Author: mightylark

Today, while in sketchbook class, we discussed the idea of authenticity.  It is an old argument, one that I am sure that Walter Benjamin was talking about and probably theorists before him as well.  Questions have surfaced over whether it was workshops who authored Master’s works or the masters themselves.  Original thoughts and scenes disappear just as easily as they are originated.  With the age of the internet information is communicated so quickly that as soon as we author or post an image in the ether, it has become public domain.  We have lost both ownership of the idea and ownership of the image.  It is no longer original.  The only original is that initial thought which artists attempt to cultivate into works in their own right.  The nugget of information that fleets before our minds’ eye, that is perhaps the authentic thought.  One of my students suggested that each of our individual experiences is actually where that authenticity lies.  When we are tapped into the moment and allowed to react and live with our works we are behaving in a manner that is authentic to our practice and our ideas as artists and human beings.

On the piggyback of this discussion was the idea of the workshop who is working under the commands of the master artist.  The group of students that I was working with this morning and I came to the conclusion that, although it may be easy enough to mimic an artist’s or creators final products, it is difficult to live the moment that led to their work.  Each of our experiences with different objects and shapes and images is based on our own individual perception.  Without acquainting ourselves with a multitude of unknown people it would be difficult to have anyone create our own artwork.  Certainly it would be difficult to recreate the questions and concerns within the work that are the artist’s own.

I found myself very much opposed to the idea of other people being allowed to create work which would cut my decision making out of it.  My decisions within my work are made on split second judgements, general feelings of my own personal aesthetics, and chance.  I cannot expect another person to make the same decisions that I make.  And so, I wonder if my work is not in some manner completely authentic.

Here are my two most recent assemblage pieces which I am creating for a show in Miami, FL which I hope to get into.  Florida would make the 16 or 17th state.  I am not sure without looking at the numbers.

The show is on a bird based theme.  I determined that it was no longer any fun to create simple works with birds and headphones or birds on the wire.  I had to do something different, so I started creating works like I would make which do not have any birds and just started to add them last minute as an impulsive sort of after thought.  So far I am very pleased with the results.

As for now, it is getting late and I am having trouble keeping my eyes open.
Peace
-Mike

On Wednesdays at Maine College of Art, I teach a class called Sketchbook as Document and Impetus.  When I first began the class it was meant as a way to encourage the use of the sketchbook as a sort of playground, a place that fostered development through making mistakes and a spot for keen observation.  I spent three semesters working through the class only to find this, the fourth semester,  contains a class full of individuals who all treat the class as a sort of salon, an ear to bounce ideas off of, a forum for the exchange of information.  The class has become a community of artists rather than a class that I feel I am in control of.  By letting go of the control of the class, it has been allowed to become so much more than I could ever make of it. 

Today I shared pieces of my animation project as well as the horizontal additive pieces that I have been working on for my application to the CMCA Biennial.  The class was very receptive of the work and the conversation progressed into a discussion of learning methods, children, and the burning questions that we had as children. 

One student admitted that since he was eight he had been asking himself the same question.  He had spent the last fifty years or more traveling, creating art, and reading all in efforts to find some sort of answer to his question.  The question still remains and it still fuels his work.  Another student in class referred to her experience as a mother and as a daughter.  She found herself asking some of the questions that she asked herself as a child and then being sidetracked to the way that her mother raised her and influenced her as a mother in the raising of her own children.  She claimed that the most important thing was to eat dessert first.  I am not certain that this is the idea that I connect with the most, but it has deep meaning to her and how she lives her life. 

I was left with the thought, “I often stand and look at the sea wondering what it was that my father could see.”  I have often wondered what this life is, what it is that we are supposed to experience, how it is that I am supposed to understand life.  I think that creating art probably serves as a means to attempt to answer this question.  What is this?  This question is not about what life is about.  Life goes on every day and is beautiful in so many ways, but what I do want to know is what it is.  I don’t really know, but I think that I am starting to arrive at something within my animation and also within my newest series of grouped panels.

The animation is a study in minutia, much like the James Joyce novels that I am think about while I create it.  The grouped panels also carry a little bit of this deference to the insignificant, as I combine all of my imagery which is comprised of such simple objects, experienced in the everyday, in groups of objects interacting to make unique conversations.

