It is my sense that art historians and some critics put far too much emphasis on chronology rather than the fact that the art is just there in space and time to comment, be seen enjoyed or challenged. In the book Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong it is said that traditional means of display, such as arranging works chronologically, prevent us from engaging with Art on a personal level. "Art can be a tool, and we need to focus more clearly on what kind of tool it is--and what good it can do for us."

As an artist in the 21st-century and prior, I have often found myself not thinking in terms of sketching we're having an objective and making my works but instead creating pieces filling in some past thought or executing for the future. I can often find myself asking what does a given work of art mean to me? Do I like it? Is it relevant or beautiful or ugly and will let me in the same to an audience 200 years from now. Does my Canon printer make better copies than that Albrecht Duer etching? Does that mean the same when I see that same image reproduced in that coffee table book on the artist? 

Yogi Berra: 1925-2015

The most quoted man in America died today at the age of 90. It may be a surprise to some people that this man was a former Major-league baseball player. He is considered by many one of the greatest of all time and played for many championship teams with the New York Yankees.

So how is it that such a talented athlete was born with a mind that could turn so many common phrases and give them such thought-provoking double meanings?

 One clue and many outside of baseball don't know this or realize it but the position of catcher, which Yogi Berra played, is considered the most important to the outcome of the game. At the major-league level the catcher needs to be aware of the tendencies of opposing hitters and how the defense is set up. The decisions he makes can often mean snatching a victory from the jaws of defeat. 

 So, why am I writing about Yogi Berra in a blog about digital painting?  I guess I find the mind of Mr. Berra absolutely fascinating. He wasn't especially intelligent in other areas of his life so it has been written by friends and colleagues over the years. Yet, he was able to hyperfocus on baseball and naturally found ways to turn a phrase.

 I guess it's the "naturally" part where the talents were super talents of individuals where a thing become so difficult for most people is like breathing for another. It's the ability to see things were others do not. It is also, something that I believe about the visual arts and perhaps other arts in general that there is nothing new under the sun and that everything good is derived from something else that was good to begin with. All of Yogi Berra's famous quotes have their derivatives but his talent was building upon those in and even unconscious way. There is a moment of creativity and the mind makes the choice a choice that can mean the difference between something that is mundane one night and something profound the next. Rest in peace Yogi Berra, baseball legend and still the most quoted man in America. 

Because Words Are Often Absent From My Art

Because words are often absent from my work, I will on occasion turn over my Blog: Notes Of A Digital Artist to my Surrealist Poetry.  This is my first poem… Ever.

Memory Of Polynesia and Warhol.

Memory a Pop Art haiku. Preamble of Matisse and conceptual art in the digital art world interview.

Criticism draftsmanship and watercolor  printmaking scouring. Harmonious result quickly answered on a horseback ride. Rowing sadly the Greeks extraordinarily lumpy emotions. Delete.   The color green,  Twombly sometimes greeted sometimes difficult travel binary around the cerebellum on the right side. Voluptuous maladies 1899, sick room much of the time. Munch  on a cutout of the Grand Canyon on Mars.  Metal aluminum shiny and luminous awaiting a soul. Layers layers layers layers deconstructed and breaking, cutting, cutting into pure color creating  shape, alluding to form.

Digital Beatles art prints  Picasso Prince of darkness  Lord of  draftsmanship.  Henri Matisse a color beast in harmony with Tensility.   Help. Songs of Innocence hit, wonder Bob Dylan round the cars shiny surface tension Clash with a deep, Blue Something. A mode of bell bottom patchwork layering. The sharing of color found   shearing, large  scissors round  pure color. Mentally shaping a memory unable to connect with an anthology... 1. Let it be known… Naked. A winding road only to get back and dig, for you color blue. The wings of a butterfly along feeling I got that one just after the number 909.

So don't let me down  Gerhard Richter and let it be known  that the Rolling Stones gathering no moss and engineering of life intertwine with digital art and digital prints and the opinions about discs and thumb drives who's smart  phonies close up, and out of the universe like a fly on the wall. Mind of out time of mind bound in cold Irons blind to beauty. Blind to truth. My music my art my art my music. Back to basics. Back to Tahiti the Facebook of my soul, Louis Kahn and Peter Lik the surface of my paintings sweet deconstruction. The atmosphere the light of the Pacific golden goblets to look to stare to disappoint. A coconut along the Tradewinds. The silky sound. A lagoon of my eye plunges into my head transparent tranquil deserted, an island.

 Unable to draw unable to paint. A memory and a testimonial. Period Of a brand-new sensibility for today, a parallel creation a view of birth.  Rembrandt. Rise up! Digital art digital art digital prints digital prints digital art digital art digital prints digital prints digital prints digital prints digital prints digital meaning digital prints digital prints digital prints digital meaning digital art digital art digital art digital art digital art digital prints digital prints digital prints.  Wake up Picasso!  Remember Matisse!

