Author: mightylark

Today I’ve continued my reading of Virginia Woolf’s diaries.  She was an incredibly force of frailty and eloquence.  To read through a diary filled with so many anxious thoughts, a self effacing approach laying your every word open for posterity, I realize how little bravery there is in filling sketchbook after sketchbook with metaphorical imagery.  The metaphors of the artist are nearly never taken for what they actually mean.  The reader is even more puzzled by images than by words in this way.  Some symbols seem to ring true across the board, but others it is obvious do not.  I find this must be the case with the number of people who ask me if I use symbolism in my work and then immediately follow up with “What does this [or that] symbolize?”

I was most taken with a particular line from Woolf’s diary today though.  And I feel that this line pretty much sums up my career as an artist and creative person trying to pave a way in the arts.
“And with it all how happy I am – if it weren’t for my feeling that it’s a strip of pavement over an abyss.“

I have felt that abyss.  I am not sure that it is obvious.  Perhaps we all feel that abyss, but I am aware of it every day.  I keep working to attempt to stay ahead of it, to avoid plummeting.  This weekend a friend of mine and I had a conversation about how one is to put their boat on course.  I immediately thought of Nicely Nicely in Guys and Dolls, with his song “Rocking the Boat.”  I suggested that artists, who see the world slightly differently, are actually the character that is standing in the boat.  Perhaps they need to stand as well.  Perhaps that is the way that makes the most sense for them.

After my reading I set to work on a couple new pieces, one of which was painted over my demo from Acrylics class this past Saturday and the other which I started to draw out during a phone conversation with my niece last evening.

The first piece has a lot more work to be put into it, while the second is pretty close to finished.  I am not sure what I am doing mixing flat color and painterly aspects in that first piece, but I kind of like it.  I will give it a bit more thought and post about it later.  I also think that I am going to do a post soon on color philosophy, so keep up if you’re interested.

Peace
-Mike

Today I will share several recent sketches from my favorite sketchbook, a series of patterns and shapes that I have been fiddling with, and my thoughts on some reading that I have been doing lately.  I want to start trying to get a little more out of this blog, specifically for me, and so I am going to be sharing some of the thoughts spawned from my readings.  I hope that you find this interesting and not overly informative or a chore to read.

I have been doing a lot of reading as of late.  This is at least in part because I have been teaching; searching for a golden nugget of information to pass onto a classroom full of people who may or may not have any interest in the thoughts and information that I can pass their way.  Today as I woke from a nap in between jobs I picked up Henry Miller, Big Sur, a book that I had borrowed from a friend and intended to finish long before now.  The excerpt that I read was incredibly apropos.  A group of uninvited visitors falls upon Miller’s house in the rural area of Big Sur.  A woman seeks to look at his watercolors because she thinks that she has always needed a Henry Miller watercolor.

Miller gets incredibly excited, bringing out all of his paintings and laying them out in front of the woman.  The woman remains aloof, searching through all of the watercolors and then on to a painting that Miller’s wife has done and then back to the watercolors, where she proceeds to pick out Miller’s favorite to have.  Miller makes the case that that is his favorite, and so, he considers charging double what he would normally, but ends up selling it for shy of what it was originally to sell for. 

The group leaves and he is left to his gardening.  He ponders what people think of his work and his intentions and then relates it to his own failures in the garden.

“After dinner that evening, thinking to empty my mind of images, I took the lantern and going to the spot in the garden where the poison oak was thick, I hung the lantern to the bough of a tree and fell to.What a pleasure, what a ferocious pleasure, to pull up long, vicious roots of poison oak! (with gloves on.)  Better than making watercolors, sometimes.  Better than selling watercolors, certainly.  But as with painting, you can never be sure of the outcome.  You may think you have a Rommel, only to find you have a scarecrow.  And now and then in your ferocious haste, you pull up pomegranates instead of camphor weed.”

Miller’s words make so much sense.  It is not that I am an incredible gardener in the time that I am not painting, but I do understand having meticulous hobbies which take your mind out of creation and into a realm of comfort.  I understand also, how making errors in these hobbies, helps to alleviate some of the pain, and provide necessary perspective in dealing with the reception of your work.  Sometimes it does take reading another person’s logic in order to realize that this is in fact what you are doing when you are cooking or tending to cacti, however.

