sistine Chapel and chiseled The David (a life-sized model of which resides in the Ringling museum's central courtyard), each taking four years to complete. Titian, Rubens, and their artistic successors created giant canvases that seem almost ridiculously large to me. The cost of the canvas alone would have been prohibitive under the best circumstances. Add to that the expense of paint and frame and you have a massive amount of money committed to a single piece. In an era of opulence, spending astronomical sums of money on art was a more common occurrence. These days, the best hope of getting a grant is by creating public art, which often times is met by skepticism, if not outright disdain, but most of the general public.
Being an artist in an era when art was revered and admired must have been much more fun than being an artist in a time when art is marginalized or even dismissed entirely. In a time when people once referred to the likes of Britney Spears and Basquiat as "artists", the word is more an insult or slir than it is a compliment.
Labels: art
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Influences schminfluences
I am taking a crash course in identifying my influences. Being an aspiring artist means having artistic influences, much as being alive means having life influences. Everyone who makes marks, sculpts, writes, etc has at least one influence. For most of my life, I haven't given any of mine much thought. For the most part, art has been something I have not taken very seriously in a long, long time. Drawing and writing were always just things I did to vent or pass time. The thought of being an artist disappeared from my priority list around the time I turned 18, and so went any focused interest in artists and their work. When I look back, I think I will have many reasons to regret my 20s, my near abandonment of art being one of the most glaring.
So I haven't given much thought to who I would consider influences for over a decade. I know that I would like to make images like this and pull it off successfully, but a part of me is drawn to stuff like this and this and this and this. I'm all over the place, and the feeling is simultaneously freeing, in that I like who I like from every end of the spectrum, but troubling, in that my interests are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. More troubling is that I am not getting any younger, and the idea that my best creative years, if I ever have/had any creative years, may very well be lost somewhere in that decade-plus spent away from art. People say I have talent, but nothing I do impresses me and that seems to be the core of really enjoying art, impressing one's self. You never really know if people are just patronizing you, or just being polite. After all, praise is just words and words are fleeting things. I think the key to really creating something, to really feeling good about something I've created, will be that moment when I look at a piece and get the undeniable feeling of satisfaction that comes from being certain you have achieved something.
So far, in art and in most of my life, I find that such a sense of satisfaction is usually lacking. Nothing I do impresses me, because anything I can do just doesn't seem impressive. The situation is a paradox of sorts, or maybe it is a sign that what I do is nothing worth talking about. I am always more impressed with other peoples' work than my own, but I am not sure that this isn't the natural state of affairs. After all, what we do is rarely, if ever, going to seem impressive, because anything we can do is going to seem less impressive for the simple fact that we have done it. Unless you are at the absolute peak of your field or profession, there will be someone whose work impresses you. The ironic twist is that once a person reaches the proverbial top, the only place to go is down. But where was I going with all this…
Oh yeah, influences…most of my heaviest influences as a youth were from the comic book world. Names like Todd McFarlane and Marc Silvestri were much more familiar and dear to me as a child than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, or any of the other American giants of the 20th century. I enjoyed Dali's work, but most "serious" art people do not take Dali very seriously, so it would seem that I gravitated toward "low", or even "low brow" work. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Donatello were just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(as drawn by Eastman and Laird, not the hokey, cartoonish crap that would later take the proletariat by storm) to me until my teens. Francis Bacon, whose work I am becoming more obsessed with, was not a name I even knew, outside of Sir Francis Bacon, who was quite a different man than his distant, contemporary namesake. I enjoyed looking at the work of Van Gogh, but always thought of him as the 'crazy artist that cut off his ear for some girl', and missed the power in his work as a result.
But we change as we age. I still love those old comic book artists, but I must admit that I do not see myself as someone who will one day be in the comic book or illustration field. I still have no affections for the work of Warhol, Pollock, or most 20th century, American artists, but that's not to say that I do not have a better appreciation of artists like Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Van Gogh. Some of my tastes still venture into so-called "low brow" art, but I see little differentiation between low and high art. We live in a world where folk art is breaking into major museums and galleries. The difference between high and low art is being blurred, which is a good thing. People always seek to establish hierarchy in an effort to stroke their own egos, but in the end, hierarchy and superiority are little more than figments of our collective imaginations.
