painting with fire: 2012

Friday, October 12, 2012

Images from Paula Roland's Advanced Encaustic Monotype workshop

Recently I was able to spend a couple weeks in New Mexico culminating in taking Paula Roland's Advanced Encaustic Monotype workshop. What a wonderful experience! Paula is a fabulous teacher and was ably assisted by Hylla Evans. Hylla's deep knowledge of color and paint-making added a great deal. The other participants in the class brought interesting ideas and work to share making for a tremendous, immersive art retreat with lots of interesting discussion of technique, materials and approach to art-making.

I have been fighting with being blocked for months after completing a large body of work for a solo show. Best possible cure: surround yourself with other artists and wonderful teachers, bringing focus and clarity while exploring new ways to use a medium I've worked in for many years.

Below are a few of the pieces created in that week in Santa Fe. They clearly continue to build on the aerial landscape theme I've worked with for years. My interest in the form and meaning of landscape and waterways continues. I'm working to combine my formal interests in painterly abstraction of landscape from on high with my concerns about climate change and how human intervention in the environment puts us all at risk.

big river bend, encaustic monotype on hosho

blue arcs, encaustic on kozo

river branches I, digital print & encaustic monotype on Rives BFK

river branches II, digital print & encaustic monotype on Rives BFK

river branches III, digital print & encaustic monotype on Rives BFK

river and inset river, monotype and graphite transfer on Shikoku paper

green figures, rust ground, encaustic monotype on kozo

While in Santa Fe I was able to connect with two other artists who also work with aerial landscape with interest in both painterly concerns and environmentalism. Jean Davey Winter is an English artist. She found me online and we were lucky enough to overlap in Santa Fe. She had some interesting work with her - paintings on paper that folded like a map, expressive images of landscape from above.

Jean and I also met Jean Arnold. Her recent paintings of strip mines painted from an aerial viewpoint are raw and political in tone - powerful and inspiring work.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Water Ways


card for my upcoming show at Kerrytown Concert House

These are some of new monotypes which will be in my upcoming show at Kerrytown Concert House. They are pieces playing with the dramatic curves of the Mississippi River as seen from both satellite images and antique maps.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Dynamic Digitals - 2 person show at Dexter Library

This morning Judith Jacobs and I delivered our work to the Dexter Library for our two person show curated by Distinct Designs. That is a lot of D's - awfully alliterative! Judith and I have both incorporated digital tools in our art-making for many years. We're also two of the founding members of the now moribund Art Alchemists collective of digital artists. All things have a lifespan so the group is no longer active although many of us still use digital tools in our work. My work in this show are landscapes, primarily woods and water. They are a mix of digital prints manipulated in Photoshop and printed on my large format HP printer and combined with encaustic on paper, on panel and in 3 dimensions. The show will be up until June 20th at the Dexter Library. Note - there is a lot of construction near the library at the moment so if you go you need to drive in via 5th to Alpine rather than simply turning off Main Street because Main is closed.

This is a selection of my work in the exhibition and is not complete. Check Judith's site for her work.

Bear/whale reliquary, encaustic, digital & mixed media in found box

Climate Change Game, encaustic, digital imaging & mixed media in found box

Fisherman's Island Dusk, encaustic, digital imaging & mixed media on panel, framed 10" x 20"

Grove at Matthai, encaustic, digital imaging & mixed media on panel, ~ 13" x 40"

Row of trees, encaustic, digital imaging & mixed media on panel, ~ 12 x 40"

Wingaersheek Ripples IV, encaustic & digital on paper, framed 16" x 20"

Wingaersheek Ripples XV, encaustic & digital on paper, framed 16" x 20"

Wingaersheek Ripples III, encaustic & digital on paper, framed 16" x 20"

Wingaersheek Beach, encaustic, digital imaging & mixed media on panel, ~ 15 x 31"

Thursday, April 5, 2012

New monotypes

These pieces will be part of my upcoming solo show at Kerrytown Concert House. I've been doing mainly river channel focused work for quite a while and these pieces continue that interest. I'm fascinated by the meandering lines rivers take, driven by details of contour in the landscape as well as human intervention. These works are intended to be spontaneous, calligraphic and intimate in nature although they are fairly good-sized. Most are 22 x 30.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Installation -Watershed Moments


Rolling the tree to the Dana building

Communitree out of car, ready to roll into building.

Moving the Communitree sculpture was an adventure. It had been stored in a basement which was once a paper mill - and the egress was a steep ramp with doors that were significantly lower than the height of the piece. Somehow we got it out having lowered the branches - the tree is now a conifer having previously been deciduous! I drive a Subaru Forester and we put down the seats and somehow got most of the sculpture in - several feet hung out the back -the green thing at the top is the flag we used to be vaguely traffic compliant when I drove across town with the hatch tied mostly closed. The elevator was not as tall as the tree either (gallery not at ground level of course) so we somehow diagonally got the piece in. This all brings back painful memories of transporting large pieces on buses in art school....and reminds me why I generally size my work based on the largest size I can conveniently fit in my car!.

