Art & Perception

I am in Beatty Nevada, doing an artist’s Workspace Residency at the Goldwell Open Air Museum.

It is currently day 4 of the residency and, frankly, I’m still trying to sort myself — and my environs — out.

Our residential quarters are quite wonderful — a little strange, but all mod cons including high speed internet.

The studio space is 4 miles away, at the Red Barn, donated to the Goldwell Foundation by the Barrick Gold mining company who mined the Barrick Bullfrog Mine, which has stripped the mountain to the east, creating a south-facing pyramidal mountain that I still haven’t gotten my camera around.

Here’s the Red Barn:

The photo was taken from Rhyolite, a ghost town within walking distance to the north of the Red Barn. The setting, as you see, strikes a bit of awe, maybe even fear, into the plein air artist.

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…..night after night critics and collectors scarf down meals paid for by dealers promoting artists, or museums promoting shows, with everyone together at the table, schmoozing, stroking, prodding, weighing the vibes. And where is art in all of this? Proliferating but languishing….

…., artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again….

Paragraphs excerpted from

The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art! By HOLLAND COTTER

“Pattern and Decoration” (P&D) is the name of an art movement that had its moment of visibility in the post-modern pluralism of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Its practitioners include Valerie Jaudon,  Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, Kim MacConnel, Tony Robbin, Robert Kushner,  Robert Zakanitch, and many others. P&D often serves as an unheralded theoretical base for the quilted arts that I am familiar with.

Robert Zakanitch, Red Watercolor, 34 x 36, 2007

Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975 –1985 is the printed catalogue of an exhibit held at the Hudson River Museum in 2007 -2008. The catalogue has excellent essays by Anne Swartz, Arthur Danto, Temma Balducci, and John Perreault, as well as including short biographies of the artists and plates of the exhibited art. Most of the words which follow come from the catalogue.

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What is graphic design? I hear this question all the time from family, friends, classmates, etc… It’s a hard question to answer, and somewhere along the line we begin to be simple and state: “Graphic design is the designing of graphics.” Unfortunately, this term is so vague and overdone that it leads to such simplistic definitions. That is not the reality.

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I’ve been too busy too long, but I have accomplished one thing the last few weeks: with another artist, Kerry Corcoran, I submitted a proposal for an exhibit at a local public space. I got the idea when I realized that Kerry and I found the same subjects appealing: trees, especially bare ones. But we work in such different media—printmaking and photography—that the show becomes as interesting for the contrast of approach as for the intrinsic interest of the subject. Following are images from the abbreviated application (some of mine may look familiar from my Cottonwood series); the actual show (if accepted) would have about twice as many. For the moment, we’re calling it In Praise of Trees.

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Suppose you grew up in a place that was ravaged with destruction, imagined, imaginary or real, where would you subsequently gravitate?

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I have just joined Facebook (thanks, D.) and of course, instantly found a group dedicated to a textile artist’s focus: namely, texture.

The photos of “texture” on the group site were close-ups, both of quilted fabric and of objects that showed as textured. I started through my photos and quickly realized that deciding on what shows texture is not as easy as might be imagined. Here are some possibilities from my files.

The High Note, JOU, Computer images on Silk, quilted, 12 x 12″, 2008.

The upper layer (of computer-printed sheer fabric) is turned back to show under layer. Normally the sheer would fall over the entire piece, showing through as it does on the right bottom. This dropping of the sheer obscures much of the texture while at the same time, contradictorily, adds to it.

Vilhelm Hammershoi, Sunbeam (and various other titles), 1900, oil on canvas.

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