Dan took some lovely pics while we were holding our workshop last night. It was a good experience, and gave me some food for thought in terms of future workshops and exercises.
(via Dan) Jason Kottke points to a recent study on morphological changes in North American birds. Apparently wing shapes are beginning to change in response to changing habitats, specifically deforestation. I’ve yet to read the original post, which links to the original article, but I’m looking forward (with some trepidation) to following that trail. I would imagine that over the span of my life time we’ll see more and more evidence of this kind of direct connection between human activity and ecological change.
I’m teaching a drawing workshop with Andrea Jenkins next Tuesday night at Trade School. The class has filled up (yay!) but we’re considering looking for other locations to teach it, probably around Bushwick. The workshop centers around the idea that reconnecting the hand, eye, and mind through drawing can start with exercises that relieve tension and build comfort levels. Learning a new skill inevitably involves hard work and degrees of frustration, but the initial steps of learning to draw (getting comfortable with the movement of your hand on paper) and can be soothing and enjoyable. I’ll post some of the exercises and approaches here next week, once we’ve completed the first workshop.
Image: Andrea Jenkins, Chair Tents Plants, watercolor, graphite and carbon transfer on paper 2008
Sort of! I’ve finished my masters, but continue to go to school, because of all this fun alternative/free school stuff that is going on in NYC of late. I particularly enjoyed some classes at the temporary Trade School (Grand Opening) over the past week. There are still a few weeks remaining to get yourself some education for barter. Dan is teaching on February 12!
(Image ripped from the OurGoods website)
My MFA is almost complete! Tomorrow, January 18th, from 6-8, we have a closing reception in the gallery. Our thesis exhibition was written about favorably by James Wagner of Art Cat in a recent blog post. I like what he had to say about my work, especially his notion that it “addresses our ‘attachment’ to our environment, both the gifted and the corrupted”. Details about the final events of the show here.
Image:
Tributary Study: Calamity Brook/Henderson Lake (detail), 2009
18 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches
graphite on paper
I spent yesterday driving around Los Angeles with Dan, his sister Jen, and her boyfriend Jonathan. We were out to catch the final day of two exhibitions: Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, at the Hammer, and New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at LACMA. We weren’t intending to see two landscape-based shows back to back, but I’m glad we did. Although the two exhibitions approach landscape from highly divergent perspectives, I found echoes of my own landscape investigations in each.
The Burchfield show, curated by Robert Gober, is romantic, expressive, and full of color. It includes a recreation of Burchfield’s 1930 exhibition at New York’s MoMA, the first solo show put on by the fledgling museum. It also follows Burchfield through his years working as a wallpaper designer, and his rise as part of American Scene Painting. For me, the most exciting part of the exhibition is the final room. Sparely hung, it is devoted to the large-scale watercolors Burchfield made in the final decades of his life. During these years (the 1950s and 60s) Burchfield broke his ties with American Scene Painting and returned to his youthful search for a romantic, direct connection with nature and his own experiences in it.
The paintings in this room radiate an exalted, ecstatic calm but also suggest a man deeply engaged in the world around him. They are both mundanely detailed and somehow sublime- we see cicada husks, dirt, river rocks, trees, flowers; but also calligraphic arcs of sound and shimmering forms suggesting light and energy. Entering this room I couldn’t help but think of the final segment of the recent Turner exhibition at the Met. Both artists seemed to find a sudden and extreme freedom in their later years, expanding upon a lifetime of painting with new passion and certainty. As Dan and I begin this new year (approaching our thirties and looking forward to a lifetime of creating) evidence of such long-lasting creative output is inspiring indeed.
In a very different vein, the photographers included in New Topographics attempt to approach landscape with an objective, impersonal eye. The LACMA exhibition is actually a “restaging” of the 1975 exhibition held at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House. It includes now well-known topographic greats like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams and Stephen Shore, who participated in the 1975 exhibition, as well as additions like Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. The curators also commissioned a video installation from the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), whose contribution is the only contemporary work included.
As expected, the work in this exhibition takes a cool, analytic approach to landscape. Despite the emphasis on objectivity (and perhaps due to the lingering influence of Burchfield, which we saw first) I felt the sublime creep into this exhibition as well. In the work of Adams especially, I found an almost clinical sublime. He isolates and analyzes the landscapes he documents, but the images still retain a sense of the wild and the raw. In the case of CLUI, I see a combination of Burchfield and Adams. This sounds a bit illogical, but experiencing CLUI’s massive double video projection, drifting slowly over bleak scenes of oil fields in California and Texas, I felt a distinct sense of subjective passion infusing this objective “interpretation” of 21st Century Landscape.
update: another blog post/review of the show here.
Images:
Charles E. Burchfield, September Wind and Rain, 1949
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Loomis Coal Breaker/Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, 1974
The results of my stick/branch/twig gathering habits of the past year or so are going to be on view soon as part of my thesis exhibition. Dan and I are also at work on a web component for the show, which will live here eventually.
We took an amazing trip to upstate New York this past week. Most of the trip was concentrated near the heart of the Adirondack Park in the Huntington Wildlife Forest, but we also stopped through Albany on our rainy trip home, where I gathered a spectacular mix of sugar maple, norway maple, red oak and liquid amber leaves. More about the trip to come!
It’s raining today in NYC. I’m sitting on the couch in the soft light of late afternoon, listening to the drizzle. I’ve been thinking a lot about water since I came back to this city about a month ago. Canals, storm drains, decommissioned water towers- infrastructure for controlling water surrounds us in urban environments. And here in New York, we also sit at the apex of many rivers- the Hudson being the most remarkable and well-known of them. A few weeks ago, I googled “Hudson River Watershed” and came up with this image:
I love how the watershed (the area of land drained by the Hudson and its tributaries) has little regard for city limits or state lines. It’s an ancient and ever-changing structure that as humans we participate in, but do not control. This image grabbed me in such a way that I started researching the watershed. I quickly stumbled into a complex web of issues (political, environmental, aesthetic, historical) that are tied to the Hudson, and I was hooked. I’m working on my masters thesis right now, and everything I’ve made so far (drawings, sculptures, sketches) relates to the concept of the watershed and our relationship to it as New Yorkers and city dwellers.
Below: me looking down on the Hudson and the town of Cold Spring. Much more “research” of this kind to follow! (thanks Dan)
Dan helped me document my Schiermonnikoog Project. He did a wonderful job:
