This Week in 2005

This week in 2005 Alison and I arrived in Florence, Italy. Above is the path we took almost every day during our stay – from our apartment on Via Ricorboli (right hand of the picture) to the Church of Santa Felicita. (On the left – click the image above to explore the area).

Why did we make the nearly 2 kilometer trek so many times, even if our final destination was in some other part of the city?

Because Pontormo’s epic Deposition resides in that church. Here I am gazing up at the piece:

I must have spent 6 or 8 hours in front of that painting. I have thought about it, written about it, and taught about it many times over the last 8 years. This painting is ingrained in my life.

I can’t wait to walk once again along the Arno, sidestep the Ponte Vecchio, slip into the cool silence of Santa Felicita, and see it again.

New Router Table Now In Effect

Back in November of last year I did some initial work on my new router table – you can click here to see what my early sketches were. I created this to replace my simple tondo jig system that I made back in 2010 (click here for info on that tool).

Today I finished work on the table – at least enough to make it functional. There are a few cosmetic details to work out, but for now it’s ready to roll. Here are a few images.

These first two images are fore and aft shots, giving a general overview of the beast. The active ingredient is a mid-range Porter Cable Plunging Router. The router has been attached to a Beseler 45MCRX Photo Enlarger body that I scavenged and hacked last year. The motor still works great, which means that my router can be moved horizontally over the table allowing me to make multiple plunges at different locations on the wood. The whole layout of the table is very close to a sketch I made last year.

Here you can see the underside of the router carriage (top half of image). The bit plunges through the oak carriage deck and into the wood that’s to be cut. The wood is sitting on a “lazy susan” deck that grips the panel and may be easily rotated past the router bit.

This is a shot of the lazy susan rotating deck. You can see the points that protrude through the deck (there are four – one point at each corner) that hold the wood in place as it’s being routed into a circular panel.

The first tondo I cut this afternoon was a resounding success. Here’s hoping for many more. It’s definitely an improvement on my old tondo jig. The big plus to this table is that I will be able to make circular frames for my tondo works. I wanted to have the movable routing deck precisely for this feature, and now we’ve got it. I’ll keep you updated.

Gouache Glow

Beneath Ahab’s Doubloon (Mandala)

Gouache on paper mounted on panel, 15 inches in diameter by 1 inch thick, 2013.

Propaganda and Crafting the Self Image of a Nation

The title of this post might seem a little heavy handed… and I guess it is. But after my little adventure today the idea that propaganda has always been a means to shape how people (who are the objects of propaganda’s political and social aims) see themselves stands out to me. It makes sense that propaganda would provide a positive view for people to buy into; it needs to use that angle in order to work at all. I guess I knew all this years ago in the first years of my undergraduate education, but seeing it up close in a major museum in China was interesting.

I began the day attempting to see two significant art museums in Guangzhou, one of which is close to our hotel and one that’s a 20 minute drive away. I was given advice by a local that I could walk to the first one, but my efforts proved futile. It was an interesting hour and 15 minutes getting myself more and more disoriented and more and more lost in a strange city.

Eventually I found myself in a large train station with thousands of Chinese people and got into a line at the taxi stand. Once in my cab I gave the driver a slip of paper that a well-meaning woman at the hotel had written out for me in Chinese. After one failed attempt to get to the closer of the two locations, I gave him another line about the more distant museum and we made it there after 35 or 40 minutes.

The Guangdong Museum of Art on Er-Sha Island is a part of a large museum campus system on a beautiful island in the Pearl River right in downtown Guangzhou. The collection is primarily traditional-based semi-contemporary work. Most of what I saw was painting, printmaking, and large figurative sculpture from the 30s through today. They have significant holdings on display from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Just one aspect that I focused on during my 3.5 hour tour of the museum’s three floors was the way women were depicted in the propaganda era works on display. As you’ve noticed, I’m posting a number of details here to illustrate my point.

