Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Art, literacy and images and politics, religion and science, oh my!

Seeing is believing!

 “Eros the Bittersweet” by Anne Carson, “Does Writing Erase Art”, Chapter 7, in Ellen Dissanayake’s “Homo Aestheticus", “The Spell of the Sensuous” by David Abram and an article by Marshall McLuhan and R.K. Logan called  “Alphabet,Mother of Invention” from 1977, all discuss literacy and make points of great interest to anyone working in the mode of visual images. 

The main point they all make is that literacy changes how we think and how we perceive—for better and for worse. Now, before you go on a rampage, know that none of these authors is suggesting we go back to pre-literate society (and they are all writers, after all!), but they are pointing out that literacy has a cost.  It may sound elitist, or even racist, as though saying pre-literate culture is somehow primitive, or predisposes one to supernatural thinking.  On the contrary!  This is not about making a judgment.  Literacy, as does any concentrated learning will, re-wire the brain.  And there are consequences to that both for better and for worse.
Literacy changes images from embodiments to representations.

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An ameliorative opinion is proffered here:
“In Louder than Words, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen draws together a decade’s worth of research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to offer a new theory of how our minds make meaning. When we hear words and sentences, Bergen contends, we engage the parts of our brain that we use for perception and action, repurposing these evolutionarily older networks to create simulations in our minds. These embodied simulations, as they're called, are what makes it possible for us to become better baseball players by merely visualizing a well-executed swing; what allows us to remember which cupboard the diapers are in without looking, and what makes it so hard to talk on a cell phone while we’re driving on the highway. Meaning is more than just knowing definitions of words, as others have previously argued. In understanding language, our brains engage in a creative process of constructing rich mental worlds in which we see, hear, feel, and act.”

Regardless, it is incredibly foolish, as a purveyor of visual images, to assume that this remedies the situation.  To me, it just means, the news isn’t all bad. And even though I am more than willing to pay the cost (I love being literate!) I find all of this to be of crucial importance as it might have an influence on how I make images. 

Other points in four sources mention at the top:
·      Alphabets create separation—specifically, they create separation between our heads and our senses (thereby further enabling the Cartesian mind/body split). 
·      Writing allows for knowledge to be encoded outside our bodies and our experiences, into abstract marks on a page, which fundamentally changes how we understand reality and our knowledge thereof. 
·      Literacy changes how we understand abstract symbolic representations.  This change is evident when comparing oral cultures to literate ones.  In short, once something is written down, it has a more fixed meaning based on the unit of “The Word”.  Categories of abstractions are enabled like “the truth” or “goodness”, or, as I will point out “Art”.  These things now exist outside ourselves as cardinal fixed points of reference but have no specific referent.
The sorting out and pigeonholing starts before words are even formed. Alphabets separate each phoneme and designates it a sign. Reading and writing are processes of exclusion. Something must happen in the brain like this when reading: “chair” as the brain decides the word is “not a bed”, “not a table” and so forth. One of the books above (I forget which) talks about how reading is best done in a quiet area—without too much sensory stimulus beyond the text, while spoken words involve experiencing the breath (and sometime saliva) of the speaker.  Breath=inspiration, metaphorically speaking, a speaker is very much alive.  Written words, not so much.
In order to read, we  (westerners) are taught to interpret marks seen on a surface as corresponding to sounds.  This involves using our eyes, obviously and therefore the part of our brains given over to visual processing.  It has been pointed out again and again that although we are “hard wired” for spoken language, literacy is not an innate human inevitability.  Alphabets had to be invented. Abstract marks on a page…is that not drawing? But of course it is.  I wonder, does drawing lead to phonetic alphabets?  It certainly leads to pictograms, hieroglyphics and the like. 

  This accounts for the shift from “seeing is believing” to “seeing is interpreting”, and therefore more opportunity to interpret incorrectly.  We begin to shift from relying on dictionaries, not our senses.  I am not sure if I read this in one of these books or if this is my idea, but surely this repurposes our image-interpreting abilities.


