Process

I thought I would outline the creative process when creating this painting as it highlights some of my methods.

• I wanted to expand my graffiti practice so instead of just writing my name I looked into typography and thought to practice all the letters of the alphabet.  My first was ABCD and then I recited the alphabet until I found some letters that had a nice mnemonic device.  I decided upon LMNOP
• After a couple of sketches I thought shorter would be better.
• Back to research, looking more at I Love Typography and read articles about some font developers and what makes an easily readable font.  IN this process I also seized on some color words..
• Adjusted the design to just LMN because it fits better on the paper.
• I drew each letter in a box, actually I drew the box first.
• Looked at the underdrawing on the paper and thought it was too simplistic.  so I reflected back and reviewed some sketch books to add to the design.
• Began painting and in the process and reviewed the color wheel during the process.  Added the little circles and octopus later during work.
• Reviewed the final painting and decided I like the design but it's too small, it needs to be wall sized.

Intellectual Review

I have been working, somewhat sluggishly, at developing myself more as an artist these days.  The entire Autumn was dedicated to first figuring out what kind of art I am going to make now that I have returned to the USA and then pushing that concept into a body of work.  In this regard things are going well.  I decided upon taking a class at the local art school to get some expert advice and take advantage of working at a studio instead my flat.  The expert advice came in the form of a discussion with my teacher, Kevin Archer and then I followed it up with a phone conversation with my friend and artist Charlie Kerns, or Beijing Charlie as he goes by  when he was traveling in China where we met.  They made two similar suggestions, one was to write about art that I like so that I can zero in more clearly on what interests me and then make art around those things.  Make what I like my own.  The second was to read art critiques from well known magazines and analyze the writing of the article and then write about my own art in the same way.  I have also made an active effort at making connections between ideas and I saw these two suggestions as a creative thinking tool as well.  So what follows below is a diary entry of my exercise of the first idea and then a short auto-critique of my own work.

Anish Kapoor
I first got a close up view of Anish Kapoor's work in Seoul although at that point I didn't really know much about him.  I just felt the trick of the eye that he was playing with were pretty neat, interesting, entertaining.  The way there was the appearance of a swirling vortex disappearing into the wall or the floor brought a smile to my face and led to many "How did he do that" moments.  In Beijing I got a much closer look.  There was one very large piece installed in the main room of Galeria Continua; that piece - Very Yes!

The entire art was constructed of mist and air.  Nothing more than a column of fog from ceiling to floor; how stunning.  I have the same appreciation for this piece as I do for something of James Turrell's  The art itself plays with the necessity of needing a thing to make art.  In these cases it is like music.  It only exists in a dynamic state.

Here my mind takes a step on its own (the creative thinking bit).  When we look at great art 'in the flesh' we normally stand in front of it for a few moments and more often than not it comes after seeing hundreds of other great works of art.  The moment we spend with it is fleeting.  The work of James Turrell and this of Anish Kapoor's highights this fact in a more direct way.  The memory we have of seeing something iconic  as Starry Night remains only a mental function.  This work of Kapoor's is vision in and of itself.  This is the strong attraction for me.
This is also why I like traditional Chinese and Japanese painting so much.  There is a delicacy that is almost ready to disappear before the eyes.  This is connected to my desire not to make more stuff.  I am very discerning about what I will hang on my wall.  When I make work I prefer to display it online or in a gallery space so that one can experience it for just a short moment.

But back to Kapoor.  I should read an interview to understand better why he makes work (the following quotes are from Kapoor during a BBC interview).

"A good work has the potential to promote a whole series of meanings, none of which are exclusive".

"The job of an artist is to excavate meaning, not to deliver it."

And her is a thought for the reader to put together - Anish Kapoor, James Turell and Yoko Ono - ephemeral and impermanence.

