Dirty Countertop

 

Still life—

When I was just a tadpole, I remember the horrible crisis of desperately wanting to make art but having no clue what I wanted to make art about.

What a dilemma, all this art energy and nothing to tie it to!  It didn’t help that the one thing I understood art to be was incredibly profound.  No pressure there!

 

I was still a painting major.  We were given little guidance—which I resented at the time but now I understand that to find one’s voice is an inside job and that it’s a fine line between influence and coercion.  Maybe I thought my teachers should have done more, but I was left with the sense that I did it all myself and how is that not actually a really good thing? 

 

In making visual art, I think of it as having three domains.  The visual, the material and the intellectual/expressive.  Eyes, hands and brains. All three are the subject of a work of art in different proportions.  But when we talk of the subject of a work of art, I think we reflexively think of it as the objects in the picture.  We think a picture of fruit is “about” the fruit.  But to the artist, it may merely be an excuse to get involved with paint.  Or color.  Or shapes. 

 

One has choices.  For example: historically speaking, on could pick some point on the design spectrum between optical realism and non-referential abstraction as a mode.  Another mode might be appropriation or ready-mades.

 

As subject, one could mine the territory of NOUNS—people, place and things; or still life, landscape or figuration.  Either as a recognizable subject or a launching point if one was abstract.

 

Blah blah blah…I started this post out with a lot of time and now I have none.  So, no. more musing on the mechanics of creative art making.

 

“Dirty Countertop” is a still life. Duh.  I haven’t done a still life since I was a sophomore in the painting department at RISD.  This example was when I wanted to be Wayne Thiebaud.

Still life—

When I was just a tadpole, I remember the horrible crisis of desperately wanting to make art but having no clue what I wanted to make art about.

What a dilemma, all this art energy and nothing to tie it to!  It didn’t help that the one thing I understood art to be was incredibly profound.  No pressure there!

 

I was still a painting major.  We were given little guidance—which I resented at the time but now I understand that to find one’s voice is an inside job and that it’s a fine line between influence and coercion.  Maybe I thought my teachers should have done more, but I was left with the sense that I did it all myself and how is that not actually a really good thing? 

 

In making visual art, I think of it as having three domains.  The visual, the material and the intellectual/expressive.  Eyes, hands and brains. All three are the subject of a work of art in different proportions.  But when we talk of the subject of a work of art, I think we reflexively think of it as the objects in the picture.  We think a picture of fruit is “about” the fruit.  But to the artist, it may merely be an excuse to get involved with paint.  Or color.  Or shapes. 

 

One has choices.  For example: historically speaking, on could pick some point on the design spectrum between optical realism and non-referential abstraction as a mode.  Another mode might be appropriation or ready-mades.

 

As subject, one could mine the territory of NOUNS—people, place and things; or still life, landscape or figuration.  Either as a recognizable subject or a launching point if one was abstract.

 

Blah blah blah…I started this post out with a lot of time and now I have none.  So, no. more musing on the mechanics of creative art making.

 

“Dirty Countertop” is a still life. Duh.  I haven’t done a still life since I was a sophomore in the painting department at RISD.  This example was when I wanted to be Wayne Thiebaud.

 

 

I did a still life now because I have been channeling the spirit of Joris Hoefnagel and drawing lots of froooooots.  Maybe they are an allegory about what happens when you don’t wipe down your countertops.  Maybe its drawing a parallel to other types of fleshy bodies.

 

Joris likes to draw combinations of fruit, insects, flowers and calligraphy.  I wish I had made his work, that’s how much I love it.

 

The big dilemma with this piece (as it often is) is where to cut the glass.  One can carefully follow the outlines of the objects, but then one must connect them to the sides of the piece leading things to look like crappy coloring book illustrations. This leads to a strange look like things being caught in spiderwebs or having superfluous antennae. Because I am engraving flash glass, I can put either no cut lines and just work large unbroken sheets like a painting or….something else.

This was kind of a combo.