I have also recently been reading excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s diary.  She was an intense woman.  I find it immensely interesting to read her thoughts on other writers and on taking manuscripts to publishers.  Every bit of anxiety and unintentional contempt that I have ever felt for other people’s work and for the people who elevate that work to that invisible pedestal that implies “good” is mirrored in these thoughts.  But I realize as I read these diary entries, that they are in fact thoughts.  They do not represent her overall feel towards the people around her, as my jealous thoughts are not the thoughts that constantly overwhelm me and my art making, however, they are natural thoughts to have and represent honest questions to be addressed when in a better state of mind.  In other words, this is the artist’s moodiness that time has told us about.  All in all, though, I still find it a little terrifying to share that I do in fact feel occasional moments of jealousy or anger for others success.  Please do not think less of me.

These three drawings were part of a very cathartic Sunday.  There is something in the drop pieces about finding order within the jumble of thoughts that I have had since leaving school this second time.  There is something more there too, however.  I am not sure what it is yet, and so I must keep drawing them and figure out what it is.

Hope I didn’t bore you.
Peace
-Mike

The snow finally came this winter.  Lord knows how long it will be with us, but all around ten there 6 to 7 foot snow drifts looming over you.  People have shoveled small pathways along the sidewalk.  For the past two days as you walk around time all that you can hear is the laughter or people walking through or playing in the snow and the rumble of plow machines and front end loaders clearing up roads and driveways.  Yesterday I was even able to snow shoe on top of huge snow drifts overlooking Congress Street and from Park Street to Clark to go see a friend.  Once home the last two nights I took to painting at a healthy clip.  It is beautiful to be inside looking out the window at the world raging,  I put on a healthy mix of This Will Destroy You and set to painting more in the Musical Machines series.  Yesterday I shared an image of what the work looked like before I left for work at the deli.

Here is a more detailed shot of the larger blue panel in the middle.  I was really pleased with it.  This specifically was the piece that made some connections that I had been reaching for for quite some time.

Last night when I returned from work, I called my friend Ivy and set to painting two more panels before bed.  Life has been like that for the past couple weeks.  I have just wanted to paint in all of these moments.

I was really pleased with the color in both of these.  Some of the work is starting to fit very nicely with other small panels.  Some are a bit more discordant right now, but with the musical them to these mechanical bits, I am pleased for those connections at times as well.  I hope to be able to fill an entire space 1 foot high around the wall of an entire gallery.  All of the pieces will be grouped in one long “work.”

Today, however, I will not be able to work on more paintings.  I must instead go start a trek with a colleague which is based on an idea we dreamed while staying up late on Thursday night chatting.  We are planning on making a Lewis and Clark style exploration, an exploration that is certainly unneeded at this time, and that is the point.  I’ll share more details later when the whole thing has come to fruition. 

Peace
-Mike

The North Easter means that I have a day off from teaching and only have to work a four hour shift at the deli.  This means that I have time to work on my new series which I have been getting really into over the past week.  I have been focusing on machines and hadn’t added too much to that original idea until today when I determined that I was going to use one of my old drop drawings to start a machine piece with.  I think that this is a good direction.  I also enjoy the idea of re-using my present work, making it better by adding to it and subtracting from it.  As my ideas merge I think that they all grow stronger.  The connections, bonds and language that I am using becomes a more cohesive entity which can communicate to a wider audience.  The paint start to act as a medium to converse with the drawing and the drawing likewise to the paint.  As I am working back and forth with color, black and white line, and subject matter I start to lose a little of the hesitance that I create when I really like the way that a drawing or painting looks.  The cohesion makes for a better show, and stronger individual pieces as well.

Check out the line up that I laid out today.

I am very pleased especially with that middle segment.  Those were the leaps that I made today.  I will have to work into some of the others a bit more now that I am on a slightly newer track.  Hope you are fairing the storm well.

Peace
-Mike

This week has been crazy.  A week and a half ago I found an open call for two person shows at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.  Naturally I asked my friend Julia if she would be interested in putting something together for it since she already lives in Brooklyn.  She did, and then I decided to start a new body of work for my half of the images to submit.  I am glad that I did.  I think they are strong images and I think that they work well with Julia’s stuff.  Hopefully the folks at Trestle Gallery will agree and we will get a show and I will be in New York City for the first time ever with my art.  That would be great.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Here are a few of the images that I put together for our proposal.

