Doubt, part 2

In the last post I mentioned that I made two pieces based on the same piece: they also have the same title: Doubt. This one is an etching that I made at Slugfest Printmaking Workshop with the help of my mom, Margie Simpson, and her lovely partner Tom Drucker.



Here's a detail:



I'm quite happy with this piece, and I'm excited to get to work on a new print. Jim Stroud at Center Street Studios has offered to work with me on another etching- I feel very lucky to have such a plethora of fantastic printmakers around me, especially because I have yet to meet a group of artists I like more.

It's my theory that printmakers are generally down to earth, funny and well socialized because they work in groups in the most insanely humbling medium on earth. It takes a sterling character to work in a process where your weeks worth of work can disappear because you lost track of time. Printmaking is good for the character. Painting, or drawing however- sitting in a room alone for long periods of time doing something that could but probably won't pay off really well...Perhaps we painters and draw-ers should be congratulated if we restrain our megalomania and paranoia for 90 minute stretches at a time...Or we should do printmaking on a regular basis, as a medicinal gesture akin to getting 15 minutes of sun exposure per day.

Doubt, part 1

I just finished a couple new pieces based on the same idea. I started a drawing, then went to Austin and made an an etching based on the idea I'd started, then I came home and finished the drawing. I really love the etching and will post images of that soon, but in the meantime here's the drawing. I've posted small images here but larger details are on the website.





It's a real mix of drawing and painting, as you can see in these details. I've taken to taking a paintbrush to the ink that's in my pens every now and then, as well as drawing on top of watercolors like I always do.






The text above says, "However comforting, faith is a far more lethal sword than" followed by a little arrow that points to the central word doubt. There's also a naked dad figure on the left edge of the drawing that you can probably see better in the big images on the website.



That text is right above this image.



I've painted lemmings before, but I realized as I was drawing these that I somehow picked up the idea that lemmings were pretty much the same as guinea pigs with tails. I looked them up this time, after I'd drawn them, and it turns out I'm pretty much right.



Whenever I use lemmings I think about the horrible story of lemmings and the turntable. I'm not sure everyone knows this story, but I never mean them as a simple symbol of mass suicide because of the story. If you don't know, here's the deal, copied from Wikipedia.

The myth of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors...[among the most] influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found that the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.

Insane! Turns out that White Wilderness won an academy award, too!

I love stories of fake things that become myths. I like Arthur Evans and Knossos and the Snake Goddess at the Boston MFA and Robert Graves and the fact that people invented the cyclops because of mammoth skeletons.

But back to Doubt. Here's the last detail.



The text says, "I know so little but this."

Reminder and The Terrifying Minute...

You know the cartoon where Charlie Brown is fighting with the lawn chair? I've been stuck in that scene, only in slow motion, only with cameras. Just imagine a bunch of cameras, all slightly but irrevocably broken or with missing battery chargers or connectors or memory cards, slowly attacking me over the course of a couple weeks. Every time I try to photogrpah my work I am utterly, maddeningly set upon by technical problems. It's exactly like that cartoon.

Today, though, I finally managed to get some decent images of my new work.

The most recent piece is called Reminder, and you can see it on the website here. I'm using watercolors with my pens now, and I'm loving how it's working out. These are special archival watercolors that are based upon the colors that were used in ancient Japanese prints- they're very vivid and beautiful, and I can't wait to work with them some more.



Here are a few details:





It's a somewhat complicated piece, and it's better if you can read all the tiny text, which you can do by looking at the details on the website.

It's not nearly as complicated as this piece, though. This one is called



The Terrifying Minute, or How to Tell the Story.

You can see it on the website here, and it's based on several Victorian games that I saw in the Free Library of Philadelphia's wonderful rare books collection. Here's the whole piece:



The overlapping circles at the center of the piece are numbered, and if you follow the numbers around from the outside of the circles spiraling in towards the center you can see the progression of a life, with a character being born at 1 and going on from there to 24. It's not a progression that goes strictly by numerical age- the person I drew is quite a bit older than 24 at the end of the path through the circles.

There's also an overarching structure*: each circle represents a theme or idea that is countered by the circle opposite. There are love and hate circles, for instance. Each segment that falls in a particular circle responds to each theme- so where the hate circle, for instance, crosses the privilege circle, you get something that makes sense with those two ideas and that still follows the narrative of the life story that's being told. I've laid out the details on the website so that if anyone is interested they can get a reasonable sense of going around the circle here, but it's pretty hard to get on the web...

The whole piece is laid out as if it's a game that you can play.



