Category: Maine Artist

Categories
Maine Artist naturalism self discovery Watercolor

Drawing From Life, Abstraction & Simplification

Drawing from life never held any allure for me.  As a young man I was obsessed with the Pop Surrealist movements of art depicted in Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose magazines.  I poured over the galleries in the ads and in the gallery directory on the Juxtapoz website.  I de-valued the ability to draw from a figure or to do a portrait.  I felt like the only work that mattered was work that elicited a higher purpose.  I never thought that anything in my daily life might hold enough interest for a viewing populace.  

Currently, I find this to be contrary to my whole practice.  I have found that I am tremendously interested in observation and communicating a figure as simply as possibly.  This has created its own issues.  When I was in school there seemed to be this heavy push to learn to draw the figure as well as possible using values and proportion perfectly.  That was freshman year, when a basis in this information is vital to your artistic development.  I didn’t take many figure drawing or drawing classes after my freshman year.  Really I only took one, but it was that same figure drawing I course. I feel that I didn’t fully learn the basics that I was aiming to learn.

That said, I do feel that I have learned a communication of a figure, albeit in my language.  I have been struggling with justifying this figure to the figure that I felt I should be capable of producing due to that undergraduate education.  So when I was reading about Gauguin’s break with the impressionists this morning, when he was abandoning the comma shaped brush stroke and leaning towards more of a caricature style, it was heartening.  Gauguin referred to his new style as “the synthesis of a form and a color, taking into consideration [only] the dominant.”
Gauguin developed this style while looking through the print works of Hokusai and Hiroshige, styles and theories which I also am very much fond of.  As I’ve been working in watercolor, I’ve started thinking about how to communicate shapes using a single line much like Asian artists working with Sumi ink.  
As I read this morning I realized a connection.  I am simplifying my brush stroke which I use while working in acrylic paint, aiming for a more gestural and abstract expression of my subject.  Lost is the noodling pixellated looking brushstroke.  I never suspected that I would discover so much more emotion by painting subjects from the everyday.  I thought that the allegories that I had created were more powerful than my work from natural subjects, but I am beginning to think that this is false.  I guess only time will tell.  

While I do not suspect that I will entirely abandon my all of my silly character work, it is rather fun after all, I do think that I am excited to continue this level of discovery within the natural subjects.  I don’t feel that it is nearly the sell out that I thought it was every time my mother asked me for a painting of “something pretty.”
Peace
-Mike
Categories
Creative Confidence Drawing Figurative work Gauguin Maine Artist

Be Impressionist to the End, and Fear Nothing

“Be impressionist to the end, and fear nothing,” Gauguin replied to a friend upon the accusation of terrible mysticism.  A terrible mysticism is surely what an artist needs to avoid in order to escape the labels that society so often casts upon creatives. How then, does one tow the line between symbolic, purposeful and thought provoking work and pedantic dribble?  Grandiloquent gestures aside, it still seems imperative to couch your work in some form of symbolism.  And symbolism almost always finds itself speaking for too much; racial issues, religion, or ecological issues.  There is too much there.  Hopefully the artist is capable of utilizing the juxtaposition of symbols in such a way that it will speak to these larger issues without either growing too big for its britches or being too straight forward.

We all utilize a library of our own symbols.  In the past I have relied on a myriad of archaic devices and machines, like the cassette, steam engines, and antique telephones to attempt to begin a dialogue about what it is we’ve discovered, used, and ultimately cast off.  What is that process I’ve wondered. This has allowed me to create a fairly vast body of work that I’ve been proud of on the whole.  As I’ve been drawing more and more in my sketchbooks over the past 9 months, I’ve realized that utilizing these symbols isn’t really achieving what I had hoped for.  I had hoped to make some pretty grand statements, to provide pause, and to ultimately affect people in some way.  I am not getting through. When I created a show of extinct birds, I received comments on how pretty the birds were.  When people saw the patterns that were coupled with each bird, they assumed that they were random.  People did not look and try to solve my riddles.  Perhaps there were too many riddles.

