Category Archives: Art

Thanksgiving

Art, Family, Journal, Life

We celebrated Thanksgiving with they Mehrer family, Quinn’s in-laws. Dinner was at Dave’s brother’s house. We had a great meal and had an excellent day. The Mehrers are great people, they couldn’t be any nicer. However they are so different from us, it’s kind of funny. They’re devout Christians, we are not believers. I’m guessing if you dug down to the basic beliefs, we’d be pretty similar.

I spend a lot of time lately thinking about how grateful I am. I have reasonably good health, our children are healthy and thriving, we managed to save enough for a comfortable retirement and I am so lucky to be married to an amazing woman and an amazing mother.

When I’m contemplating my good fortune it sometimes dawns on me that things have not always been easy. I had a lot of issues as a kid, mostly stemming from ADHD, which in those days was unheard of. I was just a pain in the ass kid. I took a lot of teasing for being a little weird and so skinny and physically frightened and anxious. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of, I treated some of my classmates very badly. Some of those behaviors percolate up to consciousness occasionally and without going into details I can tell you I’m ashamed of what I did.

And my life hasn’t really been easy. I suffered from anxiety and depression from a very early age. I can remember thinking about suicide many times, starting when I was a teenager. I even had a gun to my head a couple of times. My father died when I was twenty. I’ve dealt with chronic illness, Crohn’s disease, for most of my life. Our first child had a devastating genetic anomaly and only lived for a day. I was an alcoholic. I bounced around the world of graphic arts without much success. Every time I thought thing were going to finally be great, they fell apart. I finally found a job that I held for eighteen years, which helped us become financially secure, but was a soul sucking experience.

Thinking back, I wonder how I can be so grateful.

Probably the number one thing I’m grateful for is my wife. For one thing, she had a great career and was the main bread winner most of the time. She’s been tolerant, forgiving and loving. She’s put up with a lot. We make each other laugh, that’s so important. Our daughters are doing well and along with their spouses, seem to like to spend time with us.

I started taking meds for my depression many years ago and so many of my issues, anger, anxiety, depression, hypochondia are a thing of the past now. For years, because of cost and fear of side effects, I resisted taking medication for my Crohn’s disease. I finally started taking methotrexate which resulted in a long run of remission. My health is pretty damned good for an old fart.

Looking back all the bad stuff seems like a distant memory. I’m grateful every day.

Creative Slump

Art, Journal

It’s not that I’m not working, I do work on a regular basis, but not every day. Lately the work that I’ve been completing hasn’t really given me that spark that my best stuff does. I’m starting to wonder if my approach, intentionally trying to be unintentional, has run it’s course. I’m also having trouble maintaining a consistent, unified style without being repetitive and boring. I don’t want to be doing the same painting over and over again, such a big part of what I do is experimentation, exploring various approaches and techniques. It’s as if my mantra were, “Let’s see what happens if I do this.” I feel like I have two choices here. Keep doing what I’m doing and push through the slump. Completely change direction and start doing figurative and representational work again. Or just do whatever I want and forget about stylistic consistency.

I’ve started to try to draw every day. I’m doing portraits from photographs. Going through some of my old drawings from the 80s and 90s I’ve found that I used to draw much better than I do now. I’m not sure I’ll ever get back to that level, which is kind of frustrating.

I know I just have to keep pounding on it until I can’t anymore.

Oh and my shoulder is feeling much better, the best it has since the original injury almost a year ago now.

Out of the Ashes

Art, binging, Journal, Life

That’s, admittedly, a pretty intense title. It might be a little too intense for the subject. I had fun yesterday taking some paintings that weren’t working for me and reworking them. Successfully. There’s a feeling I get when a painting works, I don’t really know what qualities make it so. I guess it has something to do with composition, color harmony and unity. By “unity” I mean it holds together, has some kind of structural and thematic harmony. I can’t really put a finger on it but I know it when I see it. Yesterday I brought three paintings back to life.