In oral culture, things don’t always have a one to one correspondence to single words, but to phrases, which are sensory experiences with many nuances. We don’t speak by pausing to mark the end of each word, what we hear is an issuance of integrated sounds.  To wit: when you hear the Beatles' song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”  you are free to hear “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” or “the girl with colitis goes by”.  The context determines the meaning, (not the symbol with its dictionary definition).
A girl with colitis goes by
In literate cultures one can have single abstract words, like “truth”, which are connected to concepts and are ratified by dictionaries which makes them less mutable.  In oral cultures, one can have examples and embodiments of “a truth”, demonstrations of “ a good thing” etc, but an overarching, separate, non-referential abstract category is not so easy to comprehend without being able to single out the word and hold it above other things as an entity unto itself.  Because it is not a singular identifiable entity as anyone trying to define “truth” or “goodness” can tell you.  It’s not a tree!  And if it were, you might have to explain why each tree is different from the next.

As anyone who has written an artist statement, mission statement or any kind of manifesto or declaration can tell you, its very uncomfortable deciding what words to use when writing something down.  Its such a commitment! Writing has the potential to survive, possibly forever, quite apart from any human body, in a way spoken language cannot.  Writing creates laws, contracts and other codifications with dire consequences in a way speaking does not.  What good is law if you can’t write it down?  Without writing you just have “he said/she said” chaos and laws that change based on the power and will of the biggest bully in the room.

In literate cultures an image is understood as a symbol, not analogous to the “real” thing but a representation, inherently an unreality.  Literacy precipitates a much stronger “fourth wall” as it were.  Literacy makes false idols possible. 
To oral cultures, images are “presentations” not “re-presentations”; they are embodiments and instances, a real thing, an exemplar, a truth unto itself.
In oral culture, seeing is believing and in literate culture, we are taught, “don’t believe everything you read”.  Needless to say, seeing becomes suspect!  How could it not when we are seeing sounds! Don’t believe your eyes!  A whole cascade of events occurs which make images more superficial and suspicious.
One could go so far as to claim that images are only sacred when they are embodiments.  They are profane when they are representations. There was a time when it was believed that holy icons were embodiments, not illustrations.  The icons were deployed as actual shields during invasion in the belief that whatever saint depicted would protect them.  It’s possible that it even worked if the invaders were reluctant to spear a holy image. 
Seeing is believing!
 And we all get to have these experiences first hand, for as children we are pre-literate for a while and we all create images that are nothing short of magic, with the power to evoke that which we wish to call into reality.  The idea of an image as a re-presentation comes when we learn to read; I’m guessing that’s when we become interested in “realism” and documentation.  But as most artists believe, images without spirit are bereft, boring and disappointing.  This is why so much art suffers.

Art in oral culture is tied very closely to ritual and religion, and possibly politics and has no separate category to identify it as anything other than “the stuff you need for rituals and ceremonies”.  In a literate culture, “Art” is a word, like “truth”, without a solid referent. “Art” became a category until the Renaissance, and its no coincidence that this is the time “Fine Art” became a Liberal Art and became “teachable”, in theory.

As an image-maker, I would think, it is important for an artist to be keenly aware of all this.  One might attempt to reclaim their visual cortex for a more pure vision, or at least encourage it to multitask.  At the very least, artists should be aware that they can’t see like they used to before first grade (or whenever reading and writing is taught nowadays).  In deploying narrative or even “subject matter”, one should have a sense of how this will be “read” rather than seen. 

As for artists using text in their work, it is not enough to use a lovely, poetic turn of a phrase or a profound passage of prose in conjunction with appropriate accompanying visuals.  There’s something about text art that reminds me of the child who was using a machine gun for target practice.  The text outguns the image.  They can look pretty together, they convey a veneer of profundity, but that’s about the extent of it and the words largely render the image subordinate, if not irrelevant.  

