Category: Artists

Other peoples work I discuss and find interesting.

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Hills6

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0890 Hills6

These images arose driving back to Christchurch from Mt. Lyford and being struck by the colour and flow of the hills. The first image took a while but then ad libbed more to do the next one and this one is an elaboration of a bit of the last one.

Landscape. Place. Wolf Kahn’s America : an artist’s travels has plenty of art talk to chew on as well as great pastels.

Here is one idea I like, gives a nice depth to landscapes & may lead to some integration.

These reproductions take me right to the times and places I want to remember. They serve also to document moments that the painter Robert Henri in his book The Art Spirit called “states of higher awareness.” Of these moments, Henri wrote, “The pictures are a witness.” It is dear to me that an artist’s pictures are thus the repositories of much more than what he saw before him. A picture represents more than what the conscious mind grasped – at the time – the so-called subject matter.

Wolf Kahn

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Hills

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#0888 Hills

Have been working with this one for a while, resurrected it. Thinking about pastel. A while back someone said that my landscape pastels reminded them of Wolf Kahn. I managed to find a book by him the other day, and I love his work. One side in the war aspires to be a Wolf Kahn. I don’t think I’ll quit on that aspiration either.

Monday, 18 August, 2008

This image is availalable printed in a limited edition. It is available exclusively on Felt, a New Zealand Art & Craft website.

I have made the image square:

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image felt art for sale site

Some of his Kahn’s images (poor snaps) follow.

Continue reading “Hills”

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Earth Cross

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0875 Earth Cross

While it is satisfying to pursue this theme, I am conflicted. It is hard to be simple, its so minimalist.

There is a relationship in crosses. A cross is nothing if not a relationship. Relationships are not that simple.

There is the battle.

Some reflections quotes from artists follow.

~

Julian Dashper.

I saw the exhibition in the Christchurch Art Gallery recently. All new to me. I found it funny! To see the drum kit in front of the series of Hotrere circles with the name on it: The Hoteries, as if it were the Beatles… and then the same for all the other great New Zealand artists was a hoot! His work with circles and the very simple ones he does especially are of interest as I pursue these crosses.

I notice that circles recur often in your work, not only with your-
records but also in your repeated use of drumheads and the (0)
paintings. ‘What is the significance of circles for you?

I first started working with circles circa (smile out loud) 1992.
Another older artist had suggested to me that a circle was really the
hardest shape to work with as it totally dictated itself. It’s
difficult to paint a budgie inside a circle and for it
still to look good, I guess. I just immediately thought, `Gosh a
painting that makes itself’, and rushed out and bought a compass.
Circles also echo ideas in nature for me, and you can’t get more
perfect than that (nature, I mean). Actually, the thing is, Peter,
every artist has to start somewhere and I figure a circle is as good a
place as a railway station.

b.150 Bulletin of the Christchurch Art Gallery

To the Unknown New Zealander

Peter Vangioni talks to Julian Dashper

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Circles & syncronicity

#0848 Circles
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Early hours. One more sketch – anything, before I sleep. I’ll doodle something.

But it does not work like that. I am in the midst of an exploration. I have been to New York. The doodle I swear is just a doodle. Yet there is synchronicity here. I did this a few days ago. I had a quick browse in a book on styles of art, and looked up Frank Stella, as I am just starting a chapter on him in Henry Geldzahler’s book. And there it was, my own doodle! It does give me a a good feeling, my recapitualtion is just about up to my childhood. Actually I think I am getting well into the sixties with the sketches, and the project as a whole – I think – is late 2007.

Can’t find it online. Will find it though & post a picture here. Now I want this book.

Later Monday, 24 December, 2007 :

image

And while looking at my image I just had to fiddle with it. Removed background – looks better IMO. It is on show: here.

Later: Friday, 25 July, 2008

And now look here, Lisa Rivas has made a stamp.

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The art of art

#0840 The art of art
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My technical mess-up (the hard disk crash and subsequent temporary loss of pen pallet and canvas) led to asking again why I did not use real media to birth the images in the first place. That is an interesting question. Even if I wanted a website, why this digital constraint? I have answered that in other posts in a sketchy way… exploring the psyche in cyberspace. It is good to state it again as it is central. I have for years past thought about what has happened with the psychology of text as it has become digitalised. See my other blog: Psyberspace But images and art, not text on my mind now. The image is the stuff the psyche is made of.

I like art to exude some sort of consciousness about (a phrase I just picked up here), “the art of making art”. Art, in its important and interesting moments is partly (but not wholly) about art.

The shape of my work is becoming clearer. I am pleased with a bolder line in the concept. It is not a new line, but it is firmer today. Not having the PC helped to see why I missed it. I need to do every sketch digitally. Physical sketching is fine, but it is not in this project. It would be as if Piet Mondrian switched to landscapes.

I am on a narrow path, for all the diversity in the sketches, they have to be digital.

And what is the central line on that path?

To do digital sketches? Surprisingly no.

To make prints from those sketches? No.

I work with the relationship between the virtual & the physical. It is in the RELATIONSHIP – it is all in the relationship!

The whole 1000 are a negative, a template, they have a relationship with their children, their physical children, the prints or other objects still to be born. The children can phone home, each object has a number and name. Google that to return.

Relationship between the virtual world and the physical is the punctum, that is where I will do my obsessive sticking to the point.

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Works on paper by West Coast Potter – reflections on stuff

I have seen his pots, but seeing his works on paper draws me in closer. I saw one at the Arthouse recently and made a note to look online for more.

John Crawford, Hector Pottery.

I would like to make a trip to the coast just to see these. The motivation is stuff. My interest in the physical. I want to see how people make prints and works on paper to see how I might translate (now there is a word!) my “templates”. There is another word.

(In ship building there is a early version before they make the mold, what do they call that? It might even be a sort of negative… hmmm my digital files are like negatives. )

Anyway I like his work, the content and the form.

An image follows.

Continue reading “Works on paper by West Coast Potter – reflections on stuff”

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Layer Tunnel Pattern

#0835 Layer Tunnel Pattern
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In a lot of art it is integral that one can see the process, in the strokes, or even in the glimpse of the studio. The tools are showing here!

~

Still don’t have my Tablet back. Do have a new disk from the crashed HDD, has a lot of good stuff rescued, but not the missing 10 days sketches. Yet. Back to the HDD Dr. tomorrow.

~

Far from feeling curtailed today, I am stimulated by the process of the technological and human failures (failed to backup those missing days – I was moving around too much to reconnect the external drive, so Second Copy would simply say “Drive not found” and go back to sleep.)

One good thing was a synchronicity while surfing. I found some digital art I liked. There is so much, and so much of that leaves me neutral.

Somehow they also got me sketching, thinking.

Here are 2 images I saw & liked.
Continue reading “Layer Tunnel Pattern”

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Mondrian R2

#0828 Mondrian R2
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Look no pen! This originated on the Mondrimat site. I did a bit of post-production in ArtRage 2 and also in ACDsee. Piet Mondrian is just one of those people I was thinking of who was cutting edge. Arrangement, composition even when there is very little else to go on, or especially when there is little to distract from the abstraction, counts. Not a new idea, but he made an art form out of that simple idea.

The software uses his rules, even though I don’t know what they are. So there is a bit of original Piet Mondrian in this! Though I confess to thinking Diebenkorn as well.

Related: Pollock’o’matics.

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Henry

#0802 Henry
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From a video, a documentary called Who Gets to Call It Art? by Peter Rosen. (review) This is the Henry who was …. well what? Some sort of mentor to Andy Warhol and David Hockney and a whole bunch of N.Y. abstract expressionists. Will write more here, and post work from both of those artists of Henry if I can find it, and hopefully one by Alice Neel. It is such a male bunch, but there were women and she must have been one, as well as Lee Krasner, they still fall away in the gender gap.

Have found some more:

Continue reading “Henry”

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