Filed under: Developing the Process
I’m pretty excited that I’ve been accepted to the artist’s registry at The Painting Center in New York City! It’s a non-profit organization “dedicated to the exploration of painting in all its possibility.” Guest curators draw from their artist registry to plan group and solo shows at the Center, and the registry is a resource for other galleries as well. I’m listed on both their artist’s registry and their online art file. Check out the site, and of course, systematically pester them to schedule me a solo show!
Filed under: Control and Chaos
“Pattern and Dispersion for May 16, 2011″
I had set up a grid of froot loops on this smaller canvas, intending to disrupt the middle section after spattering a couple rounds of color. I was working on something on the computer when I turned to see that Marley, my springer spaniel studio dog, had eaten half of the froot loops off the canvas. Glad I’m using non-toxic paint!
I took this to be an intervention of a chaotic event on the work and decided the the plan was now modified: one side would now be different than the other. Thanks to Culture Hound.
“Pattern and Dispersion for November 4, 2010″
When I was at Vermont Studio Center in October-November 2010, it was a great opportunity to work on a backlog of ideas I’d accumulated in my sketchbooks. I had been pondering the idea of setting up a grid and progressively disrupting the pattern somehow. So I bought a bunch of boxes of Froot Loops cereal at the dollar store and set them out in a grid (2976 of them, actually) on canvas. It took a while.
When they were all neatly arranged, I spattered blue, then hit the center with compressed air to mess them up, then spattered red. Here’s how it looked at that point:
Yellow and black disturbances and spatterings followed.
My goal was to explore the idea of context and disturbance. Pattern and dispersion. Intention and accident. We create ordered systems of context to orient ourselves every day. For instance, consider what we do with time. We’re immersed in an amorphous flow of past, present, future— so we divide the time stream into years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, to give us a point of reference, a way to make sense of where we are in the stream. But events happen independently from the gridwork we overlay onto time. The car battery dies (to take a recent example) and this event disturbs the careful meshwork arranged for the day. These disruptions often become the main subject matter for the day. Likewise in this painting, the disturbance seems to become what the image is about, not the grid.
During the Monadnock Art Tour, a lot of visitors responded to this painting saying it reminded them of a map. Perfect! What’s a map but our effort to take something huge and organic and overlay a gridwork (latitude and longitude) to provide context, to orient ourselves in the vastness?
A friend in Maine puts away all clocks and watches when he and his wife are on vacation. They eat when they’re hungry, sleep when they are tired, get up when they feel rested. He says it refreshes their brains, bodies and spirits to live outside the gridwork of time for a while. He warns it does take a few days to get back to “normal.”
Filed under: Randomness and Intentionality
I was honored this month to be asked to have two of my paintings be part of the worship experience at my home church, Trinity Evangelical Church in Peterborough NH!
I chose two from my “God’s Appointment Book” series, where a perfect/imperfect circle is striving to emerge from the context of chaos and randomness. It’s an encouragement to me to ponder how God, though absolutely perfect, doesn’t seem to mind doing his creating with imperfect tools in a context of brokenness. Thanks to Pastor John Engle and Minister of Music Chuck Clark for the opportunity to share.
