Working in the studio...

I don't really get scared of blank pieces of paper, but I don't like them much, either...

Following up on some thoughts from the last post - specifically those about the anxiety of not doing anything - I was amused to come across Jenny Diski's essay in the New Statesman, Learning How to Live. Of the tension between creative labor and real work, Diski writes:

Children are always being told to stop doing “nothing” when they’re reading or daydreaming. It is lifelong training for the idea that activity is considered essential to mental health, whether it is meaningful or not. Behind the “nothing” is in part a terror of boredom, as if most of the work most people do for most of their lives isn’t boring. The longing people express to be doing “creative” work suggests that they think it less boring than other kinds of work [...] Creative work sits uneasily in the fantasy life between dread leisure and the slog of the virtuous, hardworking life. It’s seen as a method of doing something while doing nothing, one that stops you flying away in terror. 

The first six drawings of the summer are up, and I have met with a woodworker who can help with making the large panels I want to complete this fall. I am also been at work almost completely in the digital studio on a side project that I will be able to post in a day or two...I really don't want to spend too much time on the computer, but it's almost impossible to avoid these days as it touches on so many things.

I have also been exploring a new way of working on the cut up writing - instead of trying to come up with entire sentences, I have been recombining fragments into phrases that I can hook up into larger units. I think these need to become more complex to be successful (a freind who visited the studio the other day said "they look like Ed Ruscha, but good"). It's kind of a case of somthing small being easy and almost requiring a more sustained effort to be worth attention...

There are suddenly a lot of deadlines looming, and the start of classes has made me aware of the time line of the semester in a slightly anxiety-inducing way...I'll have new pictures up soon...

First day of classes

Today was the first day of classes at Temple and therefore the first day I really felt like I was away in any serious way. I've been busy rearranging the studio at home for the last few days and it's shaping up nicely, but it has kept me out of the sabbatical studio. I brought home the collage notebooks so I could be a little productive and, though I completed a dozen or so new collages, I am beginning to feel the anxiety of having finished a pile of work without exactly having the next thing ready to go.

I read Zahra Ebrahim's post about sabbaticals at Huffington post (which referenced the famous Stefan Sagmeisterand Power of Time-Off TED talk...below) and was taken by Ebrahim's emphasis on the sabbatical's ability to "recharge" artists and designers...I am hopeful that this is the case.


Most of my adult life, I have practiced a policy of keep-working-on-what-you-have-until-the-next-job-rolls-in. I've never really asked myself the question, "what would you do if you didn't have to do anything?" because the concept of not having something to do - even if it's my own assignment - is horrifying to me.

This may grow out of a childhood in which we were strictly prohibited from expressing any boredom. Not from feeling boredom (who could stop a shy, nerdy suburban kid in the 1970s from feeling bored in the endless stretch of summer time?); we were merely unable to talk about it. My mother held to the creed that "only boring people are bored" and it took a lot of torturous semantics for me to realize the value of letting your mind wander (pivotal readings included Barthes and a great interview with Chuck Close on the importance of being bored).

But I doubt, gentle reader, that you find my childhood recollections interesting. I want to return to the main problem - that of making the best use of what's been given to you. I am compelled by the opportunity to work on a scale I have not worked on for a long time. I can produce small things of some modest complexity, but I haven't had the time to focus on anything in years. This is not the model for a sabbatical Ebrahim and Sagmesiter espouse - the model of doing something 'for the love of it', or doign something (like taking an acting class) that has no apparent connection to one's creative work. Maybe it's because there really is no public for my work in the way there is for a designer, but I feel like I am doing that all the time and during this time I am compelled to go much farther (or, dare I say deeper?) than I can under normal circumstances.

The problem lies in getting ahead of one's self. Between the fabrication of panels, the translation of passages of text, the preparation of gridded papers to draw on, the creation and editing of texts for new sign pieces, and what seems like a never-ending list of other little projects I've invented to stave off boredom or the terror of having nothing no iron in the fire, I am confronting the edges of my project management skills. In makign that short list, three more responsibilities I've taken on reappeared at the edge of my mind. Geez.

So watch this speace to see how it all gets sorted out. I am curious what readers would do with a chunk of time off - would you use it to go someplace or do something you've never done? Or as a chance to focus?

Ten collages

For some reason, I have never wanted to use my own writing as the basis for my paintings. I am sure there is some fabulously dark psychological reason for this, but I am not interested in it; I accept that I like to write things that people can read and I like to paint things that are hard to read.

But I have been feeling a little like I need to find a way to put my own writing into my paintings...or at least to make it possible. So I've been making a huge pile of collages that are serving as s midpoint between the texts I feel okay with using and 'my writing' (whatever that is...)...

Here are a few...

In the few books I've filled with these, there are a few pages that seem slightly accusatory...they are there to push me further, I think, and suggest an underlying dissatisfaction with what I've made so far...

It seemed that having some phrases was a good strategy, and some of them enabled me to make passages that spanned a few pages. But they broke down. I am considering whether there should be more small units (prepositional phrases, dependent clauses and whatnot) that could be scanned and combined with other parts of sentences...