Auto-Critique
This work was created as the final to a series of four that were executed by myself and guided through the process by Kevin Archer, an Atlanta-based artist teaching at SCAD.  The work reflects an extension of imagery that I have been working with in one way or another for the past three years.  However, this series in particular serves the most effective summarization of the multitude of influences that may on the surface seem contradictory but are united by narrative and experience.  Similar to images one finds in Japanese comics or Chinese landscape paintings, the eye of an octopus gazes directly at the viewer and a tentacle hovers along the upper edge of the painting, lazily reaching across the surface with a mild, menacing intent.  Along the left hand side of the painting are three Asian-rendered trees which are a product of my years studying traditional Chinese painting and modeled after the three pines outside my flat.  The work is simultaneously open and closed; there is little depth and in the one space where to painting surface opens the viewer is halted by the large eye of the octopus in the receding space.  Despite this closed space, the large, black semi-sphere acts as the punctum to where the viewer enters the painting.

As I mentioned earlier this work is about narrative, like all of my art over the past year.  I am expressing journeys I have taken, things I have learned and my shyness when asked to expose myself.  I am a cautious person by nature and do not like to talk about myself unless I am sure of it or exploring some new possibility.   From my life as an epistemology teacher I have become uncertain about everything, so talking about myself deeply rarely happens.  But the eye is pleading to be noticed, much like myself, and wants to be noticed in a sincere fashion.  I am aware I am not an abnormality, although my personality type may be less typical, this work speaks to that aspect of everyone who is like myself.  We recognize the shyness and the desire to be noticed, and also the desire not to be arrogant.  The work is small which also requires participation on the viewer to approach and engage with it.  The other works in this series are less like this, they are open and fluctuate in their perspective.  They reveal other aspects of myself, in a more bold or symbolic fashion.  Throughout all these works the viewer is invited to share my experiences but also asked to share theirs as well.

Point of View

Over the past week I have been writing an additional supplement for my grade eleven students about how to analyze art.  The course they are studying requires that they pay the most attention to the study of art, which I find quite fascinating  especially for a high school student.  They will be assessed most heavily on their research and exploration.  While they are required to make art the importance is on what they think about and what I can find in their sketch books.  In my graduate studies I happened upon a course which discusses the fundamentals of analyzing a work or art.  In brief there are two main types of analyzing, formal and stylistic.  formal deals with how a work or looks and stylistic is about interpreting its meaning.  for the longest time I felt that what critics were interpreting in art, while entertaining to read was based so much on just one's subjective opinion.  Ultimately I have trouble with subjectivity, at least as it being the sole basis of evaluating a work of art.  There is such a thing as good and bad art, but this good and bad is difficult to pinpoint and left me the weaker of the arguments.  Another thing I find quite annoying in art is that shock and/or entertainment value seems to be how people immediately recognize a work of art as good or bad.  I myself am guilty of this but I have gotten better at enjoying the immediate pleasure derived from an eye catching work of art but also forcing myself to look deeper to see if the piece is really of value.

Let me tie this together now.  Through my re-review of stylistic analysis I was able to put together two practices I have encountered over my work as an artist and art teacher.  What we have already been talking about, stylistic analysis and what a colleague of mine dubbed 'The Idea Generator'.  Let us talk stylistic analysis first.  I am actually going to write about more specifically contextual analysis.  The idea that one adopts a certain standpoint when interpreting a work of art.  The common contexts I have come across are Marxism and Feminism.

Let's start with Marxism.looking at the work of art from the standpoint of artist as worker and patron as gentry.  I told my students to ask questions like 'What does this work say about the life of the artist versus the select public that enjoy it?'  However, I feel this does not go far enough and I have individually substituted the artist as creating a product and the public as consuming that product.  So when we look at a work of art, we are the consumers, how does it influence us when we consume it?  I am quite pleased that art is now more in the public realm than before and we can even ask 'How does the public consume the art?'  How does it influence our clothing, our food and our computer games.  I'm not a gamer but I am aware that a lot of popular music is now used for the soundtracks.  So next time you are at the gallery ask yourself "When will this show up in my breakfast?'  Have a look at Takahashi Murakami's work with LV to get the idea.  Feminism works in a similar fashion only we are reading the art from a woman's point of view.  Ask yourself "What story does this work tell?" "How do women understand this?" "What is the role of the artist in relation to their use?"  Beijing based artist Megumi Shimizu has a performance piece where she reverses Yves Klein's blue model work with red and a boy, and when I saw it that boy must have just been eighteen.  The reason I am writing about this as a creative thinking skill will become apparent soon.  We are putting ourselves in a context or a perspective and applying thinking skills from those perspectives to imagine meaning.

