Objects of Wonder

I usually spend plenty of quality time at the Portland Museum of Art, but last week was a little different. I was contracted by the museum to paint some of my small still lifes in the atrium in order to not only promote the new exhibit, "Objects of Wonder", but also to provide inspiration to kids and their families as they tried their own still lifes at stations set up nearby.

Above you see me painting a Totoro (please see Miyazake's films if you haven't already fallen in love with his stuff) that belongs to one of my boys. I had about an hour and 15 minutes to paint him, so he's not at the state of finish I usually prefer, but it was pretty fast for me anyway.

On day two I painted a Chinese ceramic horse (we call him Percy) that I'd painted before. I did an underpainting of this before I got to PMA, knowing I didn't have much time - and he's sort of complicated, as you see. He's about 90% done, I feel. The little guy in the foreground decided to draw one of my "minumentals" instead of the setups that were for the kids. Doing his own thing, as an artist should do, right?

And on day 3, I painted an orange pepper. This one I actually finished in the time allowed! I even had time to sign it! The Daily Sun plopped me on the front page while painting this.

But this was the best work done that day --This one little girl decided to go for portraiture, rather than still life. How flattering is this? Looks like I need to shave, though. I did.

A fun time, to be sure, but wow - do I have SO much to do before my visit with Kurt Kauper in NYC. It's in a few days, so I'll be reporting back on that, soon.

Mentor

(Photo courtesy of Deitch Projects)

Just wanted to make sure things were firmly established before I let on...

My mentor for this semester is Kurt Kauper. NYC-based, he currently teaches at Princeton and Queens College. Prior to his current positions, he taught at Yale, New York Academy, UCLA, and The School of the MFA Boston, to name a few. He's shown solo at ACME in Santa Monica and L.A., and Deitch Projects - numerous times!

I'm in the midst of setting up a visit this month to his studio in NYC. I'll be preparing some concepts to show. But I shall post these concepts after I meet with him. Don't wanna give anything away, eh?

What the...

Whoa, who did that?

I did. I don't know what to call it, so "Untitled #1" will have to do for now. It's charcoal on paper, 18" x 24".

Now, don't get all up in arms about this. It was strongly suggested that I experiment, so I did. Oddly enough, it was quite fun, and I'm glad I did it. Of course, the real "fun" of it was the process itself; the evolution of the image from very basic mark-making. Turns out, in order to make a successful abstract, you really DO need to know how to draw. At least, you need to know the medium well enough to get the effects you desire. Making the forms fade, coalesce and turn while overlapping and ribboning away from one another was not as simple as it may look. This was a 3 hour session.

Of course, once I was done, my reaction was, "So?" It doesn't hold much meaning other than that of a technical exercise, which isn't too much different than, say, a nude figure study from life. Nevertheless, it is different in terms of my overall process in that I usually ascribe an image to an idea as opposed to the reverse. So what meaning(s) can I ascribe to this?

While still in the studio, I sat there with a Guinness in hand and just looked at this thing on the easel for a while. I turned it in all different directions. There was something, but I think the surface tricks were getting in the way. To be sure, I knew there were some frightening things, but I needed to look past the obvious. I took a crappy photo of it with my phone and brought it into Photoshop. There, I turned it, cropped it, blurred it, colored it, solarized it... all kinds of wacky things. After a few passes with some filters, I think I landed on something. It's bizarre, but I think it can gel with what I need to express in my MFA work.

We'll see. I'll keep you posted.