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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

Sunday morning the MECA MFA students all piled into a very small studio atop a lighting fixture store in Williamsburg in order to peruse the exquisite work of Julika Rudelius. She spoke incredibly eloquently of race and money and power, and also of the social male. She claimed that men in this time are equally if not more concerned with their looks than are their female counterparts. As a moniker, she dubbed them “Dandies”.

I have never aligned myself with this sort of man. I am more what my very good friend refers to simply as “a dude”. And so I decided to make some work about the subject, about how all people, men included have their anxieties, their situations that they just can’t handle, the shortcomings and inadequacies that are what make us all human.

So with the head project still pumping through my veins, and a new goal in mind, I started thinking on the bus ride back from New York. Here are the results of my thought. Finals will follow in the next couple of weeks.

The text in the one on the left reads “emotionally fragile”. It’s funny when I start to admit to myself that I do have my emotional tirades on paper, that it feels so much better. I think that most people do though.
I really like this second one. I think all these text pieces should be accompanied by men with Sam Elliot staches.

So beat. Time for bed. We’ll have to chat again soon.
Peace
-Mike

I’ve been working with some new hat sketches and some new sketches for installations. I am still fighting to include a graphic element in all of the installation work, despite the fact that professors claim that the work is stronger without it. But I wonder if it is worthwhile to be strong work if at the same time it loses the piece that is fundamentally me, the author. How do I reconcile cutting myself completely out of the piece? I don’t think I want to, so I’m not going to do it.

New sketches, graphic element included:

This piece I think is going to include a head and a hat rack with several different hats on it that people will be able to take off of the rack and apply to the cartoon’s head. I am not sure if people will really feel ok moving the hats, so if you have any suggestions on how to make people feel welcome to move the artwork around, let me know. I figure it is kind of like clothing for paper dolls, but wooden.

This is a more formalist piece that I have been thinking about. I am not sure that I am really into it, but I like the idea of a history and a texture through the wood. Not sure where it is going beyond that though…..

Lastly, I’ve been thinking a lot about where the art comes from lately. The material collection grows more and more interesting. I think that I am going to try to document where I get all of the materials from in the future for an added layer of history. I am after all relatively obsessed with maps.

Hope you folks like the work. I’m pretty pleased with the revelations that I have had of late. Hopefully it will equal some good work for all of you to view as well soon.

Til next time.
Peace
-Mike

This semester was absolutely crazy. It was a mental marathon and one that I will take the full 6 weeks to recover from and I think. For the next couple weeks I intend to focus on some more illustrative fun work. Watching Beautiful Losers today, cemented that thought for me. In 2004, when I bought the book, it really changed the way I created, how I felt about my work, and where I felt I fit into the art world. It did wonders for the development of my artwork as a viable option for shows and illustration work.

I would like to pursue some more work in the illustrative vein and really concentrate on the vitality of that cartoon imagery, hopefully pushing it into the installation work and not leaving the two mutually exclusive. Someone told me earlier in the year that everything that I do is connected, even if the only connection is that I did the work.

The last piece of school was by no means finished but I believe it was still a step in teh right direction. It was more interventionist in nature, and left a great deal of room for improvement, which I found to be a relief and not particularly a crutch. A good feeling.

I have also started sketching out more involved environments and more detailed installation pieces. I think that the endpoint of these pieces will be more sculpture than anything else. We will see.

This piece I intend to make in the round, preferably to be displayed in the middle of a room. I am not sure that I will be painting on any of the pieces, or at least whether there will be anything representational on the wooden parts.

This piece I would like to make into more of a fete of engineering excellence. The thought of balancing the large piece on a small fulcrum is immensely interesting to me and makes me think of the problems I used to give myself when trying to work with Legos and Lincoln Logs when I was a little kid.

But for now. Illustration. Cartoons. Whatever I feel like really. I might even play some guitar and exercise some hobbies or something. I’m going to get another coffee.

Til next time.
Peace
-Mike

Last night I had to put together the installation with some level of finish. I was very pleased with what occurred. I know that when people see images of it sometimes it doesn’t appear to have changed much, but in my head it has changed so much and the small things that have changed and the bits and pieces that have been added really make it work for me. It has been an incredible lesson as well. I’ve learned that this is what I’ve been trying to create for several years now but haven’t been able to. It almost seems like that realization is what graduate school is all about anyway, so maybe this school thing is a complete success.

Anyway here’s a panorama of the installation finish as it stands now and as it was critiqued.

I also finally figured out a method of hanging and creating a piece out of a few boards that I have had grouped together in my head for ages now. They are interchangeable. I am toying with the idea of hanging the piece and inviting people to move the boards around. Let me know what you think.

I really like this piece. Though I would like it even better if the room that it is currently hanging in didn’t absolute exude office space. That’s it for now though. Starting to catch a little cold, so I think I will go take a nap and enjoy my day.