A second thing is the McLuhan article has the following passage: “The very word idea is indicative of the revolution in thinking that took place with literacy.  This word, which is not to be found in Homeric Greek, derived from the word eidos indicating ‘visual image.’”
Well now, how very fascinating!  Because I can tell you, I find the word “idea” as it is used in relation to art to be very, very tricky indeed, especially in my own practice.  The word “idea” is tossed around carelessly, with the presumption we all know what we are talking about.  But do we? How many people think in images?  I think its almost zero.  Even amongst visual artists, wherein on would hope to find a larger instance, I think its close to none.  I don’t know of any tests, but I would love to hear about them if you know.

At this point in our art culture ideas are fetishized to the point of nauseating, authoritarian doctrine.  Ideas are Important! Very, very Important, of great Importance, in fact! Being “thought provoking” is the entire enterprise of art! 
No young artist is granted a diploma until they memorize the following bit of dogma and are able to repeat it ad nauseum, ad infinitum in the manner of a spy being interrogated who repeats only his name and rank with glazed eyes and the fixed puils of a zombie: “I choose my materials to fit the idea.  Not vice-versa.”
Baloney.

I have ideas for artworks all the time.  They are all words—shopping lists for the most part.  And even when I am able to sketch something that has to do  with those “ideas”, the correspondence between the sketch and the thought is flimsy and insubstantial.  If I were to “make my ideas” I would be making garbage for the most part. It becomes further corrupt when I am in the phase of actual making.  I don’t conceive in glass and turning a sketch into glass is a matter of reinventing everything from the ground up.  By the time I am finished, whatever passed for the original “idea” has dramatically changed.  I am willing to say that there is no such thing as “ideas” in visual art.  There is only materials, process and design. Ideas are what happen at the opening.

To be as reductive as possible, there’s only one subject in art: “The Truth” (this is why we crave authenticity and sincerity, for what is the truth without it?).  That can be expressed as three arty topics: political truth, scientific truth or spiritual truth.

But, what is “truth”?  Is truth something to do with “goodness”?  Or is it something to do with “reality”?  Is it something observable or something deeper and invisible?
Is the essence of a thing what is “true” or is its appearance?  Is reality something perceived by our senses or does our thinking create it? Second of all we understand “truth” to be “good”.  But is truth good as in “accurate” or good as in “virtuous (moral, educational, etc)”?  How can truth be these mutually exclusive things at once?

Observable reality, it ain't pretty.

And this is why beauty is always at the crux of art, whether in disrepute or dogma. Because beauty suffers from the same problem.  Is beauty a synonym for the truth as Keats once said?  Or is it a method of concealing reality?  Is beauty perceived or constructed?  If beauty is the truth, then it must be good!  But is it good as in “sensual pleasure”?  Or is it good as in “good for you”?
If  “truth” is “observable reality” then art is either stuck being a falsehood, an artifice, removed from reality, at best mimicking it as a kind of lie.  Or it can do what it seems to be doing now and ally itself with the “truth” that is our current version of “reality”, science.  Hence we have a lot of science-y looking art these days. 

My point is that subjects for art tend to exist at the intersection of “beauty” and “truth”, and beauty and truth niggle around like agitated atoms at the intersection of body and soul.  Are we talking physical truth and reality here or mental?  They never seem to be able to take a fixed position (at least not for long). However, when they approach balance between the two, perhaps that’s the definition of great art right there.

There was a time when truth was clearer and it was defined by religion and for the most part, cultures were segregated enough to more or less agree locally. The truth was not even slightly in the eye of the beholder.  It was the exclusive property of God.  Art, in this case allies itself with religion.

