Cooler weather

Thinking about making sculpture. This is a move that I have thought about for a long time. The pieces I have been making are relief sculpture and are moving toward what I want the final pieces to be. I have been inspired over the years by many artists, Donald Judd (although it took me a long time to get excited about his work), Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Richard Tuttle, Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly ... etc. I have been inspired by many books, the vessel quality of books. This image of Diebenkorn's reminds me of my library and what it represents to me. Relationships and how things either fit together or they don't ...
I don't think of fitting or not fitting as better or worse they are just different relationships.
It's always in my mind to make things simple. I decided not to be a story teller or a teacher. But, instead to be an organizer of things that the elements can be used to develop meaning when they function together.

Contact

Friday. As I said, got in contact with an old friend from the corps. Forty years or so. 1969-1970. Randy Barnes! The Randy I remember was a musician and poet. Now I learn that he has been making his living as a visual artist. Visual art has been the world I have been in for a long time. Teaching, producing work, marketing, etc. We are always losing things... finding them again and re-losing them. Relationships with and to people and things, your artwork. You establish a bond and then drift along and find that the bond has become strained or evaporated. Every day in the studio the work comes into focus and then out of focus. The constant push pull, now close maybe too close, we need some distance to see it more clearly. I hope as I get older I am learning more about this balance.

June 25th 2009

It's hot in Milwaukee. The rare hot spell in the summer here in the upper mid-west. But, it's a good time to think about what happens when you go from the cold winter's here to the summer. It hasn't been that long since it was -10 degree's ... we evolved to days that were in the 50's and then we went straight into 80's and 90's. That makes a person think about transition and how quickly things change.
I just reconnected with a friend of mine from the Marines. We talked about the 40 years that have gone by since those days and how we will soon be in our sixties.
That led us to talk about our fathers and the passing of one generation on to the next. And so on and so on.
We are on the way to being orphan's.