The Idea Generator - I read that Bob Dylan book a few years back.  In it he discussed placing himself in a character's position and then writing from that position.  I've seen art teacher Richard Todd do this and he even made a graph for it.  Take a concept and brainstorm what that concept means from and old/young position, a old/new position, mother/father, student/teacher, commercial esoteric, analogue/digital, baby boom/generation y.  Really two terms that are unlike in some way.  The IBO does this when they ask students to think from different areas of interaction.

So try this for me.  Seize on a thought you find interesting.  The run it through different contexts to see what new comes about.  Add interpretation and also new meaning.  See where the contexts take you.  If you are an artist, make art about it, if you are a thinker build a syllogism around it. See what becomes.

This painting is from some time ago, but since I have not photographed any of the recent painting I've executed this will have to do.  I placed it here because in the past month and a half I have been painting a lot of pine trees (some other varieties as well).  The reason has a bit of a explanation.  I recently moved back to the USA after nine years in China and one in Korea, by far China has the stronger influence.  I was quite struck by some contemporary Chinese paining (by this I mean ink and wash painting, you know the classic style of birds and flowers and landscape etc. but the painting I was looking at was of a contemporary subject matter).  The power of the black ink was almost palpable.  That week I purchased paper and brushes and ink and had a go.  A complete fail but there was potential and I adopted it to how I was working.  Shortly thereafter I moved to China and after about six months I started studying the traditional techniques and I spent about a year and a half with two different teachers.  Another year or so after I stuck to the tradition, then it faded.  About three years ago I began to take it up again and this leads to the painting above as well as why I've been painting pine trees so much recently.

After I accepted the job in Georgia I began making plans to use the Georgia countryside as inspiration for traditional Chinese paintings.  Even though I am in the city (Atlanta) there is no shortage of pine trees (and others) to serve as inspirational pieces.  This past week I was on a school trip (I'm a teacher by profession) and lucky for me we spent the week at a YMCA camp where I had ample opportunity to view and draw.  I bought a brush-pen and sad to say I am complete shit with it but that's ok, the shape of the trees and leaves are there so now it is just the work behind working it out with a brush, and I am quite looking forward to this work.
      P.s. - the first attempt was also shit but I am working on it.

For those of you who are still reading I'll give a brief description of some of the techniques I use. You are welcome to give them a shot and let me know how you get on.  Some of the traditional rules to follow: Compose square-ish painting in a kind of C shape and long-ish paintings by an S shape.  There should be good rhythm between black and gray tones.  There should not be too much black.  By the way the Chinese can never be pinned down by how much is enough and how much is too much.  Unfortunately the trend seems to be whoever is talking to me always has the correct amount and I never do.  Anyway - whatever.  The brush is supported between the thumb on one side and the other four fingers opposite the thumb.  Once I saw in the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) that there should be the distance of an egg between the palm of the hand and the shaft of the brush, but none of my Chinese teachers ever said that.  Paint with the paper flat on the table or floor the the brush, more or less perpendicular, at least when you start.  The reason for this positioning is because the combination of wrist, elbow and shoulder give you every available angle from which to make a mark.  The beauty of Xuan Zhi (rice paper - which oddly enough has little to no rice in it) is that despite its fragility it can really take a lot of ink and water and color.  For instance you can paint in some gray, then add color, then let it dry and add black, then add some more color.  Or - this is one of my favorite techniques - make a nice think inky line and then wash the brush and add water right to the mark allowing it to bleed.  This effect is something that is looked for in 'good' paintings.  Another nifty trick (anything that entertains me I equate with good) is to load the brush with both color and ink in different parts of the brush then make a mark - cool two-tone effect.  Among my favorite strokes, and one you can see in the painting above, is the wavy, downward  line (my own description not an official term, my Chinese was pretty poor when I was taught this and I never learned the proper terminology).  Set out the edge of a shadow on a mountain or cliff and then alternate gray colored ink, water or even a little color in a wavy, downward stroke.  Another fun stroke is the hatchet (I now this one because my teacher drew me a picture of a hatchet when he demonstrated).  This one works best with think, black ink.  Load up the brush and turn it sideways against the paper and then with force shoot the brush in either direction that gives a full width streak.

