Mile Davis famously said, Do not fear mistakes – there are none. ” I like that but I like this quote better. “Don’t play what’s there; play what’s not there.” ― Miles Davis
Remember the two tone pencil/ink erasers with the beveled ends that we used when we were kids? Have you tried to buy an ink eraser anywhere lately. It is next to impossible. I tried Walgreens in the School Supplies (my favorite section of any drug store). I tried Staples and then two art supply store until it became obvious that they don’t make them anymore. I realize it’s the last thing a paperless office needs but I need one to scrub some charcoal drawings. And I’m still trying to get used to this ‘no mistakes” concept.
Modesto Foreclosure Quilt by Kathryn Clark at RoCo show “Work It: Artists Address Labor & Unemployment”
San Francisco’s Kathryn Clark has some handmade quilts that are actually maps of neighborhoods with some of the highest foreclosure rates in the United States. She is one of four artists in Rochester Contemporary’s new show, “Work It” where four artists address labor and unemployment, an art topic even more dreary than crime faces.
Since the the recent art attack piece on 60 Minutes I’ve been thinking about the inescapable relationship between money and art. This weekend’s death of Thomas Kincaid, the “painter of light” who said that God guided his brush, was another interesting study. He’s regarded as the master of kitsch and genius of commercial marketing and had a signature Lazy Boy chair and a California housing tract designed after his painting. Joan Didion wrote “A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.”
It’s easy to knock the guy but I couldn’t paint those cozy little cottages. I might be able to crank off some of these Obama paintings though. That is, if my heart was in it.
Fred Lipp altered my drawing last night by strategically placing a small piece of white paper on top of part of the drawing. His collection of black, white and mostly grey paper is his primary teaching tool and it is incredibley effective. You use your eyes to see what he is talking about. My father was standing nearby and questioned something Fred said. Fred snapped back, “Forget about logic. We’re talking graphic.”
“Model from Crime Page” charcoal drawing by Paul Dodd 2012
I like to say “the only reason I have a blog is so I can understand the content management system well enough to do blogs or cms sites for other people.” When someone asks for a website I recommend WordPress which pretty much puts me out of business and that is use fine by me. Peggi just did a site for Heather and it’s been fun watching her populate it. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to put content on their own site through a simple browser interface. This is 2012 for cripes sake. I also like to say I have a blog to keep track of things. I’ve used to search box on this site many times in order to remember what I did when. And then there’s the ability to share things. It sure saves a lot of “what’s new” conversations.
I suppose FaceBook is enough for most people but I know a few people who’ve recently dumped their fb pages because the whole creepy over-sharingthing thing. My nephew dropped out of fb and has gone twitter crazy so I ca still keep tabs on him. He’s out in Hollywood now walking a fine line. Maybe some day I paint a portrait of him.
Matisse “Portrait of Baudelaire” Etching 1932-34 MoMA
Fred Lipp wanted me to look at this etching by Matisse, a drawing really, and now I want to look at it, over and over. It’s a portrait of Baudelaire and, wow, does it look simple. Except that every line is absolutely perfect. None of the lines touch each other and they are all pretty much the same weight. They float in space while decribing physical form with supremely confident expression. There is so much volume in here and not one false move. You want to take each lines’ journey.
Si’Van artwork at the Creative Workshop in Rochester, New York
This will probably be the last week for the show of kids art at the Creative Workshop in the Memorial Art Gallery. The staff has announced an adult student show and they’re accepting entries this week. The upcoming show has a theme, something to do with color and design and Spring, but that’s an art education construct. I submitted a black and tan piece in a rectangular frame.
A couple of people from Fred Lipp’s class had moved across the hall for this season’s figure drawing class. Last night they bravely turned the tables on end so they stood six feet high and then drew full size figures in chalk on the long sheets of brown paper that normally cover the tabletop. No such organized exercises in Fred’s class where people work in any medium on any subject and in any style. I’m working on the figure too but from top down. Last night I learned a lesson in form, how a change in direction of a line or shape indicates a change in form. Most of what he teaches is centered around unlearning what you think you know and then learning to trust your eye.
Maureen, who teaches art to kids, was standing nearby working on her favorite theme, another painting of the a bend in the Genesee river as seen from the flats on the east side. She had scrubbed out some trees and was in the process of putting more trees back in when she said “I wish I could paint like those kids in the show.”
I do too. Just look at the photo above (click for enlargement.
