Category: Uncategorized

It occurred to me the other day that we are well into July.  This last weekend was a holiday weekend and the weeks preceding this past weekend accounted for the first weeks of my boy, the mini lark.  It has been super busy and I have been having trouble keeping track of much of anything.  That said, I realized that Picnic, which I will be showing in again this summer, is in a mere 6 weeks.  I need to get my work together.

I have re-thought the way that I wish to finish my totems, what they mean to me, what their cosmology entails, etc, but now I really just need to make a slew of them.  I would like to have at least a hundred miniature totems created for the Picnic festival.  Last year I did quite well with them.  I also wish to have a number of different jewelry options.  I feel like people will enjoy having the totems as pendants as well.

Tonight I found myself in studio able to putz around a bit and I started working through these three totems.  I am treating them all like pieces that work in the round.  I think that it likens the work to a more complete stage.  Here are the three that I was working on tonight.

I still find myself struggling as I know that I need to create a piece with a shark in it.  For some reason I having trouble translating a shark character into this vernacular.  My best attempt thus far is at the left.  I don’t think it is very good as a shark, but it does appear to suit itself well as a swimming dinosaur.  Art problems.

Peace
-Mike

My work has been possessed by two separate impulses since I hung my last body of work.  Last week I gave an artist talk on the show which is up in Bangor, Me at the Rock and Art Shop, which really helped to focus my thoughts on what that work was about.  The talk allowed me to understand better what transformations the work had taken and how to explain those changes.  Since I put together that work I have have been working on a very large series of grid pieces on plywood that have since started to become the White Lodge project, which I discussed in my last post.  The second avenue that my work has taken is more akin to the route that my work was on when I created my thesis work back in 2013. 

I am becoming interested, again, in the idea of very small pieces adding up into an overwhelming mass of changing color and form.  Currently I plan to stagger a series of one inch square rods in the corner of a gallery wall.  I haven’t figured out how to construct the foundation of this project but have been busy at work developing the surface level.  Here’s an image of the drawn and staggered rods.

As I’ve been adding color this piece has been really taking a form that I am pleased with, however.  I can’t wait to get these pieces accumulated in larger numbers so that I can understand better what this layout will do to the eye.

More to come later. 
Peace
-Mike

When Shirah moved out of studio she gifted me 4 large pieces of panel.  Somewhere in hanging my show at Sohns Gallery I started to see all of the layers that I have been producing for years.  I started to see how everything was connected, not as though I made the same painting over and over again, but more that I was creating a body of work which all fit together, delivered different messages although always in the same tongue.  I started to see my language and my vernacular more than the limitations of an imagery.

I have been making several different zines over the past two months.  They have been reduced to making different patterns.  I have two different sketchbooks that are being filled entirely with pattern.  I feel as though I am seeking an order where there wasn’t one previously.  From the library lately, I’ve spent a considerable portion of time reading about indigenous people of the Americas, herbs, and fungi.  I’ve balanced out these more academic subjects with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude and Herman Melville’s Omoo.  I’ve been immersed in the identity of a pregnant couple.  I’m soon to be a father and now the head of a household.

These are all patterns.  We produce similar situations to the situations we have previously experienced because these situations are unique to the individual.  The individual most likely defines the situations due to the choices that the individual makes.  The patterns surround everything.  This all seemed clear to me as I was looking at the panels that Shirah gifted me.  I’ve been practicing in the zines, considering how different marks create different thoughts, how the different thoughts are then amassed to create new webs of knowledge.  When I was in school I was very much into the ideas of Guillez Deleuze.  I felt that the rhizome idea of thinking was how our brains worked, but as I read more about the fungi and think about the mycelium in mushrooms, I am understanding my brain differently.  There are things that I constantly see as my knowledge base.  I am going to consider this the organism that I am preying on.  As I delve into this knowledge base numerous angles dive into it.  These are like the mycelium web.  My brain works like a fungi, which in all honesty makes more sense anyway since human beings are more closely linked to the consuming fungi than the food producing plant world.

Here are a few images of the grid pieces that I have been obsessing over lately.  I hope you like them and that perhaps they have you making connections in places where first you had not suspected.

