It was a pleasure viewing Continuum at @werring_contemporary over in Devon, PA. I was lucky to be in town just before the exhibition ended, and, naturally, I brought my camera.
#alexkanevsky #brucesamuelson #vincentdesiderio
Still working out the kinks of making timelapses, though not sure if I'll continue doing them since keeping tabs on the camera can be pretty distracting. The full video is nearly 17 minutes long but I've sped it up to make it seem a little less like watching paint dry.
Some critical steps have been left out as well, like applying the faux-lead ground which was applied by hand, literally, and finessed for a couple of hours as it dried—a technique I started to develop while I was working in Philadelphia.
The last couple of weeks have been something of a blur—I was, day in and day out, feverishly chipping away at this three-foot wide painting. It's probably the brightest I've ever made—much of it was developed around the basic principle of maximizing the lights as much as possible without sacrificing chroma. After an intense painting session, my vision would be in an altered state—I would read text on a screen and the spacings or intervals between characters and lines would become vividly activated. In fact, practically everything I looked at would automatically avail itself in those terms.
This one was just recently handed over to a good friend who commissioned it, but not before photographing it, which turned out to be a bit of an ordeal in itself. If the painting had not been emblazoned in my recent memory I would have never gotten the colors to look remotely right—and my camera is no slouch. I should have a timelapse of this uploaded soon, as well—stay tuned.
This summer I worked with a small team (@novella_film ) on a grant-funded animation project for Indigenous Enterprise's Still Here, which recently debuted at The Joyce Theater in NYC. A story about the project got published in Cartoon Brew and our work will be archived at the New York Public Library. Here are some digital paintings I had the pleasure of working on which served as backgrounds for the animations—enjoy!
#art #dance #nativeamericandance #digitalpainting #animationart #painting #animation
This one (titled, If This Pumpkin Should Fall) began while drawing alongside my students in the spring—it will be on view at the Visual Arts gallery at MHCC starting this Monday until the end of October. I can hardly believe it's already time for our annual faculty show again!
Here are some progress shots of an exhibit I just finished curating and installing—something I've never had the pleasure of doing before! This is Mt. Hood Community College's annual faculty show—reception is happening as I speak. I've got some drawings up, a few of which are on view to the public for the very first time. Show closes Nov 21st—hope to see you around.
Kudos to anyone who can guess the two artists and two divine figures being referenced here.
By the way, these aren't really methods I personally endorse, though, of course, they're not without their
virtues! Better that students know what they're about than to never encounter them.
#art #artdemo #vinecharcoal #drawing #drawingmethod #greekgods #greekgoddess #artistic #artoftheday #artteacher #fineart #arttimelapse #charcoaldrawing
I am, after a handful of years, back in Portland (have been for some months now, but those who know me know I'm not too keen on making public announcements). Currently, I teach drawing at MHCC, where I imagine I'll be for quite some time.
This drawing was initially a class demo, but it quickly became something more, something emblematic. As I was working on it, I found myself struck—absorbed, really—by the death of Max Azzarello, someone I was barely acquaintances with, though he was friends with a close friend of mine. He became known for his fatal self-immolation outside the NYC courthouse a little over a month ago. The tragedy of course is that he's gone, but also that most have promptly moved on after ignoring his message, or worse, making wild assumptions about who he was and why he did it—that he was a Trump supporter, or some off-the-wall conspiracy nut, to list a couple. All I can say is friends that knew him—even acquaintances—would tell you a very different story.
Of course, this is not to endorse anything in particular he said or did, neither is it a valorization. It is something like a stand-in or a space—something for remembrance, for contemplation, an emblem of irresolvability.
As promised, here are some photographic snippets from my visit to Lennart Anderson's retrospective in November of last year at the New York Studio School.
There is really too much to say about Anderson, but like all the painters I admire, there is an aspect to his work which resists photographic reproduction and photographic "vision." Of course, in one sense, everything resists photographic reproduction (nothing can be captured in full, faithfully), but Anderson deliberately goes above and beyond this by making that resistance part of the work—in his unrelenting way of painting a kind of human vision (and by extension, human touch). Looking closely at his paintings, one sees that there is a sort of refusal to internalize photography as a medium, and that remains true even as he reluctantly made use of photography later in life (which he only did after, tragically, his sight had diminished considerably).
He worked through his senses and direct observation with a keen sensitivity that, even as he strayed from a stringent naturalism, rings true to the raw sensation of sight in a way that only a painter with a very particular set of priorities and sensibilities ever could. None of this is to say that Anderson painted in a robotic, literal way, only striving to copy what he saw, either—these paintings take their liberties and relish in their own metaphors, personal symbolisms, and references to the history of painting at large.
Here are some pictures I took of some paintings by Emile Carlsen (although the last painting in this set is—to my surprise—not by Emile, but by his daughter, Dines Carlsen) from my recent visit to NYC. I am told that this may be the largest collection of Carlsen's work shown in NYC in nearly 50 years. To my eye, he was a remarkable painter that's been often overlooked. It is really unfortunate how difficult it is to find decent reproductions of these paintings online—though that's not to say that my photos of them are particularly good, either, but they are certainly a notch up from what I've seen out there.
For those interested in seeing pictures from Lennart Anderson's retrospective, I'll be sharing photos from that next—stay tuned!