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Now playing: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood
via FoxyTune
Labels: art
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Some stuff I'm working on
I've had a pretty shitty couple of weeks, but I haven't been totally stagnant. I've managed to get the 60x60 I will be working on stretched, primed, re-primed, and base coated. Then I laid down a quick sketch I've had in my head for a little while now. The results are below.
I've also started a class called "Visual Problem Solving". The basic purpose of the course is to heighten our understanding of our own creative process. As part of that, we are forced to work with a stock of 5x5 cards, creating images using only a chisel tipped, permanent marker. Our initial exercise involved creating 50 'stick faces', generated of 15 lines or less, all of which had to be arcs or angular lines. Of course, I fudged the rules a bit and used some circles. We whittled our pile of 50 faces down to 5, then we were given a fairly tight span of time to create 3 variations of each face, using lines and arcs, sans any limitation on line count. My result is below. The most left column is comprised of my originals, with the variations at right. Definitely an interesting exercise and something I really enjoyed doing!
Labels: art
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Back to doin' the mess around
Cheap and easy; it's a way of life for some people, a means of survival for others, and the defining characteristic of the American Dream in a world where work is frowned upon and concepts like "earned" have been replaced by "entitled". Right now, I'm earning a new respect for painting, while at the same time paying some dues. I started blocking in the colors for my latest 'drawing', and have been forced to play with watercolors for the first time in this existence. Right now, things are not pretty, in fact they are downright awful.
Watercolors simply do not suit my way of thinking/moving/working, so fuck them. The watercolor here is terrible. Sure, it's my first, but it's the fourth failure in a row in my attempt to create a landscape. The large drawing/painting is still in the very early stages, but I'm struggling with the tools I am being forced to use and the amount of paint it takes to cover a canvas that is 60x48. Did I mention cheap earlier? You wanna know why paintings aren't cheap? It's because paint isn't cheap. I'm not even going to divulge how much paint, primer, and canvas is involved in this monstrosity, but it's more than most would probably be willing to spend and only have the very beginnings of an image. Piss on it, it's only money.
The real point is that these pieces represent first steps on a journey that may never end. I may have some talent, I may only be kidding myself, but the one thing I do have is a desire to master acrylics and oils so that I can use them in as familiar a way as I use a pencil or pen. That means lots of practice, lots of failed pieces, and (Jesus/Jehovah/Allah/Vishnu/Buddha help me) some patience. Somehow, I have to find a way to be patient with myself, something I am not known for. Maybe this will be the last piece of my puzzle, or the straw that breaks my overextended back. Only time will tell. For now, enjoy my fumbling and the thought that you could do this too, because you most certainly, most definitely could. :)
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Now playing: Nirvana - You Know You're Right
via FoxyTunes
Labels: art
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Finally getting back to work
I'm so damn busy, I literally need more hours in each day. Finally getting the second drawing started. Not sure where this one is going, but this is the basic image. Hopefully, more will happen once I start putting the paint down. This one is 60x48 on canvas that I stretched and primed myself (more work than you would think!). Time to start slinging paint around. :)
I found some stuff from my senior year of high school. Will have to go through what I have to see if there is anything worth sharing. Will post pics of any interesting images I might find.
Labels: art
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Creative addicts
The biochemical and psychological causes of addiction have long sparked my curiosity. As someone who doesn't suffer addictive compulsions, it's hard to understand the mental state of someone like Layne Staley or Kurt Cobain, to name two of my favorite, modern rock personalities who were ultimately destroyed by their chemical mistresses. Maybe it’s the allure of the unknown that explains my gravitating toward the creative works of addicted minds. My favorite music artists read like a roll call of chemical dependency, going all the way back to Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. Edgar Allen Poe, one of my favorite authors, suffered long running addictions to alcohol and drugs throughout the latter half of his life. Addicted, creative minds exhibit a sort of weakness and fragility that intrigues me. The paradoxical nature of their addictions calls out to me. The same demons they hide from in chemical dependency fuel a creative fire that expresses itself in beautiful works.