I have found that an envelope full of pronouns is really helpful in doing these, but I am also cautious about defaulting to a Jenny Holzer/Barbara Kruger means of addressing the reader... 

Some are jus ridiculous...and that's fine.

Finishing the prints

My study leave got off to a great start in early July when I was the Von Hess Visiting Artist at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts at the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia. I worked with the fabulous Amanda D'Amico on an offset print that was - to me as a novice - rather complex. Today I finally finished the edition by signing the completed prints...Here are some photos from the process...

I set up camp at the Borowsky Center with my laptop and notes for the project. To be efficient in the limited amount of time we had, I knew I would have to do a lot of the work digitally so that I would have time to hand cut some of the stencils later in the process... 

The first few runs were very carefully selected yellows and reds. In all we did at least eight separate colors and innumerable runs of overprints of very transparent grays to adjust the relationships of values...

At the end of the second day of printing, it was beginning to look familiar to me...

Amanda D'Amico checking the color. 

One of my favorite parts of the process was cutting the rubylith stencils for the various grays we used to shade colors that had already been printed and to formulate the ground. This whole process has evidently been largely replaced by digitization, but there is something extraordinarily satisfying about directness of cutting the stencils...

...of course, it required that one think backwards and reverse positive and negative, so it was extremely complicated for me and underscored how much I have come to rely on the directness of my painting methods....

Checking the prints as we near completion.

Working with Amanda and the enormous Heidelberg press at the University of the Arts was a real treat. The press, with its breaths and rhythms, is an almost-living thing. Here is a some footage of it at work...

The conventions of signing prints are strange. I numbered the edition and signed it with the title I give the drawings. The complete text in the print reads, "Blessed are all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, and free us from the fetters of self." This has become something of a mantra in the studio...there are a few letters that are not formed correctly (M's are reversed from what they should be, and there is at least on funky A in there...)

I took fifty prints and the Borowsky Center kept 50 for its archive and its use. I also got a l the stages we pulled as we were working, which is an interesting timeline of the development of the final piece...

Famous First Words

For some time, I've wanted to use conventional letter forms. I have been searching for a good set of text to use and have begun amassing a file of 'famous first words'  - communications that are the first recorded attempts to bridge enormous distances, cultural, and even interspecies divides...there is something interesting to me about about building these on sharp contrasts of positive and negative, as if one had to figure out which was carrying the message...

After Bell, gouache on paper

At the moment, these are just sketches...I'm not sure they will go any farther. It is hard to find the texts for these, though I am considering using various creation stories as sources...and there are plenty of letters describing encounters between European explorers and Native Americans...). We'll see...

After Washoe, gouache on paper

Washoe was a chimpanzee who was taught sign language in the lab of researcher Dan Fouts. At ten months, Washoe began stringing together terms to make elementary sentences and eventually acquired a significant vocabulary of signs that she used to communicate with human researchers and other chimpanzees...

After Armstrong, gouache on paper

After Morse, gouache on pepr

One thing that makes it likely that I'll make more of these is that I am interested in the simple constructed letter forms. It took me a ridiculous amount of effort to figure out how to construct some letters from simple geometry, and I'm curious what would happen if I gave it a little more time and thought...

Readings

Fridays in summer are not studio days, so I took the boys to the library to keep up with our summer reading. I have a huge stack of books related to the paintings I'm working by the bed that I am working through, but I was looking for a little distraction and found Alec Foege's book The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors who Made America Great.

As I took the book off the shelf, I knew I was being inspired by a story on NPR earlier this week ("Hacking Real Things Becomes Child's Play at this Camp"). The report described kids at Def Con learning the basics of programming by hacking televisions and other household electronics. I was enchanted listening to these children describe finding bugs in Facebook apps (an accomplishment that could have a payoff of up to $1,000 to the child). I thought about my own childhood, and the countless hours spent unintentionally destroying things at my father's workbench. I have long maintained that the difference between artists and engineers is that while both people can take things apart, only the engineers can put them back together.

Listening to the story, it occurred to me that hacking is tinkering in the 21st century - that the ability to take something apart, modify it, and make it go in a new way is a function of being fluent with code. Just as one generation manipulated mechanical tools, and the next generation manipulated electronics and circuits, this generation has to manipulate chunks of script to reshape its world.

Foege's book only gets about one page before the identity of the hacker and the tinkerer are conflated. To his credit, he touches on the idea of the perergon early in the book. It seems almost essential to the idea of the tinkerer that there is something going on that takes up most of the frame, and then there is the tinkering...which calls to mind an important detail: a couple of people are missing from Foege's index. Samuel F.B. Morse and Abbot Thayer. Both were painters and inventors - Morse perfected the telegraph (its writing system of dots and dashes bears his name) and Thayer's observations about wildlife helped make him the father of modern camouflage. Morse is much better remembered for his code (despite his paintings continued exhibition...) and Thayer is remember as a painter, if at all.

But we'll be back for them...so much to read...