When approaching a Chinese style painting (the Japanese and Koreans do this too) the Western style general to specific, light to dark method will not serve you well.  Just get yourself in a quiet mindset and go at it with no fear - like a Samurai - There will be varying levels of success at first but when you reach that place where you can actively make decisions without having to think will yield some pretty wicked paintings and a good experience for you.  If you are going to go the traditional route work on parts of the painting that are nearest the viewer and work your way back into space.  If you are doing non-traditional subjects then fuck all, just see what works for you.  These techniques are really applicable to all subject matter, I really like to paint octopuses and jelly fish and one never finds those in Chinese painting.  I have no problem with this seeing as I am not even a little Chinese, I'm all American in blood at least.

So there you are, a ramble about something I have contemplated for the last ten years.  I'll post some of my current paintings as soon as I get an SD card for my camera.

Art on the Go

". . . because biennial curating , trust me, is not a big deal.  It's a skill set.  Like art criticism, it's a support system in the service of contemporary art, which is not that big a deal, either.  Contemporary art is a goody bag of  what's fashionable tonight, local 'cultural production' auditioning to become history.  You can argue for it but you cannot argue from it, since contemporary art lacks the sustained track record that invests art with historical authority." - Dave Hickey from July/August's Art in America

I read this article today, early, and it reconfirmed some things for me.  However, I think so many things that today's belief that is reconfirmed will be tomorrow debunked.  Doesn't matter though, today I will live by this principle and it will guide my actions, and today looks like an art making day, so the quote will serve me well.

I am an art teacher, and as of next semester, a philosophy teacher as well.  I am taking the summer not to make extra money, but to think and relax and paint and study and get a little preparation work done for next semester.  I go into my art classroom two or three times a week to get a handle on the printmaking materials.  I studied printmaking at a local small museum last week and let my normal themes of light and smoke and clouds to guide my imagery for the experimental print.  Today I will go in and print it.  Since we have textile ink I thought I would pick up a cheap t shirt and have a go at printing my image on a t shirt as well.  It is part experiment but given the above quote and my belief that contemporary post modern art should transcend boundaries of the painting plane and gallery, printing on a t shirt is also a way of forcing contemporary art to exist in the real world.  Jenny Holzer did this with her t shirt that I reproduced above.  I have a good friend who is a tattoo artist and he makes a similar comment about tattoos.  They are personal art, art for the person who has them and no one else.  A tattoo cannot be bought or sold, it is forever with the wearer as a decoration for others to enjoy and as a piece of art the wearer can enjoy whenever the mood strikes him or her.  A tattoo is a work of art that cannot possible be present in the gallery (well it can and I had an idea for this once), a tattoo embodies a principle of post modern art.  I noticed that even tattoo magazines are calling people who are series about having tattoos collectors.

Since contemporary art is striving to become history, but it cannot because history is long and the contemporary period is short, let us not worry about the art we make.  Just make it and put it in as many places as you can, let history decide if its worth remembering.  It won't really matter to us by the time history has decided, at the very least we'll be too old to care.