Category: Studio
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Fame
The Chico News and Review did a (brief) blurb on the annual Window Art Project. I mention it because my polyptych Nor against yourself was included in their mass of thumbnails.
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LUGGAGE vs. wooden frames
As I mentioned, there are two ways in which to display what I’m tentatively calling the Opiate of the Masses triptych. In the altered luggage version, there is sadly no phosphorescence whatsoever. That would be a con. It does, however, come with a handle. Schlepping art around gets old fast. The prospect of simply snapping…
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Origins cube
I finally finished the large Yoshimoto cube. Consider it homage to the link between the infinite and the infinitesimal (admittedly far less structured than “Powers of Ten” by Ray and Charles Eames). These reversible cubes perfectly suit my fascination with twinning and/or paradigms. The doppelganger this time is contrasting references to science and the first…
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luggage vs. WOODEN FRAMES
One of this semester’s experiments was to create two different types of frames for the same polyptych. One is an altered piece of secondhand luggage that opens up to expose a triptych. The other is closer to the hinged polyptychs I’ve been making for the past year. Today I’ll present the paintings in their wooden…
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Yoshimoto cubes, part 3
My previous art cubes used appropriation to present opposing two-dimensional views of womanhood in religious art history. This time that same self-transformation has a much larger scale. (Each of the black component pieces is an eight inch cube.) I thought I was finished creating art about the whole Creation vs. Evolution argument last fall, but…
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Chico window arts project
While the star of Chico’s Artoberfest is the Open Studio Tour, the month of artistic celebration also includes a push by downtown businesses to prominently display artwork. It’s a small nod to the town’s artistic proclivity. Here is a local newspaper’s report on the displays. I am not part of the studio tour, but some…
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Correspondence art, Round 2
I heard this on a recent walk. Our fall colors tend to be modest, but we see a lot of Canadian geese thanks to a local wildlife sanctuary and many rice fields. I had all sorts of complicated notions for how to incorporate my favorite symbol of fall into this round of cards. What about…
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Yoshimoto cubes, part 2
What visual and Biblical archetypes does art history (aka art by European or American men in the last 2,000 years) provide for women? Sadly, the most popular archetypes are the passive “good” girl or the deadly vamp. I now realize that Salome paintings interest me as the darker side of what I studied in all…
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Yoshimoto cubes part 1
The component pieces look like nothing more than croutons. When hinged together, each cluster of similarly sized wood cubes looks like this. I’m trying to decide which size is best. I thought the novelty of the smallest cubes would be preferable, but the two largest sizes are more satisfying for adult hands to hold.
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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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Warning: correspondence spoilers
The first round of correspondence art went out last week. [ If you didn’t get one, then I probably either: 1) had the wrong address for you, or 2) didn’t know you’d be interested. Feel free to update me on either of those points. ] Each card was both part of a series and unique. …
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Closure
[We all had to write self-assessments at the end of our studio topics course. Mine doubles as a spot check on the value of grad school for me thus far. I do not know whether my classmates had similar experiences. For more information on the group project described in this post, look at the project…
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Coming clean, part 2
[continued from Coming Clean, part 1 ] On August 2, I was allowed to use the window display space on the 8th floor of 333 S. Broad St. (aka the floor on which all the MFA painters have their studios). In the window hung an ambiguous love letter from which dangled impressions of each seal…
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Coming clean, part 1
A significant part of my studio work this summer took the form of a light-hearted prank. I wanted a puckish rather than stinging tone, which took a lot of planning since I rarely allow myself the liberty of pranking. Doing so this summer was part of a desire to set up more interactive and collaborative…
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Encaustic fad
I need a better term for this than hive mind. I know it’s part of a larger art fad, but how is it that four people in this program decided to toy with encaustics at the same time but independently of one another? I was only familiar with the painterly approach, so the more collage-…
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Crit/studio visit (with Rebecca)
How do you depict the intangible thing that is faith? What does it look like? Does it carry any of the flavor of past efforts to visually represent the same invisible thing? Rob Matthews has found some workable ways to approach those questions. I have similar questions, but need to keep working on my approach.…
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Overthink everything
This van Eyck project has already gotten deliciously out of hand. The basic concept of inserting myself in the place of one of the figures in the Arnolfini portrait is rather straightforward. I calculated a maximum of five minutes for hitting that pose and taking a picture. It was empty, soulless, and wrong in every…
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Studio visit/crit (Dan Reidy)
Sometimes critiques stop me in my tracks. It can be as simple a thing as needing a day to process all the new insights (or to recover from the shock, dismay, and general malaise). Today’s critiques had the opposite effect. I love crits that involve concrete ideas as well as generalized market/critical feedback. Some things…
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Studio visit/crit (Jess Perlitz)
Jess Perlitz was kind enough to give me some advice today. Some I can’t talk about just yet because…it’s still at the secretive idea-gestation phase. [Edit: It’s no longer secret. She advised me on early stags of the project described in Coming Clean, parts 1 and 2.) She brought a lot of common sense into…
Colleen Wampole 