Old Johnson Saw Mill

Tree House Sculpture Completed

Because the interior house lights are difficult to appreciate in these daylight outdoor photos I also took some pictures at dusk.

I rather like my Tree House out in our garden, but it would never survive the weather and Maine elements.  so I think I will have to make something that will survive outside.  this would make Shellburne very glad, because she suggested as much.

August Meeting with Mentor Shellburne Thurber

      Saturday, August 18^th, I met for the second time with my mentor Shellburne.  When I got out of my car carrying a big box with leaves and sticks poking out of it she looked at me strangely, and I thought, “Gee, she told me to make things, and now that I did she’s looking at me like I’m a crazy person.”  But once inside, with my little tree house sculpture out of the box and lit up, Shellburne lit up.  She told me when she saw the box with a ‘plant’ sticking out of it she thought, “Now why is Amy bringing me a rose bush?”  She liked my little sculpture much more than the imagined rose bush.  We talked about sculpture quite a bit; other ideas of mine, suggestions of hers, and other artists I should look at.  I showed her pictures of my chair/window sculpture in progress, and some photos of mine that have given me other ideas.  I told her about the copper house idea with the ‘rain’ inside, and told her I had a recirculating pump on order.  She told me I should consider a sculpture with a real living plant within it.  I said on the ride down I had just thought of such an idea, based on this brick skeletal structure I had recently photographed (see this week’s photos).  She told me I should look at the sculptures of Lucas Samaras and Louise Bourgeois.  She also suggested I look at Felix Gonzalas, who art deals with impermanence, and Jim Hodges, who has done a lot of curtains that look like memorials.  She said my work all seems to be about dematerialization and encroachment.

     When she finally got to looking at my photographs she said there were a number of very strong images.  But she wants me to work on being able to defend my use of color, because my color is ‘wrong’ and purists wouldn’t accept it.  I told her I didn’t want the color to be ‘real’, because I felt the images should have a sense of the not-quit-real.  She agreed, and said my color usage fit the imagery, but she wants me to play around with the color saturation as an exercise to for my color choice defense.  She also told me I should look again at William Eggleston.

Visit to Boston's Institute for Contemporary Art

     After visiting with my mentor, Shellburne, on August 18th, I went to Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art.  They had a Josiah McElheny exhibit, of which I thought his “Three Screens for Looking at Abstraction” were the most intriguing to me.  I was attracted to the way he juxtaposed geometry with reflections, two dimensions with three dimensions, and created a sense of endless space.  He did this by projecting film footage “culled from the history of abstract film” and projected it onto geometric constructions of stretched cloth and mirrors.

     There was also an exhibit by the Brazilians, Os Gemeos (brothers Gustavo & Otavio Pandolfo), who got their start as street graffiti artists.  There were a number of large, colorful, and playfully imaginative paintings that I enjoyed.  But the most interesting piece was “Os Musicos” (The Mucisians).  This was set up in a corner of the gallery, with a painted organ facing the corner.  Hanging on the two opposing corner walls where a large number of old stereo speakers, each painted as a different human face with the speaker representing their open mouths.  A few had video screens with black and white videos clips running instead of speaker-mouths.  One box had a red police light flashing and rotating on top.  The boxes formed quite an assemblage of characters.  I asked a museum employee if the organ could be played, and she said a musician would be playing the organ in 20 minutes.  (It turned out we were lucky – the organ was being played only one Saturday a month, and this was one of the Saturdays.)  Marti Epstein, composition Professor at Berkley and the New England Conservatory, played the organ for us.  And the result was wonderfully curious.  Each key projected its sound from a different speaker, and each speaker had a different ‘voice’.  Some were musical, like salsa or hip-hop.  Some were spoken phrases or single words.  The result was a sense of walking down a very busy city street, and being engulfed by the cacophony of many different people’s voices, cultures, and beings.

