Look, See

Five More Pasts Picks

 

 

These are five out of a thirty sort of "Best of" from the past nearly two years of daily HTML drawings.

 

From Dasarâjadharma: Ten Principles of Good Governance
(L) 7: Akskodha - Absence of anger
(R) 10: Avirodha - Absence of obstruction
March 1 & 4, 2005, HTML, 234 x 198 pixels

 

 

 

 

dukka, March 24, 2004, HTML, 380 x 340 pixels

 

 

 

 

The Last Light at the End of the Branch, April 25, 2004, HTML, 240 x 475 pixels

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Edges (Gold) VI, June 03, 2004, HTML , 396 x 396 pixels

 

 

 

 

Five Past Picks

 

 

Five drawings (or sets) from the past that I feel hold up to... uh, my expectations. More over the next three days or so.

 

 

 

 

Lassen, November 11, 2003, HTML, 360 x 320 pixels

 

 

 

 

El Pacific cerca Baja California, January 13, 2004, HTML, 440 x 600 pixels

 

 

 

 

 

9-12 of 16 Arhats, January 21, 2004, HTML, 280 x 200 pixels each

 

 

 

 

Arhat [4]: Subinda, January 26, 2004, HTML, 480 x 420 pixels

 

 

 

 

Lohans 9 & 10: Open Heart & Raised Hand, February 12, 2004, HTML, 242, 220 pixels each

 

 

 

 

Richard Tuttle Podcast at SFMOMA

 

 

Ahhh, this is very interesting: SFMOMA is offering a podcast exhibition guide of the The Art of Richard Tuttle. It's offered in three flavors: RSS for an aggregator, an M4A for for photo capable iPods, and an MP3 audio-only tour. Neat.

Richard Tuttle
New Mexico, New York #14, 1998
Acrylic on plywood
Collection of Susan Harris and Glenn Gissler, New York
© Richard Tuttle

 

 

 

 

Steve Karlik at Minus Space

 

 

Steve Karlik is now featured at Minus Space. The interview Steve and I conducted beginning last spring and over the summer is now available, and excerpts from the interview are published in the first catalogue produced by Minus Space, which can be ordered from Minus Space.

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Steve Karlik's paintings are formally refined yet generous in spirit, grounded in materials yet spatial and open. His work is that of a serious painter, at first seeming almost severe, yet with time revealing itself as sensual, emotional, and beautiful. A thoughtful viewer will find that his reductive forms can resonate with one's memory, references, and experiences; the associations one makes with his work are varied and surprising. The paintings involve our eyes, minds, and bodies. His work is scaled to our physical presence, but brings about in us a dual response — it is both intimate and monumental. If the personal is political, then the politics of Steve's work are a belief in the importance of the individual and a responsibility to the collective; in the viewer's heightened experience is found the significance of our connection to each other — the possibility of a simultaneously singular and shared meaning. - Chris Ashley, August 2005

The following conversation between Steve Karlik and Chris Ashley was conducted via email from April to July 2005, and included a studio visit in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, on May 20, 2005.

Chris Ashley: Steve, why don’t we start with some basics: where are you from, and how did you become a painter?

Steve Karlik: I was born in 1960 and grew up surrounded by nature in rural Oregon, outside Portland to be exact. One day in my mid 20’s, I started painting because it gave me the latitude to reflect on the texture of the land as I experienced it. I’d been looking at James Lavadour’s paintings of eastern Oregon, and my first paintings were these gray-to-sepia blurs, washy landscape references with a few recognizable features. My only concern was pushing landscape painting further into abstraction until I was introduced head-on to Mark Rothko’s work. The washy fields I was painting then began to lose their landscape reference to something more non-objective. I attended Portland State University in 1990 and studied painting under Mel Katz, a Post-Minimalist sculptor from New York who introduced me to thinking about art in a pragmatic manner. When I got to Portland State, I was surprised because my studio was in the same building where Rothko learned math as a child. In 1995, I was accepted into the graduate program at Pratt Institute and moved to New York.