Artistic addicts, particularly those addicted to hard drugs, are fascinating because their addictions become the fuel that propels their creative expression, while simultaneously becoming the fire that will ultimately destroy it, often times taking them down in the process. In developing a dependency, they eventually marry the creative process to a consumptive process and thereby doom themselves to an inevitable failing of all processes. What starts as a muse eventually becomes an albatross, and by then it is often too late. Poe had his opium dreams, which inspired his writing. Staley had his heroin-fueled lyrics. While some might wince at me drawing parallels between a mere rock vocalist and a literary luminary like Poe, I think the comparison is fair in that they were both creative souls who lived lives saturated with emotional, and later physical, suffering. The intellectual merit of their work is a subjective judgment and irrelevant to the point I am trying to make.
Art is an expressive act. Inhibitions, fear, pain, unhappiness, intellect, and a million other influences can retard or distract the creative process. Chemicals become a way of stepping outside of that retardation, which can allow the artist to tap into their root inspiration without having to filter as much noise. I see any chemical dependency as a coping mechanism, sometimes necessary, sometimes elective, but always a means of coping with a malady, physical or psychological, real or imagined. Chemicals take the turbulence of physical or psychological pain and still them, bringing still waters to an angry river, if only temporarily. Subsequently, they can be incredibly powerful influences on life's troubled souls.
Speaking specifically of the creative addict, they are typically souls inspired to exorcise the apparitions haunting their mental spaces via words, images, objects, etc. Art becomes a component of their coping, but is often not enough. Like any other addict, the process begins innocently enough. The weekend escape, the eventual dabbling in stronger, different highs. The chemical intake begins freeing them from the mind's imagined limitations, and their work becomes more expressive. What separates the creative addict from other addicts is their ability to take us with them.
When you listen to an Alice in Chains song, you are not hearing about sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. You're hearing the descent of a creative soul into misery and rot. I read a quote that likened Alice in Chains sound, and Layne Staley's lyrics specifically, to "the beauty of decay". And the music is beautiful, just as the decay is obvious. Similarly, Poe's dark lyricism takes the reader on a journey through his inner workings. He was far more poetic in his expressiveness, but his suffering is no less evident. His most famous works are ominous and macabre and at the same time wonderful. His suffering mind did more than wallow idly in misery, it reached out, gave us its hand, and sought to take us on a journey.
The demons that haunt such souls, if left unchallenged, will eventually overcome any means of subduing them. That is the power and the tragedy of the creative addict. They have the means, the motivation, and the muse to take us on a temporary walk in their world. The good ones will move us, or even leave us unsettled, if not outright disturbed. At the same time, they stand as a warning and testament to the dangers in succumbing. The demons they feared and the troubles they muted eventually adapted and overcame them. It was not a question of if, but a matter of when. None of us can run if we're ever going to overcome. Real progress only begins when we finally stop struggling to escape. That’s the most powerful lesson and it transcends the entirety of human experience.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Day 3 1/2
Well, I touched the canvas for about five minutes last night, decided I was in a shit mood for working, then got back in gear this morning. The result is below and while I am not wholly pleased, I'm not outright disappointed. I'm calling it done, though there's more I'd like to do. With the tools I have at hand, and the purpose of the course, there's no good in getting some fine brushes and setting to work on details and intricacies.
I could unfurl a ribbon of pretentious BS about why I chose the colors, how they relate to each other on the canvas, and what I was trying to express, but that's not why I make art and that's certainly not what this particular image is supposed to be about. If you don't get it what I was thinking, I didn't express it well enough with my images. If you get 'it', or your 'it' is something other than my 'it', at least 'it' is in there somewhere, and I will color myself satisfied. :)
The next image is already in the works within the confines of my cerebellum. It will be bigger and more focused than this...which should bring it more in line with the tools I am being required to use, which should in turn make creating the image a less frustrating experience. I've included a picture of my prescribed brushes, to give you an idea of what I'm dealing with. The quarter is for size reference.
Yes, he's serious about the big, black 'brush' which looks more like a tool for dusting hard to reach crevices and corners. I intend to use all of these brushes at least once. We'll see how that goes!
