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.