In the Studio: Conveying the Uncapturable

If you've ever gazed into a fine diamond and found yourself captivated by how the light affects every facet and your overall impression of the form or lack there of, you will have an idea as to how my digital of paintings appear when printed on metal. 

On the surface the piece is shiny and one is immediately aware of the unique optical qualities of my art. There is certainly a kind of reflectivity that makes the image somewhat hard to grasp but in a good way! The viewer is aware that they are looking at something beautiful and elusive, somewhat iridescent perhaps holographic… Maybe like looking at a butterfly's wings under a microscope. All of this complexity seems to work for the image.  

Colors and shapes seem to float in their unique space within the image at their own specified depth in a kind of meditation that involves real looking on the part of the viewer.  Real looking is work and takes patience.

You can see what I mean here to some degree but still seeing the work in person makes all the difference.  For this series of smaller pieces I set up a relationship between the placing of the traditional image and it's importance at the center surrounded by an area for a mat and frame. While these relationships still exist here the viewer is challenged by the central imagery but finds that the artist's hand is most evident around the periphery. The metal print floats above the field of viscous tar, an ancient substance and medium for artists. There is evidence that the tar has been handled in a similar way as the imagery in the print! Colors are stretched to the point of breaking as is the tar… One with pixels the other with a substance. Here I am trying to blur the lines between printmaking and painting but also addressing the art as conceptual.

Let me know what you think. I'll be writing more about this idea soon. 

A "finished peace" from my 'Tensility' Series: printed on metal and over sculpted tar.  

I suppose you could say that I was partially inspired to produce these works by looking at the art of Gerhard Richter. I was looking at a somewhat cleaner way of introducing the viewer to depth and the chance discovery of underpainting in the final work.

Not Sketching

I've decided that sketching in a "traditional" sense as in Prepatory drawings for a "finished"work of art doesn't seem to work for me in my process. I wonder if it's because of inertia or a kind of intuitive approach that has developed over time in a very subtle way. I find that every image I construct is a kind of preparatory drawing for the next one in the previous preparatory drawing is fodder for the latest image. There is no sequential order to them. There are no mistakes there is just image making. Some of them seem more narrative another seem near abstract. But they all seem to have in common is a dialogue between photography and painting, nature and the imagination, the subconscious call and the intuition. I wonder if other artists are working this way. I wonder if other artists will read this someday… Soon hopefully. It would be nice to have some people leave comments to let me know how they work especially if they are digital artists.  

I found myself working on this piece late this afternoon. I don't think I've given myself permission to make an image like this in a while. The photographic or element is first hierarchically. It's kind of disturbing in a sense that I had stumbled across an image of a battle scene where a Grenade had gone off and shrapnel had hit a concrete wall. This image kind of reminds me of that. Is it a sketch I don't know is it finished work… I don't know. It's just in the way of seeing the world. And I hope that others will find these challenging or enjoyable or something else entirely that I'm not even aware is possible. I just know that these images need to be made.

Push/Pull Around Us

For the last several weeks it has been hard not to notice an advertising billboard campaign around Portland advertising Alaska Airline's new service from PDX to St. Louis. The new ads feature The St. Louis Arch designed by Architect Eero Saarinen. In my opinion it is one of the most beautiful objects on the planet, an icon of modernism. 

The billboards, large prints, somehow portray this masterpiece in a way that really shows the scale of it. It's 630 feet tall. The space needle could fit under it!  

The billboard image as advertising is effective in communicating a connection between Portland and St. Louis but also how it weaves the advertising verbiage around the image of the arch. This is something I am constantly trying to do in my own artwork. If you look closely at my images you see a kind of framework in the 'Tensility' series on which shapes and colors come and go. Some people have said it looks like an ancient native American wood frame of some sort and alludes to an animal hide. On closer inspection it is actually a work of modern architecture a kind of exoskeleton. The way it is stretch on to any given format there is an immediate illusion of the bending of space. I some works the space appears to be retreating and in others it comes forward. Thus we have a push/pull situation set up for whatever I choose to hang on it. Sometimes what I hang is bits of photography, other times it's my previous artworks. The feeling I get from this process is that I am creating a kind of cinema. Other times it's samplings of other artworks that I love for one reason or another. Yet in the making of this framework I am constantly aware of an engineering term called a Catenary. My understanding is that it is a natural draping of the line between two points and the curve varies depending on the length of the line and the distance between the points. The St. Louis Arch or Gateway Arch is basically an upside down catenary situation.

As a sixth generation Oregonian I can also relate to this monument to the westward expansion of the United States as I had relatives who came across on the Oregon Trail. So, when I look at the arch I somehow imagine that at one end is St. Louis and the other is Portland and the end of that trail.

I like the way the verbiage is weaved in amongst the arch and the arch's connection with Portland and it's pioneer story.

Billboard in downtown Portland