Cassie Stover and Sarah Atlee at 611 Creative, 11.21.2008
November 17, 2008
Flyer design by Dylan Bradway.
611 Creative is a sometimes-art space at 611 N Broadway in Oklahoma City. My friends Amanda and Dylan Bradway curate a show every month, with a one-night-only opening. Come visit us this Friday!
Red Shows Saturday 11.15.2008 in OKC
November 15, 2008
This’n: Red Dot Show, an annual fundraiser for the Individual Artists of Oklahoma Gallery (IAO). 811 N Broadway Ave, Oklahoma City. Saturday November 15th, 7-11 pm. Click here for ticket information.
At the Red Dot Show, in addition to auctioning artists’ works, IAO does something different. A group of artists (myself included) [scratch that, I wasn't included] has agreed to auction “blank canvases” — that is, they are selling commissions. When a buyer purchases a blank canvas from me, the artist agrees to paint them a commissioned work.
And That’n: The Red Show: What Makes You See Red? An annual fundraiser for the Red Line Foundation, a local organization promoting education and awareness about HIV/AIDS. AKA Gallery, 3001 Paseo, Oklahoma City. Saturday November 15th, 8 pm to midnight. Tickets available at Moda Salon, The Velvet Monkey Salons, the 42nd Street Candy Company, or at the gallery door.
My friend and colleage Ashley Griffith is a cofounder of Red Line, and is lending us her Paseo gallery space for this exhibit of red art. (The show guidelines stipulate that works must be at least fifty percent red.) Below are the three paintings I made for this show. I have included in-progress shots to give an idea of how I build layers in a painting. (Secretly I hope that in five years I look back at these and think, “Gracious Aunt Betsy, what was I thinking? I am SO much better at layering now.”)
I began with photos of my subjects, which I doctored in PhotoShop to shift the color balance toward the red end of the spectrum. I drew very basic pencil outlines on my blank canvases. The underpaintings are thin layers of red (cadmium and napthol), yellow (cadmium and naples), and sienna.
This is one of my palettes at the beginning of a painting session. I use styrofoam takeout trays. When they get full of paint, I let them dry and then apply a thin coat of gesso.
Top row: burnt sienna, cadmium red light, cadmium red dark, napthol pink (mixture).
Second row: burnt sienna (liquid acrylic), Golden glaze in rust, Golden glaze in yellow ochre, Liquitex portrait pink (mixture).
Third row: burnt umber (liquid acrylic), van dyke brown, unbleached titanium (mixture), cadmium yellow.
Bottom row: payne’s gray (liquid acrylic), neutral gray, titanium white.
Not pictured: alizarin crimson.
This is a different palette, after a painting session.
Recently I am taking a more painterly approach to my work. Looking back at the last couple of years I have felt like a drafstman who uses paint. I’ve missed the tactile and aesthetic pleasures of pushing paint around, building layers of color, and laying down single, decisive brush strokes.
The Dave painting was not fit to be photographed at this point. In the final piece, you will see that I changed direction somewhat. As a professor of mine says, every painting goes through an ugly stage.
Charlie: Stripes, acrylic on canvas, 2008 by Sarah Atlee
Dave: Red, acrylic on canvas, 2008 by Sarah Atlee
Trent: Halvsies, acrylic on canvas, 2008 by Sarah Atlee
A warm thank-you to my sitters, including Mr. Trent Lawson.
Morbid Anatomy’s Contemporary Artist Blogroll
November 14, 2008
If you enjoy antique medical models, specimen collections, and anatomical diagrams from various cultures and eras, please treat yourself to the Morbid Anatomy blog. It’s not (too) icky, I promise.
The author is kind enough to include several thorough blogrolls, including museums, online exhibitions, a bibliography, and other like-minded websites. They also have compiled a list of contemporary(ish) artists whose work recalls anatomical study, whether morbid or not. The list goes from Gorey to Bourgeois to Ryden to Hirst and back. Check ‘em out.