Now, things are a lot more diverse.  God apparently died during the Modernist period and we are busy eradicating nature for financial greed.  Perhaps science will save us?  Empirical thinking seems true enough.  It ensures repeatable, peer reviewed results.  It is based on observation!  So now we see art making an alliance with science.  Hey, that rhymes!  It must be true…

As for politics, in this case, we see artists who strive to convey a moral truth.  One that is corrective and good for us.  One that makes up for what we lack, perhaps.
Political art is usually anti-aesthetic, probably because it wishes to impress upon us the harms of social wrongs.  When political art stands opposed to a cause it is usually ugly, as its “truth” is an ugly one.  When it is for a cause, it is seductive and attractive, as it is necessary to persuade nonbelievers in their “truth” (which they find lovely, presumably).

The problem with all these as subject for art is how to remain an embodiment and avoid being an illustration.  How to be an instance, a primary experience of this truth, and not propaganda, or a reflection of it, or merely a symbol of it.

To create things that exist at the very nexus of spirit and matter, to traverse, redress, and redeem the mind/body gap is at the very essence of what it means to be an artist. 
To favor ideas, to fetishize them, is to miss the point entirely.



Monday, August 25, 2014

"Dark Matter” Exhibition Opening!!!!

Hooray! I have a one-person exhibition opening at Claire Oliver Gallery September 4th. This exhibition will be the debut of my cast glass sculptures! In addition, there will be new stained glass pieces on view as well.
The opening reception will be September 4, 6-8 pm. Please join me if you are in the area! (see below for details)

A catalog is available here. (It is pricey, but you should know, I don't set the prices, nor do I get a profit.  But its real purdy!!)

Preview:
Detail from "The Birth of Eve"

"New Ghost"
"Lean Into"

"A Play About Snakes"

"Minotaur"

"Sleeping Girl"
“Dark Matter”
September 4th, 2014 - October 25th, 2014
513 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
Tel: 212.929.5949 / Info@ClaireOliver.com
www.claireoliver.com

Monday, June 16, 2014

Fleeing Foxes

Here is a recently finished piece called "Fleeing Foxes"
Stained glass (flash glass, sandblasted, engraved, hand-filed, vitreous paint, copper foil).  The size is 35"x 32". 



"Fleeing Foxes"


Wow--the flaming aqueduct really looks like crap in this image.  I am not sure why as its fine on my computer screen in preview, photoshop et al.  Well, so be it. Please know that there is much detail and subtle nuance in that section of the piece!

detail

detail

The bottom section was engraved into blue lambert's flash glass

These are two of the photoshop sketches I used....trying to decide if it should have a human figure or not.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Five Small studies

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I did them for a few reasons: for the sheer fun of it (and they were fun), and some are tests for work I want to make bigger.  Also, I neglected to order the glass I needed to finish the large window I am making and the final sculptures were not done being cast, so I had an open couple of weeks.  That will not do!!!

So, when I say “for the sheer fun of it”, I mean that part of what I wanted to do was explore motifs and techniques in a “safe” way—i.e. low stakes because they are small and not all that time consuming or expensive.

Here’s the dirty low on each one:


“Threshold” 16.5” x 7”
I keep returning to this figure that is banging on a door.  Like a cat, I imagine she wants to be let in if she’s locked out or she wants out if she is locked in.  I made this particular figure in b+w last year, but decided to finish her as part of this series.  The other one is not done yet as she will have a color test which is taking a bit longer.
Here is a piece from 1999 with the same motif.  It is in the V+A in London. 

Birdbath”, 35” x 18”
Why am I so obsessed with this theme?  I dunno.  Paging Dr. Jung!
NOT DONE YET!  9" x 5"

“Murder of Crows”  10" 10"
Three stages of painting
 I doodled the head and figure separately, as I often do.  I wanted to make at least one roundel as I consider myself to be rather massively influenced by this tradition.  Here are some awesome examples from Ye Olde Country (England).


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“Ennui”  12" x 14"
Three stages of "Ennui" in progress
 
(Alternative title, “Ageing Cheesecake”):  Yeah, I’m 53 so whadaboudit????

“Luster”  12" x 13"

three stages of painting Luster in progress
A kinky suntan or maybe not. Maybe its you who are the pervert? The chain is not attached to anything.  I like you to interpret these things, not me.


