Guest post by June Underwood
We often say that certain works of art “talk” to each other, that artworks can carry on dialogs with each other, or that an exhibit carries on its own “conversation.” Today I’m thinking of that interchange among works of art.
You might say I’m thinking about exhibits. However, I use “exhibits” loosely, meaning the exhibits in our minds and ones seen among blogs and websites. We are accustomed to the formal groupings of museums and galleries, and we can all easily come up with categories that curators must use to form exhibits. But I want to ponder the works themselves in a somewhat more casual mode. I’m thinking of those movable feasts that we encounter and move around in the compartments of our minds.
A specific example: such an exhibit might be arranged in the mind by allowing Steve’s rabbit to converse with his derelict houses in his series “Ghost Light.” The house photos seem full of empty space; the rabbit photo is full of texture. But putting the two into the same space, comparing and contrasting what we see as we group them in this way, some conversations seem to emerge.
Then, to add a different voice to the mix, I meandered through Colin’s photographs “of the day”. And I found another that I think might enter the conversation here.
Colin’s photo is also black & white, also “empty while full” but doesn’t have the same sense of mortality and loss as either of Steve’s. Is it the subject matter that gives it a different voice? Or the formal elements? Do Steve’s photos elegize in a kind anthropomorphism, while Colin’s stoutly refuse to romanticize? Are Steve’s photographs speaking in the voice of the grief-stricken while Colin’s have a jauntier tone? What might the dialog between them be? And what caused Colin’s photos to be, for the most part, not a very good conversational match with Steve’s? (This last is clearly subjective, based on a quick study and a tired mind – but fun to contemplate anyway).
Which brings me back to more general questions: within your own mind, is there a visual ecology among the artworks you love, where they feed one another? If so, are there ways to define and delineate that ecology which might move it from the personal pondering to more universal conceptions.
Do different art sets demand, in your mind, different kinds of ecologies and promote different viewing mindsets? Which works can be put together without canceling one another or without one bullying the other? What allows works to converse in a meaningful way — theme? style? medium? artist? chronology? period, size, or something not listed here? Or, conversely, what elements make for absolute incompatibility? If you had access to all the art in the world, what sets would you think of exhibiting?
Not so incidentally, my reason for asking these questions is personal. I am engaged in a multi-year project on a single theme, the life within ancient geologies and land formations of the high desert landscape of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in eastern Oregon. I am processing that landscape in a multitude of media and modes. I have done and will continue to do pleine aire painting (oil and watercolor), photographs (summation and reference rather than “hey look at this), studio oils and watercolors (mostly as studies but some finished, complete-in-themselves). All these versions of the landscape will, I hope, culminate in works done with my primary media, the stitched textiles, painted, pieced, appliquéd, representational and abstract. I am in the very early stages of this rather too ambitious process, and so I am circling the questions of why/how/when/if among the pieces that I have in front of me.
As I proceed through the variations on this landscape, I hope to be more methodical about moving from memory and photograph through oil and watercolor to textiles, from representational to semi-abstract to abstract. But right now I have a mixed conglomerate of pieces, ranging from postcard sized watercolors, to an 8 x 9 foot painted textile, probably a total of 60 or 70 pieces in different media. As I work in this way, I contemplate if and in what ways, each work speaks to the others. I have multiple “exhibiting” spaces within the house and studio, and I arrange and rearrange my work on the walls and easels to see what happens.
I’m trying to get a feel for what disparate media working on a single set of imagery might have to say to one another [two examples are shown in this post.] If you would like to see more of my work in this project, you can go here.
June, there’s a lot here to consider and respond to, and I don’t think I’ll cover much ground in this comment. Your nicely structured post ended with your work at John Day, and that’s uppermost in my mind at the moment. I think it’s a great advantage of your project and approach that it is long-term and involves disparate media. As someone mentioned a while back (sorry, I forget the context), tackling the challenges through different media will likely lead to different insights, rounding out your overall experience and understanding of the subject. As your project progresses, different views (in both senses) may be featured. I think it would be fascinating if this actually develops in a clear enough way that a viewer of a future exhibit could sense and to some extent disentangle the historical thread and the contributions of the different ways of seeing and representing.
Wow! I just followed your link; the previous paragraph was based on your writing and my memory of what I’d seen on your site before. There’s fabulous variety in the works you selected there, yet it’s clear that they’ll work well together. I haven’t taken it all in yet, but I like how the oil paintings show the most dynamic geology, almost depicting whole formation processes all in one view, while the watercolors emphasize the solid forms and the cloth paintings the topographical flow of the landscape. The stitched textiles seem to integrate all of this. I haven’t yet fit your “Miocene” oriental dreamscape into my understanding of the project ecology yet, and I’m not sure whether “The Rising” is also partly fantasy reconstruction or just an unusual natural feature. But these last pieces do seem to involve, more than the others, a human mind considering, which I find quite fitting.
