Bugging

Student Jesyka Hayworth has painted a mural in the back stairwell of the art building -- it was a midterm assignment for New Genres. Check it out when you get the chance -- here's a taste of it:

Infrastructure Alert

Instructor Rick Parsons installed his latest gallery show this past weekend:


Image: Haight & Masonic, 2010
36” x 60” latex paint on tar paper

INFRASTRUCTURE:
Tar Paper Paintings
by Rick Parsons
at Santa Clara University
Department of Art & Art History

February 16 – March 19, 2010
Reception February 24, 5:00 - 7:00 PM

Art Department Gallery
Gallery Hours 9-5 M-F

If you have a disability and require reasonable accommodation
please contact 408-554-5483

Below are some pics he took. Looking at them I was reminded of a scene from the documentary "Crumb," about cartoonist R. Crumb. Crumb has an anthropologist's eye for all the urban/suburban visual clutter that we mentally edit out of our vision -- the powerlines and various metallic doohickeys that cluster like barnacles on utility poles. He gathers photographic reference for them, because he finds them impossible to draw from memory. They're ubiquitous, but they most likely exist in your mind's eye as a sort of vague, lumpy blur. Unless you're a utility worker -- or unless you're Rick.

More on Hockney's Pawings

A couple days after making a post about getting my sea legs with iPhone's Brushes app, a really good article about David Hockney's iPhone paintings showed up in my mailbox, via the New York Review of Books. The article is also online, and I highly recommend giving it a read (although there is one piece of genuine misinformation in it: namely, that you can't use a stylus with the app. It's interesting info that Hockney exclusively uses his thumb to paint on the iPhone, but the pogo stylus works just fine).


One amusing detail from the article is the author's equivocal language when it comes to describing the act of digital painting:

...Brushes, which allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerpaint (it's not yet entirely clear what the proper verb should be for this novel activity), to create highly sophisticated full-color images directly on the device's screen...

At first glance, I thought this was a ridiculous hangup, but in thinking it over, "Brushes" really does blur the distinction between drawing and painting. Maybe it'd make sense to hybridize the words: "dainting" or "pawing," the latter being especially suitable for those who use their thumbs.

At any rate, the author of the article, Lawrence Weschler, displays a nice sensitivity to the technical aspects of working with the iPhone -- the way the black screen can function as a looking glass, and the appeal of the screen's self-illumination. The self-illumination makes the screen a natural for sketching in the dark, opening up possibilities for sketching at dawn or dusk (or in the dead of night). The flip side, however, is that full sunlight (which is a boon to paper or canvas) presents problems of reflection on the glass. I actually tried to make a picture of the beach at Sand Harbor one day, and found it fairly impossible to make headway against the glare on the screen.

Hockney, as usual, makes for a lively source of quotes. It's funny that he doesn't like the new version of Brushes, "Brushes 2" -- I haven't yet tried it out myself, but I'm kind of dying to, since it has layers, something I was really aching for in the original version. I don't know if he's just being cantankerous, but you have to love his explanation that he's not actually painting on his phone: "it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad."

I forgot, in my last couple postings on Brushes, to post a link to the Flickr Brushes group, which has a wide variety of art made with the app. There's a lot of attractive work being posted there. Three participating artists whose work I've enjoyed are:

José Carlos Lollo


fhierro (from Madrid)


Fabric Lenny

iPhone Brushes: Sketches and Trials

This summer, I made a short blog post about the iPhone app "Brushes," which David Hockney was using to make morning sketches, and which Jorge Colombo had used to paint a cover for the New Yorker (the New Yorker's website keeps a blog titled "Finger Painting" where Colombo continues to post his iPhone paintings). Since then, I got an iPhone, mostly because I was sick of suffering a barely-functioning cell phone for the past year or so -- and partly because I wanted to try "brushes" out for myself.

These are my first few attempts -- painting with my finger on the screen. I found it really hard to control -- I'm used to drawing with a pencil, not fingerpainting. I tried using thin lines for the pic of my cat, trying to build little nests out of my scribbling -- then trying to go for some blending effects with wider brushes for the face below. I didn't mind the smeary look of the face, but the lack of control was getting frustrating. There are folks who can make amazing Brushes paintings with their fingers -- youtube has a bunch of clips -- but I ain't one of them.




At that point, I decided to spring for a stylus, and ended up getting a Pogo Stylus. That was a lot more comfortable to use -- it felt more like drawing. It's funny that using a stick feels like a more intimate and controlled experience than using my fingers, but there you have it. Sometimes the "extensions of man" really do supersede your actual appendages.



Finally, in the Reno airport, things started to click. I had a few faces to pick from, and enough time to worry them into something. You can actually export quicktime movies of your drawing process -- below are movies of two airport faces. The first was quick & loose, the second one I sketched out in the airport, then finished on the flight -- it took me the better part of a trip to San Diego. You can see me figure out the guy needs an ear at the last second. With some judicious editing, you could actually do a William Kentridge-style animation right on your iPhone.