 “Three Tiered Cosmos”  12" x 15"
 three stages of painting “Three Tiered Cosmos”
This I can say the most about.  In the post below I am going on about “The Mind in the Cave” and that’s where I got the idea of what to do with this sketch.  I was originally imagining her on a “desert island”—one of those tiny comic strip trope islands, big enough for only one person.  Reading about the universality of the three tiered cosmos got me thinking as I wanted to depict her island surrounded by fish which I was sort of loosely associating with the subconscious (or, in macrocosmic terms, the underworld).  By using the concentric ovals, I put the sky surrounding the whole thing.  I just needed to make her desert island into some sort of yin/yang because design-wise, I was making the underworld dark and the heaven light and the middle had to be both but the dark had to be touching light and the light had to be touching dark for it to work metaphorically and visually.  Does this make any sense?  See examples!!!


Like this!
Or this!!!  (Robert Fludd)
Or this!!  (Outside shutters of Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights"


"Waiting Room" NOT DONE YET

Friday, May 2, 2014

The Mind in the Cave


Currently I am reading The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams.
What a fascinating book!!  As much as it is about the origins of art, it is also about the origins of human consciousness.  Some of the themes of the book I find most interesting are his connecting normal, universal neurological activity to our conceptions of reality. For example, many, many cultures conceive of a three-tiered cosmos; a “normal” level at which “normal” life and perception take place, a lower level and an upper level (in our culture that might be hell and heaven).  The author believes this conception arises from neurological activity that affects our awareness in altered states, like dreaming and hallucinating.  They tend to take on either the qualities of pressure and sinking feelings or soaring and flying sensations.  Hence, they are later explained as an underworld and an overworld.
 


Another theory he develops is that mark making also follows universal tendencies, those being grids, stars, zigzags etc.  These “images” are what we see when we close our eyes and are called “phosphenes.”  (More on phosphenes here). 
As he states on P. 127, “People in this condition are seeing the structure of their own brains”. So, then when we make these marks, when we idly scratch away at notepads, we are drawing our own brain.  Whoa! Pretty amazing.
“Phosphenes”  28” x 24”, 2008  (yes, this is exactly what the inside of my brain looks like.  That's the whole point, is it not?)
But I am most interested in his theories on the origins of image making (and, by extension, art).  What’s interesting?  Well, one thing he says is that it could not have arisen from body art. Wow, jewelers, fashion designers, tattooists, scarification aficionados et al: you have just been demoted!  Could this be the origin of Craft vs Art?  There's a thought.

Lewis-Williams believes that 2-D representations, which he calls “parietal”  (stuff on walls) art are a wholly different paradigm. He says that order to “invent pictures”  (my quotes, not his) one needs a socially agreed upon context, something that relies on language.  He also notes that it’s a real chicken and egg dilemma: what arose first?  Our ability to perceive images as meaningful or our ability to make them?  He dispatches with some popular theories too: that drawing arose from cavemen with charcoal embers scratching in the ground out of boredom and happening to notice they look like something.  Or that the shapes of rocks looked like animals so they just kind of helped them along with pigment.  No, these images rely on there being an existing “database” for 2-D images having meaning.

OK, I am no anthropologist and I may wish I was a neurologist, but, sadly, I am not one!  How frustrating as I wish I had enough knowledge to really discuss this. I still find value in the theories he is disparaging.  What about all those facial recognition modules in the brain?  What about how we see shapes in clouds?  That is surely nature and not nurture  (although I gather his point is that without the social context of language, those images we see would remain “autistic” and locked away in our individual experience and even un-remembered as we would not have the language to codify them and to a great extent would be just more useless detritus of being alive.) 
He points out that there is no evidence of stages of inventing drawing/image making.  No evidence of an “artist” trying out different subjects or styles.  And this really gets me!  Why, oh why, is there so very little images of humans and of human faces?  What is with all the bison and aurochs?? I get it, bison and aurochs were very important to them, but surely so were their own faces and bodies. I am really astounded by the fact that we did not choose to draw ourselves!!!

