Author: mightylark

It is the twenty fourth.  This year escapes me.  I have four more days of first year graduate student status before I cross the threshold and begin the downhill slide into an MFA in studio arts.  These are exciting times.  However, there are still a number of people looking for me to do my old work, which I think will inevitably be crossing paths with the new work, and this has made me one stressed little monkey.

But, things are looking good now.  I need to pull together a small show for a spot in my hometown, which is great.  I have never shown art in Lewis County.  I am working on a piece in exchange for a new American made Fender stratocaster, which is very exciting, putting together a small group of works for Bard Coffee in Portland, working up some more pieces in a series of paintings for a commission, and trying to work on a couple illustration projects.  I am feeling a bit busy, but it is a happy time.

I’m posting a couple images of my most recent installation.  It is really a portrait of an artist as you will see.  I’m pretty excited about it, but I am far more excited for my newer ideas that have come of it.  Stay tuned, at this rate, I’ll have something new up in a couple months or so.  But no, in all seriousness, I’ll try to get some sketches up soon.

 This is really a kind of a continuation around the room of the piece that I showed a couple months ago.  I have gotten way more into the making of this piece than I was though.  I think that the artist manning the stereo and thinking about a big black cloud is right where I am at.  Like I said, a self portrait of the artist.

It has been good.  Things are coming together.  Answers to questions that I hadn’t even considered are becoming more and more readily available.  I am feeling good.  More to come.

Peace
Mike

Two weeks ago I visited the site of Henry David Thoreau’s shack on Walden pond with a good friend of mine.  A small vacation in Seattle means that you don’t see the images until now, but I didn’t figure that anyone would mind the wait.

I am incredibly interested in the persona of Thoreau.  The man stated that he thought that the working man was miserable and that you should just go do whatever helps you subsist.  Interesting in theory I suppose, but it does seem relatively impossible in this day and age.  And also, it is worth noting that while he inhabited the cabin, friends would bring him food and drink.  He was not completely living off of the land, no, he was really just avoiding the tax man.  I think that in late March and early April a lot of us can kind of appreciate that mentality.

But the way that I have been thinking of Thoreau is as an icon.  He is an icon of thinking above work and of attempting to experience things to the fullest as an individual.  These are things that I feel my wooden block project is starting to hint at, so I decided to share my blocks with Mr Thoreau.  I am sure that he approved:

 

Thought I would start off the morning with a little Smashing Pumpkins reference.  Apparently they were in conversation twice yesterday in Portland.  The question of “are they still relevant/cool?” came up.  I don’t really know, but I still dig some of their stuff.  So anyway, moving on to artwork….

This has been a super difficult semester, unlike the last one that was super difficult, wait.  Ok, so no change on this front really, but I’m starting to create some very different, though fundamentally me, artwork.  I decided to share the component installation with all of you.  It is in progress, and I am just starting to get more excited with the process so we will see what happens with it in the near future.

 

I have been commissioned by a friend from the coffee shop to fill his living room wall one piece at a time.  When looking through the site he was a particular fan of the After the Ice Caps pieces.  I was pleased to hear this as that gave me a great excuse to work with water again.  So today when I was at wits end trying to deal with graduate school schtuff, I whipped out this piece.  I was completely drawn in, which is great, because the work for grad school has not been doing that.  I need to figure out what it is that makes that line for me.  I think that the block project does have the capability of getting me excited but depending on what people say about in my online forums for school, I either ride really high on the idea or beat down on it.  Currently I’m feeling a bit negative about it.  But all in all, if I can just respond by doing an illustrative piece that I am pleased with, I really can’t complain.  And now I am looking around studio at unfinished works and thinking about wrapping those up as well.

Here’s the piece that I did today.  What do you think?

I am excited as well for the upcoming pieces that will connect to this one.  It is an old concept that I worked with several years back, but one which I never developed to complete fruition, so this should be pretty good.

