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I am a little lost as to how to proceed with the piece I started working on in studio today. The current state of the piece is good. I am very pleased with where it has ended up. I chose to work through the suspicion that what I had in mind was an incomplete thought (painting.). 

No answers are coming to me. I’ve worked myself into a corner of my choice. I am under the impression that I will have to just take a step while I am working on the piece, something that does not fit particularly well which will arrest my eye and change the course of the work. 

I fear that being too conservative might make the piece feel a bit constipated but if I do not plan the piece out at all there is a good chance of over working it. I am determined at this point just to go to studio tomorrow and see what happens.

Peace

-Mike

The amount with which I have felt this week is substantial.  I began the week waking in my best friends house.  She and her husband are my son’s godparents.  I haven’t laughed and smiled that hard in ages.  I then taught a workshop on Sunday night to a mixture of adults and children, feeling as accomplished as ever.  The next morning I was featured on WKAN The Bill and Allison Morning show, achieving a certain level of “rock star” that I had always dreamed of.  I then had dinner with a good friend of mine on the way home from Boston, and got turned around on the T because I forgot to read the station that we entered at.  I then drove home and walked through my front door expectant of two of my greatest friends greeting me, but only one did and the other never will again.  It has been a tumultuous turn to say the least.

The show in Kankekee seems like a great example of a small community within a tiny city rallying around the visual arts.  The citizens seem open and eager to talk to new people with new ideas.  It was quite refreshing working within the space.  It also seemed rather fitting to be on the radio in reference to a show in which I had hung a large installation piece depicting stereos and radios.  Here is a link to the interview in full.

Ultimately, when I arrived home, I found my beloved feline friend, Cedric curled in his spot on the couch, dead.  I am so immensely saddened by this as the two of us have been through so much together.  I wish him the best in the kitty heaven that was awaiting him.

It’s back to studio as normal tomorrow.  I’m hoping getting in the swing again will help.
Peace
-Mike

I am not the Bohemian I once was.  I have changed immensely.  My social demands have grown slack.  I seldom hang out with people in the evening, seldom meet for beers, and have a more regular schedule than I’ve ever had before.  I am matured, married, settling into a profession.  I don’t really understand how all of this has happened all at once.  I do know that I have little desire to return to the party or to the sporadic schedule.

The fall semester is drawing to a close.  This last semester I taught two sections of 2D Foundations in Design.  It seems as though life has come full circle when you end up teaching the class that you had the biggest struggle with in undergrad.  I’ve also begun to settle into my teaching.  This semester I assigned a 3000 word essay on the formal aspects of one classic and one contemporary artist.  The process of grading these papers was intriguing.  There were some students who really gave me a window into a new world of artist while others rehashed ideas that I have heard for ages about the heavy hitters, like Van Gogh, Monet, and especially Keith Haring.

Teaching has helped me in my own art making.  I am reminded on a daily basis of ways to improve my images.  It is like developing a sense of zen with my work.  I am more present with the work than I have been in the past.  I am making more conscious decisions, whereas before I had been falling into a set of visual tropes that I had had success with and settling for compositions as they popped into my head.  I was much more concerned with getting to the paint and not so concerned with drawing.  While teaching has made me more present with my visual decision making, it has played a much heavier influence in helping me establish changes within my work.  I have begun to experiment as I have not done in the past.  I have attempted watercolor, worked in micron pen, worked on paper, played with scale in a more fulfilling way, and relied on my conscious decision making, not style, to make it all work within my overall body of work.

I have also spent this last year, truthfully since I was married a year ago August, feverishly reading.  I have been reading non-fiction about art, mushrooms, music, history, and physics.  I’ve also read a fair share of fiction.  My favorites have been by Saul Bellow and Haruki Murakami.  Reading has granted me more empathy.  I feel less exasperated when people don’t understand my work.  Also, I feel like I have been making more work that fulfills a universal feel.  A friend of mine, Shirah Neumann, told me that one of her old professors spent a good portion of his career painting the interior of his studio.  Stuart Davis spent nearly a year working on Egg Beater paintings.  I’ve been developing empathy for the objects around me, the ideas that I have in my head, and the icons that I have utilized over the past decade to communicate my point.  I have simplified a good deal of my work.  Rather than showing a complicated setting of cloud constructors, or a world of audiophilic birds, or robots conducting human acts, I have been focusing on stereos, trains, city skylines, and tape cassettes.  I have been drawing and painting these objects and scenes and learning how to paint, how to express myself via the application of paint rather than worry about the big plot to pull people in.  It feels more natural.  It feels like my drawing and painting skills are improving again.  It feels like the challenges that I am presenting myself with are no longer based on production levels but more on experimental and quality levels.