Peace
-Mike

This week has been really crazy.  Along with the prep work to get everything hung for my show at Sohns, I was called by a woman who I’ve picked up some shifts from at her restaurant for the summer.  She wanted me to start a week earlier than I had planned, so I was left with even less time than I thought I was going to have.  I sent my lovely wife to the hardware stores to gather the various hanging devices.  I ended up with seven packages of this and four packages of that and a blister on my palm from using my stubby screwdriver with screws that needed extra pressure to be seated.  It was an awesome week.

While I primarily focused on brand new work for this show, I was emailed earlier in the week asking if I could bring extra work because the folks who own the gallery do not want any empty space on the walls.  I really don’t think that it will be an issue anyway, but I started to group some of the older work which fit with the newer body of work.  I think that this might have made the work a bit stronger on the whole. 

Here are a few images of older works with new hardware to improve their general appearance.  This level of finishing is one of the tasks that I have been forcing myself to complete, part of my internalization of some of my art practice. 

These three pieces look so much better without visible hardware.  It was really a simple fix which I just didn’t seem to find any time for until recently.  I wonder how my patience will be after a couple months of an infant.

I’ll post some more images soon after I have the show up.  I think that this one will prove to be one of my best shows as of yet.

Peace
-Mike

It is unlike me to speak with words and not with images, but allow me to use this space to collect my thoughts.  I hope you’ll pardon me in my verboseness.  This week I am hanging a new body of work.  Generally along with the excitement of showing new work comes this hope for public approval.  You hope that people will be enthused by the work that you do, moved by your incredible ability and at your mental depth.  I am not certain that I feel the anxiety building up for that emotion now.  I don’t know that I need to please anyone in particular with this body of work.  It is new.  It is untested where so much of my work has become a bit more premeditated.  I figured out long ago how to make an image that I took to be good and then, regretfully, I tried to find ways to mimic that feeling.

After two years of graduate school I could sense that I wasn’t feeling altogether confident in my work.  I wasn’t sure to what I extent I felt that something was missing.  I had ideas that I felt were good and I made some work that I thought was of good quality, but I didn’t always feel that the good ideas would correlate with work that was good quality.  I wasn’t sure and I am still not capable of finding a way to really quantify how good or not good a work is.  It is an emotional reaction for me.  I am aware of the elements and principles of design and have immersed myself in the teaching of these concepts in the past year and a half, but in teaching these concepts I have not found a confidence in the ability to use these principles but rather the realization that I don’t think about them anymore.  Perhaps it would behoove me to do so, I thought.

This body of work happened accidentally.  I started laying work on top of work, allowing my obsessions to grow accordingly.  I have started to really let the work evolve and have released my death grip which wasn’t so much for comfort but for lack of direction.  I didn’t know what to make and rather than searching for what to make, I would make the same things again and again.  I still make the same things over and over, but I am allowing myself to let those things build on each other.  I want my language to interact with my work.  I want my work to interact with that which came before and that which comes in the future.  I am unsure if this body, my body, will hold up long enough to create the legacy that I wish to create, but I think I’ve started to make some better steps.

My website is down for the first time in nearly ten years.  That site has stood as a record of my completed work for a decade.  Whenever I needed to seek creative comfort I could look at what I had created and consider how to recreate those moments.  Surprisingly as I let the thought that I have no direct website for people to look at, I am feeling some comfort in the idea.  I don’t think that my work was ever about connecting with people through a device like a computer.  In fact, in the past I have often wondered why I do not get more visitors to this blog, and I think that maybe it is possible that I was really only keeping a diary.  It was too awkward for people to read on a regular basis.  My work, my soup, was too heavy because I kept it too personal.  Everybody keeps their work personal to a certain extent.  It needs to have an essence of self to even attempt to be created, but I was fixated on my goals.  Other peoples goals were nothing I had any interest in.  I have always been a good listener in person, but on the web I have merely been waiting for opportunities to push my own agendas, to say what I want to say.  But now I wonder if that is what I want to say.  Is that action really what I want to identify me? 

This is all to say that I have begun to think about what I want out of my web experience, what I want out of my life experience, what I really want to teach my son about life and about us, the Lewises operating in the 21st century.  It is about the work.  I have created too many things and been too closely awaiting the resounding reply.  The resounding reply isn’t coming if I don’t let the work grow at its own, unimpeded pace. 

Here’s hoping that I can continue to let go.  I think that maybe becoming a dad may be the best thing that could have ever happened to this artist, both personally and from a more creative outlook. 
Much love to those of you who’ve read this far, and even to those who didn’t make it here that just stop in occasionally here and there.  Any thoughts, as always, would be appreciated, though if there are none it’s completely fine.