I took a broad brush and fairly light color and just started painting them out, leaving spaces for the under layer to show through. I used a broad flat brush that came in a package of four and was labeled “disposable.” They seem to hold up to use and clean up well. I haven’t disposed of any yet.

I’m making an effort to draw every day and to write every day. I want to up my drawing game, I’m considering doing some figurative, representational work, I’m getting a little bored and frustrated with the abstract.

Streamed Under a Dark Sky a French mystery series. At times I thought it was a little too melodramatic, with a soap opera feel to it. But I also found it to be very suspenseful and they do a good job of not tipping off who the villains are. We really binged this one, watched all six episodes last night, stayed up till one.

Extremely Minnesota

Art, Life

We had a date night last night. We went to the opening reception for Extremely Minnesota, the Robbin Gallery’s annual juried exhibition open to all Minnesota residents. Then we headed over to downtown Robbinsdale and had dinner at Marna’s, a Costa Rican restaurant right on West Broadway. Great art, great food. It was a pleasant evening.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this here before, it came about during a long fallow period for posting, but I’m the president of the gallery board of directors. Lucky me. We had a record number of entries, around 150. Neither of the pieces I submitted were accepted. That’s not a big deal, that’s the nature of open, juried exhibitions. The pieces I submitted weren’t my strongest, most of my recent work has already been shown there and that disqualifies them. Many of my friends had work accepted though and that’s great.

The work is very high quality, maybe the best we’ve had. It’s worth a trip to Robbinsdale to check it out.

It’s a windy cloudy day. I’m staffing the gallery from 1-4 pm, which will give me some time to look more closely at the work.

A rose by any other name.

Art

Yesterday was the artist’s reception for my joint show with sculptor and glass artist James Tracey. It was a very successful show, we had a great turnout, and I had lots of fun conversations. I even sold a few paintings.

Hell is Empty and the Devils are All Here

The most commonly asked question or comment about the work was about the titles. In the past, I never really titled my abstract work. I’d name them things like “Abstract Number 3,” “Abstract with Green and Yellow, or sometimes “Untitled.” Is calling something “Untitled” actually giving it a title? In some circles the thinking is that abstract art should remain pure, with no context to it that gets between the viewer and the art. If you paint a mother and child in front of a window at twilight, staring lovingly into each other’s eyes the view is responding for the most part to the context, not the image as a purely visual experience. Titles can also influence the viewer’s perception of the work, get between the art and the viewer. Now I’m not saying that I subscribe to that school of thought. At least I don’t have a premium membership. I have the free budget plan.

When I started doing these latest paintings a couple of years ago, on a whim, I started giving them titles, and to be honest, I felt a little guilty about it. Like I was going against one of my beliefs about art, that representatives from the cult would come knocking on my door. That’s the kind of crap that comes to mind when you study this stuff in college. But then I started having some fun with it.

Folks asked how I come up with the titles. Various ways. Sometimes they just pop into my head when I’m working on them, like divine inspiration, not always having very much to do with the image itself. Other times there’s something that the image evokes, like a Rorschach test, and I base the name on that. In other cases, I’m stumped for a name. I spend too much time staring at the painting trying to pull some kind of an idea out of it. Sometimes I come up with a theme but can’t find the right words. Then I have a trick up my sleeve. Shakespeare. I look up Shakespeare quotes, sometimes using a keyword but often just scanning through lists until I have an “that works” moment.

I do have a concern that giving the work a title pushes the view into seeing the work a certain way, again getting between the viewer and the image. And although I’m not totally comfortable with that, people seem to have fun with it. I think the titles bring people into the work. When I watch people looking at art, I can tell the ones that just don’t get abstract. They just pass right by it, hardly giving it a look. If the title can make them stop for a second and try to figure out the reason for the title, I’ve pulled them into my schtick. Which is a good thing.

