Monday, February 28, 2011

Dancing with light, sculpture in wood




Well I finally got a chance to ask the creator of this sculpture if he liked my photos. He was so enthusiastic about pics, it was great. I couldn't resist taking these shots the light was so great. It wasn't hard to get him to agree to let me post them. Thanks Matt, post a link here so people can contact you about the work.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

yet another helpful resource

It is absolutely amazing how many resources are out there in cyberspace. I don't think that young people who have grown up with this technology can appreciate the almost mystical properties of virtually universal communication and information and the impact of this availability. Undoubtedly, the upheavals in the Middle East are related to this dispersal and distribution of knowledge.

I have already started posting links for different resources. I hope to find a way to index them. For now I'll just include them in the posts. Just to clarify,, I have done a cursory inspection of every outside link I post and will continue to do so. All the links I post will be connected in someway to my blog subject matter, that is art, artists, theory etc.  So here is another site that I found which links specifically to artists' blogs. http://art-blogging.blogspot.com/ enjoy!

Friday, February 25, 2011

Resource

One of the things that I wanted to do is included links I thought were useful. I am not sure how many art makers are looking at this but this is one I thought would be relevant to a lot of people I know, even though it seems to be UK based. http://www.printmaker.co.uk/links.html There are a great number of links to good print artists and various resources. This site also looks good but I am not sure how good the links are as I don't want to get caught upon surfing tonight.http://artdeadlineslist.com/

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

re ETSY

So here is the address to my little ETSY shop http://www.etsy.com/shop/Simnora . I am quite frankly amazed by the shear volume of work available and I am appreciative of scope of both subject and execution. There are some really impressive artists on there. So use my link to get there and please have fun shopping when you land. Buy some original art made by a real person, maybe from your home town.    

On that note, I would like to leave you with a link to a blog I have recently discovered regarding funding for the arts and the quality of art in general. 
http://chavisory.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/not-enough-excellent-art-o-rly/

some of my digital images ( I have just discovered ETSY)

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

photo or drawing?

If you click on the photography tag, you will find the large version of this pic. Sorry I am so tech challenged and I don't know how to link them yet. Feel free to give me advise in comments. This is a photo but you'll have to look at the photo page to read a description of techniques used.

Monday, February 21, 2011

life after Bachelard

I had intended to post yesterday but intention and reality rarely converge and to a chronic procrastinator that is as good an excuse as any. But excuses aside, yesterday was a little busy. There was a lot of errand running and laundry folding going on and despite my best intentions I only got to the print studio at 9pm. Luckily today is family day in Edmonton and my kids were good sports about waiting for me to aquatint my massive copper etching plate. It's 26" x 40" which barely makes a 2" border on a sheet of Somerset. I guess this one will take Hanaemuhle copper etching instead. Remind me in future not to make enormous prints which require 20$ per sheet paper.

But I digress. Or not. I don't want to rehash Bachelard or write some heady academic treatise. I'll leave that for "official" writing like articles or papers. This is more of an observation. The Poetics of Space is required reading for a number of U Alberta senior studios with good reason. It is thought provoking and evocative and for a contemporary art-maker this is a good thing. Right now my work has a lot of "space" and a great deal of "poetry" in it. I'll get that up in good time, I promise. I do have a senior portfolio to prepare for our jury and not a lot of time to accomplish that.

So where does Bachelard tie into my studio escapades last night? Simply put, while I was skulking about the paint studio looking for interesting paint splotches on the floor to add to my photo reference materials I noticed a really interesting phenomenon. While many of the painters take print studios, I rarely venture down to senior painting except to use the spray booth. I am a little on the OCD side and painting is, well, a bit messy. I think that characteristic is common to many University painting studios but our seems especially overcrowded with so many of the senior students involved in painting right now. I took advantage of the abandoned studio by snooping around, looking at work in progress.

I soon discovered that not unlike both printmaking and drawing, a great deal of work in painting also involves both space and poetry. Some of it seems to involves metaphorical use of various building interiors and exteriors; hence a dialectic of inside and outside. Some work appears to involve a more phenomenological relationship to space. Suffice it to say I was moved by much of the work of my fellow students and have resolved to venture downstairs more often, especially when the studio is not abandoned.

I see the dialectic of inside and outside as representative of so many things , not the least of which are concepts like conscious and unconscious, not necessarily as polarities like one or the other but as entities superimposed with areas which over lap to differing degrees. The boundaries blur and that which is in, is out and that which is out intrudes on the in. No matter wether one is in a so called tangible real space or a metaphorical one, there is always a blurred line that we can not fully distinguish.