Anatomy of the skeleton, attributed to Avicenna, 980-1037. From this article on the history of anatomical maps in Asia, via Morbid Anatomy.
Related: Sarah’s del.icio.us bookmarks tagged “anatomy”. And everyone else’s.
Refreshing the Palate: Titus
November 7, 2008
On Sunday, November 9, 2008, the Metro Wine Bar in Oklahoma City is hosting their second annual wine tasting and art exhibit, Refreshing the Palate. The Metro has commissioned twenty local artists to reinterpret the labels of their featured holiday wines. I was offered the 2006 Cabernet Franc from Titus Vineyards. How could I not riff on the deliciously gory Shakespeare tragedy of that same name?
Titus, collage and acrylic on Rives BFK, 2008. Click image to enlarge.
The artists’ labels will be sold by silent auction; proceeds will benefit the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition.
TAMORA
Know, thou sad man, I am not Tamora;
She is thy enemy, and I thy friend:
I am Revenge: sent from the infernal kingdom,
To ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind,
By working wreakful vengeance on thy foes.
Come down, and welcome me to this world’s light;
Confer with me of murder and of death:
There’s not a hollow cave or lurking-place,
No vast obscurity or misty vale,
Where bloody murder or detested rape
Can couch for fear, but I will find them out;
And in their ears tell them my dreadful name,
Revenge, which makes the foul offender quake.
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Art thou Revenge? and art thou sent to me,
To be a torment to mine enemies?
TAMORA
I am; therefore come down, and welcome me.
(Thanks to William Shakespeare Info. And thanks to Julie Taymor for making the colorful film version of Titus Andronicus.)
Afterthought: The body and limbs of this character were collaged from a copy of Woman Stabbing Herself (or Woman Next to Water) by Urs Graf. If you like this style, you might also like Durer, Cranach the Elder, and Goltzius.
How and Why to Title Your Work
November 3, 2008
You Don’t Make Friends With Salad. Well-titled photograph by the excellent Romy Owens. Click here to visit Romy’s Flickr stream.
Julia Kirt, the director of the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, published a post today about labelling your work when you deliver it to a gallery. Snip:
I recently organized an exhibition with 18 artists in it. Several pieces had no name on the back, much less a title or contact information. Of those pieces, a few were delivered when I was not in the office, so could easily have not known which was which.
I had a similar experience in 2003 when I was an intern at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe. We were mounting a fundraising show called Inside [8*3], an open call for works less than 8 inches on a side. We had hundreds. Can you guess how many of those pieces were called Untitled? Answer: waaay too many. We even had a few mixups in which buyers got incorrect pieces delivered to them because the works of art were indistinguishable on paper. This brings me to the crux of today’s post.
Title Your Work
Please, do this. “Untitled” is a cop-out, unless you have created a work that is intentionally formal (that is, concerned mainly with forms), and/or you wish for the piece to reflect as little context as possible. For my part, I’m incapable of making paintings that don’t reference visual culture in a thousand little ways, so I might as well create titles that provide additional content.
(I began actively titling my work under the instruction of Martin Facey at the University of New Mexico. It was one of the lessons that stuck.)
Another reason not to rest on “Untitled” is that it makes your work harder to distinguish and identify. As Julia mentioned above, it can be headache-inducing for gallery workers as well (and you want those people on your good side). Imagine you’ve just delivered 20 paintings to a gallery for a solo show. They have twenty different prices, but they’re all called “Untitled: oil on canvas.” It would be difficult enough for the gallery staff to properly identify your work, not to mention audiences at large.
Note: A good solution to this is to provide your gallery with a detailed inventory including thumbnails. I’ll be talking about this in more detail at an upcoming OVAC workshop; see note below.
