New Artings

So, I've been a bit quiet on this blog thing because I've been making tons and tons of art. Every day (almost). For those of you that aren't aware, I've been getting my feet on the ground in my Fine Art foundation course at the Byam Shaw school at Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London. It's been a pretty crazy (and humbling) past couple of weeks for me in which I've learned an incredible amount, and been stretched in almost every conceivable way. Anyways, to give you a feel for a bit of the stuff I've been making, a few highlights.... (and give me shout if there's one of these you find particularly successful/unsuccessful)

I was assigned a painting at the National Gallery to copy that I ended up truly despising ("Psyche showing her sisters her gifts from cupid" by Fragonard). A strange relationship with the work ensued in which I ended up making this not entirely accurate (but more interesting to me) transcription in charcoal, acrylic wash, and collage...

Installation designed to camouflage objects. Spot the fishnet stockings, the candlestick, the shoe....? Somebody had a good evening...

"Storm in a Teacup" Clay sculpture designed to go atop the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square. I'll leave it to you to figure out the references yourself.

Trees. The assignment was to create a "bridge" with rolled paper. This is what came out. Particularly like how the part on the right came out with the metal ladder and the architecture of the room.

"Ant/arctic" We were instructed to do something awesome with a book. Would be curious to hear which of the variants of the installations you think is best (text/no text, pictures/no pictures...)

"LON BRI"

Starting something new

A few weeks ago, an assignment arrived for me in the mail as a summer assignment for the fine art foundation course I am starting at the Byam Shaw school of Central St Martins. The instruction was to "make a painting that explores the notion of "self" in relation to a double space (i.e. mirror with exterior, mirror reflection, etc).

The Hills are Alive (Cottarton for Per Kirkeby)

"The hills are alive"

This might be the first painting I've done with a very specific audience in mind, that audience being my Dad and Amber to whom I owe birthday presents, father's/mother's day presents, and also a tremendous amount of gratitude for putting up with tearful phone calls and the existential crises that have defined my life over the past year. As such, I wanted to make a painting for them that was very personal, to do something that encapsulated their life at Cottarton (their cottage in the countryside of Aberdeenshire). I mulled over various ideas that involved the use of scientific data, aerial photography, etc, which I have utilized to a great extent in my most recent paintings-- but none of these seemed right. During these mental peregrinations, one image that really stuck in my mind rather iconic view out the window of the large living room window to the hill opposite the house.

To me, Scotland is a place with a lot of history. Maybe this is just coming from the United States, where everything is so new... but I really do feel as though the history of the earth and its subsequent human occupation is in your face more viscerally than in most places. Crust has been created, morphed and destroyed. Trees have grown, fallen, and been felled. People have made their mark on the landscape since the stone age. We are now drawing energy from those same rocks that lie beneath our feet, as well as from the air that we are breathing via wind turbines. There is a very strong sense of place in Scotland.... and I was interested in capturing that sense of place at Cottarton in a painting... that including everything from the history of the earth to Daddy's mushrooms and cabbages to the wind turbines (which are in the painting, but only faintly).

Trained as a geologist, I view a place in terms of its history and see time very much like a stratigraphy. Layers piled upon layers... it is this idea that I incorporated into this painting. What we see now is a function of everything that has happened before and is occurring now. It's all connected (to quote from 'I heart Huckabees,' "it's all the blanket.") While I as working on this painting, I viewed a spectacular exhibition of the Danish artist, Per Kirkeby at the Tate Modern. Kirkeby was actually trained as a geologist (he has a masters degree and was working on arctic geology in Greenland when he decided to train as an artist), and this is apparent in many of his paintings. I'm not sure if it was this knowledge that somehow caused me to be so affected by his work. However, his paintings, which incorporate landscape, figuration, abstraction, philosophy, and various art-historical references are fascinating. They are the kind that I can look at, turn away from, and then look at again, and see something completely new. I was particularly struck by his painting "Plank-Rock", which I naughtily took a photograph of... and motifs of which I think were blatantly or less blatantly stolen, but for which I'm offering him due credit and praise.

