Everyday Art

We live in a time that is full of artists making art and putting it up on the web. It comes in all types and forms, paintings, drawings, journal post ... Most of it isn't very interesting. Some is.... Picasso made ceramic plates that had the look of fish bones after eating a good meal. ( I think that's the way the story goes) Artists stories and the myth's that surround them is an area of study that could consume a lifetime.
We also live in a time full of art, amazing, good and terrible. So much of it that it's hard to tell what's ... what. But the important thing is the hunt.

Tree's in Art and Beuy's tree project

I'm beginning to understand that my small abstract paintings and reliefs that I thought were about construction sites and building foundations are also like trees. I think it's that building block idea. It is the structure and formal line and shape associated with many things and i am discovering more and more of them. I have always been interested in the Frobel Kindergarden model and building blocks as the origin of more complicated structure.
Now that I am in the wood's and tree's have become an everyday experience I am seeing them differently than before.
Nature is as structured as architecture and sometimes more ordered than it appears without closer observation. I tell my drawing students that drawing is about learning to see. Look closer.
The vertical lines and spaces between the tree's as well as the tree's themselves. The horizontal lines of the landscape including the horizon line.
So now I'm excited about planting more tree's and I want to pursue the Joseph Beuy's 7000 Oaks project. I am doing a project with Shorewood Middle School soon and I want to plant a few trees. Tree's and stones paired up to interact in the landscape.

Stella and Scully

Trying to understand the tree's and how they relate to the artwork that I have been doing for the past few years. I have simplified my work over the years. Photograph's and painting's and now the constructions and collage. Always impressed with the early work of Frank Stella and Sean Scully, both of them artists who I have worked with ... Stella at the San Antonio Art Institute in the early eighties and Scully because of his wife at the time Catherine Lee also in the 80's. In the early eighties I began to work with a series of black and white checks that were irregular or I want to say naive' in nature. I compared htem to 'handmade' roadside sign's that you would see in Texas or the south.
Now our new house has exposed me to the tree's that we are surrounded by ... it's a new way of seeing Stella and Scully. In a much more natural way than before. The line and mark of an early Stella can also be seen as nature and the way that stripe and line interact in nature.

Time to make Art and places to make it

There are always so many things to do and chores to perform that studio time gets moved to the back burner, an I mean the very back. Every artist struggles with the same problem and many never figure out what to do with it ... therefore many artist quit making art. Maybe the first definition of what an artist is should be about the artist success with this one point ... do you make art? If you can continue to make it over the long haul. And then talk about content and quality. Many very good artist just stop ... they get tired of the fight to find time for the process and finally give up. As a college professor I believe that this is the part that goes unexamined with school. How do you build a life that allows you to continue to produce artwork?
So... make it easy on yourself. Keep materials at the ready. 15 minutes here and there can be valuable and productive minutes.

A piece of art everyday or more .....

Would it be possible to do some kind of new piece of art work everyday.
It was said that Picasso made an average of five pieces of art for everyday that he was alive from birth, (that's an average!!!) But Picasso wasn't around for Performance Art and Conceptual Art,or Earth Art etc.... I wonder what he would have done if that was all out there in front of him and he could have worked in those media.
Could I do an entire exhibition in a day? A body of work in every media in a month?
How crazy could it get? So Sculpture, Painting, Photo, Ceramics ... Is everydayness Art? Is it Art that right now the entire house is full of bags and boxes? Suzanna is home waiting to go to college in Arlington Virginia. If I had an Empty Gallery and I could put things in it on a daily basis and photograph it ... what would it look like?
The Picasso Project or something.

Art and the size of the Universe

There are a couple of YouTube videos that take you on a trip through the universe and show you how big it is and how long it takes to travel through space. The images are amazing and awe inspiring, and at the same time make you feel small and very unimportant. Ideas that can make your brain start to complain that it's too much to think about. It seems like we need an upgrade in our memory software ... we are beyond our capabilities of ability to take it all in and process it.
Then I think about the images and the beauty of it all ....
Art takes a different track, making images that have beauty or some way of looking at the world that we can process. Politics, Science, Humanity, Emotions, Math, all have their own type of beauty and we try to understand their complexity's .... seeing is believing ... believing is seeing ... so it is .... or is it so?
Are there images that we can make, that do not exist in the Universe? Is man capable of making an image that does not exist? Or are we wired in a way that the totality of the Universe somehow exist in our mind, we don't create it, discover it in our mind or remember it.

Thinking about art and making...

Small pieces built out of wood. A very simple idea. An idea that goes back to the early 20th century (at Least) in the work of artist like Picasso, Dove, Schwitters, just to name a few. Then you can fast forward to the late 20th century and look at the work of Richard Tuttle, Rauchenberg and Betty Parsons, etc. These works present a small and simple gesture in an art world currently full of large dramatic efforts. What do these smaller pieces represent in a time of grand gestures? The small pieces are quiet and contemplative in nature. They are asking us to slow down and take a closer look and to move outside of the realm of Hollywood spectical and to think about very basic interaction. Two shapes, three colors, arrangements of forms, how those forms relate to each other. This is an emotional and intellectual effort to see the structure of our existence.

Sellars Project Space Denver

My nephew Jimmy has a gallery space out in Denver that is doing some really interesting work. Jimmy is doing a great community service for the Denver Art World. They are bringing in artist from all over and advising artist and their career's. It's really easy to check out on the computer, it's Sellars Project Space. They are opening a new exhibition this week end. Plus check out Jimmie's artwork, he's doing some work that I believe everyone will get something from. I want to wish Jimmy the best of luck and good wishes.

Click on images to go to SELLARSPROJECTSPACE.COM web site

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.