It's about the Bees

Am I just extremely lucky that I think my job should address those issues that I feel most strongly about? Should most jobs reflect our innermost beliefs?

I really think that what is happening to the bee population is incredibly important. How can my art express my view of this interconnected, mutually dependent reality which I think people feel free to ignore? How can our planet survive if we keep pushing and poking at jenga blocks?

The titanic is very interesting to me as an example of human building, design, and triumph denied. Icarus' defeat.

Sometimes art is a headlong rush in five different directions. Deferred gratification is a constant. Applications are sent in, and the results are frequently negative. When they are positive, life is good.

Time is poured into projects, and one by one they bear fruit.

What place does art have in discussions?

Sometimes, art starts conversations. It introduces a new idea or way of seeing reality. I would like to think my art at least continues conversations. Maybe adding my own perspective, maybe introducing new aspects or elements, or linking two things that had not been previously considered together. I do not respond well to art that tries to end conversations. Like a short loop of part of a song, monotony and boredom are big risks.

Things I have lost, things I cannot have or keep, I can still write about, and make art. I hold a world in my head.

Fiction vs Non-fiction

If I were a writer, I would write fiction. I read almost exclusively fiction, and more specifically, sci/fi or fantasy.

My art uses fantastic elements to examine deeper truths. Visual metaphors allow me to hypothesize about human experience.

Consensual Reality

Consensual reality is often neither consensual, nor convincingly real. While the teaching may begin at birth, participation waits until we have achieved either a degree of awareness or autonomy. However, our participation in this "agreement," this picture of reality, is forced by the threat of harmful labels and social sanctions. Labels often include "crazy" "antisocial" "stupid" or "weird."

Yes we have to function together as a society, but must we hurt those who perceive this world in a different way?

Art has the power to change our narrow perceptions of others. Art, film, literature, all have the power to depict other possibilities and ways of seeing the world. If they touch our hearts as well, they may teach us something.

Source Material

Source material is really important to me. Nothing comes from nowhere, and ideas can grow on their own, but a lot of my ideas have concrete sources that I can point to. Working from specific photos often gives me a lot of material even if it changes to the point of being unrecognizable.

Art draws me in, and out. It makes me keep examining myself and the world around me.

Money Jungle

Money and numeric value of artwork and effort is always going to be vaguely based on a series of coincidences and societal expectations, and not on any rational, one size fits all basis. And that's okay. The work has to find its own way in the "market" and the viewers and buyers that it ends up interacting with. The artist must help it grow up and find that place.

Public vs Private

Art ends up in many places. Art in a home seen by the same people day after day is going to be experienced in different ways than art in a museum seen less frequently. It's too bad museums are so hush-hush, where art may be discussed much more vitally when it's hanging in a dining room or living room.

The Trouble with Tribbles

Someday art becomes a million little kitties and puppies that need new homes. The value I put on my objects is my own sacrifice of time, but to avoid being overrun, I must find them new families to live with.

Layers create interest and draw the audience in.

Great discussion on how art can be good

http://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html

Work feeds thought. The left hand feeds the right and we all feed each other, intellectually speaking.

Objects are very important to me. The specific histories and memories a thing can hold are important. Places and people hold some of the same threads of sense. Stories and meaning, and connecting the past to the present, as well as exploring the future, unknowable and untouchable. Once sense is gotten, is the object done? It will tell its story tomorrow. Or a new story.

Letting go of the specific considerations of one particular media is hard, but the messages are both more complicated and more simple than can be confined to just one material.

Art is an event and a testament. It is witness, re-interpretable as the written word, and communication, and connection between people.

art makes connections, and shows new links and layers. art can bring out the wisdom we aren't always aware of. art should be an expression of a feeling. art can bring peace.

Artist Statement

Latest version of an "official artist statement" instead of the ongoing random thoughts I usually explore here:

Right now my art examines the links between language and architecture. We build bridges like we build sentences. Our ancestors built thousands of grammars, many lost forever. Syntax provides structure and stability to concepts, as do flying buttresses for giant Cathedrals. One difference: the particular is very important to me in architecture, while language, ever-changing, -growing, and abstract, is amazing to me. Individual written works, such as historical documents or highly acclaimed books, are important and relatively immutable in much the same manner as great landmarks are, but language is used in a very fluid manner, while we do not go around building and tearing down with the same ease as we write emails or texts. Perhaps my feelings are also because my linguistic education is more complete than my architectural. I do get some of the same deeper understanding with the structures of cathedrals. Apse, processional, Greek cross, Latin cross, etc operate as a visual grammar to me.

The physical structures we live among shape our experiences. The structural components of place are a major concern of my work. I work from on-site photographs and drawings. Three dimensional buildings become flat works, and are then realized in sculptural form. I draw on my own ancestry, with influences lying all across Europe, and I always consider the paradox of my place and life in America. We have built an extension of Europe in many ways, and we want to deny our connections and declare autonomy, even as we recreate Europe here.

When I draw and print and layer, I am often guided by the lessons I learned while I was studying artist’s books with Jeff Rathermel. As you read a book, every page except for the one you are looking at is hidden. Translucent pages or pages with holes in them create layers that add meaning to the images or text on every page. In a painting, the color of the underpainting continues to influence the final result long after it has been completely covered.

I began writing poetry, one poem a night, at age twelve. I am very interested in language and how it influences our perceptions of reality, and defines our attitudes, politics, and daily lives. My studies of French, Spanish, Italian and Irish Gaelic shape my thoughts and attitudes. I use language in my art, and struggle with how art functions as a form of communication in such a different way from spoken or written language.

A lot of my thought process is influenced by the museums I visited during my semester abroad in Italy. I lived for 5 months in Tuscany, surrounded by very real, tangible evidence of centuries of human labor, and returned home with an obsession with the visual wealth and culture of Medieval and renaissance Italy and Europe. I began making wall pieces and plaques modeled after the fragments I saw in museums as well as the offerings left on cathedral walls near statues of the Virgin Mary. I layered text in Italian and English, hiding and covering my words, smearing white clay and black stain over the native terracotta. Recently, I have done a lot of work with decorative symbols which I copied in museums from paintings in Europe. I am interested in decoration as message, drawing and painting decorative rococo adornment as my subject. The decorations on women’s dresses, the markings put on the frames of paintings, and the floral patterns carved into stone blocks in Cathedral walls all became part of my personal lexicon