Studio Visits

Painter William DiBello came by the studio today and I visited his space to see the work he's finishing up for a show that opens in September. Will kindly indulged my interest in photographing studios, and the details below are from his workspace along with some reflections on our conversation.

Two paintings from William DiBello's upcoming show at Artspace Liberti

A big part of the fun of studio visits lies in seeing how differently people put together the world. Will had several large paintings underway, and was wrestling with a number of ideas about the paintings relate to prints, about the way screen-vision differs from traditional painting vision, and about systems of distribution in the arts that reenforce social hierarchies. This is a lot to consider. 

Some works one paper at DiBello's studio

Nowadays, it seems that artists are being asked to take on a lot of responsibility for situating their work that formerly belonged to curators and institutions - especially when exhibiting in independent spaces. Will wants to have a wide range of options as an artist (and as a person, I would imagine) and the art world's pressures to construct a unified bodies of work appear to press in on him uncomfortably as he searches for an midpoint between breadth and depth in his work.

Customized tools for working on a monumental scale

Making paintings that are exquisitely calibrated color ideas, Will appears to be searching for ways to connect the huge, almost inherently institutionally-scaled paintings he makes to more democratic conversations and experiences (but really, who besides a bank or captain of industry could fit these canvases in a domestic space?). He described interesting ideas for putting out take-aways with the paintings at the show, stressing how these would not be just reproductions of the pictures, but things in themselves, related to but different from the paintings. In this, DiBello reminded me of Chicago artist Gaylen Gerber, whose monochrome paintings address social spaces as well as (perhaps more than) art historical ideas to which they initially appear connected...

A place for color

But the most arresting thing about William DiBello's painting is their breathtaking color and near-overwhelming sense of too-much-ness. One needn't have a lot of theoretical tools on board to be blown away by a picture like Buzz Field, a tightly-knit abstraction that seems to be unravelling before your eyes. I look forward to his show next month, and appreciated the chance to step into another artist's working space for a few minutes...

Wrapping up the first month's work...

Spent yesterday working on six drawings at once - a definite luxury of this new studio configuration. In the standard studio, I can go between two or three drawings at a time. The advantage to working on a large number at a time is that I get ideas for variations faster and can start to spin them out...the disadvantage is that I have to finish the six of them before I can move on...

Here's a closer look at the drawings I am working through...

After Auden (Blessed are all metrical rules...)

In this one, planes of color are lifting off the cube structure. I am interested in following through on the plasticity of the form in future drawings, extruding and bending the forms....

After Marcel Duchamp (Each breath is a work of art....)

This and the next drawing are less about the role of writing than about the way speech lingers in the air...there used to be this idea among 19th century spiritualists that spoken words left traces in the world, and I wonder if Duchamp is reflecting this notion...

(Both) After Babbage (The air itself is one vast library...)

Both of these drawings take one quote from Charles Babbage (“The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered”), each configured slightly differently. I am curious to what extent they are the same drawing (their content is identical, but the configuration is different...)

After Jonathan Lethem (All writing consists of conjuration...)

Lethem's remark about writing ("All writing, no matter how avowedly naturalistic or pellucid, consists of artifice, of conjuration, of the manipulation of symbols rather than the ‘opening of a window onto life'") gets at something very important about inscription, I think...

So these are coming to a close and I'll post completed images on my website. I have been trying to figure out the correct relation between this diary and the sketchbook page on my site, and have concluded that I will just use this for everything until January, but I would appreciate your thoughts on the work in the sketchbook, as it is likely to appear over here at some point, in some form...

Sabbatical Diary Begins

I should have started this a few weeks ago, but I've actually been terribly busy. I wanted to take some notes on what I am doing during this time off - a great gift - and have a place to put out pictures and ideas. So, here's the diary...

Actually, a lot has already happened in terms of research and in terms of work, but I'll loop back to some of that in future entries (part of what has slowed me down about this diary is what always slows me down...the wait for noteworthy news to report. The problem with this condition is that sooner or later, nothing looks like it's worth reporting and you end up with nothing to share...I am trying to overcome that and hope to avoid being tedious...)

Before we go too far, I have to say it's a little bewildering to be on leave from work to do research. I am so used to fitting writing and painting into the spaces between other projects that it feels strange to focus on them. I am a little concerned that inspiration for pictures and essays might be like some mysterious particles in physics that disappear when one turns one's attention to them.

Sabbatical Studio at the Crane Arts Building...it's a little like a base camp for a long climb...

The best way to combat this fear is to try to maintain continuity with earlier work. I have started a number of pictures that deal with the relationship between writing and painting (examples of these are on my website).

A lot of what I'm trying to do with this break is complete work for future shows. I also have several completed bodies of work that need to be photographed and 'packaged' for possible exhibition. While I'm doing this, I'm trying to come up with a workshop for a community agency I'd like to work with and complete a show I've been asked to curate for Bucks County Community College (opening in January). And there's always work-related stuff lingering on the fringes of my mind...there is plenty to do.

So please check in from time to time as I describe my progress. Thanks for reading...

Thinking about workshops with writing...