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Now playing: Alice In Chains - Would
via FoxyTunes
Labels: art
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Playing with paint
Day 2 with the "drawing" which is going to end up looking very much like a sloppy painting, since I am limited with how much detail/drawing I can do. The brushes I am being forced to use large brushes. The fact that they are bristle and not sable makes a huge difference as well, so keep all of that in mind when judging progress. The whole point of this course is to free up my style and get more expressive, so I'm being forced to use broad brushes and a limited color palette, which means I have to mix my own secondary colors. So far, it's been fun. I'm guessing this took an half hour to put down, as the vinyl was sucking the paint dry before I could really work into it, so you end up loading the brush repeatedly. Hopefully, I will have an interesting image when it's all said and done. Fun so far. :)
Unfortunately, the colors are not as vivid as they appear here. The relatively low-res camera and its overenthusiastic flash are really bringing up the hues, which is nice, but not entirely accurate.
Labels: art
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Making art
I think I am going to make an effort to blog the creation of this latest drawing as I go, because that seems to be what many artists do. The subject matter is more loose and the final image is not completed in my mind, just yet, hence the lack of imagery on the canvas. The medium will be acrylic paint (this is a partial sketch in pastel used for layout purposes) and the canvas is a piece of 48x30 vinyl. Dad and I built the frame and stretched the vinyl ourselves. For a first effort, I have to admit we were pretty pleased.
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Now playing: Mad Season - River Of Deceit
via FoxyTunes
Labels: art
Thursday, September 06, 2007
That thing which bends time
I have been drawing in some capacity since childhood. It was always something I did, but rarely the focus of any concerted effort on my part. My time was spent playing football and basketball, riding bikes and burning time just hanging around. Art was there, it was an interest, but not the interest. Even now, I would say art's potential as a means of expressing myself is more interesting to me than art in and of itself, if that makes any sense. It would be fair to say that I am not a student of art for art's sake. My knowledge of art and art history are fairly limited. By most standards, I am fairly ignorant where art is concerned. But my ignorance is inconsequential to me, as I am not interested in being an historian or an afficionado. I am aware of and admire the masters for their technical prowess, sense and style, or their scale, but I could not walk into a museum and lead a tour or give a dissertation on any given period or movement. In fact, I probably know just slightly more than any other 'layperson'.
And I'm fine with that. Obviously, I will have to learn some of those names and attain a better understanding of art's evolution through history to be an effective instructor, but history is only as valuable as its application in the present. In the case of art, artists become preoccupied with being new or making a name for themselves as the next big thing. I think of modern art and its historical significance seems highly dubious. Where is the passion of Michelangelo or the inquisitive power of Da Vinci? Where is the introspective, existential energy? It is being spent in pursuit of different, edgy, or some other adjective. As it is in society, so it is in art, the superficial and even the banal win out over substance. Art's greatest power is in its work as social commentary and as a chronicle of the day's sociology. I suppose modern art functions well in this capacity.
The conscious awareness of my love for the creative process came relatively late for me, but I can remember a time when creating art, drawing specifically, used to consume most of my spare time as a matter of course. I did not recognize it at the time, but I was most certainly in love with the act of picture making. During a break from class this evening, I had a conversation with the prof and a couple of other students about passion and its role in life, particularly in careers. At some point, I was reminded of a day in my youth when drawing literally consumed an entire day without me ever being aware of time's passing. What I was drawing is lost to me now, but I do remember laying down in front of a blank sketchbook page and beginning to draw.
It was probably sometime in the late morning when I started, maybe 10 or 11am. As I said, I can't remember the subject matter, or even if I liked the work, but I do remember losing a significant part of the day to graphite and paper. My mind was completely unaware of time. Hours may well have been minutes and I wouldn't have known the difference. By the time I came back to reality the outside world was dark and the house was full of artificial light. I remember feeling vaguely disoriented, but not particularly aware of what had just happened. In sacrificing most of a day to what I considered a pastime then, I set the stage for where I am today. I had no idea at the time, but I had already been fully engaged in my passion for years by that time. Where I would rather be playing football or basketball, my heart was elsewhere. Maybe that made it easier to quit football tryouts in my Freshman year of high school or to refuse a tryout with the East Lake basketball team. Or maybe I was not ever good enough at those things to have had a chance to make either team. At this point, it is irrelevant, as I had already found the thing that allowed me to break free of time's prison.
Given the finite nature of our breath and bodies, what more can any of us ask for?
