Category: Pacific Northwest Natives

Dime Store Novels, Ferry Boats, and Totems

Post author By mightylark
Post date August 12, 2014
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My preparations for Picnic have been progressing well. While the majority of my days involve juggling the schedule of an infant, I have still been able to spend a good portion of time in studio and an even better portion of time drawing. The difficulty of having a small family is obvious. There is so very much to do. We are very much into the attachment parenting philosophy, so when the little man requests attention we are rapt.

Over the weekend my wife and I made a trip out to Vinalhaven, the island that she is from, to visit her godparents. I was concerned that I would get nothing done, but I can say on two counts that this is not the case. I both managed to draw out seven new totems and create a new character based on a design decorating the door of an armoire in the side room where we slept and made it through a hefty portion of the Sirens of Titan, a Vonnegut book that I purchased in one of my favorite book stores which I always visit before getting on the ferry.

The Sirens of Titan traverses a land without feeling, the need for breath, or the need for family. Men and women are taken away to Mars and separated from their families. Small antennas are placed in peoples’ heads so that they can be shocked every time they begin to remember anything. This brings an entirely new meaning to the Zen sort of principle that there is only the now. It’s a good read for the workaholic in me. I feel as though this entity entirely controlled by remote and separated from the things in life that matter is not that far off from the human being that I become when I trap myself in my studio for too long. Oddly I had been kicking and screaming about this trip, wanting to spend more time in studio and what I actually realized is that was one of the most important times to spend with my family, on an island, resting and enjoying the company of some very compelling and compassionate individuals. The drawings that I completed on the island reflected a patience that I think I am sometimes missing.

I am attempting to reach 100 small totems for the Picnic festival. I don’t think there is much chance of me making it there as I make my drawings and mock ups more and more complicated, but I do think that the work that I show will be of a great quality and there is definitely over fifty of the totems now. It is pleasant to find inspiration in my surroundings. It is obvious that one might, however it is very easy to get lost within the studio mind, rehashing ideas and observing nothing of importance. I thank my wife for allowing me an escape from my studio mind.

Here are some photos of some of the more recent totems.

These two birds are based on the character that I saw on the armoire on the island. I don’t feel like any of my characters have this much grace and yet these birds were by no means a copy of the birds on the armoire, merely influenced by the motion. I feel like one of these birds would do well in a painting referencing Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash pictured below. Something to do with the plumage in the tail mimicking the dog’s tale and the master’s feet, but I am not sure how yet. It is just lodged in my temporal lobe waiting for the time being.

This last bird is based off of some drawings of Petroglyphs from the Haida in the Pacific Northwest, however one of Courtney’s friends pleasantly pointed out to me that it looked like an Angry Bird. I hope that that is not the only thing that this bird reminds people of. The pattern on the side is based on a fabric that my wife bought to make household goods with.

I am really pleased with the work that I have been creating of late. It is good to have my wife to make me step out of my own head every once in a while.

Peace
-Mike

Ps Here’s a cute photo of my boy.

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

The Artist’s Talk – A Rough Draft

Post author By mightylark
Post date June 26, 2014
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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

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.

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

costumes forest ranger generations New York Olympic Peninsula Pacific Northwest Natives potlatches Seattle Tacoma Smokey the bear Tlingits totem totems tradition tribes

A Family Totem

I have been obsessing over the art of the Pacific Northwest Natives again. The Tlingits in the Alaskan territories are fascinating, but what I find even more interesting are some of the tribes on the Olympic Peninsula and in the present day Seattle Tacoma area. The form lines and characters in the Pacific Northwest characters are beautiful, but the story behind the tribes makes the the topic even more rich. As I’ve been checking out the artwork and reminiscing about my time in Seattle, I’ve started putting together my own ideas of creation and tribes.

I’ve read that at ceremonies the costumery which members of the tribe wear is dependent on ancestry. If you are descendent of the person who first experienced a rainbow for instance, you would wear regalia at ceremonies and potlatches which were indicative of that moment. This idea got me thinking about a shift in ideology. I’ve used the idea of totems, a story documented from top to bottom, generally expressing the story of a tribe, creation, or parable passed down through generations, as a catalyst for using my own creatures in made up parables. As my wife has just reached her tenth week of pregnancy, I’ve been wondering what spirit my father passed along to me. My father was a forest ranger in the state of New York, Region 5. His area encompassed parts of the Adirondack State Park through some waterfront on the St Lawrence River and Lake Ontario. The area he was left to cover was huge. I’ve always searched for a way to express this authoritarian figure that I remember from my childhood. I’ve started multiple paintings, some good and some particularly awful, but have never been able to indicate the amount which I have looked to my father as this figure of guidance and as my way of learning to both assimilate and to exist independently of this world.

A portrait of someone doesn’t seem to be the best way to get at the type of respect that I am looking for. I needed something that stood for my father’s role professionally and paternally. As I was reading about totems it dawned on me that Smokey the Bear was indicative of my father’s role and his profession. Eureka.

The Mighty Lark sketch became necessary as an indication of my own influence on the baby badger that is inside of my wife. Notice the badger to the right page of this sketch. Originally I was thinking of keeping the Mighty Lark more Pacific Northwest in design with formlines defining the eyes and beak but I think that I’d rather keep the figures notably mine.

Here is the final drawing laid out. I will post the finished painting very soon.

Be sure to keep up. I’m positive that my posts will get harrier and harrier as the weeks ensue in this pregnancy. I’m also curious what type of art I will be thinking of as I keep reading about being a partner. That word has always kind of made me gag. I like wife. Wife is good. Partner, bleck.

Peace
-Mike