Peter Monacelli drawing at Joe Bean’s coffee shop in Rochester, New York
Joe Bean’s is not the best place for an art show but any place is better than no space for an art show. Peter Monacelli, who taught drawing for two decades at MCC has a beautiful show at the coffee bar, mounted high on the wall and unevenly lit. The drawings are part of a series based on the words from the song “Follow” on Richie Havens 1967 album “Mixed Bag.” The one above is entitled “But now silver leaves on mirrors bring delight,” after one of the lines in the song. Peter brought the cd with him last night to the opening but we never heard it. And he assured us he was not dead yet. A fourth cousin with the same name had recently died and Peter and his wife fielded thirty or so condolence calls. One told Gloria, “We lost Pete.”
Charles Burchfield “Telegraph”, currently on view at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York
Funny how we have not yet outdone mid-century modern. You’d think we’d be pushing it as far as it can go instead leaving it behind as retro. “Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design” at the Memorial Art Gallery touches on the art in design of that period and has quite a few pieces that I wouldn’t mind bringing home. If they had just mass produced the work in the show and turned the main gallery space into the gift shop it would have all made sense.
“Modern Icon : The Machine as Subject in American Art’, next door in the smaller Lockhart Gallery is where the art is. Robert Frank’s “Trolley Car, New Orleans” from his Americans series, a beautiful John Marin etching called “Downtown New York”, A Thomas Hart Benton ink and watercolor drawing and this wonder from Buffalo artist and visionary, Charles Burchfield. You can almost hear the telegraph.
Paul Dodd in painting class at Creative Workshop in Rochester, New York. Photo by Maureen Outlaw.Class
I thought “The Artist” was about an artist. And I thought it was going to be silent, like really silent, without any musical accompaniment. I imagined listening to people squirming in their seats but I was happily wrong on all counts. I should accept the fact that actors are artists and I do but it’s not he first thing I think of when someone talks about art.
Maureen Outlaw took this photo last night and emailed it to me from class. I work on these charcoal drawings at arms length and hold them up to a mirror to get an overview while scrubbing away with my eraser. I’ve noticed that I spend more time drawing with the eraser than I do making marks with the charcoal stick. I stuck them up on the wall at class while I addressed Fred Lipp’s criticism and moved across the room to get another perspective. Some work better in your face. This camera phone photo is yet another vantage point and they are all informative. Fred told me they look “tough”, adding, “That’s a compliment.” They could be a lot tougher.
I loved “The Artist” and how it kept playing with the vantage points of filmmaking, the movie within the movie and the movie being projected in front of us which we were made more keenly aware of because of the absence of dialog. The theater was packed and I was aware of the oversized people crammed in the seats ahead of us. Skip Bataglia’s “Car Crash Opera”, a seven minute animated short which ran before the movie was sensational. In class a fellow student Craig said told my father, who is also in the class, that he looked like the librarian in “Hugo.” So that has been added to our queue.
Brian Peterson studio door in the Hungerford Building in Rochester, New York
First Friday’s art crawl is sometimes rewarding and sometimes not but it is always entertaining. When the art fails to engage the conversation always picks up the slack. We ducked in and out of art spaces on three floors of the Hungerford Building staying the longest in Brian Peterson’s studio looking at his assemblages the shortest at Heather Erwin’s space where some sort of reading was going on to a packed house. We heard she had been temporarily locked out of Facebook for some controversial posting about her show. Doesn’t fb know Heather is keeping them in business in this town? The RIT show at the R gallery on College Avenue was interesting in that the student work looked better than the faculty work in most cases. And over at RoCo it was nice to see that Robert Marx had sold approximately $20,000 worth of paintings. Rochester likes his work for reasons that I don’t quite understand.
Artists talks are not for the faint of heart. We bravely attended one at the new I-Square gallery last night where four artists talked about their work and so much more. It was exhilarating. Richard Harvey talked mostly of process but his is multifaceted and interesting. Wendy Menzie started making art after primal therapy in the 70’s. She quoted Philip Larken, “Your mom and dad fuck you up. They don’t mean to but they do” and spoke of her journey back to the child inside. Ed Buscemi stressed the importance of improvisation and relayed a dream he had thirty years ago where people were moving by him on a conveyor belt and he jumped on and tried to shake the people but he couldn’t bring them out of their trance. It seems to be his modus operandi. He is fond of asking “Are you kidding me?” in an animated fashion and he admitted to being hooked on conspiracy therories. Todd Beers discussed his breakthrough painting which is on view until tomorrow and told a beautiful story of his encounter with a dove on the fire escape he was sleeping on. He dimmed the lights and wowed us with his poetry. Harvey, Menzie and Buscemi all studied with Robert Marx who has his own opening tonight at Rochester Contemporary. He is featured in their Makers Mentors show.
