Posts Tagged: art
Second Guessing
Berkeley CA. 2010.
Predictably, I have problems with any creative activity I engage in. It usually boils down to two things, which ultimately are two forms of the same thing. First, a nagging feeling that if the work is not something totally novel, then it has little artistic merit. Call it the curse of modernism. Since pretty much everything has been done, or at least everything that a working parent might have time to do, that seals the deal on the possibility of artistic merit. And so every result feels inadequate.
Second, there’s a lack of commitment or willingness to see something through to its logical conclusion, to really try different variations and different approaches with a given idea until I have turned it round and round, and really analyzed it from every angle. I think that’s what good artists do. They don’t get bored with say, painting lemons, after painting 4 or 5 lemons. They are not done until they have made dozens and dozens of paintings and visualized lemons in every conceivable way. That kind of thing always impresses me.
But it’s hard for me to do.
On the other hand, I still seem to be making photos of partially cropped cars parked in suburban neighborhoods. It is not that I’m eagerly exploring new conceptual terrain in this theme. It’s just that it’s so easy to do. Old cars basically make the shot on their own, making my job easy. And there are so many of them around here that I can’t go a day without passing at least one or two worthy subjects. For the time being, I suppose I’ll keep going, as long as I don’t get into any fights in the process. If only I could turn a couple upside down and see the underside…
Temple of Found Objects
Click image to view full size.
Perhaps my favorite photograph from our vacation in Hawaii. I expected to find many beautiful things to photograph in Kauai. There is an abundance of natural beauty. What surprised me was finding such nonnatural beauty. I don’t know who built this temple, or why. To what gods? For what end? It doesn’t really matter. I’m just glad they did. It seems to have been built largely of found and recycled materials, especially large metal, everything from tin cafeteria trays to airplane engines. All beautifully sculpted.
Some Candidates for a Show
Good grief! I’m participating in a group photography show opening next Friday, June 18th and the finals selections aren’t even made yet. But here are some possible candidates. More details coming very soon!
Stream of consciousness: Scenic photos
Climbing up on Albany Hill
San Francico Bay from Albany Hill, Sept. 19, 2009 #2
I’m not sure what to call the kind of photography I have been primarily engaged in since getting back into it over the last two years. I just know it hasn’t been landscapes and scenic photography. Indeed, I have not been trying to make images that are overtly beautiful or aesthetically pleasing at all.
Yet, there is something irresistible about nature. Often, it is awe-inspiring. And as we all know, sensations of pleasure, well-being, and the loss of self in the one-ness of the creation often lead to addiction. Gotta get that fix again and again. That leads to wanting it for oneself, even in a puny way like making a picture of it.
That’s not to denigrate scenic photography. I find a lot of it pretty wonderful. I just also see the production of it as beyond my ken–not to mention my lacking the wherewithal to afford the gear and the travel to seriously pursue and produce beautiful scenic photography.
All that said, I’ve had fun working with some shots of San Francisco Bay taken mostly as an afterthought–or just because I always have my camera with me, so why not? And the other night I was at a friend’s home that is on Albany Hill and overlooks almost the whole bay. After taking a couple shots from the deck, someone showed me the Richard Misrach book of the Golden Gate. It was inspiring. I came to see the intrinsic interest of a series of photographs of one thing taken over all the different conditions to which it may be subject. I think I may try my own little series from a given vantage point and see what happens. If only I could get a neon martini glass, or rusted car, or dead cow or something in there…
Blogger’s Block and Art Walk Therapy
Vista Cruiser and Barracuda For Sale
It began with writing. I found it harder and harder to do. The entries slowed to a trickle and then virtually stopped. It spread to the camera. I was able to shoot, but not with any focus or care. Going through the results at the end of the day, or week, became more and more confusing and difficult. And yet, I feel the need to get the expression out more than ever before. There are many parts to the problem, some of them seemingly contradictory. On one hand, I feel at a loss as to what exactly to try to develop in my photography or how to go about it. I feel like I’ve burned out on square format, color-tweaked, cropped cars. Everything I’ve done seems so dull and amateurish. On the other hand, I have so many ideas floating around that seem like good starting points that I can’t focus on any one for very long. Or even get past the contemplation stage. Underlying all of it is a vague feeling that I should not be thinking about this stuff at all, given my current under employment and other life obligations.
A small breakthrough tonight after returning from a “flickr photographers” show at Vox in Sacramento. Flickr friend Tom Spaulding had some nice work in the show. The show was inspirational, as was art at a couple other galleries, and the whole art party craziness of the Second Saturday Art Walk. It was my first time seeing it, and I was impressed by the sheer size of the turnout and number of galleries, music, clubs, restaurants and other participants. It was definitely worth the hour drive.