Of course, like most of my weeks, as soon as I was finished with my pieces for that proposal I became quickly aware that it was already the sixth of February and I didn’t have this month’s Thursday Night Throwdown poster done.  So I brainstormed ideas on a walk home from the coffee shop and started some thumbnails and ended up riffing off of the Edward Hopper piece Nighthawks.  I’m sure you’ll see the resemblance. 

It’s a pretty dope poster though.  I am super stoked with it.  Hope you are doing well and feeling as productive as I feel this week.  Only one more day until the weekend.  Rock it out.

Peace
-Mike

Today I was in want of another panel and I started to look around the studio for the spare panel that I was sure that I had.  I couldn’t find the panel though.  I did however find a painting that I did not wish to keep.  The idea was weak.  At least the finished product with that idea was weak.  I decided that I wanted to get rid of it.  Usually I paint over images but this time I was more taken with the idea of Robert Rauschenberg erasing a Willem De Kooning drawing.  What was it for Rauschenberg to erase a De Kooning?  It’s always been a piece that has stuck with me.  I never really understood why I thought it was important.  Sure there are lines of thought that you can read in books.  If you can believe the ideas that others preach to you I am sure that that is a good enough explanation for why something is important, but today as I was sanding my old painting down and creating this pile of dust I really started to see that the labor involved with both the addition and the subtraction of this work was more evident when it was no longer part of the piece.  At the same time, the product of the work then becomes a pile of dust which is also a pleasant correlation.  All that any of us produces eventually becomes dust.  We eventually become dust.

Here are a couple images of the sanding.

It is incredible to understand an artists’ work through replication rather than through study.  I am glad that I thought of the piece this morning.  It is weird to feel so proud of a pile of dust, which I will have to sweep into the trash so as not to let my cats into it, but proud I am anyway.

More later.
Peace
-Mike

The people of Portland, ME haven’t seen much of me lately.  I have been holed up in my house for the most part over the past week.  I am working six days a week between teaching and a deli position.  The rest of my week can easily become preoccupied with reading, painting, and writing, all of which seem to have eclipsed my traditional social life over the past several weeks.  I am, frankly, becoming tired of being on show at all times and just want to get some work done.  I have started searching for more open calls, some residencies, some new illustration work.  I like my teaching, and I enjoy my art work, but the restaurant and deli work has to go unless it is at a super class joint where I can really work up a good looking plate.  Plastic disposable containers just aren’t my bag.

There are a couple things on the horizon.  First I am proposing a two person show with my good friend, Julia, for which I have been trying to put together some new work.  The intent of these pieces is to paint/draw machinery which implies motion and sound.  I am not sure how successful they all are yet, but it is an entertaining and challenging goal which allows me some room to discover new and untapped creative resources.

The piece to the left stayed as is.  I really like it.  I will be painting up the background a bit to give it a color to pop off of but it is for the most part very much done.  The piece to the right was not sitting right with me last night, nor was it really feeling very good this morning and so it has seen several incarnations since this image, the last one in the image below to the left.

I can’t really say that I kept much of the original.  The piece to the right is still in the drawing phase and I think will include more arrows like that first piece to the top left.  It is good to work with this old machinery again.  I enjoy the movement that becomes implied by the connections between parts.  I really hope that as I develop the series I can make marks that indicate movement.  For now, I guess the pieces are what they are.  Hopefully Julia and I get our show, though.

In other news, I have been invited to create four pieces for Artstream Gallery’s 10th Anniversary show.  That is super cool and I am very much looking forward to being involved.  Last but not least, the Yancey Family Sugar Bush has asked me to redesign the labels for their maple syrup products.  I am really excited to work on that project as it is both interesting and nabs me some syrup.  Double bonus.

I hope you are all doing well.  Catch you on the flip.
Peace
Mike

Or maybe it is too early.  I’ve been on a weird hiatus from making work.  I’ve been thinking a ton, working on some illustration projects, taking some drives, hanging out with some friends.  The idea that everything that I have ever needed to be more successful was really in my depiction of my present state had never really occurred to me, but as I was sitting with my friend Ben tonight, I realized that that was where my only downfall had ever been really evident.  Persistence and work will pay off, but the attitude in which you communicate that work to other people, the attitude with which you approach the inevitable pitfalls and tribulations will be read into.  They will strike a greater chord than some of your positivity, because unfortunately everybody knows negativity and has a quiet, defined box in which to store it.  Negativity is easily dealt with, even if dealing with it is merely to ignore it.  Positivity is a difference in perception, sure, but also a difference in understanding and communication.  More to come later….