I’ve realized that what I want to communicate is a compassion, an acceptance, a contentedness in the daily routine.  It isn’t so much about what we have cast off.  While I do care about what we have cast off and I think that what is left behind does say a lot about our level of contentedness in life, I think that I have, perhaps, missed the mark a bit.  That said, I do think that some of the symbols are important, just not all symbols all of the time.  It is the juxtaposition of symbol, of the signified and the signifier that I need to master.  Gauguin understood that dichotomy very well, even if he didn’t always expect the viewer to come along for the ride.  He went on to say, “It is evident that the symbolist path is full of potholes, and I have only treaded it with the tip of my foot, but it is, after all, part of my nature, and one must always follow one’s temperament.  I know well that I shall become less and less understood.  What does it matter if I separate myself from the others?  For the masses, I shall be a riddle, for a few, I shall be a poet, and sooner or later quality finds its rightful place.”

In studying Gauguin, I am finding a language within myself that I had given up on.  The human figure is making more sense as a moving object, capable of communicating allegory and emotion.  I am finding in the figures that I am studying the very slimmest inkling of an idea of how to communicate what has been swimming in the ether just beyond my mental grasp, and it excites me deeply.

“For the masses, I shall be a riddle, for a few, I shall be a poet…”  I am slowly stamping out my creative fears one by one.  I shall be a painter to the end.  I will find my voice.

Peace
-Mike

Categories
Drawing Maine Artist Portland Maine Watercolor

New Projects in the Mix

My world has become so full.  I am doing more design work and illustration than I’ve ever had before.  I have had at least three shows and a couple extra projects each year to work on and I now have a family to take care of and a son to raise.  I’m finally starting to feel okay with it.  This is it.  I’m living now.  Whatever that now is, I’ve got to live it.

I’ve been working on a watercolor of a bug every day this year.  Until about a week ago they were straight forward watercolors.  I’ve never used watercolor very much.  It was too unforgiving and I used a heavy hand.  I really just didn’t have the patience.  Enter toddler.  I suddenly have so much more patience than I ever thought myself capable.  The watercolors have advanced though, and I knew that sooner or later I would find myself adding myself back into the project.  This past week I started adding some geometric elements into the pieces.  I really like them.  Here are a few of the best ones.

I have also started another small side project.  I’ve always collected a number of sketchbooks.  One of my favorit types is called Dept. de Poche.  I have a small square book that I’ve started making simple graphics of whatever imagery I’m into on a daily basis.  I’ve started thinking of them as Squares of Vitality.  I hope to fill the whole book with foundation pieces of my vitality.  Here’s one of Mingus and some lettuce that is growing in my garden.

I hope this blogpost finds you well.  I’m wrestling with myself to get back into this space.  It used to be so good for me and I think that now more than ever it could be that outlet that I am not finding in other ways.

Peace
Mike

Categories
Art Dystopian Maine Artist The DeCordova Thoreau Unabomber Utopian

Two Cabins, Hermeticism, Jack London and a Romantic Ideal of Adventure

In my last blog post I mentioned feeling like an artist working hermetically in my space.  The idea of the artist working in a space in solitary is very romantic.  If conversations with people at art shows and sales and even when I am out and about town are proof enough, the average person seems to think of an artist sitting alone in a zen like experience, joyously skipping between painting surfaces, elated to be doing something fun for a living; but tortured at the same time, suffering to find something to eat, irreversibly poor.

As I was reading an article on “Walden, Revisited” at the DeCordova, I started to feel more conflicted by the idea of hermeticism.  When I think of hermeticism, I think of an old man who lived down the road from my Uncle Roger.  I seem to remember that occasionally my cousin Chris and I would venture down and talk to the man, who had crudely constructed his little ramshackle shack out of mismatching woods.  He was grizzled and I have no idea what he talked about.  He is just a vague image in my mind.  Conversely, I think of Strickland in Maugham’s “The Moon and Sixpence.”  He is so taken by his painting that he is unaware of love, social niceties, or even the state of his own body; he was dying of leprosy but still painted on.

