Olympia viewed from Spruce Street Harbor Park (Proposed)

Trying to get a feeling for what the banners I'm thinking of would look like from the park...

A few more code signals...

The International Code of Signals has a vocabulary for affirmative, negative and evasive responses...how incredibly useful...

I am not in a position to be able to form an opinion.

I do not know.

I think so; most likely.

Artship Olympia brainstorming...

I'm very interested in the call for proposals for the USS Olympia now available through Philadelphia Sculptors. I've thought about the Olympia for a long time, but never really as a site for art work. But it's been an important place for me for a long time, so I am trying to think of how to work with it.

The Olympia

A few weeks ago, I visited with my friend the painter who makes things, H. John Thompson. This seems made for him - especially after his last show at Napoleon. We looked around the Seaport Museum and were very helpfully guided through the ship by an employee who shared a lot of good info.

John at the place where the remains of the Unknown Soldier of WWI were placed en route to Arlington Cemetery.

I had been to the Olympia earlier this summer, with Carmina and the boys. We stood on the spot where Commodore Dewey began the Battle of Manilla - the spot where you could trace a line through American international relations from May 1, 1898 and the end of the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines to the 1960s and the immigration policies that made it possible for the Ocampos to come to this country.

On this most recent trip, I learned about change to the international signal flag system and was able to get a lead on the way the flags would have been used in 1989. Through the library at Temple, I got a hold of the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations - 1894 edition. My work with signal flags made this a natural course to follow...

Using old work for placement, to see how it looks on the rails

The signal book describes how three-letter combinations are used to communicate certain frequently used messages...much like three letter shortcuts are used in text messages (LOL, etc.).

A version using some simpler banners

Here are a few of the short versions...I am also thinking of making enamel pins of them...

Are you on fire?

We shall have calm.

Will you give me passage?

Further progress...

From the studio...

Some drawings coming together on the drawing board...

Starting to think a little less flat...

New print in progress...

I am very psyched to be going back to the Borowsky Center at the University of the Arts later this summer to make another offset litho with Amanda D'Amico. Last time, I felt like I was learning as we went...and I made a million mistakes. This time, I hope to be a little more organized. Here is the image I am working on for this year's print...

Last year, I was making layers on the fly. This year, I plan to have everything ready to roll as soon as I walk in. That means setting up the image...I realized how much I get out of having something lay around for a few days, so I got this done. Expect some changes (I can tell I am going to be adjusting contrast, for example...)

I'll post updates as the print unfolds...

Revised Dossier

Gerard Brown Dossier by Gerard Brown | Make Your Own Book

On Professionalism: Artists in their natural habitats

The conference at which I was going to present some of my research on professionalism in the arts has been postponed, so I stopped posting little teasers about it. But here's one more to think about until it gets rescheduled...

In in 1923 book The Art Spirit, influential teacher and painter Robert Henri discusses the conventions of the artist's studio. According to historian Sarah Burns, the studio of the late 19th century had become an important front in the creation of a professional identity for the American artist. Particularly thought the work of artists William Merritt Chase (whose studio was a frequent subject of his art, see below) the studio communicated a kind of worldliness to visiting collectors who were charmed by the artist's taste in furniture, textiles, and other miscellanea. American artists of Chase's generation (and audiences, as the Godey's Magazine image above suggests)  saw the studio as a stage on which artist identity was performed, and a large part of that identity was the demonstration of sophistication and sensitivity.

William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916). Studio Interior, ca. 1882. Oil on canvas, 28 1/16 x 40 1/8 in. 

Henri objected to such posturing, and suggested the artist had something to learn for a more common tradesman, the barber. He writes:

A barber has an apparatus that is surprising, and all in such remarkable order. [...] An artist proposes to make a work of art, and while his work requires infinite skill, he is generally far behind the barber in the arrangement of the most ordinary necessities. Why should this be so? Why would a studio be a boudoir, a dream of oriental splendor to have tea in, a junk shop, a dirty place, and rarely a good convenient workshop for the kind of thought and the kind of work the making of a good picture demands? [itals. mine]

In opposition to a powerful visual metaphor for creativity, Henri tries to re-position the artist's studio as a kind of workshop, moving it away from the implicitly feminine 'boudoir' of an earlier generation. Connecting the studio with a rather humble job, Henri draws a circle around the creative act, limiting to certain tasks (after the completion of which, one can exercise thrift by cleaning up and saving unused material, he later writes, rather than wasting it by allowing it to become a 'crust of dirty, dust collecting dried up paint'). He doesn't reject the idea that the studio is a manifestation of the artist's identity; but he clearly seeks to shift it to a more masculine and industrial statement - one reflective of the climate of professionalism in which he lived.

Visiting David Stephens

In preparation for a little lable-writing I need to do, I visited David Stephens' studio last week. I've been interested in his work for some time and I'm looking forward to his upcoming (and overdue) show at the Center for Art in Wood. Here are some picutres....

Daid with pieces of an unfinished work (Peeled Turf) that will be in his upcoming show at the Center for Art in Wood. The completed work will have an organic, textured surface.

Unwrapping segments of a large sculpture. Some parts of these pieces look like wooden robot limbs...

A bookshelf in the studio

We talked in one of the studio's work rooms...

Unwrapping another piece of a sculpture that will be part of the show at the Center for Art in Wood

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...

From the studio - Kandinsky Paints

I first came across this through Open Culture. Had to share it here, as I love to see people work in the studio...

Studio wall

Having trouble getting images on my webpage's sketchbook, so I wanted to share this here....still sorting out the studio to some extent, but getting work done a little at a time...these are transcriptions of passages from the readings I assigned my students this fall, or things I found while I was researching the Intro to Visual Studies class.

New work

I often put images of things one the studio desktop on the sketchbook page of my website...and I'm nto sure why I am using this instead...but I am.

The book factory has had a slow start this year. I think it's the chaos of the new studio. But I am working...

small books getting done...

I have also been working on some new paintings...I hope to have some images of them to post soon, but here is a small piece I made for a fundraiser that I think might suggest where things are going...

We/You/I See...gouache on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Virtual Studio Tour - Slideshow

I've been meaning to put this up forever - hope you find it interesting...

Virtual Studio Tour

View more presentations from gerard brown.

Spin Art

It's been years since I "liked" making a painting in any way I could explain to someone. I don't consider this tragic, I consider it rather a good sign. I like feeling like my work is work. But today I made some paintings I enjoyed. I made spin art.

Eventually, no matter where I'm teaching, I seem to come across a crit that includes a statement like, "I like it, I had fun making it" as a defense of the work in question. As if liking anything ever mattered in any professional sense. When are people going to realize that art is not there to make artists happy? I take is as a manifestation of entertainment culture that young artists tend to gauge the success or failure of their work by the pleasure its making gave them. Entertainment culture or maybe vestigial therapy culture – after all, the pleasure principle also works nicely with the idea that one should be 'releasing' things through one's art.

Spin art was great fun not for its expressive products (how expressive an they be?) so much as for the formal opportunities I'd never noticed before. I realized that the spinning paper is like a potter's wheel, and that a line pulled straight out from center would result in a spiral on the surface. I realized that even with kindergarten tempera paint, simple color chords could be made. I remembered that keeping the ground available was a good way to keep some energy in the picture.

Of course I'm familiar with Damien Hirst's spin art paintings, and I'm not about to give up my pain-in-the ass methods for a frolic at the fair. I'm not even going to claim special status for the works I'm talking about - I wouldn't even think of them as sketches in any real sense. They’re more like color swatches or something – sort of like pure research rather than applied research. But they are fun, for whatever that’s worth.