For now, I am pleased.  I need to do more of this to keep me happy.  The seriousness that they push at school seems so oppressive, and I am a pretty cheery guy most of the time.  I hope you all have a great day!  Do something that makes you feel awesome, as a favor, for me.

Peace
-Mike

All of you.  That’s right.  I love you, and all of my other friends, and my cats and just about everything on the planet.  It’s great.  Except maybe snakes.  Snakes scare the crap out of me.  This is my piece for the
“Lovers and Haters” show at the Hive Gallery.

It’s good to do one again after a little while off from these group shows.

I have some more stuff to blog about soon as well.  Actually the images are already scanned in and everything, but I am 90% certain this blog is going to be moving to Lewis Acrylics dot com soon, so I haven’t been adding as much as usual since I will have to export all of the posts to the blog over there.  I will give plenty of advance notice so you can change your pointers though.

Hope you have an awesome January 27th.
Peace
-Mike

I am finished with the Jar Project. I feel quite good about the finished product too, which is great. I received the final checklist and reminder list and saw that the jar top wasn’t allowed to be painted, but I also notice that we are supposed to remove all labels from the outside of the jar, so I just sanded off the paint, because Smuckers insists on emblazoning their jars with their logo all over the cap as well as on the paper on the jar.

I also added a small handwritten biography to the underside of the jar cap and repainted Cuddles himself so that he shone a little brighter in the glass jar. I think it looks pretty great. Check it out!

And here is another view from straight on so you get a better idea of the colors used.

There she be. More to come soon. I’ve got some more in the works and I’m pretty excited about it all. I am also going to be teaching a class of fifth graders soon, so we’ll see what comes of that as well. For now I must go, it is nearly impossible to type with a cat sitting on your hands after all.

Peace
-Mike

The Jar Project is a show that as I have informed you will be at Whitney Art Works here in Portland, ME. It will be the first time that I am showing in a well recognized East Coast gallery. I am very excited for the opportunity.

I thought that I would begin the year by showing a little bit of the process behind this piece. I had intended to use the overlapping blocks like I described earlier. I set out with 7 or 8 painted blocks and looked at the different compositions that I could make with them, thinking that I would only incorporate the blocks in the final product. I wasn’t really into the final piece with that in mind, but more into the process, which from the perspective of the post-modernists may not be a bad thing, but keeping in mind that this is a project about jars and things that are kept in them, it seems important to think of the object within the jar and therefore this post-modern thing just won’t work on this piece.

So I said to myself, self, I need some cartoons in this bad boy. My friend Mattie came over and I started drawing out a squirrel for the inside of the jar. Later that night as I was walking home I found a piece of what I assume was a cross on the side of the road at some point, but had found its way to the road way. The piece of wood read “Cuddles / We Love N Miss You / 1 – 2008 to 8 – 2010. It’s kind of a sad thought, but really got me thinking so I started working with this:

I decided to add some direct references, another block and to paint the lid of the jar and came up with what I presently have. It interested me to put the monument of a pet within a glass jar much as we keep the living animals in captivity within a glass jar, cage, or at least our doors and windows in our houses. Anyway, here is how the piece currently looks:

I am not sure at this point how close to done the piece is. I kind of feel as if I should paint the squirrel more, but I am not sure that it is necessary. Either way, I think the piece is a big step for me, and I am excited with the results.

See you soon.
Peace
-Mike

I am going to be participating in the Jar Project, a local show here in Portland, ME this coming Spring. The show is being held at Whitney Art Works, which is really exciting because it is the first non-boutique style gallery that I will be showing in since I showed at Gallery 070 back in 2007. The show will be comprised of approximately 50 different artists, so I am sure that my piece will not seem incredibly large or anything, but I am still excited about it.

Thus far I have been really stuck on one of my wooden productions inside my jar’o’art. Here are the painted blocks thus far. I figure that if I find that I do not like this particular set up I can just make this into another one of the trim pieces and then move on with a different Jar Project. I have until the end of the month after all.