The show features “Two Cabins,” by James Benning; comparison between Thoreau’s cabin on Walden and the unabomber, Ted Kacynski’s shack in Montana.  The strange correlation between utopia and dystopia becomes evident.  They are both other worlds which we are in one case yearning for an in another case heading toward.  Perhaps neither is entirely attainable or perhaps both are ultimately truisms dependent on the other.  Maybe it is the job of the hermetic artist, one who is detached from society if only in perception, to reveal the utopia within our more dystopian reality.  Utopia only exists in that we know what does not work.  We have forever been trying to produce machinery and goods which will make life easier.  It is a utopian ideal that life should be easier, but as we grow to find our lives easier, we realize that error of our leisure.  Our leisure begets idleness which as a byproduct results in a dystopian society.

As I sit in studio visiting and revisiting mathematical patterns and optical illusions coupled with drawings of nature and the failures of our industrial society, I begin to see the paradoxical relationship of Utopia and Dystopia.  The work begins to make more sense.  It is more simply put an accumulation of the things we want and the things we wanted and their propensity to change in relation to what we have.

My desires are mercurial at best.  I have started reading “The Sea Wolf,” by Jack London.  Humphrey Van Weyden is a learned man from San Francisco who is lost at sea after his Ferry boat is struck and sinks.  He is picked up by a sealing schooner set for the Japanese coast.  At the helm of this ship is Wolf Larsen.  The two characters talk of their varying ideals of life; Larsen is a scourge and an autodidact, Van Weyden a studious scholar.  Larsen yearns for adventure and the knowledge within that adventure, but only insofar as it will benefit him economically.  Van Weyden is wound up in his philosophical ideals of life.  He is very detached from what life actually is.  He grows to value his own breath, as he could surely have been left for dead at any moment thus far in the book.  And so I find the conundrum that always stings my being and my creativity.  Adventure is dangerous by necessity.  Without any threat to our well being there is no adventure.  We must overcome threats in order to feel that rush indicative of an adventure.  That rush coupled with the bucolic or the mathematical precision of a city’s architecture yield a sense of accomplishment and Benjamin’s aura. I yearn for both settings.  I yearn for the danger and I yearn for my work.  I am at once Van Weyden and Wolf Larsen.  I am Nick Carraway on his ledge in New York city, experiencing life both within myself and witnessing myself.

Peace
-Mike

Categories
Maine Artist rent painting rentpainting

Rent Painting

Yesterday over lunch my friend Melissa and I were talking about creating art for the purposes of making money versus creating artwork out of a compulsion to answer a diverse array of visual problems.  Both are adequate goals.  To be sure creating work that is salable is a difficult problem to solve in and of itself, but it is sadly not a question that I find any interest in.

We definitely agreed that paying for the costs of being an artist were vital.  In regards to that we began to talk about creating a hashtag: #rentpainting.  Hashtag rentpainting refers to that painting which is created at the end of each month in efforts to raise rent money for studio.  Here’s the first #rentpainting from the Mighty Lark.

It is priced at $200, just enough to pay my studio rent.  If you’re interested, simply send payment through paypal to [email protected].  Please spread the word.  Thank you.
Peace
-Mike

Categories
Art Maine Artist Painter Philosophy Sacred Geometry Truth

Sacred Geometry & Agnes Martin

Last week I substitute taught a class on minimalism for a friend of mine at Maine College of Art and I couldn’t be more grateful, as without her, I never would have stumbled across Agnes Martin’s Grid Paintings.  In a Charles Darwent article in the July, August issue of Modern Painters, Darwent says, “the artisanal slowness of Martin’s paintings – each canvas stretched and gessoed by the artist herself, its gridded lines worked out mathematically in her head and then drawn freehand onto the surface with a short ruler – calls for us to see them slowly.“