Attaching line to the bracket with Dave's help

Installing a monotype and an installation view of 4 of the 5 monotypes

Between Sara Adlerstein (gallery director) and Dave - the SNRE's photographer - whose last name I need to get - I had a lot of kind and competent help installing. Never a given and much appreciated!

Communitree in Dana commons

For a relatively small show - 5 large monotypes and one large sculpture - this show was more challenging to install than some, largely because of the difficulty of moving the sculpture. The Communitree is a piece that was done last summer as a collaborative piece funded by Annarbor.com and the Street Art Fair. Many hundreds of people were involved in building it over about a week during the summer. Now it will continue to grow and evolve at the School of Natural Resources.

The opening for this show is tomorrow - Feb 16 at 4pm. Gallery director Sara Adlerstein and I will both be speaking about the gallery - this is the inaugural show for the Art & the Environment Gallery at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment - and about the work in particular.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

More big monotypes

These are more of the current series of large encaustic monotypes. I haven't written much about the process of making these one-off prints. A monotype, as opposed to a monoprint, is made as a unique piece through a print process (monoprints have repeatable elements like stencils). I work on a heated surface - a hotbox, as developed by Paula Roland. I use a sheet of galvanized steel (many artists use anodized aluminum), heated with 4 100w light bulbs in an enclosure of insulated wood which I built. For these large prints I actually use two hot boxes under one large sheet of metal - so 8 bulbs total. I paint directly on the metal surface with a mix of encaustic and pigment sticks and then make a single print using a variety of papers. This is the point where the pieces can diverge from a classical monotype because I often work back into the piece with graphite, pastels (both soft and oil), conte or add collage elements.

My upcoming show at UM has been publicized at Montage - the U's arts portal and at the School of Natural Resources' site.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Big monotypes

This series of monotypes is part of my ongoing exploration of river movement. These are far and away the biggest monotypes I've done - they're all 25" x 50" on kozo. They all incorporate encaustc, graphite, pigment sticks, conte and other drawing media.

Like all of my recent monotypes they are strongly influenced by both my connection with the environment AND with the music I've been listening to in the studio. WEMU plays jazz and blues during my studio hours and that sets the mood and the motion for the work.

These five pieces will be the inaugural show at the new Art & the Environment Gallery at the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan. The opening will be Thursday Feb 16 at 4pm.

Watershed Monotype #5

Watershed Monotype #4

Watershed Monotype #3

Watershed Monotype #2

Watershed Monotype #1

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Stop SOPA/PIPA

What is SOPA/PIPA?

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R. 3261 is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011. The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.*

Similar to SOPA, the PROTECT IP Act or S.968, (PIPA) establishes a system for taking down websites that the DoJ determines to be "dedicated to infringing activities." In some cases, action could be taken to block sites without first allowing the alleged infringer to defend themselves in court.**

As artists, inventors, educators, writers, creators, and dedicated citizens, we believe in the importance of protecting individuals' intellectual property, but these bills are too broad and go far beyond addressing issues of internet piracy. If passed, they will infringe on First Amendment rights, enable Internet censorship, weaken Internet security, destroy jobs and cripple the Internet.

Open letters in protest of SOPA/PIPA have been written to Congress from some of the most influential and important members of the internet community including the founders of Google, Twitter, Flickr, Yahoo!, The Huffington Post, LinkedIn, Youtube, Paypal, Craigslist, eBay, Wikipedia, Blogger, and a group of eighty-three engineers instrumental in the creation of the internet, to name a few.

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IN ORDER TO STOP THESE BILLS, EVERYONE READING THIS MUST:

CALL or E-MAIL your Congressional Representatives and let them know that you do not support this bill and won't vote for them if they support it.

It's easy! Visit this website to call and then do the Take Action Checklist:
http://tinyurl.com/SOPAcallcongress

Congress will be voting on this when they reconvene in January 2012, so make sure their inboxes and voicemails are flooded when they get back!

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Here are links to two of the open letters:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57342914-281/silicon-valley-execs-blast-sopa-in-open-letter/

Check out these videos for a more thorough explanation of the implications surround the passage of SOPA/PIPA:

http://tinyurl.com/SOPABreaksTheNet

http://tinyurl.com/SOPAInDepth

What is the difference between PIPA and SOPA? Not much.
http://tinyurl.com/SOPAvPIPAchart

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TAKE YOUR OWN PHOTO.

Take a photo of yourself with tape over your mouth and write "SOPA" on it. Upload it to Facebook and copy-and-paste this description. Tell your friends about it!

Educate yourself!

Get the word out!

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*excerpted from Wikipedia. Read the full bill here:
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show

**excerpted from OpenCongress. Read the full bill here:
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/text