At Pratt I studied under Ted Kurahara and Linda Francis, and developed friendships with the Brazilian painter Daniel Feingold, and future Minus Space artists Mathew Deleget and Rossana Martínez. In 1996, I saw two important exhibitions that made a lot of sense: the Ellsworth Kelly retrospective at the Guggenheim; and the wall-mounted oil stick planes by Richard Serra at Mathew Marks. Kelly and Serra began to express for me critical art that pushed the relationships of form and space, and used those relationships to engage the viewer directly. Immediately after Pratt I found a studio in DUMBO (the Brooklyn neighborhood Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and I now live and paint in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

CA: You entered graduate school in your thirties, an age later than seems typical these days. What were you doing before then? What difference do you think your age may have made in your approach to graduate school, the work you did there, and the path you took afterwards?

SK: Before graduate school I was a book binder. I did that for about ten years. It was kind of a cool profession with lots of hands-on work. My age was a factor then in the kind of art I produced. I'd been in a trade for ten years where the production process was meticulous and extremely demanding. A strong sense of craftsmanship was essential, and you had to turn out a well-crafted product in large volume at high speed. I was twenty-seven at the time, and just entering art school as an undergraduate — I remember taking a lot of what I practiced at work into the studio. I had a studio for a while where I worked in the loft space above the production floor. I would work at night using the equipment below to produce art. I made a series of reductive forms that for the first time really followed an exact process determined by the materials. I would eventually use mylar and multiple layers of an industrial tape that was thick and soft, semi-transparent and amber-colored. As the layers built up, I would take the work-in-progress to the hydraulic cutter, apply clamped pressure (about 600 lbs per square inch) and clean it up with the hydraulic knife. I wish I still had some examples; the surfaces were packed and had the appearance of layered bands of raw beeswax. It was really then that I started developing a personal aesthetic.

CA: Bookbinding as a craft is, of course, very hands-on and visual. I think it’s fascinating that you were doing this other kind of visual work before painting, and that bookbinding lent its materials to the beginning of your making visual art. It sounds like you came to making art mostly on your own. How did making a painting with tape turn into painting with paint?

SK: The overall experience in the shop seductively smelled of drying ink, lacquer, and paper; it felt like a place where art was being made. I worked on a printing press setting up dies and locking in forms for the purpose of scoring book and magazine covers so they wouldn't crack when folded. These were basically locked-in steel structures that held scoring blades sandwiched between wood and lead strips of different widths and point degrees. The sheet would run over this die while moving around a large drum.

We had to sometimes shim the die to make it score deeper, and pack the drum with paper backing to protect it. Some of the runs were long and the drum would take a beating. When the run was over, the press was cleaned with lacquer thinner. There would be a deposit of dust, ink, oil, lead and tape on the backing sheets, a transferred film or stain that was a silky gray green. It wasn't long before I started seeing abstractly into the by-products of production.

I started using the backing sheets like an underpainting, applying a tape we used in production over these stains to give them depth and a thick, almost opaque, amber color. Soon thereafter, the tape became the primary focus. I could lay down tape, layer upon layer, apply pressure and repeat the process, building up a thick, waxy, amber field. I was creating art that looked like painting without actually painting. More importantly, I was intrigued by how much variation could be found within one unified surface. When I was formally enrolled in art school, this was the imagery I attempted to recreate with paint — it was dark, indifferent and physical, and it looked severe and spontaneous. Finally, the canvas seemed so much more vital to presenting it as art.

CA: It’s interesting how the imagery and surfaces in your paintings seem to have these definite sources. With this earlier work you’ve just described, there is a process of laying things down and working at a surface, and while your current work is quite different, there is also a great attention to surface and process. It’s always interesting to hear about what an artist has in mind, even distantly, when thinking about his or her work. You mentioned the landscape, and I'm wondering if there are references to other media or fields of study that are important to your work. For some this might be literature, film, architecture, music, scientific facts or data, and these might be influences that are visual, philosophic, sociological, and so on.

SK: I like to think that my paintings are somewhat informed by Modernist architecture. The 2004 panels on view on Minus Space with the elliptical forms actually came about after looking at Louis Kahn. I see these elliptical forms as drawings — plan views for idealized structures.