Here are a couple of images from the two newest pieces in the series.

I am still asking the same questions I always did.  I still wonder what my father sees when he looks out over the water, mimicking his father before him and our ancestors from Wales before that.  I think that perhaps what is different about me attempting to answer the questions now is that I am starting with honest information.  I am not trying to create anything which talks in metaphors.  I am more speaking in earnest.

Peace
-Mike

Ever since I left studio the other day I have been trying to figure out what is going on next in my stream of conscience animation.  Thursday night after I finished teaching I came home to an empty house and spent a couple hours attempting to figure out how one of my drops ends up hitting the ground.  It’s odd, but none of my drops had ever hit the ground before.  They had always been suspended in air.  Perhaps this animation will make me think through the actions of the characters in my pieces more thoroughly.

I don’t know if this will really be the case or not, but I do know that I took a drive north to the Paper Store in Wiscasset yesterday and picked up a few more sketchbooks.  I am starting to figure out drawing again and it feels good.  For a little while I felt as though I should be paying attention to my new wife and my new wife solely, but I can’t do that, and she didn’t marry that, so I’ve been working a lot more.  I’m pretty excited about it.

Here’s my new sketchbook.  I got two in this style.  I do not feel embarrassed to share that they make me feel absolutely giddy.  Also, I think I figured out how one of my drops hits the ground.

The paper in these books is so great, heavy and accepts the ink incredibly well.  I think I may have to go back and buy the paper store out of them.

More animation to come later this coming week.
Peace
-Mike

I have wanted to create an animation at least since I first saw Kevin Cross’s Monkey Mod trailer, but really I think much much earlier.  I always felt attracted to simpler animations.  I was a big fan of the Batman cartoon from the mid nineties and the Powerpuff Girls.  I also was really into Dexter’s Laboratory.  When I was a kid, I was obviously into Transformers and G.I. Joe, but even more than the main stream cartoons I was into Hanna Barbara cartoons.  The drawing in Hanna Barbara cartoons was so simple.  I took a lot from watching Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound.  Simple shapes translate easier than more complex drawings.  A professor in undergrad once told me that the most successful drawings were the drawings that children would try to copy.  The simple shapes were easier for young people to process and so they were more likely to draw from them.  I was not aware at this time how difficult it actually is to simplify things.  Cartooning, on one front is easy, but providing simple characters with expression and movement can be immensely difficult.  I have spent the past ten years attempting to perfect this quality in my drawing.  I am sure that I could very easily spend another ten years attempting to perfect that quality in my drawing.

Last summer I was talking with a friend concerning the segmented paintings that I was putting together utilizing power lines and pipes.  We determined that we could set up some of those paintings with a qr code which would then allow an animation to play on the viewers’ phone screen.  I never completed the animation because of lack of confidence.

Since that failure, I have had some major boosts to my confidence and I have gotten a good deal more rest than I was getting.  Last Saturday while teaching class, I began to lay out thumbnails for an animation.  I have long had a loose plan for an animation but have as of yet not been able to create anything concrete story wise.  However, as I have become more comfortable with the changing events in my life I have grown more tolerant of chance.  I have also been reading James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young man which has had me contemplating stream of consciousness.  The thumbnails started to look like a completed animation to me.  Another undergraduate professor had assigned a project which involved scanning in a tiny drawing and blowing it up to life size.  The drawings all looked pixelated and rough, but I thought to myself that perhaps that was a bit of the look that I am going for now.  The thumbnails needed to be their own piece.

Here are a couple pages from my sketchbook as I worked through the process.

I love the second page of thumbs.  It seems like the weirdest graphic novel that I have ever seen.  The first set surrounds a sketch of a cowboy robot much like a robot that I drew back in 2007 for a show in Santa Fe.  The following is seven seconds worth of stop motion animation created from 37 thumbnail drawings.

I’m overwhelmingly pleased with how this has turned out so far.  I have already started the second page of drawings.  I think that I should be able to get about a minute worth of animation in a week.