It was on a crazy morning that I reviewed this material for Angela’s class.  My wife was in need of a greasy breakfast and my son was not having it.  As Austin lost his kit and kaboodle, my dreams of understanding the nuances of a class on minimalism slipped away into an endless void, seemingly never to be found again.  But as Austin drifted off to sleep in the car and little wife ran into a bagel shop for a second go round at breakfast, I settled in to an article about a woman who worked during the fury that was the American Abstract Expressionist movement; a movement characterized by the testicular forces of Pollock and Rothko, a movement which could overshadow someone with something quiet to say.  I thought it sort of like trying to think with an infant screaming into your ear. While reading about her grid paintings I began to see the similarities between the origin of her quiet lines drawn with a small ruler, and my bic pen lines drawn with my square.  The measure is incredibly important, but really not important at all.  The patterns require a geometry, but where they fall apart oft becomes the most interesting part of the piece.  
A good friend visited me today in studio and showed me a video on sacred geometry and the number 9.  It is incredible how ordered the entire world is on a physical and theoretical level.  Still, when we consider our social interactions, cultural differences and general racial and caste warfare the order falls apart.  The micro view begets The Lord of the Flies while the macro view looks more like Huxley’s Brave New World.  We are wired for disorder but built on geometry.  Therein lies some of the meaning that I’ve been seeking for my sudden compulsion to paint patterns in the last year and a half.  That’s not all that I realized today, however.  As I was chatting with Melissa, it dawned on me, that when I was creating animal characters I was responding to people that I would see out and about town, combining features and personality traits, finding patterns within our human experience.  When I stopped working as much with the characters, I commenced creating patterns.  I began my own hermetic process, a holy endeavor, like a monk, holed away in my studio seeking a holy equation, but accepting that life is more about flaws and variances than exactitude.  That is my truth for today and will stand until a newer, shinier truth takes its place.

Time to head to bed with a sketchbook, my journal, and a book of Von Humboldt essays.
Peace
-Mike
Categories
Installation jazz Maine Artist painting race soul

Dig

I am in Chicago sitting quietly on a friends couch waiting for the illustrious Shirah Neumann to pick me and drive us to Kankakee, IL, a town which I have never heard of, to install a show called “Transmissions.”  The installation is loosely titled “Coal Trane,” but I am not sure that it will stay that. En route to Chicago I started reading Amiri Baraka’s “Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music.”
Baraka is an intense sound. At first I found his writing very difficult to follow. His rhythm fell very much in an African realm. It felt disjointed to me, a person who had never experienced that language in a medium other than hiphop and soul music. But after I reached his essay on rhythm the text began to move with a strikingly poetic fluidity. It is always difficult to read the history of blacks and other ethnic minorities in America as it is near impossible to do so without feeling an immense amount of guilt, but Baraka lenlighttened me with a truth that was always right in front of my face. So obvious was the thought that I felt not guilty, but embarrassed when he led me to it. We were always taught about the history of Blacks in America. This is what THEY had to go through. Even in the sense of our learning about the Afro-American culture we are encouraged to view this race as other. It’s a little painful to be able to draw similarities between a David Attinborough special and the history of a people that make up a significant portion of our populace. 
And so Baraka has left me thinking. He goes on to speak about how people dig for information, for communication, for the need to feel as one, and for the love of life, exemplified rather than ignored through the need to get down. As I’ve read this book it has occurred to me how much the music has always meant to me. This piece started as a pun on Coltrane, coal Trane, because it sounded like soul train. This made me think of all the music that I thought fueled my soul, but I realize now that that is wrong. I realize now that the music is our soul. It is the personification of an idea that swims in the ether of our being. If you feel it you can hear, play it, paint it. But if you can’t then you are left outside waiting for your heart to beat. 
So blow that horn blow and feel that jam from the ground through your feet and all over this wide planet. The key to the world playing nice is feeling. You can feel the world if you feel their jams. Don’t listen. Be the vibe and find the groove.  Drop the needle and spin into another condition. You gotta git it in your soul man.  

Peace
-mike

Categories
Art Maine Artist Mythology Pacific Northwest Natives Solace The Mighty Lark totems

The Artist’s Talk – A Rough Draft

I’ve determined that I will share with you the rough draft of my notes for my artist talk on Friday.  I have been under the assumption that nothing has changed in me since before graduate school for the longest time, but I now realize that this is a fallacy.  My work has changed, as too, my voice has changed.  Let me know what you think of the notes.
 