Modernist architects have done some amazing things, and when it’s really good, the thinking comes through visually. There's logic with architects like Alvaro Siza or Kahn that is tied directly to their relationship with materials — simplicity derived from using steel or wood, for instance, on steel’s and wood’s terms. The really good architects, historically, have had a close relationship with the materials and have had the ability to assert their own identity into the process, so that while the uniqueness of the materials helped shape the project, the project visually shows the architect's ideals. Siza's use of brick brought us unique forms that were realized by using brick slightly out of context. In looking at some of these structures, it all makes complete sense rather quickly.

CA: Can you describe some of the ideas you’re trying to realize in the work, and how you think you’re successful at making that happen? Perhaps you can talk about a specific work that you feel integrates the conceptual and visual aspects of your work.

SK: Finding ways of letting the materials carry an idea is something I'm always trying to track down and will probably always be moving towards; you could refer to it as transcendence of the everyday through visual experience. I like to think that reductive work has a poetic undercurrent that supports reductive painting's more literal and theoretical understanding.

The piece Settlement Series, Corsair (24 x 48 inches) has connotations that are pretty obvious — Corsair refers to the aircraft. This work is an idealization, and considers the pre-high modern images of some aircraft in current high-Modernist light. I think it's important to understand that this painting isn't a duplication of actual wing markings, but the essence of them through color and structure. The markings on the original aircraft were bands of white-black-white-black-white amidst the blue of the wing.

The materials used in the painting are hand-polished wood and specific hues of extremely flat gray-blue acrylic and tempera paint, which is brushed, rolled, and sanded with care and precision. I was careful to duplicate the original blue of the Corsair's body on the painting with mixtures of Cerulean Blue, Medium Gray Light, and Lamp Black; one band tended towards black and the other band is the actual blue of the Corsair. The piece is elongated, horizontal, and object-like to suggest a general sense of the ideal wing, yet it is the emblematic quality of the painted bands that is important for the painting to carry a reference to the actual Corsair. With the painted surface hard and matte, like paint on metal, there is a transition from non-concrete idea to meaning.

In the work Corsair, a visible reference to a specific, almost mythical aircraft is established in the context of contemporary art as motif, and the painting becomes a field where a current interest in blue finds a childhood fascination with a specific visual memory and plants it solely in an art context. The reference to a Corsair becomes less important than how the work reinterprets Corsair as the emphasis for making painting that engages in a dialogue with painting.

CA: Painters, particularly abstract painters, often work to make paintings that are both an image and an object, and work at integrating those two aspects. Each aspect requires its own considerations, and making the painting a whole entity requires additional considerations. Are you working towards a painting that the viewer can see holistically? And in doing this are you trying to let the viewer follow your decision making process, as well as be aware of whatever intentions or impulses you may be operating with? Is there an ideal that you hope to lead the viewer towards?

SK: I have a history of making work that is mute and intends to transcend expressive activity — what artist Daniel Feingold refers to as a "sound free ambiance devoid of personal expression." Holistic is a good term. Recognizing the painting pre-consciously, or feeling it in the gut, is one of the goals. Like most painting, the information is all there to be retrieved or uncovered, yet what is brought to the activity of viewing that positions the viewer centrally within the experience of the work is most important. I think if I were to move the viewer towards an understanding of the really precarious state that the idea of balance suggests, I would be adding value to art and painting in general.

CA: This notion of the viewer’s experience of your paintings as leading to an “understanding of the precarious state that the idea of balance suggests” really appeals to me. It’s something that one would think would be present in all art, but mostly in the background. It sounds like you want that to be one of the primary experiences of your work. Can you say a little more about that idea?

SK: I have always tried to establish an overall sense of balance, or rather equilibrium, so that it becomes the signature of oppositions that resonate in a kind of dance. Equilibrium reflects a universality or wholeness that is a dynamic state. You might say that I explore in painting what may exist in essence through geometric forms which are purely abstract and build (visually) into highly structured compositions. What is important is that space is not static, but a visually dynamic push-and-pull.

CA: It appears from studio photos that you work on paintings laid flat on the table, and my studio visit seemed to confirm that, too. Do you always work flat, or do you also work on paintings hanging on the wall?

SK: Rarely do I work on the wall. The surface I am after is blatantly flat with little imperfection. The paint I use is a water-thin mixture of acrylic and tempera with acrylic binders similar to extremely thin house paint, which dries with the same characteristics. The paint is put on in many coats and has a tendency to run, sometimes showing light-traces where the paint might dry more unevenly in areas that accumulate more paint. Having the work face up allows me to look at it as raking light falls down and across it. This is important with the darker colors, where what is required is a dense sheet or film. When light falls across the surface evenly, I know it's close to being finished.