One thing the author doesn’t discuss (but I am not finished yet, actually, so maybe he does in the last 80 pages) is how images making/drawing develops in children.  Children make scribbles for a while, which seem to gradually coalesce into something more meaningful.  Then they go on a trajectory of attempting “realism” and I think (but can’t say for sure since I am also not a child development expert) that they compulsively draw human forms.  Is that nurture?  Could be.  But I think the draw (pun intended) towards figuration is very deeply encoded into us…so why didn’t the cavemen do it??
Representation of a human puking by me at age 3 or 4.
Someone go do a Ph.D. thesis on this, please!

Thursday, April 24, 2014

What have you done for them lately?

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What have you done for them lately?
"We need to get the art community to recognize stained glass as art!"
"We need to get the art community to recognize glass as an art form"
"We need to get the glass community to recognize stained glass as an art form!"
I have been to enough GAS conferences, and Facebook forums to see those folks saying "we just have to get the fine arts to recognize GLASS” so I guess stained glass is even further down the food chain.

OH PUH-LEEEZ!

There is so much wrong with these statements I hardly know where to begin.

Let's start with manners, shall we?  When asking a monumental favor of someone, it is the barest modicum of respect to have some basic knowledge of whom you are asking and if it might be possible for them to actually grant this favor.  First of all, there is no monolithic art world that was in a position to grant seals of approval. Secondly, could it be the glass artists and stained glass artists are blissfully unawares of the credibility issues with the Art World?  Its not like its is brimming with respectability.  Itwould appear, judging from the press the fine arts generates, that they need to spend all their resources rationalizing what 99.9% of the world finds utterly contemptible (even if they are too pompous to recognize this themselves).  Thirdly, it would be lovely, not to mention appropriate, to know that the artistic concerns of glass artists and stained glass artists are at least remotely in concert with those of "The Art World" whom they are desperately courting.  How many fine artists are role models for stained glass artists?  How many really and truly know what philosophic, technologic and aesthetic issues are "trending" these days?  Are they YOURS?  Probably not.  I rest my case.

But, you say, we don't really care about them—their approval is still what we seek, in order to sustain our dying art form!  Well, if its not some philosophic, aesthetic simpatico you are after, then it must be the money and glory you are after.  HAHAHAHAHAHA!  Don't get me started.  Glass artists are much better off, especially if they are still object makers.  They are even better off if their work is aesthetically pleasing.  Stained glass artists are even better off as they still have the church as a patron as well as some private clients.  Most artists don't make money from art at all.  Those who exhibit typically are funding their careers with second and third jobs.  They fundraise and grant write and their art is more or less supported by non-profits.
The exceptions are the super famous.  You know they are just sitting around waiting to endorse your stained glass. Because, you know, you deserve it! Uh huh, sure.

And here's a special message to the stained glass people who are concerned because they can't even get the respect of GAS and the studio class community.  Here's the history: this all began in the 1960's with Harvey Littleton who was a ceramist.  He put a hot shop in an art school. What does this have in common with the history of stained glass?  Um…exactly zero. Stained glass follows an entirely different trajectory—one that is much older and much more interesting, actually (IMHO). Later this happened: glass as a studio art form was more or less entirely popularized by Dale Chihuly. Stained glass was given a real shot in the arm in the early 20th C by Tiffany. Two artists who, I am betting, never once had whiney temper tantrums wondering why they weren’t being adored by the art world.  If you want recognition…do something to merit it.  The sense of entitlement astounds me.  What are we offering them in return??

Anyone?  Buehler?

Asking to be rescued is nauseating.  What a victim mentality. What a loser mentality!
 I don't think either glass or stained glass needs outside help.  We need less crappy work, that's for sure.  I will say this, though: at least those in the stained glass circles don't lie about why they use stained glass. They do so out of knowledge and/or love of the material. Glass artists who say they only use it because it "just so happens to be the best material for this particular sculpture" (and yet, they keep using it, now, don't they?) are dishonest and also undermining the notion that dedication to a singular material can be a path to enlightenment (as I have stated previously).

