Art & Perception

I’d like to describe a collaborative experiment that started from recent attempts to use simple image manipulation to aid in discussing visual art, such as painting (see comment 6 here) or fiber art (comment 12 here). Quite a few artists these days work partly or wholly digitally, and I wondered whether some of the advantages (like Undo!) could be carried over to an otherwise non-digital workflow.

In one of the posts mentioned above, June Underwood described her huge, inspirational, and ongoing project at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. I proposed to cast myself as her assistant:

more… »

Despite recent posts here on the subject of art about art, by Leslie and by Karl, I hadn’t thought of the question in application to myself. Then I remembered that I did indeed have some photographs of art, at least if the gentle reader allows graffiti to be considered art. In any case, I was definitely interested in the personal expression represented by the graffiti. I was also interested in the setting, a half-underground concrete parking structure, and especially in the lighting, a mixture of glaring incandescent light and early morning daylight.

I made these images nearly a year ago, but still haven’t arrived at a presentation I’m happy with. I’m curious what you think of the following pairs of images. The first pair pits color against black and white. The color version shows the different tints of the two light sources, but the blacks feel richer to me in the monochrome image. Do you have a preference? For what reason?

more… »

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.

Probably every cat owner has encountered a scene like this on the garden path, or maybe even on the living room rug. When I came across it one morning, I immediately went for my camera and tripod. I felt slightly odd about it, but there was, after all, nothing I could do for the rabbit at that point. There is a long tradition of photographing dead subjects, and almost a genre of roadkill snapshots. Edward Weston once even photographed a dead man he happened on in the California desert. Nevertheless, presenting the result as art, for example by hanging it on a wall or in a gallery, could be considered tacky or provocative or risky. Much, of course, depends on the audience. What do you think of this picture? And is there subject matter that is unlikely to make good art?

Who is the most influential art blogger? Ed Winkleman, of course. I haven’t been following his blog as closely as I would like to, but yesterday I took a look and the title of his recent post Art About Art got me excited. I’ve been working on an essay about this general subject “art about art”, and I wondered if I had been scooped. In fact, there was no connection; Winkleman’s post could have been titled “Art about making art,” how artwork depicting artists “caught in the act” of creation tells us about how artists did what they did. In my own experience this is a fruitful avenue for research, because there is much to be learned about studio practice from old paintings, (how to store brushes in linseed oil, for example, or how the palette was laid out in the 15th century). There is also much to learn from ancient art about the making, painting, and firing of ancient Greek ceramics.

Back to art about art — the concept of depicting art in art opens a lot of possibilities. The imaginary vase painting still life above is an example. I have long been fascinated by Athenian vase painting because of the potential of the vase to act as a “frame” for drawings and paintings on the vase itself. This fascination led me to a long love affair with ceramics and kiln building — that’s for another time though. The painting above is a technical study in how to paint a representation of a vase with oil colors on canvas. The form of the vase is based on studies of a stamnos in a museum in nearby Leiden, while the “red figure painting” is based on a painting on an amphora in the same museum. I studied these ancient objects by drawing in my sketchbook at the museum, then created this fantasy synthesis in my studio.

In fact, I worked out the rough form of the vase together with Hanneke van Oosterhout in a large painting we did together. I made this study to develop the technique for painting the vase before overpainting it in the large painting.

Every blog post should end with a question, right? Okay then, what do you think about Ed Winkleman’s blog? Or, what do you think about “art about art”? Or, what do you think of collaborating on artwork?

…

related post: Art about art and doing a 180

If you could hang out for an evening talking with any living person (or persons), who would your top 5 choices be? Here’s my list:

1. Thomas Pynchon
2. Brian Eno or Stewart Brand (or both)
3. Woody Allen
4. Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen (or both)
5. the Dalai Lama

  Who would you choose?

On the last day of 2006 I made several pictures of grasses in the snow. They were in a field near the woods I’ve been frequenting for my series of Sourdough Trail photographs. Although that series is concerned with complexity, at least in part, the grasses were classic studies in simplicity.

I feel that I am as much drawn to minimal subjects as complex ones — certainly when it comes to photographs I would like to own — but few of my own images are minimalist ones. Is it possible to encompass both complex and simple images within a single, coherent style? Or do they represent ways of looking at the world that are too different? If you saw both kinds of images in the same show, would you sense that the artist did not have a “mature vision”? Do you work in different “styles” at the same time?