"Plank-Rock" by Per Kirkeby at Tate Modern

Amheida 1 (Out of Egypt, into the great laugh of mankind, and I shake the dirt from my sandals as I run)

This piece was inspired in part by my work this past winter with the Amheida Project in Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt, which is involved in the excavation of a Roman Era (and probably earlier) archaeological site. One of the more spectacular parts of the site, much of which remains to be excavated and is still swallowed in sand, is a Roman bath (below). On the surface of the site, you can see the bricks forming the edges, and in places on the interior, plaster still remains. It was architecture like this, as well as many other spectacular features of the site that got me thinking about what we leave behind, and how our remains reflect who we are... and how somebody else later on might go and interpret that.

This painting consists of a number of layers. First, you have what you see at the surface (bricks). Then you have what it represents (a pool, literally; a whirlpool of time, more metaphorically). Finally, you have how we represent it now (the black lines, which correspond to the lines drawn by the archaeologists denoting the construction itself, as well as surrounding structures).

This piece was, incidentally, painted almost entirely (exception is the black gouache and a wee bit of blue watercolor) with pigments collected in Dakhleh. These consisted of some sort of red oxide and some charcoal I collected from spring mounds and mixed with an acrylic medium (as a binder) and then added water to, and painted with, just like one would with watercolor.

Finally, regarding the title, in my (so far) tradition of naming my paintings after songs I like, this one goes out to Sufjan Stevens.

Just unwinding from a long day....

Contemplating Erasure

I guess the concept of "erasure" has been on my mind a lot lately.  I'm moving (to London) and wonder what sort of lasting 'impact' I have had on the Columbus area.  As I watch my belongings disappear into boxes, I feel as though I'm being erased from the space in which I live... When I'm physically gone, am I really gone?  It leaves me with this desperate desire to grab a can of spray paint and scrawl on these now-empty walls "I was here."  Is it in our physical detritus that our presence on the Earth is noted, the literal marks that we leave on the Earth?  My intellectual self wants to tread lightly, whereas my ego wants to make a mark.  'Erasure' has also been on my mind through reading about Rauschenberg's "Erased DeKooning" in a book about conceptual art and also through some conversations I've had recently with my friend Sara about some of the interesting things she's doing with an eraser in her drawing class.  

A while ago, I read an article about how GoogleEarth teamed up with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to document the destruction of villages in Darfur.  I was really struck by how (from an aerial perspective) it looks like somebody has taken an eraser to the skin of the Earth and scrubbing as hard as possible.  Which, sadlly, is a fairly apt analogy.

So hence this series of drawings, depicting destroyed Darfur villages.  For each of these, I toned the paper and drew in charcoal the outline of a village I'd found on GoogleEarth, and then started to erase and erase and erase.

This Desert Life

"This Desert Life"

see below for more/process shots

This piece, which is a kind of sculpture-painting hybrid, was a long time coming and represents the direction that I’m really interested in taking my art-- that is, making visually provocative art (you decide if that's achieved) that has a basis in science and also speaks to societal issues at-large.

I have long been fascinated by water issues in the American West.  I guess this comes from my undergraduate education at UCSB, where we learned stories about William Mullholand, water treaties, and the development of Los Angeles.  Cadillac Desert is an amazing book.  On the way to Santa Barbara from Houston, I would often have layovers in Phoenix, which kind of epitomizes thef conflict between the natural environment and the ridiculous, unsustainable lifestyles of (some) occupants of the area.

This piece was provoked by those sentiments, as well as an amazing photo of subsidence of the San Joaquin Valley in California due to groundwater extraction and some data of subsidence contours that I have my students work with.  This painting portrays Palmdale, CA (a kind of hellish suburb of LA) and its surroundings, where subsidence has also occurred (though of slightly lesser magnitude, its presence in suburbia is in a way more significant in a sense to me). 

I am interested in landscape in its both literal and metaphorical senses.  I see this piece of art as a meeting of those two ideas.  The surface itself comes from a USGS map of land subsidence (so not actual topography-- so actually creating a new landscape out of scientific data).  The wires that 'hover' above the surface represent the current levels of the groundwater (circa mid-90's).  I'm interested in how our lifestyles and actions are manifested in visible and invisible ways.... (and thus playing a bit with positive and negative space).  The inclusion of aluminum foil, silver paint, salt, and sand are not accidental either-- but are intended to speak both to the natural state of the "system", and our modification of it.  I could write more that you probably won't read, so if you're interested in learning more, let me know and I'll talk your ear off about it since I've been living with this thing for about 4 months now.

Some other views/process shots: