Okay, having reviewed my sculpture, it’s not that good. I mentioned that I hardly looked at the thing while I was sculpting it. That’s true. Also, the lines drawn onto the surface were easily modified back into a surface texture that made sense. My sculpture had a ton of heart. I woke in the middle of the night from dreaming (NIGHTMARING) about it. It’s consumed me for the past three days.
The judge made his conclusions based on academic sculpting. I’d take mine over the others any day. Um.. but I would like to know the academic stuff. This has helped by bringing up something again- what I run into. I mean, first off, I am a kind of hack. My roommate had gone to art highschool, and has been at it (though my skepticisms lie in to what capacity) for about as long but with different focuses. He’s younger, and I try to be careful not to digress into ageism. He’s actually really good. I don’t mean to sound like a journaler from the turn of the nineteenth century England, but sometimes I think I do; that’s a digression but if you’re ever pained by my false-d pining into a blog site; endlessly ironic and cliche, so am I. I’ll say again I write this thing on a public stage, so you can share my sentiments. Eric Hoffer said that there’s something about the moderately boring that bring out those brilliant thoughts (maybe I lost the competition to a moderately boring piece!). I hope this can tickle your intellect in that moderately boring way. I want to bring light. Full disclosure; I like artists like Gauguin, Van Gogh, Tintoretto, Bla blah, the infamous. Gauguin was funny by the extent which he excitedly waited by the letterbox in Tahiti to hear whether his infamy had matured, whether he had made sales, or news, and as to wether it would be a good time to make his grand entrance back! What a diva!!
I’m super blessed that I’m around people that can tolerate me. I’m super blessed that I can be in the northeast, with terribly capable people. Ps. My homeland is of no salable novelty. What have we got; gators and bath salts man.
I’m super stoked to be in the big leagues of art colleges. I think PAFA’s the best, and what arrogance I bring with me is my mistake alone.
See how good I’m getting?
I want to write a little about the walls I keep hitting, and the things I’m good at.
I’m good at drawing. Seeing and putting it down; and I’m not talking about seeing a rib cage and drawing an ellipse bc fuck that. I’m good at value, and color. A teacher told me I have perfect pitch, ie I can mix the perfect relative color for a painting. I’ve painted a lot. I may be approaching that silly ten thousand hour mark in both drawing and painting, and I’m probably closer in drawing. I’ve done rough calculations, and I’m close-ish in drawing as of two years ago. Um . . I’m not good at anatomy- not really. I can draw maybe half of what’s topically visible, and that’s pretty poor. What’s more is my sensibilities to anatomy spacialy. This is why I lost the sculpture competition, for one. I made an entire sculpture off of silhouette matching. It looks like a Stephen Balkenhol sculpture, which I love. It looks like a chainsaw art sculpture, which I still love. I run into this problem/non-problem sometimes. the fact is if you can do it then you can choose to do it or not do it. But if you can’t do it, then you can only not do it. I mean, duh, but, that’s the wager, and while in school, especially an academic training school, it might be a great time to learn to do it- so rather than try to look smart with teachers that talk about my perfect pitch (this guy’s also an awesome awesome teacher), I’m thinking I’ll take some sculptural anatomy courses forthcoming.
Sunday, March 25, 2018
SO it’s said you gotta write to know what you think. I’ve thought a cycle over the past couple hours.
I sculpted for the last couple days, well few days. Annual PAFA competition. My roommate won.
Roommate skipped half the first day, half the second day, etc. kinda diddled.
Judge said a bunch of stuff about intellectual efficiency and awarded the prize, negating his high claims. I thought it a cop-out, and easy out- to which his selection reflected. ON one hand talking about shorthand notation and language- and the competition is based on rhythm, some other shit and some other shit.
Judge copped out and picked the sculptural equivalent to Muzak.
Tbh just very safe and detached, like the judging.
The cycle part of my thinking is that this doesn’t mean anything for my future - the judgement was a social one, as made concrete in his critiques, offered afterward. I took him up on the crit, and he drew garbage on my sculpture; literally circling areas and speaking about the regions as if reading a textbook, yet my solutions were valid. He drew a center line over my center line, like a dumbass, didn’t look at the thing. By the measures he’d proposed, he was just trying to sound like a sculptor.
My armature was badass, I spent six hours on the armature. Another ten minutes on the armature, then six hours blocking, then cutting. Today I spent six hours cutting, and basically matching the silhouette. It was a tour-de-force. I hardly looked at the thing, so when the judge went on about the sculpture being a product of process and intellectual investigation, then selected the object which was furthest from his sky-high statements, I knew he was a shill, and full of shit. So, I won. That’s the only way I can live with myself. I mean, I know I didn’t win, but I gave it my best, and I won’t take this judgement as some sign for more things than it is. If it means anything it’s that I alluded yet another curse of validation in exchange for clarity.
No humans were harmed in the posting of this blog.
I sculpted for the last couple days, well few days. Annual PAFA competition. My roommate won.
Roommate skipped half the first day, half the second day, etc. kinda diddled.
Judge said a bunch of stuff about intellectual efficiency and awarded the prize, negating his high claims. I thought it a cop-out, and easy out- to which his selection reflected. ON one hand talking about shorthand notation and language- and the competition is based on rhythm, some other shit and some other shit.
Judge copped out and picked the sculptural equivalent to Muzak.
Tbh just very safe and detached, like the judging.
The cycle part of my thinking is that this doesn’t mean anything for my future - the judgement was a social one, as made concrete in his critiques, offered afterward. I took him up on the crit, and he drew garbage on my sculpture; literally circling areas and speaking about the regions as if reading a textbook, yet my solutions were valid. He drew a center line over my center line, like a dumbass, didn’t look at the thing. By the measures he’d proposed, he was just trying to sound like a sculptor.
My armature was badass, I spent six hours on the armature. Another ten minutes on the armature, then six hours blocking, then cutting. Today I spent six hours cutting, and basically matching the silhouette. It was a tour-de-force. I hardly looked at the thing, so when the judge went on about the sculpture being a product of process and intellectual investigation, then selected the object which was furthest from his sky-high statements, I knew he was a shill, and full of shit. So, I won. That’s the only way I can live with myself. I mean, I know I didn’t win, but I gave it my best, and I won’t take this judgement as some sign for more things than it is. If it means anything it’s that I alluded yet another curse of validation in exchange for clarity.
No humans were harmed in the posting of this blog.
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Stevedore
It’s spring break now for PAFA.
This week Iv’e been hired by the school to clean up MILA walls for the forthcoming student exhibition showcase. MILA walls are modular and can join at a straight, a right angle, and at t’s. They’re honeycombed aluminum, with composite board and hardboard, which you adhere vinyl to the broadside and paint. Our job (a crew of nine) was to strip the old paint-and-vinyl layers off the wall sections, patch the holes (from art hanging), and adhere new vinyl. The job is supposed to last all week but we put a hell of a dent in them today. I kept thinking of Eric Hoffer’s Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, even though I’ve since ceased to read it. I’m putting in time to a handful of books. I’m reading The ISIS papers, by Dr. Cress, and W.E.B. Dubois’s The Souls Of Black Folks. There’s a preface to the former which references another book as required reading, so I’ll be reading that soon- about FBI’s active resistance to American Civil Rights movement. I’m reading the Roots of Romanticism from Isaiah Berlin; a collection from his public lectures compiled and published posthumously. It’s a whip-ride that’s made for a lens, same with the Dubois, however I’m fresher into that one.
______
It’s day four on this job. I keep thinking of Eric Hoffer’s Working and Thinking on the Waterfront. I parallel myself to his stevedore. We’re making great time; we’re ahead of the clock even with taking yesterday off on account of heavy snowfall. It’s Jose and Jotham and I in one room and another small crew in the other room. Our team rules.
I drew and blocked in this painting yesterday, during the snow day. I had a dream where bodybags lined the periphery of a pool environment. The bags were blue, and referred to as ‘sacs’, as in egg sacs, like those of a shark. Although the bodies had lived (they were adult sized), and there was a connotation of their death- a morbidity, it occurs to me now that the figures inside were in gestation. The bodybags bobbed, and I moved around. I think I was in the pool and all that, on the pool deck, etc. Plenty of options in dreams.
Oh yeah, the painting. Well, first a painting idea; from that dream, I imagined a clear cylinder, six inches in diameter, filled with clear (mildly tannic) water, with soil debris. The cylinder would have a stirrer and stirbar arrangement, and an illuminated base, that the vessels contents glow (like an illuminated aquarium, so the light could be at the top too, no problem). Vinyl decals would cling to the outside of the glass, in the pattern of fan coral (this is a secondary thought to the vision). An obscuring shade would go around with designs (but what?). . I think of the sacks, somehow, like paper cutting. This outer ring-shade would revolve around the glass vessel in an animation like some Muybridge zoetrope. . Finally a pinhole would flip this animation and project it on to a plate of opaque glass.
Okay, the painting. The painting is a still life. It’s a still life of a couple pieces of paper, cut out and pasted to a full sheet of notebook paper. I’m enlarging from 2” by 3” to about eight inches by 16. I know those ratios don’t add up, but just add bleed with the notebook paper’s full sheet. The cut-out paper says “convenient time to have an opinion”.