Til next time.
Peace
-Mike

For some reason tonight I felt like going back to freshman year of high school. I’m pumping a little Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It’s odd, but I feel like this album should have been played in heavier rotation after the whole break up this summer. Ben Gibbard definitely had the corner on that market, but I view Mellon Collie with far more nostalgia. It makes me remember, a lot. Which leads me to the piece that I am working on now.

THE INSTALLATION

The installation has been a long time coming. Ever since I first purchased the book Beautiful Losers in 2004, I have wanted to make pieces similar to the large installations by Barry McGee, Thomas Campbell, and Phil Frost depicted within the book’s beautiful pages. For some reason, whether it be space issues or just the daunting task of changing my entire course of working, I have never done it. Until now. I am finally working on my first installation and it is, albeit not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, a start.

First Incarnation:

The head was actually far easier to hang than I had assumed it would be. A timely trip to the hardware store and two picture hanging kits later and the head and the original set of surround pieces was up. Unfortunately with this one I felt the head and it’s neighboring blocks were too crowded. You can get a better idea of what I mean from this angle.

Admittedly, I just wasn’t pleased with this crowded approach. While I feel the claustrophobia is very important, I at the same think there is a tight line to walk here. Too crowded will not do. So I tried to air it out a bit, and I’m liking it better…

And here is to the right side….

I really enjoy how the two pieces of raw found wood when placed in juxtaposition to my painted elements look painted. Also the tone on the two pieces is very similar to the wall and starts asking some interesting questions that I have had of late about art within the cube. It was also mentioned to me tonight that I should really show up to a construction site and make one of these. I do not know if I am up for this guerrilla art making ideal, but I do enjoy the idea of this type of project being site specific and located outside.

Well I’ve bantered enough for one night I think. I’m going to go jump in bed before 11. You have no idea how rare that is.

Peace
-Mike

There is a peaceful calm in the air. Finally. I find myself going to bed later and rising earlier. Things are far from perfect. I am currently working on several projects and none of them are really going exactly how I had planned, but I am pleased that I am doing them, no matter how they turn out. In fact I am viewing failure as a means to an ends now. I am not sure that this is such a radical change from the way that I felt before this term but it is good to realize that it is the way that I feel. (also of note, apparently I can type while looking out the window now, very cool)

I am amazed with where I am now. I had never thought that I would be in this kind of atmosphere, where intellectual thought is encouraged and where I am surrounded by some of the most amazingly intelligent and gifted people that I have ever met. It is a pleasure to have this opportunity, and I am finally feeling well enough emotionally that I can really appreciate that. Also thank you US government for your loan assistance!

But I blabber.

Today I received another map in the mail. Slowly this project is building up some steam. I am loving it. This one came from Massachusetts, so now I have 4 states and 1 province represented. So exciting! I have not scanned the 3 most recent maps yet. They are forthcoming in a tremendous display of scanning endurance, but for now, here is a little teaser.

This project is so cool. I am very pleased that people are getting involved. And please, once again, I am not concerned with how “artistic” the maps are. That is not the nature of the project. If you are interested in sending a map, please do, without any concerns of having your artistic abilities judged. Here’s the address to send to:

Mike Lewis
28 Gilman St. Apt 2
Portland, ME 04102

Keep in mind, that each person ho sends me a map is going to be receiving an original map drawn by me in return. Seems like an easy way to receive some free art and to continue getting to one another a little better in this world that is so digital-centric. Don’t you think?

Hope you are all well. Have a great day.
Peace
-Mike

Today I spent several hours in a coffee shop making sketches for this piece that I am working on. The head structure is becoming a much larger project, which somehow when I was originally putting it together I suspected would happen. Basically what I have determined is that I am going to put together a cross hatched support using shingles that mimic my line worked cross hatching with the big head in the foreground. The sketch comes out looking like this:The shingles that I have came off of the roof early this fall, which means that they are in pretty rough shape. It’s not like anything that comes off of this house is in particularly tip-top shape. So we’re talking a little dry rot and some brittleness, so screws seem right out. Even though drilled holes seem to go fine, the expansion that the screw would make out of the hole seemed like a bad idea, so I decided to join each piece using a loop of wire. Here is the beginning of that:

The shingles seem to be holding together well with the wire, and the wire seems relatively non-invasive to the flow of the wood. There is not too much shine, and not too much weight added. I think it will work out well.

I also managed to piece together the face with strips across the back today and added the first eyebrow shape. I went with finishing nails as I liked the repetition along the brow area.

This project is going better than I had really suspected it would. I am very pleased because the other options that I had worked up for myself in the studio were just so lacking in hands on time that I couldn’t get into them. This is meaty enough for me to really get into and it is more personal than a lot of the projects that I develop as well.

Hope you like the progression and hopefully I have more for you tomorrow as well.
Til then.

Peace
-Mike