Category: totems

Categories
Cityscapes Discovery Family Day Found Objects New England Painter Portland Maine totems Whale

Family Day and a Significant Break in Walking

Saturdays, since I quit working in the restaurant industry and found myself married with child, have become family day.  I often find myself reluctantly leaving the house to go do something social when really I want to hole up reading or head to studio, but all in all I am a fan of family day.  Today we ventured out for a walk.  After leaving the house and taking a left turn, we walked all the way up the hill and down the Eastern Prom to the water.  We then turned left again and walked along a bit of the Back Bay Trail.  The Back Bay Trail features a free wall where folks are legally allowed to paint graffiti.  There was a fellow working as we passed today.  As we walked past I started thinking about how I’ve always wanted to do work in public.  The problem is that I’ve never wanted to leave that lasting mark on a space.

I have often wondered, however, if the act of subtraction within a landscape might work the same as addition in a landscape.  Both Leave a lasting mark.  No matter how we look at it, the environment that we see is the environment that is.  What I mean is this, we cannot exclude the detritus of society in favor of a bucolic sense of the pristine landscape.  Our landscape is just as much our trash as it is our carefully tended shrubberies, raised beds, and lawns.  If we are to remove that detritus with the cognitive desire for visual change cannot that act make just as much of a mark as adding ink or paint?

The discovery of such an object, Gascoygne contended, is accompanied by an emotional experience “of an aesthetic nature . . . as the finder discovers an unrealised significance in the object” (p. 170). A new boundary is formed around the object by the finder through removing it from its found environment and placing it in a new one, thus empowering the finder in the role of creating a new reality for the object.  – Paul M. Cacim
I would argue that a new reality is also created for the space which the object formerly occupied.
After my wife and I had passed the free wall, we needed to stop to feed our son.  As we were sitting on a short fence, I noticed a stray piece of driftwood.  It struck me that it would be a good piece of wood to take home to work on, possibly to make another totem.  Then it occurred to me that the object had its own beauty that didn’t need to be removed from its environment.  Perhaps the drawing which I would make would be stronger left annonymously right where the found object was.  I decided to draw one of my totemic whales on this piece of wood, sign it, and leave it.  It was, I think, the first time that I have ever detached myself from the collecting process.  The collecting process encumbers my ability to distribute work in a manner that allows the necessary level of anonymity required to be successful in street art forays.

I was very much pleased with this piece and surprisingly felt fine creating something that only really exists on this blog and on my instagram page.  I feel like this fleeting level of connection is more appropriate than the attachment that I usually endow these objects with.  The act was more about that space than a gallery space or an art store.  It was that object AND place AND moment that I was attracted to.  Rather than attempting to render that level of excitement in a setting by making a bang up piece, maybe it is better to create and leave that piece?

Also, I wonder, as this act settled with me throughout the day.  I was able to show my discovery by creating this work and leaving it where I found it.  The tiny cityscapes project that I have begun is much the same.  I am excited about my discoveries.  I feel like not many people are concerned with looking up as they walk or drive about a city.  Things can be hidden in plain sight just by placing them above our field of vision.  I have been obsessed with looking up at these splices of Portland.  The pieces that I’ve been creating have just been the equivalent of a view finder showing others how and where to look to see these segments of society which are right in front of us.

My work is getting very exciting for me again.  Between the things I am reading and the theories that are starting to grow on me and the family that is constantly rooting for me and providing me pause, I feel as though I am becoming a much more mature artist.  I feel like I am actually chasing my dreams again.
Peace
-Mike

Categories
Brain Structure Madlib Pedagogy Philosophy Study totems

My Brain is Different. Different, how?

I was turned onto a study today, which was recently published by the BBC News concerning the possible differences in artists and non-artists brains.  Research suggested that artists carried more developed grey matter in the area of the brain called the precuneus in the parietal lobe.  Additionally subjects more disposed to drawing were found to have increased grey and white matter in the cerebellum and also in the supplementary motor area.  This leads to a a greater refinement in motor skills.  The full article can be found here.  