On the more general question, I wonder if it is really possible for different works of one artist not to fit together in an instructive way? I haven’t really considered together my own bit of work over the last couple years, but you’ve pointed me toward some ideas I definitely want to look at.
June,
I compared the three pictures that you linked to on my desktop. Colin’s picture conveys strength and Steve’s pictures convey frailty. I could imagine setting up an exhibition where I would illustrate different artists’ approaches to the ‘well-worn’ in the sense of ‘showing signs of much wear or use’.
More later, back to my day-job.
On the subject of visual ecologies: here and here.
Steve,
Shortly after I sent my post to Karl so he could put it up at A&P, I read the reviews Arthur linked to in his Hot and Cold post; in both reviews, if I’m remembering correctly, he talked about work that didn’t belong in the exhibit as it was set up. When I read that, I thought I might have been too ambitious in my post, since it’s clear that some works just don’t go together. Which makes me appreciate your comments even more.
It’s interesting that you question the two big textile pieces of my work, Miocene and The Rising, because they are the furthest away from the photos and literal representation of the land formations themselves. They are both totally imaginative (imaginary?) recreations of what I felt during the month+ time I spent among the geology. The small oil also called “The Rising” was done at one sitting arising from who-knows-where in my being, and that was the model I worked from to paint and stitch the big textile. Miocene was done when I was ill and too exhausted to be inhibited about the process or the product. Later, of course, it got reworked to make it technically usable, but the first “draft” was done in an almost hallucinatory state.
And thank you too for this sentence, which says eloquently what I am hoping could evolve from the work in terms of an exhibit: “I think it would be fascinating if this actually develops in a clear enough way that a viewer of a future exhibit could sense and to some extent disentangle the historical thread and the contributions of the different ways of seeing and representing.”
Birgit,
“Frailty” is a good word, although I think I sense loss even more strongly than fragility in Steve’s work. And the “strength” of Colin’s image is perhaps not so strange, considering that the subject matter is industrial detritus. But Colin’s photo is not just about detritus, but it’s also got an air of the disinterested observer about it — rather different than Steve’s which seems heavily engaged to me.
An exhibit of the “well-worn” in all the senses we use the word could be interesting and jarring — I’m thinking of art using well-worn words about war, perhaps, as well as art depicting holey gloves and discarded hardware.
Arthur —
I didn’t see your post until after I wrote mine — thanks for the quiet intervention. And,
Wow! The first of your linked blog entries blew me away. I wasn’t sure about the connections in the second, but within the first, the variations on a singular theme amazed me. They go together and yet are quite disparate. Thanks.
June, I find your photographs and painting to be breathtaking. They do indeed seem to have a dialogue going between them about the strengths of their respective art forms.
One thing I would consider about the painting in this post relates to something Leslie said recently about Hanneke’s grapes: the possibility of using more variation in warm/cool to indicate depth. The distant rolling landscape in the painting is a strong ochre color, whereas in the foreground you have some cool pinks. If the ochre were less intense, it would recede in depth behind the foreground forms. Of course, it depends on what you want to say. For instance, your photograph almost seems to reverse the physical depth — the foreground colors are cool and mute for the most part, while in the distance are the strong reds. This might be what gives it the “breathtaking” feeling.
June, I am intrigued by the symmetry that is not a complete symmetry in your ‘Miocene’ and ‘The Rising’.
Knowing very little about geology, I googled Miocene and learned that it was a time of great mammalian diversity, and that many species originated and became extinct in response to environmental change. Looking at your Miocene, I see these animals and trees.
In The Rising series, I see you looking at a nowaday geology, dreaming about the great birthing of the Miocene epoch.
June, I love your “The Rising” series.
Before seeing your post today, I felt badly about my confusion how to interpret the Sleeping Bear Dune landscape in Northern Michigan. Was I going to concentrate on photography, painting or textile art? Now I learned from you that these approaches complement one another. Thank you.
Karl,
Thank you for the comments on the way the color is working.
I chose the photo and oil because they most clearly exemplified some of what I was saying. But I am not sure the oil is finished. (In fact, I seldom am sure an oil painting is finished.) And I hadn’t noticed the warm ochre/cool pink, although I was thinking about adding greater value range.
However, I had done some previous work with desert landscapes (Arizona rather than Oregon) and had deliberately used the warm distance with a cool foreground. It did seem to work for me in those pieces. So perhaps I was unconsciously using the same temperature scheme. I think I need to somehow enhance the effect, though, if I want it to be seen as intentional. I’ll be thinking about it.