I Don’t Know Anything About Art, But…

Art, Uncategorized

Some time ago I set out to start writing about art. This creates a strange paradox for me. On the surface I should be well qualified to write about art. I’ve been creating art since I could hold a pencil, I majored in art in college, I have a pretty broad knowledge of art history, and most of my work life involved art in some form or another. However, somehow I feel like I know nothing about art. I haven’t paid much attention to the fine art world for years, and I really struggle with understanding some of the avant garde trends of the last half century. Actually I couldn’t even come up with an example of current avant garde art. I am clueless about aesthetics and haven’t read a word of art criticism in probably half a century. I only darkened the door of the Walker a couple of times since they moved into the new building. I rarely go to galleries and I very rarely have a conversation about art. So that’s where I’m coming from as I start this endeavor.

So here’s the approach I’m thinking about. I will be spewing my thoughts about art in general. I’m also going to use this as a journal to record my thoughts about my art practice and feature some artists, contemporary and from the past, that I admire and that inspire me. And of course there will be a certain amount of shameless self promotion.

A long time gone.

Art, Uncategorized

It’s been over three years since I’ve posted here. It’s time to start writing again. I’ve been thinking about doing some writing about art. One reason for this strange urge is that I want to explore what I think about art, and I think about it a lot.

On one hand, I could be considered somewhat of an expert on the subject. I’ve been creating art since I could hold a pencil. When I was very young, my parents gave me pencils and paper to keep me from drawing on the walls and in the margins of books. With my two siblings grown up and out of the house by the time I was five, I was virtually an only child. An only child with ADD, which of course no one had heard of at that time, so an only child who was just weird. I don’t think my parents really knew what to do with me. When they figured out I would spend hours silently drawing, my dad started bringing home typing paper and pencils from his office. Reams of typing paper and boxes of pencils. I would lay on the floor in front of the TV with a pad and pencil and silently draw rather than bounce off the walls and get into trouble. I know the television of the fifties from the audio, I wasn’t watching I was drawing.

I majored in art in college and when I graduated I tried to make it as an artist and a printmaker, but I really didn’t try very hard. In my twenties I had the perfect job for an aspiring artist, I tended bar at the Black Forest Inn, near the Art Institute and frequented by the local art crowd. I could get by on working 3 shifts a week so I had lots of time to develop my skills. But like so many things in my life, I was distracted by another obsession. I was addicted to pickup basketball, and I spent that time working on those skills. All I have to show for that is really bad knees. But that’s a different story.

I moved on to “commercial art.” In quotes because it’s an old term that folks in field absolutely hate. I plan to address the artificial divide between “fine art” and the applied arts. Something I’ve never quite understood.

I worked as an illustrator, an animation inbetweener (yes that’s a job title), a production artist, a newspaper layout artist, a graphic designer and unfortunately a manager of a group of artists. I say unfortunately, because I was the poster child for the Peter Principle, I sucked at management.

On the other hand I don’t know shit about art. I was at best a mediocre art history student. I’ve never read much about art theory or aesthetics. I do love museums and galleries and combing the internet for art of all kinds. But I can’t make any claim to being a critic or knowing anything about current trends in fine art.

So, this is the beginning of a series of posts about art. I’m not doing this to educate anyone but myself. Hopefully you won’t think it’s complete bullshit.

Freedom

Art, Life

One of my favorite illustrations that I did for Computer User. Notice the hardware… it was a long time ago.

Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to get paid for making art. Most of the time, I’ve been constrained by the needs of clients. I once had a gig doing highly rendered illustrations of grocery products for newspaper publication. I did them with stippling technique, building the values with tiny dots. I was pretty good at it but it was intensely boring and unsatisfying from a creative standpoint. Most of my work was editorial, illustrating articles for publication, which is a lot more creative, but the work is still directed by the content of the article.

I’m semi-retired now and have the freedom to create whatever want. WTF! What do I want to create?  Right now I’m getting in the groove doing small impressionist still lifes and landscapes. I’m enjoying the work and I’ve gotten good feedback, but I’m not so sure that’s the direction I want to go.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve gone pretty far down the abstract rabbit hole. I still want to explore that direction, with both digital and natural media.

But for now I’m enjoying the challenge of working with paint to make it do what I want and using color and value to express light. The discipline involved in this study brings a heightened awareness of the visual world. I notice color and form more intensely and from a new perspective.