As someone who has straddled all three worlds for about 30 years, I all say this.  If it has to die, let it die, already.  Its not the worst thing that could happen (unless someone went around, Cromwell-style and destroyed all the existing work.  Or they started actually outlawing stained glass and arresting the straggling practitioners.  That would suck.) There's no way we can foist it off as "the next thing" since, obviously it was the next thing circa c1200.  And that's pretty cool, actually.  Working in a dying medium is a very interesting thing to do.  It shows intense dedication, it shows a willingness to buck trends and it shows a type of intellectual nerdiness/ nerviness I find nothing short of honorable, laudable and really, REALLY cool.
So keep going stained glass people, stained glass is dead, long live stained glass!





Thursday, April 17, 2014

Doodles and drawings

Most of this stuff is very recent.  Click to embiggen.
 All of these are done in meetings, lectures and other times when I cannot pay attention if my hands are not moving.

 
 Judith and the head of Holofernes.  A favorite theme.  I am not sure why...
 This one is older--but unusual and I thought, interesting.
 This is my "real" sketchbook (as opposed to a note pad or some handout).  When I can I like rougher paper than Moleskine and also the lines are helpful in keeping me from trying to make a "drawing".  (When I try to make a "real drawing" I immediately default to some weird perfectionist state wherein creativity is utterly inhibited and I just repeat myself.  Which I do anyway, but why exacerbate the problem?)


 
This is a compilation of all the figures I have that seem promising.  Most were made by attaching sketched heads to various bodies in Photoshop, which allows me to mix and match.  This porcess brings great glee to all my obsessive tendencies and sometimes I just keep rearranging things and going in circles for what seems like eternity.  The possibilities are so dazzling and final decisions so...final!
 These are screen captures of my "best faces" files



Sunday, February 9, 2014

I am not a Glass Secessionist!

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I am not a Glass Secessionist!

Well, what a world we live in that I am making such a post.  But there you go.  I really feel compelled to make some sort of a statement as my name has gotten tied in with the group known as Glass Secessionism, hopefully not anywhere but Facebook but I know GS is making headway publicity-wise into print, conferences, etc (and my name has come up, apparently) so I wish to be crystal clear. Although I thought I was clear enough here.

I am not a Glass Secessionist!

I was really enjoying the conversation in the Facebook Group, which is why I stayed a member of the page.  But since that is confusing to some, I have since left the group.  I did not intend my participating in debates on FB pages to constitute some sort of philosophical allegiance.


I didn’t want to say anything one way or the other because:
1.     Tim Tate is a personal friend and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.  GS is his baby and I didn’t want him to feel slighted or disrespected.  I am glad he is ambitious enough to really create some waves. 
2.     Why would anyone possibly care what my alliances is in terms of labeling myself?  Surely it doesn’t really matter.  If I get to pick, then I am a Militant Ornamentalist.  At least for now. 

So here’s why I am emphatically not a Glass Secessionist
1.     I fundamentally disagree with their stance on “concept”. To me concept cannot ever be separated from process and material. NEVER EVER  EVER.  So a sentence like “concept is more important than material” is not only utterly wrongheaded, but close to impossible from my POV. (Or at the very least leads to art works that are as bereft and disappointing as work that is entirely technical.)

2.     The point that historically speaking studio glass has favored the technical is wrong.  Any movement predicated on an historical misunderstanding is a problem for me.  My experience…and I was there (working in glass since 1980) is that ever since I have known it, glass artists have been SCREAMING and YELLING about how important concept was.  To hear glass artists talk you would think close to every last one of them was a dyed in the wool conceptualist.  (Not that they were, but they sure talked a good game.)

Paul Marioni, "Nerve", 197?

Thank you for your attention.  And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.  (I will be posting something soon of a stained glass nature… also my revised skill paper)