Additionally, I have not been using this blog space as my sound board.  Most nights I sit across from my wife and we chat.  Often we chat about things that I am not wholly present for as I am still trying to find the calm after finishing painting work, reworking pieces in my mind, questioning where to go next.  I have not had that time to remain possessed by my work.  I have had to compromise with my wife and find a more inclusive manner of working out those post studio energies.  Perhaps I just need to refigure what my goal is for this space and that will help me determine how to proceed with it.  I have started to use instagram in the same manner as I used to use this space.  I never did cull many comments on this platform and I get a whole lot more feedback with just the image.  Maybe I ramble too much.

I had intended to share a couple images of current projects that I have been putting together.  I will attempt to post some more work from each soon, detailing the process behind each series.

These two images detail a recent series of miniature city scapes that I have been putting together of Portland, Me.  I thought that perhaps by looking in spots which were not quite so obvious I could find a certain kind of beauty in my surroundings that I cannot find by paying attention to the everyday things that I find in front of me while walking around the city.  I began the series with watercolor on wooden blocks and have since switched to acrylic paints for archival purposes.

This second pairing is from a series of works for a “soul train.”  I have been listening to nothing by John Coltrane while I’ve been working on the piece, not because he did soul music, he obviously didn’t, but merely for the tenuous connection between his nickname, “train,” the “soul train,” and regular trains.  The work is about music and repetition, about defying the left to right structure in music and letting the form of the instruments create the direction of the printed page.  The work is for a show in Illinois.

The last work pictured is from my small series of deconstructed boomboxes.  The work is spontaneous in the drawing so it made a lot of sense to color the work with watercolors rather than the more meditative acrylic paints.  The drawings are based in the roots of Malevich and Kandinsky but picture an archaic but more modern device.  I thought that by giving myself the rule that I was only allowed to draw the stereo, I would take my work to the level of abstraction which Braqcue and Picasso achieved with their violins and pitchers.  It has been a good experiment thus far.  I have even lined up a small show of the work with The Studio in Laconia, NH.

My life is different. I have had difficulties accepting this in every facet.  We hope, at times, that one thing or another will stay the same so that we may have something to depend on.  The fact of the matter is that as soon I was married the expectations of my time became different.  There were suddenly two people determining what I was going to be doing with my time.  It is a good thing, but it is very difficult, even a year and a half later, to get used to.

Peace
-Mike

I don’t read with any great speed.  I am prone to filling my schedule with art projects and leaving myself exhausted, trying to muster a little bit more effort to keep working.  Tonight, after nearly a week of dragging my feet, I finished Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.  The story follows a high class butler reflecting back on his years in service of a dignified  British Lord who fell from favor amongst British subjects due to his ties to German aristocrats. 

It seemed like an important book to read.  I have been left with the impression that I am not unlike this butler.  The man was constantly at work.  So much so, that when it came to the end of the day his head was filled with reflection and not with a sense of relaxation.  I often suffer from this same affliction.  As I was chatting about this with my wife, she suggested that my work is really a source of meditation for me.  I am more relaxed when working than I sometimes am sitting still or attempting to pay attention to a movie.  All I have wanted to be in the past 15 years is a painter.  I have made myself that.  Now that I am teaching instead of working in a restaurant, I feel like there is very little about my life that isn’t devoted to the goal of being a successful painter.  While I do lose focus at times, I do think that that has more to do with a lack of understanding of what kind of painter I want to be, where I want to show, how I want to show.  My head runs too many different ways at once.  Perhaps it doesn’t though.  I really don’t know anymore.

I have spent the last three hours trying to let the remains of the day settle.  It is Saturday.  Today is a day for relaxation and enjoyment, but these things are sometimes confusing to me.  I am fortunate to have a very understanding wife who helps me work through some of the weirdest doldrums.  Painting in miniature has been a great source of comfort for me and I think provides something unique that I have not yet seen from many people. 

I’ve been asked to show in a group exhibition at Waterfall Arts in December.  I realized that I was going to have to come up with a lot more pieces than I had started.  The beauty of the miniature is that I can view the same spot from a slightly different vantage point and completely change the subject of the work.  I had my studio assistant walk around town with me the other day taking just shy of three hundred photos which I will be working from in the near future.  The city is bigger than I give it credit for.

Here are a few of the drawings which I started using those photos.

 This second image is from the back window of the Time and Temperature building.  I took maybe five photographs from the same vantage point focusing on different areas of the neighboring rooftops.  I’m feeling much better about my ability to find different sorts of shapes.