For me it’s a form of meditation.

Paint

Art, Life

I’ve started painting again. It’s been years. I started painting when I was very young, I was one of those kids that drew all the time. When I was five or six I started drawing in the margins of books and on walls and any surface available. My dad started bringing home tablets of typing paper and boxes of pencils to keep the rest of the house free of my murals. I would lay on the floor and draw while I watched TV. More like listened to TV, most of those early shows from the fifties were more like radio for me. I’m sure they were glad to find something to keep me occupied, I’m pretty sure I had ADHD, but in those days they just called me a bratty kid.

I was maybe 12, my parents let me wander around downtown Moorhead by myself while I waited for a ride. Or maybe I rode my bike down there. Imagine that.  I was downtown  getting a haircut when I discovered that there was an art supply store across the street. I might have been an art supply store virgin. I found my toy store. That’s also the day I met James O’Rourke. One of, if not the most, influential people in my life. More about that later.

To make a long story, Jim soon had me coming to painting classes. I continued to paint through college, where I became focused on abstract art. I was interested in using repeated shapes from realistic drawings, reconstructing them into new compositions. I also experimented with an organic approach where I started randomly making marks and then building on them to create a composition.

I graduated from college with the intent of finding seasonal or part time work to support my art habit until it could sustain itself. I found the perfect job, but love and basketball intervened and I ended up dropping painting. When I started doing illustration I did a few mixed media pieces and some paintings, but didn’t really sustain the effort.

So I haven’t done any natural media painting for decades and now I’m starting up again. I’m trying to take an open minded approach, I’ve done both abstract and representational pieces, right now it seems like I’m more drawn to the representational. I’m going for an impressionist, alla prima schtick, although I have to admit I cheat on the alla prima part quite a bit. I’m not above going back in with some glazes to make adjustments to values and colors, but I won’t tell if you don’t .

I hope to be posting here regularly about my painting adventure, things I’m learning along the way, problems I’m mulling, and general observations about art. I hope a couple of people might find it mildly amusing.

Scottsboro Boys

Art, Family

We had a great weekend. Lucia and David drove up from Chicago and Quinn came home to celebrate Reb’s birthday. It was great to have the whole family together, even for such a short time.

Lucia and David had to leave in the early afternoon Sunday and we capped the weekend off by attending a performance of the bound for Broadway musical Scottsboro Boys. We went with Quinn and her BF Dave, Quinn had landed free tickets courtesy her server job at Level Five, one of the restaurants at the Guthrie.

When Quinn offered us the tickets, my first instinct was to not go. Scottsboro Boys is a musical based on the story of nine black teenagers who were arrested in Alabama in the thirtys, accused of gang raping two white women while riding a freight train from Chattanooga to Memphis. They were tried and sentenced to death but the Supreme Court overturned their convictions, and in spite of the fact that one of the women recanted, they were retried and convicted several more times. All but one of them was eventually released. But not until they spent years in jail. I didn’t see how a musical about the evils of southern justice would be that entertaining. The theme of social injustice in dramatic presentations always fills me with a level of anger that I find hard to take. I had to be dragged to see Schindler’s List and probably would have walked out if I hadn’t been in the middle of the row. The idea of making a light hearted musical out of something truly evil doesn’t sit well with me.

I’m glad I went. It wasn’t a light hearted musical. They take an outdated form, the minstrel show, and bend it into a cuttingly ironic social critique. Minstrel shows featured white men in black face playing stereotypical blacks for laughs. Here, in all but one case, the black minstrels play the white characters, representing southern justice and biting, black humor. They’ve taken a huge risk presenting this sad story in a comic form that our twenty-first century sensibilities would find appallingly offensive and turn it on it’s head to make a powerful statement. And immensely entertains us in the process. From the spare set, some chairs a few planks and some tambourines, the incredible timing of the choreography and the performances of the cast, you know you are witnessing something really special.

I’m so glad that they chose the Guthrie for their final tune-up before taking the show to Broadway. I’m sure it’s going to be a huge hit. Thanks Quinn.