CA: What is the “fox fur” reference that you are using in many of the recent titles? My guess is that it has something to do with color. It seems that all the paintings with "fox fur" in the title have a gray. There is, of course, the silvery gray of fox, and these grays look rather lustrous. How are you using that term?

SK: The term "fox fur" ultimately describes a range of grays that I started using in early 2004. When I did the series Fox Fur and Teal, I was rediscovering that all forms of gray are really complex hints of muted color, and I was looking for a title for the series that described the overall variations of gray within the range being used.

In the first series, however, entitled Fox Fur, I was pulling paint over the surface with a large knife, leaving accumulated skins of translucent paint. These skins or films always covered a dark blue or black ground and the surface became cloud-like in appearance. The term "fox fur" became descriptive of a process. It certainly referred to a subtle range of color, but also alluded to the nebulous quality of the final surface, i.e., the Fox Fur Nebula. The interest in the silvery grays stuck and I started using this focus as the basis for developing new work that considered color in a more specific manner. The "fox fur" reference finally became a reference to, or rather a description of, a quality of color, a non-descript silvery gray that ranges from yellow to magenta and includes any color absorbed by it.

CA: It can be pretty bold to say, as you do in your MINUS SPACE statement, "The work is not about anything, but the thought of remnants is important...," because you're asking the viewer to give up on expecting to be handed a readily received, digestible package of meaning. Instead the viewer enters into a pre-verbal, visual, time-based experience, which requires an investment in the process of looking, during which the painted object “unfolds.” In this dynamic I think the artist gives something to the viewer, but also requires that the viewer give to the work too. The viewer's giving is their engagement in the process of active, sensitive looking. Without that the image/object’s unfolding doesn't happen. Do you see this — the engagement, the unfolding through looking, the time it takes to do all of this — as part of the subject matter and meaning of your work?

SK: I don't like letting the viewer off the hook easily. I like to think I demand of the viewer as much as they demand of the so-called artwork. I don't think the viewer is transparent to painting, especially with reductive abstraction. There is no subject-object relationship, unless of course you immediately hand them all the answers right up front, so asking the viewer to go to the pre-verbal and give up on a readily digestible package of meaning seems appropriate for where I want my painting to go.

I say my work is not about anything because it sits in that literalist realm where it unfolds continuously with time. Some painting is visually ever-renewing; each time you come back to it there is some variable that wasn't noticed or that becomes apparent over time. Painting that is more literal is wholly manifest at any moment and never changes; it keeps unfolding continuously with time rather than over it. The work confronts the viewer and meaning depends partially on what the viewer brings to it and what the work offers. As a structure outside of consciousness that consciousness refers to, abstraction becomes a field that provides an extension into an idealized sphere of meaning. I think this has to happen pre-verbally before meaning is given.

CA: It seems to me that this structure would first engage the viewer in your experience, as a model, a thing outside themselves, and then as an experience of their own. Do you agree with that?

SK: I do. There are qualities in some art forms that are more, to some degree, objectifiable. Art can be representational and meaning can be developed more immediately. With non-objective or more literal art, the model is more perceptual and doesn't carry as well-developed or agreed-upon sets of meaning that a painting such as the The Last Supper or even a stop sign carries. With non-objective art we almost have to weigh the whole object and perceptually gauge its presence. We have to come to terms with it individually as a thing.

CA: The imagery and ideas you use have definite sources. Earlier you referred to the importance of Kelly and Serra in your comprehension of “critical art that pushed the relationships of form and space and used those relationships to engage the viewer directly.” I think this statement could apply to your work, too. I wonder if you could unpack this a bit, in particular, what this might mean for your art.

SK: Every once in a while, a painter or a sculptor needs to come along and really try to dismantle the art form. Kelly uses the formal, visual elements that define painting's flatness to make objects. Serra takes our understanding of an object and turns it back on us, redefining it by challenging human perception. In both artists I saw work that was highly conceptual because the idea became visible in the object during the viewing of it. I see art with heavy formal elements becoming a more open-ended system when the space of the viewer is enlisted.