I am by no means an expert in Chinese art during Mao’s time, but I am aware of a variety of aspects of it. Getting to see these works in their country of origin and within their own context was a great experience. There was, to a piece, excellent craftsmanship in the work itself. The woodblock prints and oil paintings in particular were fantastic examples of the genre and time. I am sad to say that they were not all presented well, however. The framing was inconsistent – sometimes downright baffling (dozens of prints were matted with foamcore) – and many of the walls were scuffed and marked. In some rooms the arrangement of works seemed somewhat scattershot. But none of that can make one mistake the energy and physical presence of the best of the works on display.

These works were designed to present a powerful, healthy, vigorous and virtuous people. Look at the faces of these women I’ve posted: In one a young mother runs out to work in the early morning before dawn, implement in hand, her baby strapped to her back. In another, two women - stern-faced and sharp-eyed, look determined to defend their way of life… machine guns rest against their bodies. In perhaps the most recent example, three young women rest in dappled sunlight beneath the massive tires of some piece of heavy machinery; their labors afford them peaceful - and aesthetic - rest.

These propagandistic images succeed on a number of levels – they are expertly crafted illustrations, and so it makes sense that they utilize the visual language of illustration so well. They are illustrations of the regime’s aims and means. They functioned as didactic projections; they were the stained-glass window training centers of a new era. Yet they did more, as all propaganda does.

Artworks such as these offered viewers both a prescribed view they were conditioned to believe and a perspective that plays into what every human being wants for themselves. We want signifigance. We want inclusion. We want meaning. We want to be noble. In spite of the pernicious and sometimes evil ends to which propaganda of all kinds has been used I think we can agree that part of the reason that it works is that it gives an image of self-virtue that the human animal craves. In light of these things, can we blame any people of any time for  buying in? I see the faces of these women and I have to wonder what their lives were – or are, if some of them are still living - really like. I can, at the very least, absolutely affirm that they were valuable, they were meaningful simply as human beings. The lives they lived, their loves, their sorrows, were all knit together into a weaving of the human consciousness in time and space. They were beautiful and strange, and they tried to believe in something beyond themselves that was, in fact, unified with all that they were. We all seek this, and we all want to know that it’s real.

The horror of propaganda is that it uses our own innate desire to be embedded in a broader truth against us.

New Homes

2012 was a good year for selling my work. Many pieces that we’ve lived with for many years are now gone. They live new lives with others. They will, in tandem with these fresh viewers, take on different resonances, build more meanings. Three recent sales in particular are significant to me. What’s interesting to me as an artist is that these works don’t necessarily represent the height of my prowess as a painter or draftsperson (Though I do count Four Pale Bricks as among the most significant paintings I’ve ever made). Nor are these works the end of a particular line of thought or closed, singular achievement. Each was, in some sense, a reaction to different pressures and concerns. They were attempts to understand influences, necessities, desires. They were stepping stones.

Untitled Landscape (#1), Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 46 inches, 2000. Private collection, MO. Click to view larger.

They are all about different times in my life. The colorful Untitled Landscape (#1) above was made when I was a junior at SAIC. It wasn’t meant to be my own personal expression. I was trying to understand Diebenkorn and integrate his approach to composition and structure. In spite of the derivative quality (something that’s unavoidable for any artist and something that, when embraced, can spark true development) the work displays my growing sense of color and use of mark and mass.

As I packed it up for delivery to its new owners, I was so pleased with the craftsmanship: the bars are still square; the canvas stretched and primed beautifully; the corners wrapped flat and tight. It was that follow-through with the love for the materials at all levels that, I think, made me develop as an artist. I wasn’t just winging it. I was being thoughtfully engaged all the way through. I’m not saying this just to toot my own horn… I’m just proud of the fact that, in spite of myself, I got something about materials, process, and focus that still rings true and gives the work quality.

Four Pale Bricks, Oil on canvas on panel, 14 by 22 inches, 2006. Private collection, MO. Click to view larger.