     There were a number of sculptures at the ICA that I really liked.  One of my favorites was “Hanging Fire” by English artist Cornelia Parker.  This sculpture was composed of many pieces of significantly charred wood strung on monofilament and suspended from the ceiling.  The burnt wood was from the remains of a building that was set alight by an arsonist.  The way the sculpture was composed suggested a human constructed fire, like a camp-fire, with and sparks flying out and high up into the air.  The other sculpture that attracted my attention still haunts me.  This sculpture was made by the Columbian artist Doris Salcedo and entitled “Atrabiliarios” (from the words ‘atra billis’ meaning ‘melancholy associated with mourning’).  This sculpture was composed with drywall (recessed into the gallery wall), cow-bladder, surgical thread, and actual shoes that belonged to women abducted in Columbia.   The shoes stood on their toes, facing out, in recessed boxes in the wall.  Cow-bladder was stretched over the opening on the boxes, and sutured tightly to the wall with surgical thread.  The effect made my heart break for these lost women, and felt as if they were trapped by physically painful means, encased but still able to see through a dim veil of reality, and lost in a timelessness as though buried or embalmed alive.

     I was pleased that there were a number of photographs.  I was glad to see a photography by Philip-Lorca di Corcia, and Anne Collier’s “Open Book #3”.  But the series that left me pondering was Moyra Davey’s “The Whites of Your Eyes”.   This was a composed by a series of chromogenic prints of images taken at her home (stacks of books, dishes, a dog) set in a grid on the wall without framing.  Each one of these images had been folded into six part, addressed with white labels, stamped, and sent through the mail to gallery or museum curators.  The images being from her everyday mundane life made these seem like a series of visual letters.  And in an age of e-mail, tweets, and Facebook it made these letter-photographs all the more appealingly interesting.

Jerry Saltz lecture - Art and the World Today - 8/12/12

Sunday, August 12^th, I went to a lecture given by Jerry Saltz called Art and the World Today, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Arts in Rockport Maine.  It was an excellent and engaging talk.  Here are some of the points I jotted down to remember.

     Art is a form of knowledge that is about experience.  Art is a content carrier.  Art is about how to imbed thought into material.   Art is work, work, work.   Style is something that eventually picks the individual artist, not the other way around.  As an artist you need to ‘hear’ yourself ‘see’.   And one can never see too much.   An artist can never really know what they’re creating until they are done.   Artists need to be willing to be wrong, to dance naked in public. Art is not optional; it’s part of the cosmic force. 

  

     Artists need to be seen, have their work witnessed, and have people tell them what they think.  Forming opinions on art is a way to get to know yourself, by understanding why you have the opinions that you do about art.  The moment you understand a work of art it gets you.

     The art world loves to pretend it’s the undertaker: painting is dead, this style is dead, etc..  But we humans are all making this up as we go along.  The whole world is built on opinions, so artists need to be delusional.  And you can never let rejection define your life.

Back to Photography

Other Than Photography

I have been exploring Inside / Outside concepts in a variety of ways.  I got a William Christianberry book last week called Architecture / Archetype that I have found particularly inspiring, so I've begun building some sculptures.  I am currently working on two pieces.  Both are still in progress, but here is where they are at.

The first one is inspired by one of my Parsonfield photographs: the one with a chair in front of a window.  I have constructed a chair whose back holds a curtained window.  Behind the back of the chair are the trees outside.  The tree part is not done, and I want to have the trees entering the 'inside' space of the chair to blur the lines between 'outside' and 'inside'.

The other sculpture I am working on I am placing the 'outside'  within the 'inside'.  Here is the 'outside' piece by itself.

I have constructed a house that is to fit on top of my tree and surround it so the 'outside' is contained within the house walls.  It is constructed with loose fit slats to be able to see through the planking, and its windows are of plexiglass so that they have the solidity and reflective qualities of real windows. Here is the house by itself.

So here is my 'outside' 'inside'.  My idea is to have the inside lit, so the house looks warm and inviting, and also to illuminate the foliage inside.  The light I was going to use is not bright enough, so I need to go to Home Depot to investigate the possibilities.  The house is also going to have a witches hat style roof, with one side being hinged to hold the batteries for my lighting.  The top of the tree will also be  breaking through one side of the roof, reaching to the 'outside'.

Here is my original plan.

Here are a couple of close-ups with a light inside and reflections on the windows.

And now onto another project.  Here is a watercolor I that is in the very early stages.  It has been a bit neglected since I've begun constructing my sculptures, but this week I'll get back to it.

Today I dropped off 5 rolls of film for development.  But I probably won't post them until  next weekend, since this seems like enough to view.