Peace
-Mike

My show at Sohns Gallery goes up this Saturday.  The work will be a mixture of totems.  I am including several pieces which include the various power line, stereo and drop motifs as well as a number of character driven totems.  I have been granted a thirty foot wall to work with.  The grid work will be going in the center of the wall with the totems on found wood flanking the grid on either side.  I do not think that I plan on making the wall look symmetrical.  Hopefully that will enhance the overall visual of the exhibition.

Last night I started piecing together the found wood totems with two pegs between each panel.  I have determined that these pieces are in fact totems despite the fact that they do not appear as such.  The process was more about building the story piece by piece and later incorporating a number of different pieces into one story, which is very similar to how I understand a myth falling into place.  To use self-righteous art speak, the work is a series of personal mythologies.  The characters are a symbolic creatures for me. 

Here is a preview of how the work will be laid over top of the grid.

I particularly enjoy how the totems play into this structure.  I had thought that either placing them over this structure or on a single rail that ran the length of the gallery would be my best bet to display these.  I like how this worked out for this series in conjunction with the other work.

Here is a quick image of my panels as they get pieced together.  Sorry if it’s a bit blurry.

It is exciting to see this work finally play out.  I feel like this body of work finally is both as clean as I’d like it and stretches construction and illustration enough to please my tastes.  I finally learn something from school if you will.

Peace
-Mike

I left for studio without making coffee this morning.  I didn’t have the patience.  When I reached studio I felt like I needed a boost.  I was very slow about my work and lackadaisical.  I could feel myself wanting to start new totems, to assemble my horizontal stripe pieces and to continue painting grids.  I had emailed Sohns Gallery an update of the work that I have been preparing for the May show yesterday.  The response was very positive, so I wanted to keep that project on track.  This project is multifaceted, however.   It is not so simple as to just finish one or two things or continue working in the same vein.  I have started to create a body of work which merges disparate concepts and unifies them. 

During a break, I started to read from Stuart Davis’s notebooks.  I was taken by his unapologetic classification as a painter, his ability to discern between craftspeople and artists, and most of all with his statements on what painting is.  He claimed that a painting could be made of anything, but that the replication of nature is impossible.  You are left with a surface and layers of paint, which has an inherently different make-up than the objects that an artist attempts to recreate from life.  He also claimed that a painting must contain the emotion of the artist without being subject to every aspect of feeling that the artist may feel in their up and downs.

It was necessary reading for the morning.  When I am troubled about what it is that I should be doing, it is nice to get that little ray of focus.  It also made me wonder if there was any way that I was really including emotion in my grid pieces.  Are they a painting on their own or merely a ground?  Would I show them by themselves or is it necessary to hang work over them?  Do the pieces that I hang over the top of the grid work retain their own autonomous function or are they only visible as a part of the whole?

Here are a couple updated images of the work for Sohns.

I hope to get the rest of this work assembled within the next week.  I am not sure how I am connecting the paintings to the grid (physically).  There are still so many questions to answer.  I’ll try to keep up a bit better here.  My head has been all over the place.

Peace
-Mike

My schedule has changed.  I have added another job.  It seems like this could be a bad time to do so, but as my time shrinks my desire to work grows.  Every time in my life that I start to feel overworked or stressed, in a tight position, I find my work serving as a catharsis.  It starts to grow and change with me and helps me see what I should do and what could work better.

As a result of the new position I have started getting up at 5:30 in the morning and getting to studio at 6:00 or a little after.  I have been able to wake up with a brush in my hand and work through some of the patterns that I have been seeing everywhere.  I have been obsessed with the idea of hanging my new show on an awkward grid of painted panels.  I think that it will serve to locate all of the diverse concepts that I have been thinking about into a united theme.

Here are some images of the grids.

The process is taking a while and I really only have another three weeks to work on this show.  I am glad that I made this breakthrough this week.  If it had happened any later I wouldn’t be able to even come close to finishing the work in time.  As it is, should I not finish in time, I am resigned to finish it at some other point.  This work is some of my favorite that I have finished up to this point.