to·tem
ˈtōtəm/
noun
noun: totem; plural noun: totems
  1. a natural object or animal believed by a particular society to have spiritual significance and adopted by it as an emblem.
This body is really a culmination of several years worth of work. Tonight I intend to share with you the source of my interest in totems and native artwork, my love affair with found surfaces, the intersection between illustration and painting, and how we arrived at this point.
I have lived in Seattle twice. The Seattle Art Museum, SAM, has an extensive collective of Pacific Northwest Artifacts. I’d like to stand in front of you and say that my interest in totems was derived from my exposure to this work. It’s not. That exposure did not hinder my interest by any means, but I can definitively say that it was not the source of my interest in totems.
Seattle, I think it’s safe to say, is known for its coffee shops. I frequented many of them. One of these was Top Pot Donuts, which made a might fine donut and some mighty good coffee. One morning after a domestic dispute, I found myself seated upon patio furniture out front of Top Pot eating a maple glazed donut and drinking a large coffee. As the crumbs started to fall through the perforations in the wonky table, I realized that I had a visitor. A small bird was hopping from one side of my foot to the other, on top of my foot, around in circles and every which way, ecstatic over the falling crumbs of my donut. While in my vacant domestic doldrums, it occurred to me that there was something about this bird, something not quite like escapism and not quite like omniscience, but firmly placed in a realm of entropy. He, or she, I am not really aware of the distinction in colors of this particular city dwelling species of bird, was completely free to hop around and eat crumbs, or, to more importantly, fly away.
Let’s fast forward approximately three years. I was working with a gallery called The Hive in Los Angelos. The curator of the Hive requested that the artist regulars in his group shows all create an avatar. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, although it now has in recent years, but what I was searching for in an artistic avatar, was anonymity, escape, dream seeking and freedom. I wanted a world full of choose your own art adventures, because I felt that my own world presented myself and my peers with such a limited offering of adventure. I immediately thought back to my tiny bird friend. He had the capability of all of the adventure he could possibly dream of. I titled him the Mighty Lark, and he was all of the things that I was not.
I followed the Mighty Lark with a multitude of characters, all of which I thought were just cute little creatures, but all of which actually seem to carry little bits of my persona. I carried them to graduate school, where they were dismissed and ridiculed and I tried to hide them, but they kept coming out. They kept coming back. I couldn’t hide my little illustrative troupe. They were my in crowd that I could never attend to in my real world. I carried as well my desire for found and weathered surfaces, another key element to my work that I could never begin to explain.
As I kept day dreaming about and developing these characters and these surfaces, I kept trying to come up with what I thought of as “big boy” art ideas. I wanted to create work that would appear in major galleries across the world, that would make people go oooh and aaaah in the way that Jeff Koons’ huge shiny things make all art snobs and A.D.D. kids go oooooh and aaaah. But what has occurred to me in the past year is that I didn’t want to say anything that big. I didn’t want to make the things that kept appearing in my art text books which were categorized as successful fine art.
And so this past year, I realized that I need to provide a frame into my day dream, some way to separate the viewer from my characters and illustrations. To this end I discovered the grid. It was mathematical, but avoided the rules, just as I did in high school so many years ago. It was about color and order. It was about framing. I determined that I would provide my viewer with the right side of the mushroom, so that they could shrink into my headspace. More importantly, however, I realized that my band of merry and mellow characters needed their own cosmology. I needed to separate them from this earthly realm and don them with the moniker of myth. I needed to make them a spiritual other. As I was attempting to create this more spiritual idea of my characters, it was then only logical that the images of Pacific Northwest Totems began to mean something to me.
The characters in the original totem poles and native art told myths which related the origins of that which was important to each tribe. As I began to breathe the vital air into the pictorial lungs of my illustrations I started to realize that these characters and machines were actually very vague representations and allusions to the ideas and beliefs of my own tribe. Like the artifacts of actual tribes, however, I have always wanted my work to feel old, to feel like it has its own history, and so, suddenly it occurred to me that, “hey, this found wood thing carries some history.” It carries age. It is the perfect medium for constructing totems out of. This is obvious. What were totem poles made of? I had my answers, for now at least. I have come as far as I have come.
And with that I will open the floor for questions.
Categories
David Lynch Maine Artist Nez Perce Pacific Northwest Natives Sculpture The White Lodge totems

The White Lodge

I’ve been hard at work.  My son was born a week ago yesterday and after 5 days of sitting still, growing used to the idea of being a father, coupled with helping my wife out and about, I started to get very antsy.  I determined that I needed to create grids that were environments of their own.  I wanted to control the space, both from the point of how a viewer would be able to access that space and where that work could be positioned.