We scurried downtown for the Ossia show at Kilbourn Hall but missed the opening toy piano number. We caught “I Can’t Concentrate” by the Brooklyn band, Zs, a mathematically challenging, post jazz, brutal-chamber piece. And then were blown away (again) by Ossia’s performance of Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together.” From the liner notes – “The work consists of a bass line accompanied by a series of instructions which can be realized by any group of instruments. With each performer acting as composer, the work allows for a variety of performance outcomes and is essentially an experiment in compositional anarchy.” A vocalist read a letter from Sam Melville-in prison in 1970 for series of radical bombings in Manhattan where no one was hurt-to his brother on top of the music. The twenty minute piece was trance-like and hallucinatory like a deep dream.
Alberto Giacometti Walking Man II (L’Homme qui marche II) at the Johnson Museum in Ithaca New York
Whenever I catch a glimpse of myself while walking by a building with reflective glass I’m always taken aback by how bent over I look. And we were really slumped over yesterday as we climbed the big hill up to the Cornell campus in Ithaca.
The guard at the Johnson Museum yesterday was downright chatty. We were admiring Giacometti’s “Walking Man II (L’Homme qui marche II)” when he offered that this piece was the most expensive one in the collection, worth over a hundred million in fact. I said, “You better make sure no one walks into it and he said “Someone already did.” “A women backed into it while she was taking a photo.” He showed us a slight crack in one of the legs setting the alarm off as he pointed to it. I had just seen a sign that said “No Photos” so I asked if it was ok to take photos and said it was ok to photograph the permanent collection but not the work on loan or the work that is usually in storage but temporarily on display. I really wanted a photo of the Otto Dix etching called “Self Portrait with Cigarette” (also in MoMA collection) but that was off limits so I took one of Walking Man and got the Otto Dix print in the background.
Paul Dodd “Model From Crime Page” 2012 charcoal on paper
After painting class last night the talk centered around critical thinking and the lack of it. I was trying to imagine any other kind of thinking.
My drawing above was characterized as “academic” and I would agree with that. Adequate but not particularly expressive. I set out to do some rather quick sketches on craft paper and realized that quick or not the same criteria applies to any piece. The effort must work as a whole so the focus is the same.
Every mark matters. They must contribute value not deflate worth.
One must be committed and focused yet totally open to proceed.
People like interesting things not just well executed things.
The value, the commitment and the interest must all be on the page.
Barbara Fox art work entitled “Close Observations 3” at the Dean’s Gallery at Rochester Institute of Technology
I remember seeing the Young Rascals at RIT’s downtown campus. It seemed like a pretty cool spot but then they moved the school out to windswept, god forsaken Henrietta. I really don’t like going out there but I make exceptions all the time like yesterday afternoon for the opening of Barbara Fox’s show of new paintings on paper. We had quite a time finding the Booth building. Didn’t see any signs labeling one as such and asked a student for help. She said she had no idea where it was but it turned out we were standing right in front of it.
Barbara told us her husband trimmed the wysteria in front of their home and she brought the clippings into her studio to draw them. Barbara starts these big paintings with a very loose, gestural application of gesso and then draws in charcoal or Conti crayon before working in oil. Some also included ink and they are all very beautiful. So dress warm and see if you can find the Booth building. This show is the perfect antidote for our wimpy winter.
Back just in time for winter and last night’s art opening at I-Square at the future four corners of Irondequoit. I have a few pieces in a show with Wendie Menzie, Ed Buscemi, Todd Beers and Richard Harvey. That’s Richard Harvey’s work shown to the left of mine in the photo above. It was a cool little gathering with coffee and homemade sweets. Peggi made ginger snaps with cayenne pepper following Shelley’s recipe.
We met I-Square developer, Mike Nolan, and our friend Charlie’s little sister. It gave me the opportunity to tell her the story Charlie told me of their other sister taking the ring off a famous dead man’s finger. I told the story to Chuck Cuminale and he wrote a song about it for Colorblind James. Charlie and Chuck are both dead now and Charlie’s sister had no idea there was song about all this.
Poet and artist, Todd Beers, said he gets all fired up at openings and can’t wait to get back and start work on something. I told him openings have exactly the opposite effect on me. Todd said he saw Peggi and me in my two portraits and he a sang a line from an old song of ours.
They make a big deal of Antoni Tápies in Barcelona. He is one of their own and his work is everywhere. We visited the Fundación Antoni Tápies, a building and foundation that he set up to not only showcase some of his work but to give back. The foundation supports artists of all stripes and shows their work as well.
Tápies’ work has to be seen in person. It is large, hands on, rough and tumble graphic work. He often uses concrete on his canvases. It encapsulates the look and feel of Barcelona, full of history and that rich Spanish palette and as lively as the graffiti on the grates they pull down over the shop windows at night. By the time you get down to the gift shop and start thumbing through hundreds of postcards you really miss the physical nature of his work.