To answer the question, in painting I look for visual elements that are speculative, that challenge the art form and remain unique in voice. The space of painting is a fairly tricky space to navigate; it's flat, but also contains connotations and narrations that are other than flat. Painting’s space is illusionistic. These concerns have to be orchestrated in a way that is visually unique, makes sense conceptually, and moves the art form ahead intellectually.

CA: We have talked elsewhere about the idea of a central metaphor to an artist's work. I brought up examples discussed in an interview in a catalogue for painter George Lawson; Lawson mentions painter Patsy Krebs’ idea of a central metaphor regarding one’s work and discusses his own central metaphor. For example, Krebs had referred to a reproduction of a Siennese Annunciation in her studio and identified the concept of transmission and inspiration as central metaphors for her work. In Lawson's case, as I understand it, a reproduction of one of the sarcophagus frescoes from the Diver's Tomb in Paestum is an image that he identifies with and connects his work to in terms of the importance of diving deeply, of taking a leap and plunging into the middle of an action, place, or emotion. Can you identify a central metaphor that is operating in your work? You've already mentioned the importance of Modernist architecture and also the idea of flight related to the Corsair airplane.

SK: Flight is beauty in tension — all that force, speed and grace. The reference to the Corsair worked well for that particular painting; it allowed me to locate idea in a realm separate from expression so I could remove myself somewhat and stand outside or adjacent to the work and visually focus on the painting.

I tend to be pretty methodical in my approach to looking at work-in-progress, and when I'm in the studio, I mostly contemplate the work’s visual logic. All the visual elements (surface, form, and color) have to balance, yet have a slightly-off quality, a weight. I’ll refer to it as a strange sense of familiarity. The Japanese refer to it in their traditional pottery as a balance of perfect imperfection, which comes from nature. The idea signifies for me a balance or beauty that has tension.

When I paint I tape off and paint rather quickly. The works are a lot less planned than they look. The slightly-off quality I refer to is a subtlety, and recognizing it on the panel before it’s taped-off is like seeing something as a flash that goes off when, for a brief moment, the mind is left with an imprint of structure. I really have to trust my decisions, because often times the kind of tension I’m after is poised on failure — failure of not being taken far enough, or taken too far.

CA: I think I see a number of ideas in operation in your work: the separation of idea and expression; the precarious nature of balance; and the moment of recognition, or understanding, as a flash. You work to achieve this by creating or finding tensions in a work that catches the viewer by surprise, sparking a moment of recognition or memory.

SK: I’m often surprised myself. Looking for minor visual elements, such as emerging color relationships or the relationships of form that need to be explored and made concrete, sits at the heart of what I do. What really inspires me is nature and its systems, the motion of which always tends towards maximum efficiency. It is nature’s systems that first got me interested in thinking about balance and how tenuous and resilient natural systems are, always poised between decay and regeneration. There is a lot of movement there that when experienced on a human scale looks static, but it’s constantly aligning and realigning itself so that it stays poised and efficient.

CA: There are a couple more ideas, I think. One is in the idea you mentioned related to pottery— is your painting a kind of following your materials and their properties and behaviors, of accepting what they can do, just as a ceramicist might have to do with clay and glazes? And secondly, you said you are looking for subtle tensions and beauty related to “perfect imperfection”— are you trying to create those tensions, or are you trying to find those tensions? Where does that tension reside? Is it mostly in the surface of the painting, in the drawing and form, or are there other aspects to the entire painted image and object that are contributing to these tensions?

SK: I definitely prefer to let the materials be themselves and follow them. The materials set the rules. Imperfections in the materials often set the tone for what happens visually with the entire painting. I first started using wood as a support for functional reasons — I tend to press hard, and it doesn’t warp as canvas can. Wood became an aesthetic choice because it’s a finished surface that reacts dramatically with nearly any surface next to it. The tonality of wood changes with different colors and can float or recede much as a color does depending on what color or texture is adjacent to it. I also prefer panels with a good deal of surface tension, where the grain shows stress or character.

An entire image or object in balance with its imperfections is worked to that level of completion and is usually a quality that is subtle and realized only when it’s finished. There is a level of spontaneity related to the painting process in finding it. Usually there is something (a form, a surface, or a color) that might weigh just a bit more than another area relative to it, or might impact the painting as a whole without being so obvious that it dominates the entire painting. This is how I ultimately see tension having the greatest strength. I like to work these areas of tension into relationships so they are controlled as an entire painting that functions as a system.