I could write about it. It fulfillls so many categories for my painting curiosities; at once polemic, ironic, dogmatic, self-deprecating, self-indulgent/centered/less. It’s a veritable mirror. I can’t speak to what others see in it. It’s democratic, intellectual, stupid. I love it.
It’s on a panel that’s five feet long; inhabited by other compositions, at once, dada surreal, boring, etc. I think I’ve hit a nerve and I’m excited to paint.
A buddy I used to skate with had a theory of skating on shitty boards for years, that you would get good with poor equipment, then blast off once you get to a pro-level deck. I’ve been painting a lot of models in chairs. I wonder if that’s any equivalent.
I dropped a class on the basis that I could use the time to paint, rather than be political, which is what was happening in that room- critiques with political centers. How boring. I am tempted to drop another class on the basis that the PMA is open late that night, and I could use the time to learn and draw from the collection, rather than analyze literature. It’s a Feminist Reconstructs class. I took it so that I could have a finger on the pulse, and get some guidance on reading supplements. It’s been good, but I’m balls deep in paintings now and I’ve got the reading done, and I keep thinking ‘buy low, sell high.’ I do not need the class for my major.
______
It’s day four on this job. I keep thinking of Eric Hoffer’s Working and Thinking on the Waterfront. I parallel myself to his stevedore. We’re making great time; we’re ahead of the clock even with taking yesterday off on account of heavy snowfall. It’s Jose and Jotham and I in one room and another small crew in the other room. Our team rules.
I drew and blocked in this painting yesterday, during the snow day. I had a dream where bodybags lined the periphery of a pool environment. The bags were blue, and referred to as ‘sacs’, as in egg sacs, like those of a shark. Although the bodies had lived (they were adult sized), and there was a connotation of their death- a morbidity, it occurs to me now that the figures inside were in gestation. The bodybags bobbed, and I moved around. I think I was in the pool and all that, on the pool deck, etc. Plenty of options in dreams.
Oh yeah, the painting. Well, first a painting idea; from that dream, I imagined a clear cylinder, six inches in diameter, filled with clear (mildly tannic) water, with soil debris. The cylinder would have a stirrer and stirbar arrangement, and an illuminated base, that the vessels contents glow (like an illuminated aquarium, so the light could be at the top too, no problem). Vinyl decals would cling to the outside of the glass, in the pattern of fan coral (this is a secondary thought to the vision). An obscuring shade would go around with designs (but what?). . I think of the sacks, somehow, like paper cutting. This outer ring-shade would revolve around the glass vessel in an animation like some Muybridge zoetrope. . Finally a pinhole would flip this animation and project it on to a plate of opaque glass.
Okay, the painting. The painting is a still life. It’s a still life of a couple pieces of paper, cut out and pasted to a full sheet of notebook paper. I’m enlarging from 2” by 3” to about eight inches by 16. I know those ratios don’t add up, but just add bleed with the notebook paper’s full sheet. The cut-out paper says “convenient time to have an opinion”.
I could write about it. It fulfillls so many categories for my painting curiosities; at once polemic, ironic, dogmatic, self-deprecating, self-indulgent/centered/less. It’s a veritable mirror. I can’t speak to what others see in it. It’s democratic, intellectual, stupid. I love it.
It’s on a panel that’s five feet long; inhabited by other compositions, at once, dada surreal, boring, etc. I think I’ve hit a nerve and I’m excited to paint.
A buddy I used to skate with had a theory of skating on shitty boards for years, that you would get good with poor equipment, then blast off once you get to a pro-level deck. I’ve been painting a lot of models in chairs. I wonder if that’s any equivalent.
I dropped a class on the basis that I could use the time to paint, rather than be political, which is what was happening in that room- critiques with political centers. How boring. I am tempted to drop another class on the basis that the PMA is open late that night, and I could use the time to learn and draw from the collection, rather than analyze literature. It’s a Feminist Reconstructs class. I took it so that I could have a finger on the pulse, and get some guidance on reading supplements. It’s been good, but I’m balls deep in paintings now and I’ve got the reading done, and I keep thinking ‘buy low, sell high.’ I do not need the class for my major.
Monday, March 5, 2018
Dream Notation
Night before last I dreamt of being strapped to the front of a tourism gorilla, like a baby in one of those front pouches, we bounced around. It was an unfortunate leg of an African trip. I’d flown on a small plane in, then took a train, where I lost my childhood gymnastics team duffel bag. It’s funny what the mind does with the stuff you load into it. When I have dreams, even weird ones, I’m comforted- it’s much less harmless than accusations and hostilities posited by peers in waking life. What a shame that we castle into our disadvantages. I’ve been paranoid.