Here are the blocks:

I thought this line of blocks actually looked kind of cool not even in the jar yet. I still want to incorporate some kind of graphic element as well, but I am not sure why or how I intend to do it yet. This is an ongoing debate that I have with my adviser at school.

We’ll see what happens. So far so good. At least some different things are happening. It’ll all connect in the end, I’m sure.

Peace
-Mike

If you’ve been following my progression over the past several months you are aware that I have been seeing everything in rectangles and hard edged shapes. I have been putting together some installation work and many sketches for future installation work. Most recently I have been thinking about models for larger pieces done in complete obsession as a finished work. This is more about my obsession recently with Jim Houser and with touching upon some old imagery and thoughts in my sketchbooks. It occurs to me that I wasn’t wrong that I was just too immature as an artist to create some of my ideas from earlier years.

I have been cutting and painting trim scraps and thinking about placing all of this business as a new sort of trim around my studio. I do not know if that is a deep enough intent for the academic art public, but I plan on running with it for a while and failing if need be. I’ve determined recently that I want to fail more. I do not think that I will be as successful as I would like to be until I start to go out on a limb a bit more often and attempt to fail. Failure is key.

Here is the first bit of trim work in the form of a complete piece that I have finished.

It is the top trim of the room. I decided to trim the double doors leading out of the studio first. This is the view that a normal height person gets of the piece. And here is the view of a really tall person or me on a chair.

Failures on this first attempt include:

the wire.
the head work in the back and the trim aren’t perfectly married yet.
The layers do no fit together smoothly.

I am looking forward to fixing these issues. So here I go, Charles Mingus on the radio, saw in hand. Best of wishes to all of you for the rest of 2010. 2011 is a new year with new posts, new art, and perhaps new sensibilities. You never know.

Talk with ya later.
Peace
-Mike

I am very excited to show you folks the development of this new piece! It is hitting some of the same notes as the head installation but feels more significant to maintaining my identity as an artist over the last decade. All of the seriousness of art theory and and art classes, intent and content and practice have me thinking, and what they have me thinking about is joy. I’ve been making artwork for years, and I think the reasoning behind it was best put by a zine writer that I once read. “We Were Ugly, so We Made Beautiful Things”. This is not to say that I think I was ugly, but rather to say that I felt edged out of the norm as a young adult, and that has forever shaped who I have become. I am rather a soft personality, and I love to make people laugh and smile. I do have “intellectual” things to say at times, but it is good to sit back, and realize, that I make things to help you my viewer and me, myself, to communicate, and hopefully to share a laugh, or a smile.

So now, after that preamble it might look like I am trying to pull the wool over your eyes while I make a piece with no substance. Not true. I think this one is going to be great, and has a lot of inside meaning to me, which I’ve determined over the past six months of school, never really needs to be shared, because you will read it how you will read it, and I don’t want to mess that up. Everything means something different to somebody else.

So without further ado, here is the original sketch:

In keeping with the shapes from the last semester I want to use the different panels as different textures in a painting. I have been really into these textures but at the same time have no desire to re-create textures using a paint brush. It is more interesting to me to obtain the textures in a found material.

The tree does look a little different than in the sketch, but I’ve been thinking of the actual production of the pieces as a little more liquid, so that doesn’t really bother me that much. I think that I am attempting to approach a little of Barthes’ concept of Greek Rarus, or the concept of using chance and dispersion together to enhance the art making and viewing process.

And here is the squirrel that I carved. I am very excited to be doing a little bit of this again. I don’t think that I have worked on anything like this since my show for Gallery 070 on Vashon Island. I really like it. Hopefully author and reader agree!

Gotta finish up some Christmas shopping and go see a good friend I haven’t seen in a while, then it’s back to painting and maybe some late night gift exchange. Have a good holiday!

Peace
-Mike