CA: Any recent developments in your work? What’s ahead?

SK: Sometimes we overlook things that after the fact seem painfully obvious. During our studio visit, you pointed out that my wood surfaces functioned like drawing by comparing them with the earlier pulled wax surfaces. I owe you for that one — it’s become a kind of echo with implications on how I might consider the surface as more active. “Flip” is a new piece on MINUS SPACE that reflects this. I am also starting a series of vertical wall mounted sculpture that involve reflective color and reflective light; they follow nicely off the paintings, but seem strangely lighter.

CA: I’m curious to know what place you think art, and in particular your art, has in the world? I’m asking that kind of eternal question about the meaning of art and what it’s good for.

SK: Someone once made a joke in one of my studio critiques at Pratt that started up a good conversation. They were considering the way of the dinosaur and trying to determine what kind I was. My instructor (bless her) told them, "the kind that wants to bring people to their knees" — that would be the Abstract Expressionist inside me. All joking aside, the kind of Modernism that was emerging after Abstract Expressionism, only gets to flourish sporadically. High Modernism keeps appearing and reappearing and is continually taking on new meaning and escalating Modernism as an art form that is critical of itself. That is the key to keeping Modernist art from intellectually going the way of the dinosaur. Because Modernism reserves some of the critical dialogue for the artists, I hope that my work helps push that dialogue along.

To answer the last part of the question honestly, I get kind of itchy if I go too long without moving paint around — again, the inner Abstract Expressionist talking. Painting allows me to navigate the world in a way that brings visual structure to its nuances, reshape it, tag it, preserve it, and color it. While I feel I’m continually arriving at something, I’m also searching for something and painting allows me to work that out visually. I also get a great deal of pleasure from living with painting.

 

 

 

 

Top Ten, or so

 

 

A couple of weeks ago, when talking with George Lawson about my August break from making and posting HTML drawings here, he suggested that I choose ten drawings as an overview of the past three years or so to kick off a return to drawing on September 1. I thought that was a good idea, and he wondered if I could really only narrow a selection down to a top ten. Sure I thought, I can do that. No problem.

Well, it has been a problem. And I don't mean that the problem is that there is too much wonderfulness from which to choose. I'm feeling the opposite- as I look back I'm not seeing as many successful drawings as I thought I'd find.

First, I decided to only choose from drawings posted on this weblog, Look,See, and not bother going back through the old weblog, A Place to Work, Nothing Fancy, just to lessen my work load. Had I tried to pull from the two years or whatever drawings there it would've been too much to take on.

As I looked through drawings month by month back to October 2003 I began to feel a little depressed, a little unhappy, a little impatient, because I found there were very few drawings that felt alive to me, that overcame the awkwardness of the locked-in, hard-edged grid, the even, monotonous brilliance of hexadecimal color and the monitor, and the complete absence of the hand. I have felt this before, and then fought my way through that feeling by doing more drawings and finding new little twists or approaches to a subject. Maybe that will happen again in the future. I have really mixed feelings about this, and I'm not sure where I stand right now. Obviously, I didn't figure anything out during August. And certainly, this confession is not a smooth career move, as if that was ever in question, anyway. But that's the nature of the weblog, and that's been the nature of this project for me, too.

I realized there were two criteria I used for my selection- did it work as a standalone drawing, and did it lead somewhere? In particular, has the drawing been useful for me in work outside the HTML medium? There are aspects of these drawings I've chosen that I'm using in paintings and drawings. I'm glad for that.

Currently I have a list of about thirty drawings. I can't reduce it to ten. And there were days when I made two drawings, so in those few cases when I picked a day I included both drawings. There is one incidence of four drawings on one day. I also cheated a bit and pulled two drawings from a series and counted them as one.

Over the next few days I'll post these drawings. But just for today I'm only going to post one drawing which is now close to two years old and which I think is my absolute favorite.