Browsing and organizing shots from the past month or so, I came back to this shot of the Vista Cruiser and Barracuda and just really liked it. It vaguely reminds me of Robert Bechtle, whose work I really like and whose name has come up in conversation with artist friends a couple times recently. I tried it in black and white, and really liked that too. It feels like the start of a return of clarity. If I can just keep at it, one shot at a time…
Fingado Art Gallery Opening
This is the final set of images I will have in a group photography show that opens Friday at Fingado Art Gallery. Nine is quite a few but the prints are not very big, just 12 inches square. I printed them at Dickerman Prints and had them mounted on aluminum at General Graphics, both in San Francisco. They came out very nice, and I’m pretty excited about it.
It has been an interesting project to try to print and prepare for presentation a small set of photographs. In a way, it seems easier than simply showing things on the web. I think the reason for this is that a physical show has, by its very nature, physical limitations and boundaries. A small set of images allows one to focus on them and the process of getting them where you want them to be. By contrast, putting things up on flickr or another such site is pretty much wide open in terms of numbers and organization. One can drown in a sea of possibilities.
This was my thought about what’s going on with this series of photos. The starting point is an exploration of color. Not color simpliciter, but as it relates to memory, history and the fictional narratives they constitute. The combination of color shifts and vintage subjects recall a generic past and, paradoxically, place the viewer within a fictitious historical narrative by playing upon her memories and nostalgic sensibilities. The deportation is paradoxical since taken literally, these narratives describe a logical impossibility. The images waver between recalling a past as it was, and a decayed, dissolving past as it comes to us. On one hand we are presented with something recalling a snapshot from the family drawer, a snapshot whose color as shifted over time, but whose referent we can conjure through memory as pristine. On the other hand, the subject is captured and presented not as it was in the past, but as it is now, in the present. It is the color, as it were, of the subject itself which has shifted over time rather than the photograph.
Maker Faire 2009
Fire-breathing Snail at Maker Faire
I attended Maker Faire 2009 this last weekend with Sarah and Theo. I was not quite sure what all to really expect other than “burners”, art cars, and other alt-artists. It is definitely a scene for Bay Area hipsters.The fire-breathing snail truck, motorized one-person cupcakes, tesla coils, fire-arts displays from The Crucible, body art, etc. set that vibe for sure.
If it were just this, it would have been fine, but it was so much more than this. We went as a family, and the number of activities and other things geared toward kids and families was really great. Theo was totally into it. Of course, for a six-year-old boy, the main buzz was word of a large Legoland display and activity area. Theo wouldn’t settle down until we found it, and then wouldn’t leave it once we did. (We could hardly escape to do the things WE wanted to do.) There were many other building, science and educational activities and presentations going on from groups like NASA and Exploratorium. Sarah and I both came to the conclusion that the Weekend Pass is a good idea; the Faire really demands a two-day visit, and next year we thought we’d spend one day largely devoted to kid stuff, and one day to explore all the stuff we really want to see. I was disappointed to entirely miss Survival Research Labs among other things.
Among the things I checked out was the experimental and computer music section, which was definitely cool. There were individuals there with their own creations, like computer controlled prepared piano, home-built electronic zither things, guitars with sound-sensitive color displays built into the body, and more. I also discovered organizations like Sound Arts, which work to support the sound arts community in a variety of ways. I was actually inspired to try to participate next year. I’m eager to start composing electronic music again, and perhaps put it together with photographic imagery. There were several multi-media tools on exhibit, and the possibilities for interactive mash-ups appear to be very extensive. So, we’ll see..
Beyond the fun of electronic noise-toys, it seems to me that the notion of making your own fill-in-the-blank, instead of relying only on mass-produced consumables for furnishing one’s life, is more important than ever. A quick review of the story of stuff should convince you of that. In fact, among the most interesting and yet slightly disturbing activities we did at Maker Faire involved making things out of discarded stuff, mostly computer stuff. There were gigantic piles of computer gear that were available for dismantling and use as raw material. (I’m not really sure which Theo enjoyed more, destroying a computer keyboard, or assembling its pieces into a robot ship.) The fun aside, the sheer volume of discarded material present here gives one pause as to what must be going into the world’s landfills. Thank goodness for groups like the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, which was a participating organization and probably the source of the “art supplies”, for what they do to stem the tide of electronics discards.
Not that everyone is going to build their own computers. But there were exhibits and activities on everything from sewing, to gardening, to “slow food”, to green energy technology, to bicycling, and how to make your own robot. I’m already looking forward to next year.
