Progress Continues/Self-Reflection/Geeking Out

Was back in the studio last night doing a little more drawing on the megature - dogs, tigers, more spines on the snakes...

While I was creating a series of arching, fluted horns growing from the back of a floating, greyhound-like creature, I found myself in a moment of self-recognition.

backstory:
A week or so ago Jonathan Bennett came by to discuss some potential collaborative work, (ekphrastic stuff, as we say here in Wenham) and we got into a fairly in-depth talk about my artistic motivations (it was actually a little like being in therapy). At first I was a little wierded out, but eventually he explained that he was just trying to find out what makes me tick artistically so that he could respond informedly to the work.

Since Jonathan is a poet, the conversation naturally drifted to my past work in orthographies and constructed languages - what sounds I like, how I go about choosing and developing letter/character forms, etc. I have mostly abandoned such pursuits in the last few years since they're time-consuming and fairly solipsistic, but it was fun to babble about them to someone who was actually interested.

One of the languages, Oriset (the only one with a semi-developed working grammar and vocabulary) whose script is calligraphic and resembles sequences of clouds or waves, has a very complicated system of verbs, with many irregular ones and an ornate method of conjugation. The entire language from the choice of consonant sounds up to conjugations and noun declensions, was developed for beauty, flow and a rhythmic, embellished sound, which brings me back to the Persian Megature.

As I was drawing the various creatures, it struck me that I was designing the line-quality of the Megature in much the same way that I went about building the sound-quality of Oriset. I take the necessary and essential elements of the creatures I choose to include, and spin them out into a sort of attenuated Mannerism that borders on the Rococo.

So, an interesting observation - don't what what I'll do with it yet.

From The Vault


Speaking of hyperstylized linework: a rabbit grooming itself in a thicket by a pond, in the Thai style. Circa late 90s?


Illuminated manuscript, color pencil, 2004ish

Rabbits

One of my approaches to the rabbit is iconoclastic. I paint rabbits, not bunnies. The rabbit is a creature with many associations. First and foremost is The Bunny, which is cute, innocuous, fluffy and bland, reducible to two ears, two teeth, and a carrot. Then there is the rabbit as reproducer ("breeding like rabbits"), the rabbit as fleeing prey, weak and with its only recourse in speed and cowering. Overall the animal is usually portrayed in a light that is condescending if not negative.

One of the aspects of my employment of rabbit imagery is to subvert these stereotypes. In my paintings of rabbits, I try to capture and enunciate the native grace of their movements and body - to remind the viewer that in technical terms, rabbits are referred to as does and bucks.
Like the mythical creatures of Thailand and China, they take on ennobled characteristics of other animals; the horns of the stag, the claws of the cat, the haunches of the greyhound. Like Japanese kitsune their horns and ears may multiply, implying a great store of wisdom or power.

The rabbits in the paintings may initially seem cute, (and of course that is an aspect of a rabbit's charm - sometime I'll post a little chart that explicates this further :) but upon closer inspection other details appear. These rabbits do not cower or flee. They have claws, they have teeth, their ears catch the wind like sails and slice like curved blades. My attempt is to remove them from one an anthropomorphised sphere of cute and cuddly, and reinstate them as amoral forces of nature. In Predator/Prey the eyes are blank, black, cavernous, leading inward into a hidden place, but also flat and forbidding.

The Matrix

The most important thing (for me) when coming up with a show, is the intellectual-imaginative and/or design framework which will hold it together and make it truly function as a BODY of work. A show without such a thing (like my portion of last summer's Inside/Outside, may (or may not) satisfy the viewer, but for me will never be as fulfilling as something with the flavor of gesamtkunstwerk.

If a show is small, like ShowOff in summer 05, such a framework is relatively easy to come up with (although will probably be lacking in grand schemes). ShowOff consisted exclusively of my first Ex Nihilo series of ink drawings, so it was cohesive, but that was kind of it.

My senior thesis From The New World was the first time I put together something which really captivated me, creatively, imaginitively and intellectually, not just in the creation of the individual pieces but in coming up with thought processes and a narrative/symbolic structure which would inform which pieces (out of the many I sketched and planned for) would be executed and included in the final show, what order I would make them in, what materials (gold or silver) they would be embellished with, what their focal points would be (birds, rabbits, humans), and also suggest what motifs and symbols would be included in the marginalia (The New World had a very illuminated manuscript feel and upon completing the general layout/design of each piece, I would be confronted with areas that needed to be filled in or embellished but were theretofore unused space, physically and symbolically. The theme and its associated symbol systems then supplied me with appropriate material for marginalia that would support, enhance and commentate on the main elements of the piece (for instance, here and here) - it creates a very real, though submerged, framework that the viewer recognizes on some level, enough to follow its scaffolding across and between the pieces, but cannot completely enter into - akin to C.S. Lewis' kappa element in fiction).

The projected exhibition is in even greater need of such an organizing factor, having so many separate series. I am happy to say that I have found that rubric and will be applying it.

How To Talk About Your Work

I attended a lecture/Q+A session this morning with curator/critic Barbara O'Brien, former editor of ArtNewEngland this morning. It was the third talk I've attended of hers (once when she introduced her exhibit Standing On One Foot at Gordon College, and another time with the art critic Donald Kuspit as Simmons College, where she now teaches). I'm been impressed each time by her sensitivity; usually I think of The Art World as a very scary and brittle political space with a clandestine sense of manners; a single wrong move can you booted or blacklisted. Barbara O'B., though, always communicates a sense of humanity and reverence, if you will, for the artist as person, and their work as an essential aspect of that. I like that.

Her talk today was on presenting your work to curators and galleries; the public, business side of being an artist. She said, interestingly, that in an artist's statement she doesn't necessary want to find out about the conceptual or emotional trappings of a work; she wants first to connect to the work on a physical level, on the level of materials and practice - and then discover its meaning later for herself. I love that; as for me the original meaning of the artwork is not something that the audience necessarily needs to know to appreciate it. I don't want my art to speak for itself necessarily (of course we could spend a long time unpacking exactly what that means), but rather to present a unified sybolic matrix that the viewer can extrapolate from. My repetition of rabbits, birds, metal leaf placement, etc. is meant to evoke a series of connections that will give viewers spaces to build their own narrative connections on. Time and time again the things that people tell me they see or 'understand' from looking at the paintings are widely divergent from my own initial understanding of the work, and while showing the work in progress, my continued work on a piece has often been influenced by what viewers have said. So in that sense, I would say that the work is collaborative.

Umm...trying to reunite this thought-train...in the end I got to talk to Ms. O'Brien for about thirty seconds. I've introduced myself every time I've met her, but of course she doesn't remember me :). She asked me about my work and I found myself telling her about my senior thesis work from two years ago, which is still important to me but not really the most logical thing to be telling a curator about, esp. since it's scattered and sold now. Immediately after she wished me the best of luck and walked away, I realized that I should have said something like, "I work on a small-to-medium scale with acrylic and precious metals, using a decorative, Southeast Asian aesthetic and animal imagery to intimately communicate a sense of simultaneous power, threat and vulnerability." Oh well...next time. We are only succinct in our own heads I guess.

P.S. After my Barbara blunder, another artist I know invited me to submit to an invitation-only juried exhibit, which I'm really excited about! The deadline's coming up though (they always are) so i'll need to get cracking to have my piece in.