The Holiday Season always carries with it the pressures to create small, hand held, handmade, locally inspired merchandise to sell at various local craft fairs and art walks.  Coupled with that desire is the desire to do my own holiday shopping and gifting to family members.  Inevitably I feel trapped by this process.  As a reader of this blog you will recall the cycle.  In response I started working a large piece with seemingly less commercial value. 

A couple years ago I became obsessed with a vast quantity of six by six panels which a friend had gifted me.  I worked myself through a variety of ideas which had been nagging at me, matriculating, and operating in their own unique spheres.  I took all of the ideas that I was working with, pipes, a crude house, power lines, and drips, working the motifs into mishmash of random, semi-surreal pieces.

During this time period it occurred to me that I wanted to make a few larger pieces with this imagery worked into it.  The first piece of this nature was made on boards collected from a neighbors dilapidated deck.  They ripped the deck off the side of the house and left the wood stacked out front, so naturally a good portion of that wood came home with me.  As I started to think about this level of ruin that resulted in my new found wood, the logical imagery to apply to these boards was the falling house imagery.  The falling houses have always been a kind of response to the American Dream.  They are a sort of desperate cry for a normal life (in the sense of what is sold as normal,) one free of huge student loan debt, the fight to obtain healthcare, and trying to find enough time to work on my own career while negotiating a number of odd jobs required to pay back the massive student debt that my career has incurred. 

Here are a few of the first images using that imagery.

The found wood is obviously much rougher than some of these panels.  That seems to affect their feel of falling and how they occupy their space.  I’ve added some atmospheric color around the new houses in the big piece in order to control the environment that the subject is in a little better.

 

This last juxtaposition seems the most successful to me, however, I would need to at least change up the scale of the different grids a bit more than what I have thus far.  I’m still working with it.  It’s in that good frustration stage right now.  At any rate, hope you dig the work.  Keep up.

Peace
-Mike

When I was in graduate school there were whole classes devoted to experimentation.  Over the past 11 years, however, I have sometimes viewed experimentation as a waste of time, preferring a model of production over a model of improvement.  To be sure, I’ve spent a good deal of time attempting to get better with my medium, but I think that over the course of the years I found my self rather pigeon holed.  My website name is Lewis Acrylics and while I still use acrylics almost every day, not all of the artwork that I make is acrylic.  In fact, even the pieces that make use of acrylic paint often bear Bic pen marks as well, making my work not acrylic in nature but mixed media.

I have also not been a fan of moleskine sketchbooks for some time.  The paper is so thin and the hype so oppressive, but a few people whose images I’ve seen online make me a little bit more excited about them.  One of these artists is Mattias Adolfsson.  He makes me want to draw all of the time.  With some of his work in mind I started putting together some sketches of boomboxes and cassettes and later some abstractions of the two.

 These were four contour drawings of cassettes which I put together while my class was drawing cross contours of their hands.  I drew them over top of some other random sketches so I’m not sure how well the information is translated.

These boomboxes were more as research than anything else.  I wasn’t that pleased with the quality of the drawings from the get go.  However as I was sketching boomboxes it occurred to me that I was interested in the shapes within the boombox and how they might break down, which led to this series of drawings.

I felt very much influenced by Wassily Kandinsky later Supremacist pieces.  The color is very much meant to be viewed in the same manner and the shapes are much the same as well.

It feels odd to be working in watercolors.  I keep fearing that I am using them incorrectly.  I layer my color with them a bit more than I remember being taught in school.  I do, however, like laying compliments and near compliments over top of each other.  I think it gives a particularly vibrant pop to the shapes.  I am surprised at how good it feels to be experimenting.  I don’t feel as though these pieces are particularly precious which helps me make some more rash and spontaneous color and shape decisions.  Perhaps I finally understand what my professors were getting at.

Peace
-Mike

I’ve been waiting for something to say.  I’ve been absolutely certain that the work that I’ve been creating would lead to something to say, but that really hasn’t proven to be the case.  I feel like Joseph in the Dangling Man again.  Work has been different.  Studio has felt freer.  While I have in the past spent much of my time in studio with preconceived notions of the pieces that I would create, I have been stuck in a conundrum.  None of the work which I have been creating has any pre-determined answers.  I’ve finally reached a point where I’ve freed myself from the necessity of having an answer and that, ultimately, is a good thing, although it does leave me in a bit more of a bind when I’m trying to figure out what kind of shows to prepare and for whom.

When I speak with my good friend Julie, she has everything figured out.  She understands her concepts front and back; the references that might be conjured, and every element of visual fodder that exists within her work.  I don’t.  I have no idea.  When I attempt to understand how someone is going to see my work then it merely gets me thinking in a manner which makes me construct things specifically so that people will understand my work.  This seems inherently bad.  And so I wonder if people don’t just create from different perspectives much like they view from different perspectives.  This is obvious.  Of course we would, but it seems that when you go to graduate school the intent is to learn how to mold your work with a viewer in mind and how to build multifarious works which speak to several different levels with every piece of work.

