Stuff in my studio

I have a couple of drawings from the past year sitting around in my studio. So that is what these two images are.

I also have been making sculpture out of painted foamcore for my classes. I am making them in color schemes: one is primary colors, one uses optical color blending (pointilism). I think I will make one that is in a grey scale and use it to teach the way to render light hitting an object.

Collaboration # 2, from Jesse, Dan, and I

Here is the second drawing I have drawn on from Jesse and Dan.

Jesse Albrecht sent me some drawings that he and Dan Attoe had worked on.

So this is the first drawing I have worked on too.

I drew the old man with the multiple color face and the stripped shirt.

I like working with my friends. The three of us know each other from the University of Iowa, where we all went to grad school together.

I was excited to draw on this because both Dan and Jesse really made a nice drawing.

Drawing Class Website

Final Project for my Figure Drawing Class, click here.

Painting in Progress

Painting

I have been painting a lot lately.

I think I have figured something out about being an artist. Making art is thinking about art.

You do not need seperate thinking time. Painting time is thinking time, they are the same time.

Thinking about painting when I am not painting is really just thinking about starting a painting. The process of making a painting includes making a lot of decisions that would be very hard to predict before you start.

Here is a new drawing.

Neo Rauch, and the Bird

I wanted to draw a house, and I have been drawing the bird almost everyday...

Neo Rauch talking about his work in German with a translator. Then he speaks English (at 8:14) and surprises everyone in the room.

Broke out some new pens, and made a crap drawing

Using the British phrase, this is a crap drawing, haha. I am posting it because I am not editing myself so I can produce more work. I did photoshop the background with a blur tool to give the image some depth of field, and I used the dodge tool on the face because the scan wasn't showing the cross hatching.

The Language Change, Positive Experience

I picked up a copy of Kevin Hooyman*s The Language Change at Printed Matter on my Wednesday in the city, and man this book is smart and funny, from banter between the heads of disembodied wizards about the nature of time to forest animals musing about identity, this book has it all. It is drawn in a style that is somewhere between cartoon, Celtic knots, and faux naive contemporary painting.


His website is pretty amazing, with lots of animation, weird circular links, and clever banterish writing. A totally enjoyable experience if you are looking for something to kill some time* (or answer questions about time)!


I tried all kinds of tricky ways to get the cover of The Language Change and post it here, but apparently it is trick proof, and I can not get an image short of scanning the cover, and the scanner is in the basement (I am on the third floor) so you will have to content yourselves with looking at it on his website.

Until next time.

You're not Listening Loud Enough - The Portraits of Joseph Patrick

Joe Patrick was my professor at the University of Iowa. He taught a legendary life drawing class that I was lucky enough to be a student in. He emailed me these photos today, and they are from his show of portrait drawings at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids Iowa.

I remember when Joe was explaining to me how he came to enjoy the music of Tom Waits. Dan Attoe had given Joe a couple of Tom Waits albums to listen too. Joe went home and listened to the CDs and he told Dan that he did not care for the music, Dan told him that wasn't listening to the music loud enough. So Joe went back and listened to the music louder, came back and pronounced the music as very good!

It is this kind of hidden distinction and detail that Joe has boundless enthusiasm for, and is always ready to point out: the music is only good when played loudly.

Joe also creates landscapes and urban scenes, they are oil paintings, based on his sometime home in Mexico:

Thank you Joe!

Laur and I Drew a Cartoon

Laur and I were drawing in the kitchen together, and we drew this little guy. I think he will make a good logo next time I publish something.

You can see more of my drawings here.

Zombie Girl with Emeralds

The Drawing Center, Gianna Commito and Jered Sprecher

I went to the Drawing Center on Wooster St yesterday to see Non-Declarive Drawings. Two of my friends from Iowa were in the show, Gianna Commito and Jered Sprecher, and it was a good feeling to see their work in New York.

The show was curated under the auspices of a theme that is difficult, and does not give enough credit to the viewer. The idea behind it being that some drawing/painting is Non-declarative and leaves the viewer to form their own meanings when contemplating the image, as opposed to the painting dictating what to think. Or maybe that an agenda is dictated, but its a false lead, and after your first impression your left swimming in your own thoughts wondering where your first read went. I guess I would like it better if it acknowledged that the drawings are starting points, provide clues, instead of insisting on muteness.

I think some of the work was very hard to approach and think about directly, and lead to tangents that were generated by me, by my day etc, but in other cases the work was speaking a visual language that left it in a more accessible place than the show would have you think. Some of the drawings were just quiet, and I went to school in the Mid-West, quiet is not the same as Non-Declarative, you just have to down shift your mind to think in quiet thoughts and understand them.

I did think the show was quietly provocative. In that it forced you to still your mind and search for where the work is.

Ok, enough on the curation. Back to Gianna and Jered, who both made very interesting contributions, and for me made the show very special.

Gianna made some very exciting drawings. I was looking at them, trying to think of the best way to explain them, and I started to accumulate visual analogies: dirt devils with leaves, polygon explosions in video games, shattered glass, something made by a schizophrenic architect, exploding stained glass, they made me think of California too (I have never been there...). The drawings are dynamic and situated in a shallow pictorial space, they pull you around the space in a way that was interesting perceptually because your eyes moved around, under, and over spaces/planes. I like when paintings are objects that can be meditated on, or provide a static illusion of change/flux, in other words when the can be non-specific illustrations for life, like instrumental music on the radio that you realize is synchronized with your driving. You can approach Gianna's work with either a quiet or a loud mind and enjoy it.

Jered Sprecher makes such benign looking things that they can make you nervous, and you wonder if hes pulling a joke on you. If you assert your mind forcefully you will bowl over the image, if you approach it with skepticism you will miss the lyricism, if you can approach them with a calm mind I think that is when they are best. I have a painting of his from about 4 years ago, and it is very subtle, very interesting, it references old photo albums and Renaissance portraiture with the same set of marks. Jered definitely made work for the show that fits in with the curatorial theme, because you will impose yourself on the work unless you have enough self-control to be patient and look closely. There are definite stories being told (or at least re-constructable processes), but it takes a while to understand them, its a slow read. The work itself has become simpler and sparser than I remember his work being, but there were at least three very rewarding moments of contemplation trying to retrace his thoughts/process and pick through the limited info to detect a story.

I found something and I was not looking for anything

I started reading a pretty famous book about Zen, The Beginners Mind, that I made fun of when my father gave it to me as a birthday present. It is really interesting, and has a lot of genuinely profound insight.

I think this book could hurt no one, and help most people.

Click here to see the book, and 2 others

especially click it if your life is crazy, or if you feel like your brain is a chaotic swirl of mashed potatoes, pasta sauce, and a show from the adult swim programming on cartoon network.