Tuolumne, November 17, 2003, HTML, 400 x 380 pixels

 

 

 

 

de Kooning's "Woman I" via knitPro

 

 

"knitPro is a web application that translates digital images into knit, crochet, needlepoint and cross-stitch patterns. Just upload jpeg, gif or png images of whatever you wish -- portraits, landscapes, logos... and it will generate the image pattern on a graph sizable for any fiber project."

mission
"microRevolt projects investigate the dawn of sweatshops in early industrial capitalism to inform the current crisis of global expansion and the feminization of labor."

"microRevolt developed web application knitPro, a protest tool that generates knit patterns of sweatshop offenders."

Or just use it for fun.

Willem de Kooning
Woman, I, 1950-52
Oil on canvas
6' 3 7/8" x 58" (192.7 x 147.3 cm)
MoMA Purchase
© 2005 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

 

 

 

ascii Chewy

 

 

About ascii chewy

"ascii chewy" is an ascii based emotive life form and improvisational comic strip that dwells within your browser. His behavior is loosely inspired by the misadventures of Jason Van Anden and Lauri Goldkind's puppy, "Chewy".

As time and inspiration call, Jason will add to ascii chewy's re-pet-oire. This will result in a web based, real-time, interactive comic strip. Visitors will likely encounter surprising new behavior every time they return.

This artwork has been made available to the world for non-commercial purposes thanks to a Creative Commons license. If you have a non-commercial website or blog and agree to the terms of the Creative Commons license, you can add ascii chewy to your site.

This emotive ascii based life form was written in javascript and uses cascading style sheets in interesting ways.

 

 

 

 

Topical

 

 

This weblog is never topical. Until now. For a bit.

I heard Larry Diamond talk on the radio Monday night. He spoke clearly, dispassionately, honestly, and brilliantly about how this administration totally blew the Iraw war, turning it into a long term occupation, and he pointed fingers and named names. Streamed at It's Your World.

Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq -- The guest speaker is Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution; Professor, Political Science and Sociology, Stanford University; Founding Co-Editor, Journal of Democracy; and former Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Baghdad, Iraq (2004) In Squandered Victory, Dr. Diamond shows how the American effort to establish democracy in Iraq was hampered not only by insurgents and terrorists but also by a long chain of miscalculations, missed opportunities, and acts of ideological blindness that helped assure that the transition to independence would be neither peaceful nor entirely democratic.

A couple of other things on my mind:

First off, New Orleans- out here in warm, calm, late summer California I really don't have a clue, but it's bad, so here's my inadequate little gesture; jeez, it's totally flooded. Devastating.	Second, in some ways this whole Camp Casey thing is a little goofy. On the other hand, I want peace in and Bush out, a goofiness is often a good thing. So, Go Cindy!

 

 

 

 

Tom Moody writes about Kara Hammond

 

 

Read a good essay by Tom Moody about Kara Hammond's work at the Halsey Gallery, College of Charleston, South Carolina, where she teaches.

In language terms Hammond’s images aspire to a condition of pure noun-hood. Typically she centers a single subject within a bland or neutral background, avoiding arty expressionist points of view. Her rendering takes pains not to call too much attention to itself, employing no more brushing or penciling than necessary to convey a subject.

Kara Hammond, Fortress of the Dead, 2005, oil on linen, 39x39”

 

 

 

 

Painter News

 

 

Just a few things of note:

• It's painter Douglas Witmer's 34th birthday.
• Brent Hallard continues exploring an octagonal shape.
• Dennis Hollingsworth just opened a show at Tanya Rumpff in Haarlem, NL.
• Vince Romaniello shows a new painting, a sneak peek at the Gallery Siano show.

Grange, 54x64", mixed mediums on canvas, 2005

 

 

 

 

News Flash: Painting is old and decrepit and nobody likes the poor senile SOB anymore!

 

 

A little verbiage to show what painting is up against, critically and culturally, at least according to SF Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker. This post is a wobbly assemblage of incomplete thoughts about the position of painting, where and for whom.

Baker notes in the SF Chronicle (20050827) that within the context of a local show at Pro Arts in Oakland called New Visions: Introductions 2005, "Painting comes across as an eccentric preoccupation, where it does not serve some political purpose," and that the title of Lisa Ostapinski's "wonderfully crafted but very odd little oil and encaustic painting called Does Your Experience of Carbonated Beverages Resemble What Is Depicted Here(2005)" suggests "a mischievous attitude toward the whole fraught question of painting's position in the contemporary world."