I don’t know what I’m doing though.  It seems incredibly frustrating.  I am left with images that are burned into my mind, characters that I obsess over, and systems with and without function.

It’s also been suggested to me that my artwork should be split up into that which is for commercial work and that which is for fine art.  I have so much trouble with the idea of it.  My illustrative work informs my fine art and my fine art informs my illustrative work.  I’ve always wanted to make work that functioned in both spheres, not in just one.   Perhaps I’m just confused.  Here’s my opportunity to let you all know that I am immensely confused.  I am, however, very pleased with working, being in the work, and feeling the rhythms of creativity that keep me moving.

I’ve studied a great deal over the past few years, tried to remain present within my work, and mindful of my surroundings, but I still do not seem to have any idea of what I am doing before I make things.  At first I am only attempting to make something that is stuck in my head and I don’t know that that accounts for anything to say.

With that all said, here are some of the projects that I have been working on most recently.  I am super stoked about all of them.

 

 I have been working on a segmented series of vertical patterns and city scape paintings which I most recently have started to combine.  The intention of the segmented piece is to finish it and have it occupy the Space Gallery window.  Every time that I apply for that window space I am told that the gallery is looking for something that says “Maine” more.  I feel like the city scapes automatically say Maine and I am also quite interested in communicating the different spaces within my city in very small segments of the city.  The two seem to make sense with each other.

The last series that I am working on is a stereo train which I am creating on different boards about a foot tall.  The lengths of the boards vary, as do the styles of drawings and painting.  The idea of the trainset is that it will span one small segment of the room near the top much like an actual train set that used to run around the top of the Boxcar, a restaurant where I used to stop with my old friend Kelly after we had hiked at Magnussen Park in Seattle.

I’m pleased to be in the midst of all of this work.  I wish I understood more what I was doing, but I imagine that I will find the meaning somewhere on the other end.  Hopefully at least admitting my lack of intent will help me to find some.

Peace
-Mike

I recently sent myself a text message to my email from class.  It read, “Art is found, not created.”  The reference was to an image I had just sent myself of a gap in the ceiling with two lights to either side of the gap.  It looked as though there were a face coming out of the ceiling and while I was teaching class and waiting for students to respond to the ideas and prompts that I was feeding them I couldn’t help but have this image stuck in my mind.

It kept telling me that “art is found, not created.”  It’s true, I think.  The ideas that pop into my head are the results of explorations.  During the exploration we find something new here or there and add it into our repertoire or respond to it accordingly. 

With this sort of logic working in me the last several days it seems as no surprise that while in studio working on what has become a production project in the totems.  I say it is now a production project because I am not trying to solve anything new with the totems at this point, or least if I am the realizations are coming much slower than they were.  Ideas seem like that.  As we first explore the ideas there is a change here and there and all over the place, but as we sit on the idea for a little while it mellows out a bit.  It becomes an idea which is in need of transformation or modification. While I am not done with the totems project, I have learned a lot of what I am open to learning before I intend to show the work next Saturday at Picnic.  To be fair you have to stop someplace. 

I started looking around studio.  Four years ago when I got to graduate school I started working on a couple mobiles.  They weren’t balanced correctly and I failed miserably in producing them successfully but the panels which I used in the mobile are still around.  They were in the style that I have been using for the past several years; drawn with a flat paint background.  What the patterns have made me realize more than anything is that I miss pushing paint, mixing colors, layering and overlapping.  I needed a change in 2010.  There was a lot going on in and outside of art, but now I am feeling patient with myself again.  I am not in a rush to get everything done and more importantly I am feeling very excited about the contrast between well rendered painterly subject, flat patterns and flat backgrounds. 

This image popped into my head and as I am a student at all times, I followed it with all my might.

There is something that may be better about the raw drawing, but I am excited to face this dilemma and for now it is nice to work with the machinery again.  I stopped working with the machinery when I was in graduate school because none of my answers to questions there were good enough for faculty and peers.  The thing is that modern art doesn’t like an image which states what it is.  This image is what it is and there is no room for the modern art world to negotiate its space.  I am not leaving myself open to learn in the showing process perhaps, but frankly I don’t care.  Our world is full of machines tearing down and rebuilding our landscape.  We try to fix everything that we destroy by destroying it even more.  I am merely waiting for the day that we try to repair our atmosphere and water cycles with machines. 

Peace
-Mike

I’m really pleased with this work and I can’t wait to get it all out there at Picnic.  I’m hoping that the public will appreciate it like I do.

Peace
-Mike