A little over a year ago, I adopted an image of falling houses as an indication of nuclear families surrounding me but never feeling terribly apart of me.  I’m now one child away from a nuclear family but that house image still sits with me.  There is something very profound to me about the symbol that indicates stability, family, good health, American Values, and prosperity.  I don’t think any symbol of the American Dream is more accessible than the simple house.  Our children understand it and draw it from a very young age.  It is not so much the object which makes it important, but everything that it represents to the child.  That is where his or her family lives.  There they are, or at any rate should be, completely safe.  It is a symbol of the thing that they have come to understand from living in a space with the same people for a number of years, people that most likely have been with you since day one.

Ideas of family still appear far different in this 21st Century than they did in previous centuries.  Our families are not as close as they used to be.  College age people move all over the country, sometimes never to come back.  We are a trans-familial society if we are to use Baudrillard’s logic.  When Baudrillard uses the prefix “trans,” he refers to an item in culture which is experienced by the simulacra, or copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original.  In essence, our idea of family is what we see on television and in the movies.  This cookie cutter existence which is prescribed by various clothing, household goods, and technology companies is indicative of a happiness that never existed in that way to begin with.  It’s similar to that saying “money can’t buy you happiness.”

During my wife’s pregnancy and our ensuing birth, I began to lose myself in reading on cultures which stressed oral histories passed along through the bloodlines.  The indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest particularly held my attention.  The art work and mythologies which are so unique and specific to each tribe seemed a healthy alternative to the cultural sameness which modern America seems to prefer.  The design and pattern in the work seemed to speak of an order and a logic by which the people lived.  Naturally, as my social life changed, I sought out this same type of order through patterns of my own.  I also started to reincorporate characters into my work, defining them through mythologies that I steadily made up.  The final straw which cast me into this present work occurred while reading about Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.  Christian missionaries worked with the Nez Perce, who were a very receptive nation, to instill in them the ideas of Christianity.  After a time of adopting the Christian Religion, many Nez Perce returned to their owner dreamer faith.  The Nez Perce believed in spirits called weyekins which would, they thought, offer “a link to the invisible world of spiritual power”(1).

This idea of spirits linked to spiritual power reminded me of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.  I started to think about the White Lodge and the Black Lodge.  My brain leaped to the falling houses again; symbols of a lodge, a home where people congregated, a spiritual dwelling.  It suddenly made sense to create a lodge of my own.  It is the Lewis’s White Lodge, where the Mighty Lark is omniscient.   It is a place of safety for my boy.

 The idea is still taking a little shape, but at least I understand how there is a context to mix these creatures and my more contemporary painting work.  There is a spirituality and a mythology brewing which I think will explain for me some of my dependency on this more illustrative method of communication.

Peace
-Mike

(1) Hoxie, Frederick E.; Nelson, Jay T. (2007). Lewis & Clark and the Indian Country: the Native American Perspective. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. pp. 66–67. ISBN 0252074858. OCLC 132681406

Categories
Color Jets to Brazil Maine Artist

Color, the Kaddish and Jets to Brazil

Today I finished work early and came home to an empty house.  It was lovely.  I packed up some books, stretched out on the couch, read a bit of Allen Ginsberg’s The Kaddish, and listened to Jets To Brazil’s Perfecting Loneliness.  It was a completely peaceful moment.  Then my wife came home, made a lovely dinner, minus her chipped tooth.  Darn you Whole Foods and your ready to eat Edamame.

After dinner, Courtney shipped me off to studio for a bit with a thermos full of coffee.  It was a great night.  At studio I worked on her Christmas present, which I can’t share and a pipe in the clouds piece that has been coming slowly along.  After about an hour of working on the piece, I decided that it needed more color, a little pop in one direction or another.  I retrieved my cobalt turquoise which I hadn’t used in ages (way back in the days of the cloud constructors and my show at Lunar Boy Gallery in Astoria, OR.)  After a bit of experimentation I was reminded of exactly how awesome the color was.  While this isn’t a terribly good photo I think you will get the idea.

The piece has definitely taken a turn for the better.  I can’t wait to go work on it again tomorrow.  Courtney is actually packing me lunch for studio tomorrow as we speak.  Life is awesome.

Peace
-Mike