Keep up.
Peace
-Mike

Today, while in sketchbook class, we discussed the idea of authenticity.  It is an old argument, one that I am sure that Walter Benjamin was talking about and probably theorists before him as well.  Questions have surfaced over whether it was workshops who authored Master’s works or the masters themselves.  Original thoughts and scenes disappear just as easily as they are originated.  With the age of the internet information is communicated so quickly that as soon as we author or post an image in the ether, it has become public domain.  We have lost both ownership of the idea and ownership of the image.  It is no longer original.  The only original is that initial thought which artists attempt to cultivate into works in their own right.  The nugget of information that fleets before our minds’ eye, that is perhaps the authentic thought.  One of my students suggested that each of our individual experiences is actually where that authenticity lies.  When we are tapped into the moment and allowed to react and live with our works we are behaving in a manner that is authentic to our practice and our ideas as artists and human beings.

On the piggyback of this discussion was the idea of the workshop who is working under the commands of the master artist.  The group of students that I was working with this morning and I came to the conclusion that, although it may be easy enough to mimic an artist’s or creators final products, it is difficult to live the moment that led to their work.  Each of our experiences with different objects and shapes and images is based on our own individual perception.  Without acquainting ourselves with a multitude of unknown people it would be difficult to have anyone create our own artwork.  Certainly it would be difficult to recreate the questions and concerns within the work that are the artist’s own.

I found myself very much opposed to the idea of other people being allowed to create work which would cut my decision making out of it.  My decisions within my work are made on split second judgements, general feelings of my own personal aesthetics, and chance.  I cannot expect another person to make the same decisions that I make.  And so, I wonder if my work is not in some manner completely authentic.

Here are my two most recent assemblage pieces which I am creating for a show in Miami, FL which I hope to get into.  Florida would make the 16 or 17th state.  I am not sure without looking at the numbers.

The show is on a bird based theme.  I determined that it was no longer any fun to create simple works with birds and headphones or birds on the wire.  I had to do something different, so I started creating works like I would make which do not have any birds and just started to add them last minute as an impulsive sort of after thought.  So far I am very pleased with the results.

As for now, it is getting late and I am having trouble keeping my eyes open.
Peace
-Mike

On Wednesdays at Maine College of Art, I teach a class called Sketchbook as Document and Impetus.  When I first began the class it was meant as a way to encourage the use of the sketchbook as a sort of playground, a place that fostered development through making mistakes and a spot for keen observation.  I spent three semesters working through the class only to find this, the fourth semester,  contains a class full of individuals who all treat the class as a sort of salon, an ear to bounce ideas off of, a forum for the exchange of information.  The class has become a community of artists rather than a class that I feel I am in control of.  By letting go of the control of the class, it has been allowed to become so much more than I could ever make of it. 

Today I shared pieces of my animation project as well as the horizontal additive pieces that I have been working on for my application to the CMCA Biennial.  The class was very receptive of the work and the conversation progressed into a discussion of learning methods, children, and the burning questions that we had as children. 

One student admitted that since he was eight he had been asking himself the same question.  He had spent the last fifty years or more traveling, creating art, and reading all in efforts to find some sort of answer to his question.  The question still remains and it still fuels his work.  Another student in class referred to her experience as a mother and as a daughter.  She found herself asking some of the questions that she asked herself as a child and then being sidetracked to the way that her mother raised her and influenced her as a mother in the raising of her own children.  She claimed that the most important thing was to eat dessert first.  I am not certain that this is the idea that I connect with the most, but it has deep meaning to her and how she lives her life. 

I was left with the thought, “I often stand and look at the sea wondering what it was that my father could see.”  I have often wondered what this life is, what it is that we are supposed to experience, how it is that I am supposed to understand life.  I think that creating art probably serves as a means to attempt to answer this question.  What is this?  This question is not about what life is about.  Life goes on every day and is beautiful in so many ways, but what I do want to know is what it is.  I don’t really know, but I think that I am starting to arrive at something within my animation and also within my newest series of grouped panels.

The animation is a study in minutia, much like the James Joyce novels that I am think about while I create it.  The grouped panels also carry a little bit of this deference to the insignificant, as I combine all of my imagery which is comprised of such simple objects, experienced in the everyday, in groups of objects interacting to make unique conversations.

Here are a couple of images from the two newest pieces in the series.

I am still asking the same questions I always did.  I still wonder what my father sees when he looks out over the water, mimicking his father before him and our ancestors from Wales before that.  I think that perhaps what is different about me attempting to answer the questions now is that I am starting with honest information.  I am not trying to create anything which talks in metaphors.  I am more speaking in earnest.

Peace
-Mike