The second piece, above, really shows (to me) how my grasp of composition and visual dynamics was affected by combining my early love for Diebenkorn with my research, via Frank Stella’s Working Space, into the formal concerns of the Renaissance. Four Pale Bricks was painted very soon after my return from Italy, a trip that greatly supplemented what I thought I’d learned from Working Space. My encounters there with alchemical pictorial formulas, various numerological/metaphysical theories a la sacred geometry, and the intense formal constructions of everyone from Giotto to Pontormo were extremely influential. In many ways this work was the beginning of my current explorations into two-dimensional shape and angle dynamics as they manifest in illusions of space, air, and light.

Still Life With Tinfoil, Coal, and Plywood, Graphite on paper, 18 by 24 inches, 2007. Private collection, MO. Click to view larger.

This last work – something I shipped out to its new owner just this morning – is all about my having become a teacher. One of the things I believe in most strongly as an educator is that I must model the skills, ideas, and values that I teach. I will never make any impression at all if I merely vomit out vague data; I’ve got to believe it and practice it. This work came about as a challenge from my students, who did not believe the processes I was teaching them would yield positive results. As I drew this work, I took photos and from them produced a short video to demonstrate how it all worked. I have used this example every semester since. The piece is very sentimental to me because of how it embodies my own practice of teaching. I was willing to live out the things I talked about, and that made my students trust me.

Having these three works – and all of the others recently sold – go into the hands of people who appreciate them is wonderful for me. It’s also a reminder that gratification (and appreciation) is often very much delayed. I do work today that may only become appreciated decades from now. That is something that is hard for all artists – we are a notoriously insecure and touchy lot, aren’t we? – but having these works go out into the world is special.

It’s all the more special for me because every dollar from every sale I’ve made over the last year has gone directly into bringing Madeleine Cai Qun home. Now when I think of these artworks, I won’t only consider what they were for me or how they have gone to new homes, but I’ll be able to see in them how they gave my daughter a new home.

That’s a value that is transcendent. I’m thankful that my work as an artist can be a part of that even greater work of manifesting love and peace into the world.

There’s still a few more weeks before we head to China. If you’d like to help out in the final stretch by bringing one of my works into your home, check out my etsy site here.

 

 

Dream of Light

I attended the opening of Antonio Lopez Garcia‘s retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts – Boston back in April of 2008. It was a wonderful trip. I was thinking about it today. How momentous it felt to be there. Seeing so many friends from all over the US who were there for it – even Rackstraw Downes was there that day! Tim Lowly was there. Tim Kennedy and Eve Mansdorf were there. David Gracie was there. Sangram Majundar was there. A few low-quality photo pictures are below.

The best part for me was at an early point in the day before the crowds arrived. I found myself standing next to the master, looking together at one of his paintings. It was nice to see him looking closely, finding a contemplative moment in a masterwork he’d painted many years before. There was a leveling there, an equanimity – the master must look, just as the audience must. We both see and take in what is before us. In that space and time of perception we try to understand. In those wavelengths of light we dream of a unity and order and meaning beyond ourselves. We dream of light.

Matt Ballou: RANGE – Reception at William Woods University

My exhibition – Matt Ballou: RANGE – is still up at William Woods University until December 16, 2012. I hope you can go see it if you haven’t yet. Below are some photos of the space, both after the installation and during the reception. I want to thank everyone who came out – friends, students (graduate and undergrad, current and former), and colleagues – and especially Jennifer Sain for her help in making the exhibition happen. Special thanks to Jane Mudd for encouraging William Woods to host this show.

Installation, back on November 12, 2012.

Three panoramas of the installed work.

Two of my all-time favorite works… Locus #77 and #78

Beautiful angles and shapes during the reception…

At the reception I gave a brief impromptu talk that led into some interesting questions from the audience and my own musing on the work.

Me during my talk – Photo by Kevin Larson.

Click here to download the talk and Q+A session (42 MB MP3 format, 50 minutes long).