These are the characters you can choose:





And there are choices to make:





* I almost wrote "metastructure". At what age does it become impossible to use words like metastructure with a straight face?

Disreputable Miracles, Our Carnal Eyes, Issues and a Statement...

This is a jam packed blog post! I recently finished a couple new pieces, and there are enlargements and details on the website. The image above is Disreputable Miracles, and it's made with markers rather than ballpoint pen, as is the one below, which is called Our Carnal Eyes".



I had occasion to rewrite my artists' statement recently, and it posed an interesting problem for me. I found it difficult to write text about text, and it was particularly weird because several of my new pieces can be read as artists' statements in and of themselves. These last few pieces have been very much about the way I'm thinking about aesthetics and culture. I addressed that aspect of my work when I wrote, and for once my artists' statement doesn't make me cringe when I read it. So if you're interested, here it is, with handy hypertext links to my images because I'm technical like that.

I think of my work as a way of enshrining time spent in doubt. I draw rather than write, and write rather than communicate exclusively through images, because for me the combination is the best way to speak clearly about things I'm not at all clear about. I often make statements that are contradicted by words in the details, or write words in fonts or near images that undermine the meaning of what I'm saying. If I present a self in my work, it's a fractured, contingent self. The sense of breakage is not so much about violence as it is about splitting in the way that a playwright might split himself into several voices or characters to explore an idea. Some of my ideas are best said by cockroaches, or written in bubble letters backwards next to pictures of babies. Words like maybe, possibly and hopefully occur over and over. I'm interested in the contradiction between the amount of time I put in to each piece and the amount of doubt it embodies. I like putting a lot of artistic muscle behind subjective, fluctuating, unresolved ideas.

Several of my recent pieces revolve around questions I have about the relationship between high art and mass culture. Efficacy reads*, "If the value (read: emotional viability) of an image is adversely affected by the frequency of its use, what are we left with?" I come back to this question a lot. I love the art world because it creates a cultural space that values individuality, but I worry that in the process of doing so we've defined ourselves in opposition to mass culture so persistently that it's become easy to dismiss imagery, subject matter and ideas that address universal experiences simply because they are common. I'm interested in pinpointing the time in my artistic development when I realized I shouldn't paint a sunset, or a swan, or anything too girly. (Matthew Barney climbs the levels of the Guggenheim in one of the Cremaster movies- girl art, entertaining and pleasing, is right at the bottom level. He ascends to Robert Smithson.)

I sometimes think that visual pleasure itself has become suspect as subject matter unless it's radically decontextualized, laughed at, or forced into a context that severs its ties to the world around us. I think there's a funny puritan strain in some thinking about art, in which the highest aesthetic experience is the one that is the least embodied. It's as if beauty, because it's been used in advertising, has lost all claims to our attention, except when it can take on a cerebral, nun-like aspect that disavows all connection to the corporeal world, or when it's so debased that it can seem ironic. One of the things I doubt a lot is the idea that using art to entertain, seduce or connect is silly regardless of the context.

I care very much that my work is accessible. One of my students, a working class urban kid, got a summer scholarship to art school. He was impressed with the upper middle class students' drawing ability, but asked with great bitterness, "Why are they so dirty? Don't they ever take a bath?" I tried lamely to explain that they were dirty in a well intentioned attempt to reject their privilege, but I didn't convince anyone. I think about this exchange every time I get asked to talk about my work. It struck me that making work that rejects beauty is the visual art equivalent of not taking a bath. I want my work to look difficult, to be readable, to be pretty and funny and cute and decorative- all the disreputable, supposedly lightweight artistic categories that function to give people who don't know much about art entrance into the work- without sacrificing complexity.

A recent piece, Trade shows a woman figure with text that reads*, "Will (NOT. Hopefully. Maybe.) Trade Beauty for (a secretive and obnoxious system of) Taxonomy." Banners below read, "Our Loves (Eyes) Do Not Betray Us." I'm trying to marry my own primal aesthetic experiences: sunsets, swans, flowers, birds, etc; to primary emotional realities: motherhood, mortality, the natural world, our relationships to ourselves and each other. Trade says, in bubble letters, "The power of that first flower or sunset may fade, but must we throw the ocean out with the bathwater? We seek blossoms as a pure ideation of pink, frightened of pollen and obsessed by bees."

*When I quote my own work I put words that are in small text, or otherwise inserted in a marginal way in to a larger statement in to parentheses.



Also, I just posted images of this piece I did last summer, which is done in ball point pen. It's called Issues.