What bugs me here is that if a painting doesn't appear to be useful, doesn't have an obvious message, then it's irrelevant.

What follow are some excerpts from a Baker review a couple of months back (20050618) regarding a recent exhibit of paintings by Michael Toenges and Peter Tollens at Pat Sweetow and new work by John Zurier at Paule Anglim:

• Arthur Danto and various younger critics have argued persuasively that they and a raft of contemporary artists since the 1960s have put to rest the issues of modernism. But abstract painting still nourishes itself on a central modernist project: a search for the art form's internal self- definition.

Who decides when modernism is dead- when all modernists stop practicing modernism? Or when critics tell us that they have ended it? And who says that abstract painting is strictly modernist and merely self-referential? Anyone who thinks that abstract painting is removed from life, from ordinary dailiness to the edge of politics, is plain ignorant or insensitive, if not both.

• Tollens' paintings imply that sheer persistence has become a core imperative of painting as an art at a time when power flows mostly through more kinetic and diverting media.

I guess painting exists, though doesn't survive, through sheer stubborness- horseshoes, corsets, paintings: the only folks who still make those are curmudgeons who haven't yet given up the ghost.

• A profession of faith seems to lie at the heart of Bay Area painter John Zurier's recent work at Paule Anglim. Certainly not religious faith, but something more in the line of an anti-heroic existentialism.

This suggests that painting is now a faith-based initiative, without data to validate its experience or meaningfulness for the viewer or practictioner. I wonder if this means that post-postmodernism came about (evolved?) through intelligent design.

• Zurier's work exhales a full acceptance of the futility of painting in the 21st century. He responds to this situation not with yawps of protest, lament or frustration, but with whispering assertions of the memory and potentiality instinct in the materials of his art, thanks to its long history. Even abstraction now has nearly a century behind it.

I asked Baker about this comment via email. I won't quote his email without permission, but he says he intended the word "futile" not to refer to painting as a futile practice, but the challenge for a medium to attract and maintain an audience in a culture that is less and less interested in engaging in active looking at and listening to tangible things.

• Zurier's work will take those willing to go there inside the focal distance from which paintings customarily appear resolved, into a zone known mostly to painters.

Does this mean that painting won't take you anywhere unless one is willing? How is this different now from anytime in the last two hundred years when a general level of literacy could be assumed (that is, when painting is not needed as a didactic narrative depiction such as, for example, 14th and 15th century Italian frescos commissioned by the church), and after an early modern era (early to mid-18th century) beginning, with, say, Courbet? Doesn't virtually all painting after that, and probably beginning even earlier, require an engaged and willing viewer? And hasn't attracting an audience to abstract painting always been more difficult? If there were utopian thoughts in early modermism that the audience for art, and art's uses, would grow from an increasingly educated, enlightened population, aren't these hopes now rightfully recognized as antiquated notions given, at least in the U.S., for example, this country's increasing (and hopefully temporary) conservatism? But there I go again, being liberal and hopeful.

• ...Zurier's pallid, tattered red-on-aqua field connotes a reluctance or incapacity to adopt Newman's foursquare, heroic mode of address to the viewer. Nothing compels that sort of conviction anymore besides the painter's own uncertainly shareable values. Zurier's paintings are banners of that uncertainty.

There's the nails in the coffin, by gosh: "uncertainly shareable values," and "banners of uncertainty."

• The Romantic temper burns on in Zurier's art, but faintly, almost starved of the oxygen of anticipated response.

Ah, so the painter's dilemma is, "Does anyone else care besides my fellow painters?"

I believe in Barnett Newman's statement:

In late spring (1970), Emile de Antonio interviews Newman for his film Painters Painting, an oral history of the New York art world. Newman recounts a story from early in his career: “Some twenty-two years ago in a gathering, I was asked what my painting really means in terms of society, in terms of the world. . . . And my answer then was that if my work were properly understood, it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism. Because to the extent that my painting was not an arrangement of objects, not an arrangement of spaces, not an arrangement of graphic elements, was [instead] an open painting . . . to that extent I thought, and I still believe, that my work in terms of its social impact does denote the possibility of an open society [http://www.barnettnewman.org/chronology.php].”