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Now playing: Janis Joplin - Summertime
via FoxyTunes
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
My first attempt at painting hair
I'm only sharing because I share so little artwork on this page, and I'm fairly happy with the results, given that this is a first attempt. I'm guessing the time involved was a little over two hours, though I did not do everything in one sitting. The medium is Photoshop and the tool was my trusty Wacom 12x12. This is my first attempt at painting hair in a semi-realistic fashion, ever, so I wanted to document it for history. Hopefully, I will have made some serious progress in a year or two. :) There are some substantial problems and obviously, things are not complete, but I'm done with this particular learning exercise.
I'll try to post more as I create more, though my finished work will go to my DeviantArt account, to make things easier to keep organized. Let me know what you think (and be as brutally honest as you feel is necessary...my feelings won't be hurt).
Click the image for a larger view.
Labels: art
Friday, August 03, 2007
The plot thickens
Got a laugh at my own expense this morning. As noted in one or two my previous posts, I wake up each morning to the sounds of Fisher and Boy of the 97X morning show. A vast majority of the time, I give little or no attention to the subject of the moment, but this morning they were running a call-in contest searching for the oldest male still living with his mom/parents in the Tampa Bay area. Today’s prize was a pair of concert tickets to one of the larger shows coming to town…I can’t remember which at this point. Now, I’ve gone over the reasons for my living situation, so I’ll save the explanation/justifications, because the phone calls that began making it to air made any justification I might have irrelevant. As far as the world is concerned, these men are my peers, and in some ways, my people. The more calls they fielded, the more pathetic things became, but I couldn’t help but laugh.
The contest was inspired by an AP story about a 61-years old man who still lived with his mother, received an allowance, depended on her for his meals, etc. The calls start coming in and the bidding, as it were, starts at 27 years old. Quickly things advanced to 29, 31, 33, and so on. I had to leave for the office before the contest could reach its conclusion, but I’m guessing they found someone in their 40s or even 50s before wrapping up. I was taken aback at how few of the 30-somethings even paid rent, and they all seemed to be jobless. The 33 years-old didn’t even have a high school diploma. I laughed, because like or not, these are my peers. These are the men strangers will associate me with. Finally, I have a peer group! What a relief it is to have people I can relate to. :)
In related news, I’ve decided that I am going to do a Masters in Fine Arts, and that I am almost 100% certain that I will be doing it through Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). I dreamed of taking classes there as a kid, and it seems reasonable to make that happen now that I am older and wiser. There had been talk that SCAD was looking for Florida facilities in order to open a satellite campus in the St Pete area, which would have been ideal, but that talk has since died down and things are now looking doubtful. This means a move to Savannah will be in order, should I decide to do my Masters there. USF has an excellent MFA program, but nothing like what is available at SCAD. The more I think about the possibilities, the more attractive the idea becomes.
SCAD is located in the heart of Victorian Savannah. The college has created something of a bohemian environment in which students of art can congregate and expand their collective understanding of what it means to be an artist. I’m told the area itself is beautiful, the residents being more Mayberry than Desperate Housewives, and the general vibe being more laid back, old-South, than sprawling metropolis. When I think about the possibilities, I get excited at the idea of getting away from Tampa’s vacuous ‘culture’ and diving into what sounds more and more like a tiny, artist’s retreat. Of course, the costs of getting a Masters at SCAD will be nothing short of exorbitant, but life is short, money comes and goes, and I’m bored with business anyway.
So my plan is starting to become more defined. First, I’m going to change my business major to a minor, thereby making it possible to finish my VA degree next Fall. By that point, I should have the Harley paid off. With a little luck, I will have six months or so of rent saved up, so that I can find a part-time job in the area. This means I will have to quit Nielsen…I’ll miss the salary, but not the work…and take out some student loans. The loans would be a nightmare and are the last thing I would actually want to do, but given the expense of attending SCAD, I won’t have a choice. With enough aid, grants, and assistance, I might be able to keep the costs from going stratospheric, but there’s no way I will be able to avoid digging a hole of debt, should I have to move to Savannah.