I've also been enjoying the camera on the phone. I like that it's so susceptible to motion -- you can get some nice washy effects from it if you train yourself have have an unsteady hand.

Ensor's Appalling Parade

Sanford Schwartz had a good article on James Ensor in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, titled "The Mysteries of Ensor." I'd seen a few examples of Ensor's work before -- including a couple of his skeleton pictures, like "Skeletons Warming Themselves" and "Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring" (both reproduced below), which offer riffs on the medieval "Dance of Death" sequences that showed Death leading people from all walks of life into the grave. I'd come to the "Dance of Death" out of an interest in comics -- they're an early Western use of images deployed in sequence; probably the most famous of these sequences was done by Holbein the Younger -- several of those images are linked on this page from a site organized around the theme of Death in Art. Ensor got himself into the death game with his etching "My Portrait in 1960" (he was born in 1860):
But Ensor's work wasn't restricted to turning the "Dance of Death" into morbid comedy. Schwartz describes Ensor's work further:

Ensor is... known, of course, for prying open, as it were, the lid of propriety on the box that holds our most impish and irregular thoughts. His best-known images present a kind of nonstop Mardi Gras, where goblins peer from behind furniture or swarm around us as we sleep, skeletons in top hats and overcoats try to warm themselves near a stove, and Satan's hairy-tailed helpers drop down from above to round up various locals. Jurists, prelates, the Belgian king, military men, and officials of every sort (some of whom we learn are members of the art establishment) turn up as ogres. In the print Doctrinaire Nourishment, these upholders of society's moral values squat on a ledge and defecate (each stream reflecting the relative heft of the man's buttocks) into the open mouths of the horde waiting below.

In other words, Ensor's work is right up my alley, and I'm surprised it's taken me this long to really know something about him. Comical, grosteque, scatalogical, proto-surrealist: what's not to love? Reading the article sent me on a Google Image Search to dig up as many hi-res versions of his work as I could -- I've culled my favorites below. Click on them for larger versions.

Kat Hutter, Tahoe & Guns

I don't know if Kat's being shy or just busy, but she got a nice write-up in Moonshine Ink this week.


From the article:

... it wasn’t until graduate work at Clemson that Hutter’s signature style today developed. A lot of thinking in the studio drew her eye to the objects around her: tape, paint cans and other artist supplies. She began experimenting with symbols and repetition through stenciling. “For me, that’s where things started clicking,” Hutter says. “I was looking for this big idea about why I paint, but instead found myself drawn to banal, everyday items.”

To read the full article, click here.

So Emotional

James Nagel's BFA show opened tonight, headed by his self-kidding title: "I'm So Emotional." His paintings were created around the theme of a breakup, playing around with images that cross the line between personal snapshots and glossy magazine ads.




As he was working his way through the images, he was dealing with a kind of haunted sense of commercialized deja-vu. Memories of a departed person suddenly resurrected in the stylized daydreams of perfume and clothes ads. Magazine ads are airports for all sorts or eros -- thwarted, hopeful, mangled, obsessive -- to land in. Some strips of paint on the canvasses look like they've been laid in at an auto-body shop.




James' process of working towards these images was partly a process of abstraction. Patterns, and especially stripes, came further and further to the fore. After looking at the paintings it was hard not to see stripes everywhere.

"The issues are in the tissues"

Jonah gave his artists' talk last night. He partly talked about how his training as a massage therapist prepared him as a painter. As part of his training, he had to assemble muscles onto a skeletal model, giving him an understanding of their relations, insertions, etc. Part of his interest in the subject of his paintings, Mary, was an interest in the way the body posture in older people seems more transparent and revelatory -- the body seems to express itself more plainly, with less self-consciousness, as it ages.


He said the bust portraits were more about Mary as a person -- the full-body paintings were more about "using" Mary as a model to express some of his own ideas and obsessions.


The image of Mary in the trunk is an interesting re-visiting of an image in a painting Jonah had done before. The previous painting was of a young woman either emerging from, or being closed into, a suitcase. That image was lusciously painted, but I found something almost callow about it. Having Mary in the trunk struck me as being a far more interesting confluence of figure and luggage. There's a lot more empathy to the image of Mary in the trunk, even as if retains a somewhat jaundiced, absurdist vantage point on the efficacy of prayer. The trunk seems like a minimalist ark, set out on a sea of matte black infinity.

Jonah Harjer's BFA show

There's a preview showing tonight, and then Jonah will give his talk tomorrow evening. Here are a few images. There was that Burning Man show for a few days in between, but I'm kinda happy my "woman of a certain age" show is being followed up by another woman of a certain age show. Long live the septugenarians!