TELEPHONE is Huge!

The Telephone project hit the ground running, with excellent coverage in the New York Times, Hyperallergic and NPR.

Wow, I never thought it would come to this when I made my piece:

You can have fun on the Telephone website, or start from my page and move backward.

This project is an awesome example of a great, selfless idea, and people who made it happen because they wanted to do something wonderful. That's what art is.

Gone Fishing at SPA

I've got two pieces in the Gone Fishing show at SPA. The opening for the show is the annual BASH, so come on out and do some cajun dancing on Friday, May 8, 7-9 PM!

The painting in the middle of the panel is mine, called Secret Things -- from way back in 1998! It's funny that I've started to re-work paintings from that era -- though this one is unchanged.

Also an oldie,  from a series of paintings on books:

News, News, News!

Such a lot is afoot! And here's the news in chronological order:

 

The first excitement is the wonderful TELEPHONE project that Nathan Langston and the Satellite Collective in New York organized. I had just started working with photographs when I got hooked up with the project, and made a boat piece using found photographs that responded to a work by an artist in Istanbul, Turkey. The project is going live online now!  You can find my piece here, at the end of one of the strands of the web, and you can follow it back to the beginning. It's fun to cruise around, going both backwards and forwards in the process. There was a great article in the New York Times today about the project, and you can see the article online here.

 Next, I'm reminding folks that I'm having my studio open this Friday in conjunction with International Sculpture Day, organized by the publishers of Sculpture magazine. I'll be at the studio, 201 North Main Street in Barre, Vermont from 9 AM-4 PM on Friday, April 24, 2015, talking about and showing my 3-dimensional work, and I'll have coupons available for a 20% discount on membership in the International Sculpture Center, which includes a subscription to Sculpture magazine.


Third, I'm joining a cooperative gallery organized by Glen Coburn Hutcheson, located where Gallery Six was -- near the corner of Barre Street and Main Street in Montpelier. It is yet to be named, but it will probably have a name before May 1, when we'll be open for the Montpelier Art Walk, 4-8 PM. I hope to see folks there.


And finally the GREAT ANNUAL SPA BASH IS COMING:
 

BASH:  Big Arty SPA Happening

Fri., May 8, 7-9PM

Join us for our annual fundraising party, with great art, music & eats.  Enjoy the current exhibits, including Gone Fishing in the main floor gallery & Sweet Images upstairs.   Kick back to the high energy Cajun music of the Green Mountain Playboys, bid on wonderful items in the silent auction fundraiser [including a bunch of my button fish], view the art of free-style fly tying with Judd Levine [which is going to be set up in my studio!], and more.  (The silent auction includes artwork, crafts and many other great items.  Bidding starts now and concludes at the BASH.)  Cash bar by Dustin Smith of the Morse Block Deli.

Tickets:  $15 advance/$25 day of event

(You may reserve your tickets with Paypal at the SPA website. Scroll down to "Class or Fee Payment".)

The Closet

Eleanor Ott gave me a fabulous cabinet, and I very quickly knew what I wanted to do with it. The Closet. I appropriated the button garment of the man in this piece and hung it inside the cabinet, surrounded by cabinet cards of young men. It is very beautiful.

Painting

I've finished two of the boards I'm painting over, and have found myself embarked on a lot of text-painting. The original images on the boards are gently showing through, which I like. The images were incomplete or too thin before, but they are more engaging now in a layer underneath.

In the first piece (seen at the front of the pile in the previous post) I created a grid and a few random words in the painted square sections. Then I pulled out some older painted tin disks that were appropriate and created some new ones with other random words, using the same colors from the square sections.  I sanded down to the gesso in a small area under the disks, and mounted them with gel medium on pillars of various heights from the surface of the painting. When there's more direct light, the disks will cast shadows on the surface of the painting beneath them.

I installed it in the frame from its previous incarnation, and hung it next to an old 3D piece called The Technology of Rebirth (to which I had recently added arms, legs, and a new head). I've been thinking for awhile about pairing paintings with 3D work, so maybe this is a beginning of that.

Next up, WAY more text. This was a meditation on time and the passage of time in large timescales. It begins with my own early experience, which seems to become the early experience of humans on the planet.

Clean Studio

Quick, see it before it reverts to chaos! The studio is clean, and I am embarked on painting over the old boards you see below. They are pieces I don't want to save, and they've got frames and good surfaces, so I've unframed them and have begun on the first board in the pile. If it turns into anything I feel good about, I'll post it somewhere down the line... I don't know if I still have any painting chops. We'll see.

I decided to hang representative pieces from each of my major painting series on the walls -- here you see some from the Nests and Eggs series (above) and the Red Dress series (below).

And I put all the remaining Circular Statements pieces on the back wall and one from the Imprimatura series on the left wall (it's hiding behind a painting that's going to the next SPA show, Gone Fishing.

It's very liberating to cull work and part with materials I've been keeping "on spec". Wood was burned (I still need to get rid of the long pieces that you see in front of the window at the back of the studio, but I have to wait until the snow melts at my house so I can put them on the burn pile), and metal taken to recycling.

5x5 Finished

So I finished this piece, and it's framed. The final state has two 29x29" pieces, one with text and one without. I discarded the text a few posts down, as too wordy and banal. Instead, I decided I need to find (anonymous) text, as I had found (anonymous) photographs. So I went to places where I had bought the photographs, and to other places (libraries) with bookshelves, and randomly selected a shelf of books. I started with the first book on the left of my chosen shelf, opened it up randomly, and wrote down fragments of text that I found interesting (no more than a sentence or two). I put it back, then took down the second book and did the same... through the fifth book.

I did this at five different locations, and then took the text and put fragments that seemed to work in the photographs, from top to bottom, each shelf of books corresponding to a row of photographs, 1-5.

Here is how the whole thing (with text) looks, and a few details so you can read the text and see how interesting the correspondences are!