Monday in London
I finally got a chance to work through a batch of photos from the London trip and posted them on flickr last night. My walking tour began on Monday. We had been here many years ago, but I did not get a real sense of the layout of the city center. It seemed pretty big and confusing, and hard to grasp. We took the Underground pretty much everywhere, and got good at looking at the tube map and figuring out how to get from hotel to museum, etc. But this means that you start at a point and then disappear underground, and then pop up at another point. So, one does not get a real sense of the connective tissue between. This time was different. I took the tube to get a bit closer in, but then just walked the streets from point to point. This helped to make it clear where things are in relation to each other and made the city intelligible to me as a visitor. I’m not claiming I’ll remember any of this by the next time I get to visit, but that is another story entirely.
As I mentioned in the last post, I took the District Line tube to Westminster and came out of the station right in front of Big Ben.
This was a wonderful site with which to start a day in London. The sky was clear and the gold glinted in the sun. I walked around the corner onto Victoria Embankment to stroll along the Thames for a bit. That’s when I first glimpsed the London Eye, a gigantic ferris wheel 443 ft. high. That’s over 25 stories! It simply dwarfs the large buildings right next to it. Sarah wanted to go for a ride, but I’m not sure how my acrophobia would treat me up in that thing.
Along the way I also saw the Battle of Britain Monument. I thought it was rather an odd monument that was not sure whether it wanted to be a contemporary, abstract work or more of a traditional figurative sculpture.
I walked up Horse Guards Ave, and back down Parliament St, past the Horse Guards Cavalry Museum. Then past Downing St., which is pretty well guarded. It’s a fairly small and short side street, closed off with a large metal fence and gate and many police guards standing around. No surprise, of course.
I didn’t see Mr. Brown, however. He and the finance minister were busy working on a deficit budget to bail out the British economy, which became quite a news story while we there. There is quite a bit of opposition to the amount of borrowing the British government is proposing to do to get through the economic hard times. In contrast, the daily protests by Tamils over Sri Lanka were barely covered in the media I saw while there. A couple citizens I spoke to seemed mystified about what the protesters were demanding the government do about the situation in Sri Lanka.
Coming back down the street toward Parliament, I happened upon the aforementioned Sri Lankan Tamil protest. I’m not sure how I missed it the first time around; perhaps they had not started “protesting” yet and I took them for tourists.
At first, I was quite surprised to come upon the scene and found it rather exciting. There was definitely some action as the huge crowd spilled out of the park at one point and blocked Bridge St. The police were trying to hold them , but got pushed back and eventually fell back to protect the House of Commons, etc. Ultimately, it was all pretty civil, and well behaved on this day. After taking about 100 photos at the protest, I headed back up Parliament St toward the National Gallery. This time the Horse Guards were out and I got a couple shots.
Soon I arrived at Trafalgar Square, and got the standard shots of the Nelson’s Column and National Gallery in the background. I immediately recognized Admiralty Arch from my previous visit to London, but only as a landmark I passed through to get to the ICA.
I spent only about two hours in the National Gallery. Since I was traveling on a budget, I didn’t spring for special exhibits, but immensely enjoyed the fabulous permanent collection in the rest of the museum, which is free.
After the NG, I headed up Strand toward St Paul’s Cathedral. Along the way, I passed Somerset House, a large historic complex which I’d not heard of before, but which appeared to include a wonderful art venue and be worth a special effort to visit in the future. More on that and the rest of Monday in the next post, coming soon.
The first time I told this story
this is what I said:
“We were getting into our bunks when this strange light seemed to come down from the sky, and there was this rumbling noise and the camper swayed a little. It got really loud, then suddenly–very quiet. And we felt this pressure, and then I blacked out. When I woke up, I was alone.”
Flip-book Life
We recently took a trip to Seattle for our dear friend Jen Dixon’s birthday. Jen’s friends from all over the country came for this one, and so we saw a lot of people. We had a wonderful time, and it was actually rejuvenating. It just felt like we reconnected with our friends there in a much more significant way this time. I suppose that because it was a tough year marked by personal loss, and because we saw people we had not seen in years, and because we are all older, there was this pervasive sense that being with people you care for is what matters in life. It sounds corny, but I don’t know how else to describe it.
One of the really nice things we had a chance to do was take a drive up Aurora Ave to see Jen’s public art work installed on the Interurban Trail. I really loved the work. It has a playfulness and a sense of place. Yet the combination of the simple, colorful, unfolding content on a form usually reserved for the concise delivery of important information for travelers creates a semiotic mystery. “What does that sign mean? What is it telling me about what’s ahead?” I love that in a work.
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