Moving is such a drain on creativity, resources both financial and mental, and time. Since my wife and I found out that we had to move, we have had our noses to the ground trying to make a bit more money, find a house, and keep ourselves sane. Throughout this process the only thing that has kept me okay is sharing my friend Shirah’s studio space. I have a show coming up in February and another in May. I have several projects on the drawing boards that I wish to give my attention so much more than I want to give my attention to a move that at times I feel so completely nonplussed by.
That said, there is no way around the move. It will happen, and so, that studio space has become a bit of a safe haven for me. Recently I began to think about the pieces that I was making in the different divided segments on the 6″ X 6″ panels. I wondered if I couldn’t combine the ideas of pattern that I had been studying in Franz Boas’s Primitive arts with the ideas behind those segmented images. Franz Boas suggested that patterns change vertically but become repetitive or symmetrical to the left and right. This mimics change in our everyday setting. Consider the skyline, treeline and land. They are three different segments to our everyday which change vertically but repeat in a sense laterally.
I have always felt like I work better in constrained proportions. Long vertical or horizontal pieces have always seemed more comfortable to work in than the traditional canvas shapes. When I have been stacking these pieces I’ve realized that I am actually creating a different type of pattern. Check out the images below.
In addition, I’ve been trying to do more index card pieces for the show in February. It is a show of advice and words of comfort from media, relatives and my own sketchbooks. These word based pieces have struck me as slightly uninteresting as of late, but this morning I started using one of the new sketchbooks that my wife got me for Christmas. I started to think about the word based pieces as text out of silent movies. Here is the result.
The patterns grow. I am beginning to think of words as a really complicated pattern. That is all that a pun really is; manipulating the patterns that we have created for letters. I’m off to studio for a bit more work. I hope you enjoyed the images.
Peace
-Mike