Peace
Mike

I have been trying to wrap my head around getting images and work ready for the biennial at the CMCA in Rockport, Me this week.  It is not easy to think about my work in this manner.  There seems to me a big line across which I do not usually step between the contemporary art world and the Street Influenced, Illustrative paintings that I produce.  That said, I know that there is work of that nature in major museums now.  It is very much what is contemporary, but somehow it doesn’t really feel like fine art to me if I am producing it.  I have no idea why.  I am just as educated and equally as prolific as so many of the more heavy hitting “fine artists” in the world.  At least I very much think that I am.  I don’t understand the hang up.  I can’t even really blame the disconnect on a lack of references or allusions to philosophy or art theory.  I spend a good deal of time reading.  Sometimes it is theory and philosophy.  Often it is poetry or fiction, usually things that end up falling in the literature section.  I really haven’t much interest in the Science Fiction and Westerns that I loved when I was a kid.  I can’t help but think of the great Egon line from Ghostbusters 2 when I say that; “I had a slinky once, but I straightened it.”  Absolutely no fun dude.  But actually I don’t really feel that way.  I really enjoy the materials that I read.

I digress though.  The fact is, I wonder why I have difficulty seeing my work in a fine art setting and I really don’t know why.  I have been trying to get over this feeling.  This series of paintings that I have started include  mixture of ideas from a bunch of different work that I’ve done in the past.  Oddly I feel like the juxtaposition of many of my ideas allows the work to maybe speak on one of those more intellectual levels.  I at least think that it begins to speak in the same language no matter how rudimentary the translation.

My studio assistant told me the colors in the second painting were very retro.  I wonder about that.  Perhaps the color then mixes with my interests more.  Certainly my reading interests do not constitute incredibly new knowledge or technologies.  She might be on to something.

More work to come soon.  I have one more in this series started and intend to do more tomorrow as well.

Peace
-Mike

I visited a friend in Seattle last week.  Well actually, I visited several friends in Seattle last week, but the trip was to see one friend in particular.  He owns over ten pieces of my artwork and when I found out that he had had a stroke I wanted to hand deliver him some new stuff very badly.  Three weeks later I was handing my friend two new pieces.  It was well worth the trip.  However, after a week off from studio and the prior week which had been entirely devoted to my show at the studio, it was finally time to go back to work today.

I am trying to put together work to submit to the CMCA in Rockland, ME for their biennial which is coming up soon.  I also very much want to have my work for my show in Bangor, ME done well before the actual hanging date as we will be very close to baby time in this household.  With a ton of things on my mind today, I felt like I just had to start a new piece.  Here is what I ended up with today.

The show at The Studio in New Hampshire was a great success.  The work looked good, the gallery owner was happy, the people who came to see the show seemed pleased with the work.  By all rights I think that I have made some good work.  Finishing a show leaves me in one of two head spaces.  Either I feel like I worked my tail off, explored every avenue of that body of work that I could, and completely exhausted both the work and myself or I feel open, like I haven’t begun to pick away at the top of the iceberg of an idea.  Currently I feel as though I am at the peak of an iceberg.  There is so much more that this idea and style of work could convey.  The show at the Studio was thereby a great start, and I am proud of the work, but as it settles in, I realize that I want to do the same sort of work in a much bigger venue.  Here are a couple images of the installation.

 

Peace
-Mike

I am showing at The Studio again.  Melissa McCarthy has invited me back for the third straight year and I could not be more pleased.  The first year I build a large scale installation over the course of three days entitled “Love Me.”  The second year I followed with “I Shall Not Want, A Wholly Irreverent Display,” which was my take on the Last Supper.  This year I’ve added the powers of my friend, Tom Konieczko, to bring the world, “I Had to Walk Uphill To School, Both Ways.”  The show primarily features drawings, lots of drawings to be precise.  I began working on index cards and library circulation cards several months ago as I was inspired by the work of my then roommate, Tom, and the honesty therein.  I gifted him the piece “Today May Just Be Everything You Need.”  Essentially the piece was something that seemed to describe the feelings and emotions that I experienced while living with Tom.  He is incredibly genuine and deep.

The following is his Pecha Kucha on Automatic Doodling.

Tom Konieczko: Automatic Doodling from PechaKucha Portland on Vimeo.