The question that I can’t shake is one of origin.  Are artists and creatives innately granted more of this particular type of brain matter, or is the function of these various areas of the brain similar to the function of a muscle used in sport?  If a subject were to use his or her creative muscle more would that then allow those parts of the brain to grow?

I’ve also been mulling over a bit of what I read in the August 2014 issue of Juxtapoz on Madlib.  DJ’s have always seemed to be the rawest form of what I consider my creativity to be.  They are constantly collecting sounds and beats, while I find that I am constantly collecting surfaces and imagery.  The method is not that different.  Madlib expresses that he is “into” no particular style of music or sounds.  He is a student of the sounds.  He is a student of the world.  You can see a preview of some of the Madlib articles on Juxtapoz’s website, here.  I think that this format of thinking about art work is more productive than relying on the idea that my brain may or may not be different from anyone else.  Essentially, hard work and study may in fact improve the function and growth of certain areas of the brain, but half of the production is in the study.

The reason that I find myself curious about the origin of this creativity is more or less to hone those skills.  We all wonder what it is that makes us unique.  I think that creatives can actually more actively be aware of what it is that makes them unique, but the source of the attributes sometimes interrupts the flow of the creativity.  Perhaps knowing that working the area like a muscle will help, both scientifically and dogmatically.  The idea of “working your creative muscle” was one pushed in art school, hence dogma, but seeing this study seems to give some much needed credence to this hokey sounding idea.

The patterns within my totem series seems to be a good example of both the study and the push.  I feel as though I am thoroughly exercising my brain, while thoroughly studying some classic material.  Here are the two newest totems that I finished.

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
ME illustration Mighty Lark Progress totems

Good and Big

Last night I had a First Friday Open Studio event at my studio in the State Theater Building with my good friend Shirah.  We split the studio walls down the middle and put her work up on one half and mine on the other.  We did not have many visitors, a few good friends who stayed for a bit but not many outside folk.  What we did have, however, was an opportunity to power clean the studio and hang up all of the work that has been going on in the space.

I’ve devoted the last couple weeks to a bunch of totems, which I can draw at home.  Working at home is becoming more and more useful as my wife approaches her 33rd week of pregnancy.  Meanwhile I’ve been filling in the time with several books on the Navajo, Athapascans and some of the Northwest Tribes.  It is strange to be reading Navajo legend while working on totems.  Their tribe didn’t make totem poles, sand paintings, yes, but no totem poles.  However, the legends and spirit of the nation has been influencing me a great deal.  The Navajo are only known as the Navajo in that the Spaniards residing in the Southwest named them as such.  They refer to themselves as the Dene, or people of the earth. 

This clash of identities is compelling to take on in the respects of being an artist.  During my open studio I asked that my shop be called The Mighty Lark, which is my art making moniker, but the building operator put me down as Michael Lewis and called my business name Mighty Lark.  I do not really think of the Mighty Lark as my business.  I am the Mighty Lark, just not when I am cooking or teaching, only when I am creating artwork and living with my pieces.  With this in mind, my own personal mythologies are starting to come out in force in my new series of totem pieces.  I am going to hang them as an allover pattern and try to take up an entire wall.

Here is an image of them in progress.

They are adding up quickly.  It is the most exciting thing that I am currently working on.  I have also been working more on the laterally divided pieces for Sohn’s gallery.  Here is an update of the most recent piece in that series.

I started painting this work opaquely this morning.  Having made that decision there is still more work to do, but I think that the quality of the piece is definitely improving with that change.  If nothing else it is helping me understand what these lighthouse character and squid characters are to me. 

The work is coming along, as is my research.  I finally feel as though I am heading down a path that I understand and desire to take viewers down.  This is a big step.  All of my blog posts in the past six months seem to mention something about big steps.  I don’t know if everything that I mention really is a big step or not, but it does feel good, and big, today.

Peace
-Mike

Categories
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