Category: Research
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Living artistically with paradigm crises, part 2
[ continued from this post ] Grouping art history by theme and subjecting it to feminist interpretation can be a helpful exercise. As Bram Dijkstra pointed out in the introduction to Idols of Perversity, “while we may have forgotten the specific content of these images, they nevertheless had a fundamental influence on the development of…
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Living artistically with paradigm crises, part 1
Everybody makes mistakes. Some “mistakes” are not mistakes. Sometimes they are entirely logical extensions of political, religious, or academic doctrines that used to yield dependable results. When we become aware of our cognitive biases and preconceptions, how do we decide which to keep? Far more intriguing and useful is the concept of multiple truths that…
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The One and Only Original, 2nd ed.
Seven hundred pages of research and note-taking later, I was floored by déjà vu. As George Santayana’s epigram scolds, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (qtd. in The Culture of the Copy 271). The repetition was this: I wrote on the relative merits of originality and duplication in art almost…
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Book reviews
I was recently asked about the top three ideas or theories from this year’s massive pile of academic reading. #1 “…since no paradigm ever solves all the problems it defines and since no two paradigms leave all the same problems unsolved, paradigm debates always involve the question: Which problems is it more significant to have…
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More recursion
It’s time to present another eclectic batch of artworks that question assumptions and generally inspire imagination. Simon Stalenhag’s illustrations present a divergent version of the eighties. The Swedish artist provides the alternative reality’s historical summary in a review of his work in WIRED. In this case, each digital illustration combines elements of white, middle-class…
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Our hubris regarding realism
[ This paper was written in November 2012 to highlight the central irony of realistic painting. ] Naively, we artists often expect our familiarity with art to protect us from its tricks; like wise fools, we fall prey to its more disingenuous incarnations. As a prime example, consider the paradox of realistic painting. It pretends…
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The One and Only Original
[The following is a defense of original artwork I wrote during October 2012.] “We heard about this paint,” the customers explained, “which you put on a print to make it just like a real painting.” They might have purchased Liquitex acrylic gel or perhaps (if they balked at the price) some Mod Podge. Unfortunately, they…
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Kewpies, feminism, and humility
As Elaine Scarry mentions in On Beauty and Being Just, we more vividly remember our mistakes about beauty than intellectual topics (11). Somehow it is easier to recall a time when we dramatically revised our opinion about the beauty of a person, place, or experience. I have recently had just such a humbling experience…about paper…
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Collections and series
Ten years ago, art vocabulary, theory, and history seemed so fresh and new that I saw no alternative but to act like a sponge and learn anything and everything. I still gobble new ideas, but notice that I consistently hunger to relate these concepts to a preexisting project, a series, or an overall goal. This…
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Luggage popups
My frames are about to get even weirder. There are many ways in which I could improve future hinged wood frames…but there might be a better approach. In their pre-Renaissance heyday, hinged polyptychs were an efficient way to store multiple artworks in the same space, to switch between them at liturgically significant intervals, and to…
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Immersive art
How do you balance gimmickry and conceptual art? Months later, I am still chewing on some of the responses to my altarpieces during the spring critique. To recap, several of my peers loudly agreed about how the hinged frames detracted and distracted from the painted imagery. When consulted separately, several clarified their stance as not…
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Lessons from the Penn Museum
Here are a few thoughts from a recent visit to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The majority of what I noticed was curatorial. Most of the museum is arranged for a rather passive ambulatory viewer. The current Imagine Africa installation is a major exception to this traditional format. It is highly…
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Summer 2013
A summary of a summer of studio work (in reverse chronological order): I’m rather interested in the idea of combining rendered and linear elements in painting. This painting was barely dry in time to ship home at the end of the summer session. I’m not particularly enraptured by gore, but there’s something about seeing your…
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monca
The ArtFull House fundraiser at Jana and Dave Lawton’s Art House was a fantastic curatorial display of local artwork. It also happened to be a fundraiser for the Museum of Northern California Art (monca). They finally have a venue, a twenty-year lease, a collection of artworks, and six years to open for visitors. Oh, and…
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Irony as postmodern rhetoric [an essay from this spring]
L—-, who teaches literature courses at a college in —–, uses the following model to introduce the themes of modernism and postmodernism to her students. First, imagine two emoticons. The frowning emoticon on the left is the face of modernism, and the smiling one on the right is postmodernism. The caption for each emoticon informs…
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Crit/ studio visit (Margery Amdur)
First up, I’m adding something to my list of ambitions: hone my critiquing to the level of Margery Amdur‘s. 1) She showed a lot of stamina with doing crits at an equally energetic and committed level for an entire afternoon (and an extra hour and a half, from what I observed). 2) Then, when she…
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Obstructions project
There’s a doozy of a project they like to give us painters over in the Uarts low-residency MFA program. Students divide into groups to give each other challenging assignments. The goals are to practice seeing each others’ work insightfully enough to design assignments which challenge their working habits or preconceptions…just as much as it is…
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Images and text (learning from book covers and comic books)
Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Making Comics are of course essential reading for fine and sequential artists working with the relationship of text to image. I have spoken at length (with varying degrees of coherence) about the fascinating relationship of comics to fine art (narrative, pacing, spatial concerns, framing, etcetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum)…but don’t…
Colleen Wampole 