Birgit,
I am also intrigued by the almost-but-not-quite symmetrical — partly because it seems flawed and thus more human and perhaps more natural, but also because it’s just a trifle jarring. It makes for a touch of unease, a sense of indeterminacy. “Indeterminacy” as the 21st century art form was the theme of a lecture I gave a few years ago; the topic was just a tad ambitious <snort> but interesting to meander about in. The idea isn’t mine, but rather comes from a writer about craft forms, whose name escapes me at the moment.
And you have caught the attributes of the Miocene epoch. While we were there, my husband was studying and feeding me geological information from the Fossil Beds, which range from about 65 million years ago to 16 million years ago. The land is almost entirely Cenozoic in age — late comers in geological terms (although there’s one large anomalous exception) — and within the Cenozoic, the Miocene is the period from which most of the fossils at John Day seem to be being found. The whole Cenozoic era for Oregon was a tempestuously volcanic time — Oregon basically rose out of the sea during the early and mid-Cenozoic. From the volcanoes came both destruction and fertility. I think of “Miocene” and “The Rising” as twinned figures, maybe male and female — or maybe both female — but I’m not sure I could articulate why.
And I’m pleased if anything I do feeds your art — that is more than I ever imagined I could do.
June,
Karl’s comment on the use of warm/cool contrast to enhance depth — assuming you would want to do that, which is certainly not given — is the traditional one I also made regarding Birgit’s photo at the lake. However, as you mention, the opposite also has a nice effect: since the eye tends to be drawn to warm, a warm background encourages the eye to move back into it. Perhaps contrast directing movement is the key, so value matters in a similar way. Anyway, rather than speculate, I took your image and processed it to make either the foreground or the background more cool and slightly darker, with the other remaining the same. This could be done in many ways, I just chose a fairly crude one. The results are below (sorry, I can’t put the images directly into the comment).
cool background
cool foreground
I find the last one most pleasing. It’s interesting how the change is read as cloud shadow, but that may be partly due to the deliberately heavy-handed manipulation. That reading could conflict with a depiction of a hot, sun-drenched desert, if that is what is desired. Anyway, perhaps this exercise will give you some ideas.
Steve,
Wow! Is that cool! That gives me lots of ideas for teaching color – did you just manipulate that in photoshop? It never occurred to me to do that in an existing painting.
What I think it illustrates is that these “rules” of color are meant to be broken. The cool in the forground is much stronger of an image to me.
June,
Before Steve showed those two versions, I was going to mention that my feedback to Hanneke about her grapes painting would not be the same I would give to you about hers. Your intents are really different it seems, but either of you can argue with me. It seesm like Hanneke’s paintigns are playing well within the rules of visual illusion and color, meaning they are about this careful, sesnitive observation and response with paint. She wants to replicate the sensation of sitting nad lookng at these grapes with intensity and connection.
Yours, on the other hand are very much about observation, combined with, I feel, an interest in playing with the color and responding to an emotional response to the landscape. You are painting about place, both literal and metaphorical. And your sense of color is a mix of what you see from the photos, what you experience standing there, and what you remember when you are gone. The series is gorgeous. I repsond most to the textiles at the moment, but I want to spend a long time looking at all of it, as they really do talk to each other.
Steve and Leslie,
The photoshopping of the oil painting is great and, even if exaggerated, is worth pondering. I too like the cool foreground and I like its exaggerated state. I will be playing with that.
I have maybe 3 pieces (2 partly finished textiles) that I can push around, and now, I know I can do it in Photoshop to try out possibilities. Like Leslie, I hadn’t thought of that, although I have photoshopped in deciding about cropping and adding to, etc; in textiles you have a freedom of size and scale (and an ability to revise sizes) that you don’t have in other media. This is even more true than in photographs, since I can add more to a piece as well as take bits away. And I’m not restricted to what the original material consisted of — I can add large sections of new material if I wish. But I digress.
Leslie, thanks for the comparison with Hanneke. I’m flattered that you would even make it. I struggle with the painting (as I said, textiles are my first medium) and so have been drinking in Hanneke’s paintings and drawings and the comments on them. I want to have enough control in my painting that I can both see and manipulate the paint to do what I want it to do, not just accidentally sort of accomplish it.
The multidisciplinary approach of A and P seems to be working very well for many of us.
Very interesting Steve. Very interesting. My first reaction was that this should go in the post. I think a separate post with these images would be better though, because June’s first two images have such an interesting discussion going already. I hope you or June will present these in a regular post sometime. Inspirational, that’s my reaction.