Bonus: Georgia has some awesome roads to ride on, I wouldn’t be too far from home, so weekend trips back to town wouldn’t be unreasonable, and I’d be away from the malignant nature of Tampa’s populace, which would certainly do my spirit some good. Ironically, it looks to be an almost sure thing that Scott and Laura will be moving back to the area, which means the twins would be nearby and I could potentially be moving away. What are the odds?! Hopefully, SCAD will come to St Pete and all of this talk of moving will be made moot, though I do have to admit that I would like to get away from here for a year or two.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Uploaded a few of my drawings from this past term
I finally got around to uploading some of my drawings from this term. Nothing overly impressive, but it's nice to be continually working. You can check them out on my DeviantArt account. Nothing much else to report.
My ability to hold off on resurfacing my backrest and passenger pillion lasted all of a week. Dropped both parts off this morning and picked up a service manual for the bike on the way home. Just listening to a little Janis Joplin, and working on a drawing I've owed Scott for about a year now. Anyone want to model as a pin-up girl? lol
Monday, July 23, 2007
Jackson Pollack
Wrapped up the Summer drawing course with a 2+ hour movie detailing the rise and fall of Jackson Pollack. If you're not familiar, Pollack was an early-to-mid 20th century painter who was one of the original abstract-expressionist painters. He is also credited with being the father of action painting. His work was some of the most original of its time, and he eventually achieved a high level of fame, though he would truly rise, peak, and plateau in the span of about 10 years. Eventually, his notoriety began fading, as did his output and relevance.
He was born in 1912 and would be dead by 1956. In that time, he developed a unique style born of years struggling in New York City. He would achieve fame with the help of Peggy Gugenheim and Clement Greenberg. Gugenheim was Pollock's primary patron, and Greenberg was the most powerful art critic of his day. Once both of these individuals were on Pollock's side, his eventual rise to fame was almost assured. Inevitably, he climbed the short ladder to the top of America's modern art hierarchy, where he would remain for a decade.
Unfortunately, Pollock was also a raging alcoholic. On more than one occasion, he found himself waking up on a New York sidewalk or storm drain. Prior to achieving fame in the 1940s, Pollock was regularly on the verge of being homeless. Between his lack of money and his dependence on alcohol, it's amazing the man survived to become Amerca's most famous artist, but he did.
By the 1950s, the American art scene had begun moving away from abstract expressionism and Pollock seemed to be less motivated by it himself. Instead, he returned to figure drawing, something abstractionists had expressly sought to move away from. His time at the top had more or less ended by the time he decided to drive his mistress and her friend around town at a high rate of speed while loaded to the gills with liquor. At some point, he miscalculated, left the road, and killed both himself, and his mistress' friend Edith Metzger. His girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, survived the crash, and continues to make art to this day.
In many ways, Pollock embodied the troubled, drug-addled artist stereotype. He was impetuous, arrogant, pretentious, and very likely a narcissist. His art fails to move me, but then I do not have the intellectual background required to fully appreciate what he was trying to do. Pollock's work seems to be more of an academic exercise than an expression of his soul, but then there are people with far more valid credentials than I who would argue that his portfolio is exactly the opposite. With those people, I would have to politely agree to disagree. Suffice it to say, I am not particularly interested in the abstract expressionist period.
All that said, I am very much looking forward to next term's painting class. I have hardly any experience with paint, and that tidbit of dabbling was done over 12 years ago now. This should be fun. :)
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Getting out of my way
Making art, or undertaking any sort of creative endeavour, is a sometimes frustrating form of alchemy that seems to defy any logical interface. When taking on the task of creating, we are actually risking total failure in the name of intangible satisfaction. The drawing may be a complete disappointment, it may end up as trash, but we can't know until we have already begun the process. Every drawing I have ever done has been a failure, because the vision in my mind is always superior to what I have rendered with my hands. I think everyone with a passion for life can relate to this frustration. Even when we get so close as to have faithfully recreated the formless beauty in our mind's eye to the best of our ability, there will be flaws and failings. Flaws are as inherent in the creative process as the spirit that fuels it. At times, the work is so flawed, and the process so futile, that the product really is trash and can be freely discarded.
So I'm working a drawing on Sunday and things aren't going well. It is actually a pastel drawing of a collage based on another drawing I originally did in charcoal. I was happy with the original drawing, not too thrilled with the collage, and disgusted by the pastel. It's funny, because I recognize the fact that I have some skill for creation. Where I would rate is irrelevant, it is enough to say that I have some ability. So I believe in my ability to create, but sometimes my execution is so poor that I can't stand the results. Such was the case on Sunday. Nothing seemed to be working. I literally could not get the pastels to do what I wanted them to, and the more I pushed, the more pushback came from the materials in my hands. It was essential that I step away and do something else, otherwise it may have all ended up in the trash.
I went for a ride to the beach, a slow stroll back and forth on the Dunedin Causeway, then a lazy roll down to Clearwater, and home again to clear the mind. With a more relaxed disposition, I put pastel to paper with the idea of proving to myself that I could use these relatively unfamiliar tools as a means to create something. I started with a simple apple and focused on layering colors. Instead of working to control what was happening on the page, I let the colors interact more freely, and tried to take my desire for control out of the equation. In other words, I let go and just went from the gut. Low and behold, the drawing was fairly successful. Not perfect, of course, but certainly my best effort with pastels to date. I ended up adding in a pair of angel figures borrowed from mom's collection, and a simple background that ran from blue to what was supposed to be a glowing gold. I resisted the urge for halos or auras…barely.
The first drawing remains unfinished and will probably stay that way. I have no desire to revisit it and the prof was happy with my efforts on the other piece. Perhaps I am finally starting to learn the "remove head, make art" lesson. Getting our mind and ourselves out of the way is difficult, but it is the only way to allow ourselves the breathing room needed for honest, creative pursuits. If we can’t get out of our own way, we cannot go anywhere.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Free Play
Been reading a book entitled Free Play by a gentleman named Stephen Nachmanovitch. The focus is on improvisation in the arts and in life. Nachmanovitch is a classically trained musician, so he references his personal exploration of improvisation in practice and in his performances, but the book does provide some useful insights and ideas for increasing one's capacity for generalized improvisation. Some of the things he mentions are tried and true methods of tapping into what is commonly thought of as our subconscious, i.e. breathing exercises, meditation, etc, with the focus being on putting one's self into a free, focused state of mind, so that we can create on the fly. The concept is about freeing ourselves to create without interfering with the creative process, to push personal boundaries, and explore our true potential.
I am only about half way through the book, but have been impressed with some of the ideas Nachmanovitch puts forth. Here are a few of my favorites so far...
"A creative life is a risky business. To follow your own course, not patterned on parents, peers, or institutions, involves a delicate balance of tradition and personal freedom, a delicate balance of sticking to your guns and remaining open to change."
"Impulse, like improvisation, is not "just anything", it is not without structure, but is the expression of organic, immanent, self-creating structure."
"...[E]verything in nature arises from the power of free play sloshing against the power of limits."
"Galumphing is the seemingly useless elaboration and ornamentation of activity...we galumph when we hop instead of walk, when we take the scenic route instead of the efficient one...when we are interested in means rather than ends."
For one reason or another, these quotes jumped out at me as I was reading. All of this came full circle in class tonight, as it was the first night of the Summer term and we were presented with a still life made up of a balloon animals (apparently a previous class had created a large pile of these things, and Mark decided that they would make a good drawing). At first, I started in with my usual contour drawing approach, then fell right into my usual habit of working from one point outward. It's something that is ingrained in me and in some ways it works really well, but I'm looking to expand so as to explore my true capabilities. So it was decided that I would do blind contours, which means that I would draw what was in front of me with a continuous line, that is, without lifting my pen/marker/pencil, and that I would draw this picture without looking at the paper I was working on. The idea is to connect your hand to your eye without having to watch your hand move across the paper. It's an interesting exercise and I found myself getting totally absorbed in the effort involved in "flying blind". If you haven't tried it and you enjoy drawing, I would highly recommend it.
So now I am assigned with the task of doing three, layered, blind drawings of a particular section of my bike, then doing a controlled, ordinary, contour drawing of the same afterward. It should be interesting and I have to admit that I'm eager to get started. :)
Speaking of the bike, I FINALLY got the pipes and air cleaner on, which means she makes a LOT more noise now. I can only describe the sound as being a cross between a bass drum and a thunderclap happening immediately to your right several times per second...music to my ears.
