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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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…
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Colleen Wampole 