For now, here are a couple projects that I have been working on while I have been mistakenly telling people that I am not working that hard.  I have been working.  Hard.

 These second two images are idea sketches for a text solution to a new market in Portsmouth, NH.  I am honored and excited to be working on these.  I hope you like them.  The “A”, I think is slated to become a tent and the bricks in the other two letters are to become more like that in the “A.”

My head is whirling, but I am too tired now to do anything about it.  Here’s hoping to wake up a little sleep deprived tomorrow.  It seems sure to happen, really.  Thanks for reading.  I really appreciate it.
Peace
-Mike

I am terrified.  Change can be a huge blessing or an absolute anxiety bomb, and this time it has ended up being a gigantic anxiety bomb.  It’s a ridiculous situation to find myself in.  Good things are on the horizon, but I don’t understand them, don’t know what to do and don’t know how to proceed without feeling a little bit lost for a bit.  I’m going to be a teacher in a little less than a week.  I am going to be looking at a class full of students telling them how to illustrate.  I’ll be relaying the finer points of illustration, the ideas which I most want them to glean from my speech.  I can’t even spell without a word processor underlining my mistakes in a curly red line.  Oh my.  I feel overwhelmed, but, I know, that at the same time, it will be totally okay.  I’ll do fine.  I won’t know what I am doing, but I will fumble my way through it as well as I can, and most importantly, I will get better.  It is a new era.

With that in mind, I have been spending the first week of this year hiding from the very things that make me happy.  Over the weekend I finally put together the first Thursday Night Throwdown Poster of the year, and between yesterday and today I put together the first major piece in the commission that I am putting together for a clean energy man that frequents my coffee shop.  I have been a ball of stress but am finally starting to ease into the gotta do it mindset.  Procrastination with me is a science.  I need to worry about something for ages before I start it.  Thank the lord drawing feels so right and can make all of these ills slowly pass.  Drawing is my golden ticket. 

Here is the poster that I put together for the TNT this month, courtesy of an awesome dream by one of the employees at Bard.

 Here is the first piece that I have put together in a while for the commission as well.  I have been struggling with the ideas surrounding the connection of the pieces.  This method finally made sense, although I will most likely need to modify some of the measurements, etc.  It is still a step in the right direction.

That is all for now.  There is more stuff on the horizon, but I really need to get some lesson plans written up before I can spend much time working on them and ruminating on what they mean.  At least there is more to come soon.

Peace
-Mike

Today I cleaned and organized my space here in studio and in my house.  Sometimes it is the number one thing that I need to do in order to keep working.  I unfortunately am not very good at cleaning up every day as I often try to keep working until the very last minute that I can get away with and still get enough sleep to not be a zombie the next day at the day job.  Anyway, I cleaned today and it feels really nice.  As a result I worked on several different pieces in different zones of the studio depending upon the type of work and I get to type the blog up in the corner that I have intended to be the reading corner forever, but have never organized or cleaned enough to actually make it so.  Let me just say that I am excited to read a Wild West magazine that my Dad sent me after I finish typing all of my thoughts out here!

I’ve been pretty steadily working on the large scale cross hatched piece the past two weeks or so.  The friend who commissioned the piece granted me some reprieve in our deadline, but I would still like to get the piece done sooner than later.  Tonight was a little bit of a test.  I felt done with the piece after about four hours of work.  It is easy to get into but also very easy to get tired of.  We’re talking the same motion for several hours at a time.  Tonight I forced myself to keep going, however.  There is a high that you get when you finish something that you didn’t want to finish earlier.  So today I filled a large area of the piece that I didn’t think that I could.  I am stoked, and the piece is starting to look pretty great and just as round as I was originally hoping for too.

 These first three images represent how the piece appeared on Tuesday.  Since then I have worked on the panel in the last image and the panel in the first image.  I flipped the panel on orange over so I could work on those space at the bottom more freely.  It is really starting to tighten up.  The line on the original drawing was really not straight.  So I added a little hiccup in the pipe which I am a huge fan of.

Jasper has not granted me any space all weekend.  In fact he is editing some of the text that I am writing this very minute.  At least he’s cute. 

Here’s how the panel in the first image is turning out.  I finished way more of this than I thought I would tonight.  I am so pleased.  Well, I need to be running so I can relax a bit before I hit the hay.  Also the angle that I am trying to type at is in direct opposition to how this cat is sitting.  My hand is falling asleep.

Have a good holiday.
Peace
-Mike