Sadly, my vacation is at an end. I have been off since Saturday, the 26th, so it's been a while since I saw the inside of the office. I can't say I'm happy to be headed back, but at least it will be a short week and a brief wait for the weekend. Here's to a quiet week in the cube farm and a sunny weekend of riding. :D
Saturday, March 10, 2007
And that's enough of the whining
So I'm lonely, frustrated, and stressed...when I put life in those simple terms, I see that I am no different than a million other poor bastards out there. Therefore, the whining has to stop and it has to stop now.
In the spirit of my return to functionality, I wanted to write a little about art. Art, in the form of 2D drawing, painting, etc, has been a part of my life since I was 5 or 6 years old. I started like most artists do, with poorly drawn stick figures depicting my family and friends. It wasn't long before I started dabbling in tanks, airplanes, and soldiers, then cars, buildings, so on and so forth. By the time I reached middle school, my artistic energies were devoted primarily to cartooning, with a focus on comic book characters and movie monsters.
Drawing was little more than a pastime for me through high school. I was arguably "talented", though probably not gifted. Creating became something I did instead of taking notes in class or finishing homework at home, but it wasn't my focus. I would draw in the afternoons while waiting to play football, or on weekends when no one else was available. The problem may have been that it came easily to me, so I didn't see the challenges and let my attention wander, or perhaps I took it for granted and neglected my own development. Whatever the case, when it came time to graduate high school, I found myself with a fairly weak portfolio, a pessimistic attitude toward my work, and a dwindling desire to do much of anything but sit as a passenger and let life take me where it willed.
I put art down almost completely at that point. After Christmas-treeing the math section of my SAT, I decided to apply to UF for shits and giggles as much as anything else. Maybe I wanted to pretend I had further ambitions beyond high school and Junior College...at this point, I'm no longer sure. There really wasn't any purpose in my applying, as UF's art program was nothing compared to Ringling's or even Eckerd's, both of which are closer to home. Those schools are private, and therefore very expensive. They are also highly selective, as their student bodies are historically very small. I saw no hope of getting into either one of them, given my weak portfolio, so I refused to even submit an application. It was no great surprise that UF denied my request for entry. My SAT was awful (around 1100, if memory serves), though I did manage a 29 or something similar on my ACT. I had no volunteer time on my resume, no real desire to actually attend the school, and no self-confidence to speak of. Going to UF would have been a disaster and it is probably best that I was not deemed worthy of attending the institution.
Fast forward 10 years and things had changed drastically. Art was still not a focus, but I had learned to have a much higher appreciation for what it meant to have creative ability. I had studied the greats of the Renaissance and Baroque, being held in awe by the marvels of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Bernini, and Bosch. I came to love Rembrandt, Dali, and lesser known commercial artists like Boris Vallejo, Micheal Whelan, and Luis Royo. My eyes were opened to the fact that the arts and the creative process were the true measures of civilization. How many people will remember Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods 500 years from now? How many will know Michelangelo and Da Vinci, or Mozart and Beethoven, or even Aristotle and Homer? Leading the NBA in career scoring and having a shoe line named after you is nothing compared to creating the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, or composing Beethoven's Fifth.
Our modern heroes are nothing but entertainers. What historical significance does Tiger Woods winning another PGA tour event really have? What commentary will his career make, beyond serving as a chronicle of the sociological ridiculousness in paying a man millions of dollars to play a game no more dangerous than strolling through a park? Some would say that perfecting the techniques of his game is an art form in and of itself, and there's certainly some merit in the idea, but winning a game is not the same as actually creating something tangible. In the end, I have more respect for the craftsman than the entertainer.
Art is something different, in that it is something which has been a part of our species since before time was time. Great music, paintings, sculptures, architecture, etc, stand the test of eons. The Great Wall, Egypt's pyramids, the Sistine Chapel, the architecture of Ancient Greece and Rome - these are all artistic creations that serve as historical benchmarks. As these thoughts formulated and settled in my mind, I came to realize how important my old pastime really was in the scope of human history. While I cannot claim to be on the level of history's greats, I do have a connection, in that I too can create. That is not something to be taken lightly and most definitely not something to be neglected.