Last night in a dream I inhabited a world not unlike Silver Springs, Florida, where my family camped a couple times for family reunions. I was under eight at the time. This place caught my imagination like a sweater thread, and if you asked me to unravel, it might have something to do with the glitter of the sun across the lake, or the pine needles outside of the rent-a-cabin, or the wooden paver-blocks making a coral for the family van. SO in my dream, I was myself, my age, and an artist in residence, violet and creamed whites, -pthaloey blacks, small flares of macaroni orange-yellow. My residence was a tow-behind camper. It had water leaks and sat crooked, it was parked in a kind of playground, Kentucky-made hydraulic trailers abounded, the neighbors were the type of my step-grandmother, and blood grandfather on mom’s side- working class mechanics, truck drivers. I had a stoat, or a stoat was present, an ermine, a white one like in the Leonardo painting. (I can’t tell purples from blues, so isn’t it funny to dream of one and not the other? ). The stoat became a black Pine Martin, and joined a less dynamic Red Panda. They climbed onto a playground fixture before I came to.
In the middle of the night I awoke with a vision of a bronze horse. Id sculpted it and was making a drawing and planning to paint it. My painting was anticipated by spectators and adulators. In dreams, darkness envelops and details float, This may be why those old paintings were so dark. I’m making darker paintings recently. Part of the gig is up regarding plugging in past solutions to PAFA paintings. I had a crit the other day, and my solutions were regarded as ‘banal’, and ‘contrived’. It was a relief- they were. I posted a video to social media and was replied to with praise, but I knew the crit was spot on. I was over the paintings and buffed them. The attitude to preserve paintings for posterity and to start on fresh surfaces each time is gone, I’m looking forward to painting over these older paintings. Yes, I did document them with a photograph first. This same dream but a little earlie I remember a haunting feeling. My work was haunted, I am haunted by my work- one of these things. I didn’t eat before bed, tapering from lunchtime, and I could feel my body heal in the night, going through whack food I’ve been putting into it. I wrestled restlessly like in grips of a fever, but it was my body going through the poisons I’d put in to it.
I thought the other day how I didn’t have dreams of painting, and wasn’t that peculiar because I Shane so much time doing that. Now it’s clear to me that I am painting in my dreams, it’s a calling from the ether, with visitors, and hauntings. It’s vivid, it bleeds.
Last night in a dream I inhabited a world not unlike Silver Springs, Florida, where my family camped a couple times for family reunions. I was under eight at the time. This place caught my imagination like a sweater thread, and if you asked me to unravel, it might have something to do with the glitter of the sun across the lake, or the pine needles outside of the rent-a-cabin, or the wooden paver-blocks making a coral for the family van. SO in my dream, I was myself, my age, and an artist in residence, violet and creamed whites, -pthaloey blacks, small flares of macaroni orange-yellow. My residence was a tow-behind camper. It had water leaks and sat crooked, it was parked in a kind of playground, Kentucky-made hydraulic trailers abounded, the neighbors were the type of my step-grandmother, and blood grandfather on mom’s side- working class mechanics, truck drivers. I had a stoat, or a stoat was present, an ermine, a white one like in the Leonardo painting. (I can’t tell purples from blues, so isn’t it funny to dream of one and not the other? ). The stoat became a black Pine Martin, and joined a less dynamic Red Panda. They climbed onto a playground fixture before I came to.
In the middle of the night I awoke with a vision of a bronze horse. Id sculpted it and was making a drawing and planning to paint it. My painting was anticipated by spectators and adulators. In dreams, darkness envelops and details float, This may be why those old paintings were so dark. I’m making darker paintings recently. Part of the gig is up regarding plugging in past solutions to PAFA paintings. I had a crit the other day, and my solutions were regarded as ‘banal’, and ‘contrived’. It was a relief- they were. I posted a video to social media and was replied to with praise, but I knew the crit was spot on. I was over the paintings and buffed them. The attitude to preserve paintings for posterity and to start on fresh surfaces each time is gone, I’m looking forward to painting over these older paintings. Yes, I did document them with a photograph first. This same dream but a little earlie I remember a haunting feeling. My work was haunted, I am haunted by my work- one of these things. I didn’t eat before bed, tapering from lunchtime, and I could feel my body heal in the night, going through whack food I’ve been putting into it. I wrestled restlessly like in grips of a fever, but it was my body going through the poisons I’d put in to it.
I thought the other day how I didn’t have dreams of painting, and wasn’t that peculiar because I Shane so much time doing that. Now it’s clear to me that I am painting in my dreams, it’s a calling from the ether, with visitors, and hauntings. It’s vivid, it bleeds.
Friday, March 2, 2018
Green onion
Will it venture into shooting tendrils out
It seems to be alive
Pulling from the dirt, it’s rooting
Ah! I see a horn, and a sheath retreating
It seems to be alive
Pulling from the dirt, it’s rooting
Ah! I see a horn, and a sheath retreating
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