Some notes about the talk:

• Click here to see a picture of a Diebenkorn Ocean Park painting next to Nerdrum’s defecating woman painting.
• Learn more about Miyoko Ito here. See more of Miyoko Ito’s work here – there’s a current show up in Berlin.
• I mispronounced Coyolxauhqui in the talk. Here’s more information about her.
• Basic info about the Dodecahedron, here.
• Information about Kepler and polyhedra, here.
• Durer’s Melancholia, an example of how artists have used geometric-forms-as-connected-to-metaphysical-ideas that I speak of in the talk.
• Information on the mandorla here and here. The mandorla is based on the vesica piscis.
• Information on my Lamentations 3 series here.

Photo of me at the talk – Photo by Eric Norby.

My First Classroom

Click to see a larger view.

Here it is.

My first REAL classroom. I’d done a bit here and there. I’d done some substitution work. I’d done some minor short term stuff. But this was my first place of my own. Room 175 in the The Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University Bloomington. I taught some amazing students there. I cut my teeth, tested my strength, felt out the pace and scope and sequence of teaching. It was good to go back to that room recently – more than 8 years after – and spend time in that space. Snap a picture. Sense the light. Remember the slide of charcoal, the scratch of graphite, and the laughter of willing students.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember why this path I’ve taken is important. In the silent witness of this room there is proof of what I – what so many of us – have tried to express about awareness and presence.

I’m still seeking to be worthy of that task.

Barry Gealt: Embracing Nature at the IU Art Museum

Yesterday my wife, daughter, and I made an epic 17 hour round trip to Bloomington, Indiana. We left our home at 9am and returned a little after 2am the next morning.

It was a long, rainy drive, but it was worth it. We went to the opening reception for Emeritus Professor Barry Gealt’s retrospective exhibition Embracing Nature at the Indiana University Art Museum.

Barry was my main professor while I earned my MFA at IU and has continued to be a mentor and encouragement. It was the least I could do to be present for this opening and evening of celebrating Barry’s life and work as both a painter and an educator. Below are a few fragments from the night.

The text just inside the doorway to the Special Exhibitions Wing of the IU Art Museum.

Detail of Greenwich Beach, Prince Edward Island, 2009. The top layer of a living document.

Detail of Condon’s View of Corea, Maine, 2011. Brushmarks are alchemical – both entirely surface and entirely illusion; both/and.

Prince Edward Island, East Point (2009), commands a wall in the gallery. The works spill and splash; their air inundates viewers.

A detail of the majestic edge of Indiana Vista, 2001. Paint as light, matter, air, and presence.

A detail view of Owen County Vista from 1994 – compared to Barry’s more recent work this is pretty smooth. Even so, it’s tremendously worked and amazingly saturated.

Beautiful density in a detail of The Cave, 1994. This painting is incredible in its color and level of surface development. Evocative.

Robert Shakespeare’s Light Totem saturated the area outside Barry’s show with energy – my 2 year old loved it.

There’s Barry waving to me from across the Atrium during the post-reception dinner. A beautiful space and a beautiful evening.

Here I am (sporting my Indianapolis Colts Marvin Harrison #88 jersey) holding the book that was published in tandem with the exhibition. It is AWESOME. You can pre-order your own copy by clicking here. Do it! The essays are wonderful, the reproductions and details fantastic. I was able to have a significant correspondence with the author, Rachael Berenson Perry, in 2011 which resulted in many of my thoughts and reflections on my time with Barry being used in the book. I was extremely honored to be included in this text; it’s really more than I could have imagined. To get to be a part of this celebration of Barry’s life and work is humbling and truly a highpoint of my life as an artist.

If you can get to the show, DO IT. It’s worth it.

Barry Gealt: Embracing Nature will be on at the IU Art Museum from October 6 until December 23, 2012

New Diebenkorn book on the way!

Click the image to see the Yale University Press page for this new book on Richard Diebenkorn!