This is what I really had in mind when I suggested to him that we do a show together with Melissa.  His desire to emote the complexities of fear in small digestible nuggets of truth is incredibly poetic.  I felt that his work was functioning the same way that my sketchbooks often do.  When people see my art they are seldom as excited as when they get to flip through my sketchbooks.  I am sure that there is a sort of voyeurism that makes this more appealing but on the other hand, there is a very real truth that the artwork has not been modified for public consumption yet.  It is one hundred percent mine.

As I started laying out my more personal artworks on index cards, a very disposable and readily available medium, I was taken by how easy it was to take the filter off.  I started to trust my mark making more and second guessed my process less.  The work became about something more experiential for me than about it being a finished product.

I then determined that I wanted to paint a bit more.  I have been missing the act of pushing paint in the frequency that I used to.  So while I was listening to a Shins song I determined one painting.  A second was born during a sketching session in the ICA a year ago and the last was taken from a conversation I had on a ferry.  I kept true to the style that I was working in on my index cards, however, working quickly and without edits.  I think the result is very different in feel than most of my other work.

My sketchbook work is getting turned inside out.  There is something that feels amazing about that process.  I am excited to see how the work looks up in Melissa’s new space.  Come say hello to Tom and I on Friday night if you like.  The opening starts at 4 and we will both be there.

Peace
-Mike

It might appear that I haven”t been up to much in January, but quite honestly I have been very busy.  I have been piecing together my show for the Studio which opens on the seventh of February as well as putting together notes and lesson plans for five different classes between two different schools.

I have been very pleased with the way that my current projects have been going.  I have been a bit more free with my concepts which has proved quite beneficial.  I determined that I wanted to try as hard as possible to do as much with index cards that I could.  It has been a good way to provide myself with limits in order to focus more on how the content could shift and change.  I found myself quite opposed to this idea of rule setting when I was in graduate school, but now I am beginning to see the point behind what my more educated professors were suggesting to me.  There really is more freedom to exercise when you have picked a control.

After I had loosened up a bit with the index card creations, I began to work on a few wooden pieces that would work in the same manner as the original index card pieces.    Once I had set my rules with the index cards, the transference to a new ground was a much more open process. 

The index cards have made me more open to being honest, wearing my thoughts and feelings as a badge, and enjoying my own personal metaphors.  I have previously tried to find ways around this in my art, choosing instead to make visual jokes with “funny” characters.  I’ve grown tired of this, however.  This show has been immensely important to my development as a creative. 

I am looking forward to future developments that this index card series may lead to.  I am also interested to see how bringing the more painterly strokes into some of my wooden grounds will change and or work the some of the other works.

Peace
-Mike

The move is done.  My wife and I are settling into our new home nicely and with that new home life have come a couple of new exciting tidbits.  She has managed to set up an internet Hotspot so that I can use the internet at home and at studio.  This works out well as I am now able to post to this super duper up to date blog right from the studio.  I also have been granted a new phone from the folks at AT&T allowing me to take better photos from my phone as well.  All of this is making me feel slightly more up to date and much better capable of doing the things that I want to do creatively.

My upcoming show at the Studio is coming along nicely.  The work has really taken a turn for the better in the last couple of weeks.  Once I opened myself up to a wider range of word pieces the show has really made more sense.  I don’t think that I had ever intended on being as specific as my earlier pieces were.  The trouble was that I loved the “Today may Just be…” piece entirely too much to make wise decisions about future pieces.  Fortunately the shrinking allotted time always allows me to think a bit more aggressively on the creative end.  Today I spent the majority of my day working on a font for this piece.

 I was very pleased making this font up today.  The M was based on the font used in an Of Monsters and Men album.  The rest of the letters were made to go with that M.  It was nice to be working in a tiny sketchbook next to the final piece.  The results seemed to be so immediate working in that way.  Often I will be working in a sketchbook at home and unable to really visualize the final product because I can’t see the surface that I am putting the work on.  Having the final right next to the sketchbook definitely felt better in this way.

I love this piece and how much more subtle I feel it is when I am using this font rather than a more aggressive in your face font.  I wonder what that other font might suggest with this lettering.

With any luck more to come tomorrow.  It is time for the Mighty Lark to fly.
Peace
-Mike