How To Title Your Work
Language is a frequent trigger of my creative process. In my character-based work, I may start with a name and put a face to it, or vice versa. I keep a file containing my favorite idioms, and another for the almost-correct-but-mistranslated-sounding advertisements that appear in my email spam. Maybe I’ll latch onto a song lyric or movie line. Sometimes I’ll be working on a painting, and an appropriate phrase will float to the surface of my consciousness. All these can become titles.
If coming up with titles is difficult for you, here are some suggestions for semi-random word generators.
Reader’s Digest or any newspaper or magazine. Pick a column. Read the last word of each line in that column. Choose a sequence of 3-5 words that sound interesting. ex. “Teaches how they sip.” “Working love had most empathic.”
Babelfish. The AltaVista Babelfish translator is a great source of slightly innacurate language. Begin with a common phrase, such as “All roads lead to Rome.” Send it through the translator multiple times through multiple languages. I had it translated to Russian, back to English, to Japanese, to English again, to French, then Greek, back to English. “Action of all streets to Rome” is what came out.
Channel surfing. Flip through channels on the boob tube. Write down the first word that you hear each time you turn to a new channel. Repeat as needed.
Diceware and the Beale List. Roll 5d6 (or one six-sided die five times) and write down the six numbers that come up. Repeat two more times, or more if you like. You will have three five-digit numbers. Each of these numbers corresponds to a word on the Beale list. (This is an excellent method for generating memorable but hard-to-break passwords.) ex. “Noun walls fauna.” “Feels bozo spire.”
Place names. This is how I created the characters of Normal, OK. Use an atlas or actual road signs. ex. Pernell Foster, Guthrie Perkins Cushing, Stillwater Hennessey.
Your birthdate and a book. Say your birthday is April 4 1967. (Mine isn’t.) Grab any book off any shelf. Turn to page 4, look at the fourth line, and note the first, ninth, sixth and seventh words. ex. “Writing as is uncertain.” “Worthy now as I.” Modify this as you see fit, by matching the digits of your birthdate to chapters, pages, lines, or words.
Speaking of books. Look at your bookshelf. Read one word from each consecutive book title, three to five in a row. ex. “Dawn to Modern Ambassador.” “Name Visual Working Basics.” “Geek Garlic Housekeeping.” “Sylvia Companion of Insects.”
Phone book acronyms. Open the phone book and choose the first name you see (first or last). Write words that begin with each letter of that name. ex. “Paul” becomes “Please Accept Understanding Limes.”
Wikiquote. Use a quote as is, or for extra fun, switch the words around.
The Internet Anagram Server. Begin with a name or phrase, then send it through the anagram generator. For a more concise result, I set the maximum number of words to no more than three, and the minimum number of letters to three or four. Here is such a result for “All roads lead to Rome.” That’s right, 654 anagrams. That’s why I leave this up to a computer. Amoral aloe toddlers, anyone?
Go ye and title.
UPDATE. You can find some more colorful phrases at this page detailing the animal naming scheme for various versions of Ubuntu (a popular distribution of the Linux operating system).
Related: I’m going to be giving a talk about organizing one’s art inventory on November 22. It’s part of OVAC’s workshop series called A.S.K. (Artist’s Survival Kit). The Business of Art 101 will be at the Edmond Public Library. Visit OVAC’s site to register.
I recently attended an OVAC workshop on building your portfolio, and it was a great experience. I came away feeling energized, motivated, and well-informed. Most of these workshops are only $15 for non-OVAC members! You can’t not go.
Paho Mann and Dylan Bradway, My Famous Friends
October 9, 2008
Untitled (Re-inhabited Circle-K Store, Albuquerque), photograph by Paho Mann. Click image to visit the artist’s website.
Two things happened on the internet this week. (That’s right, just two. This blog post makes three.) Two of my artist friends, Dylan Bradway and Paho Mann, have been recognized on blogs with startlingly high readerships.
Dylan Bradway is an up-and-comer here in Oklahoma City. In addition to quality graphic design (such as the catalog for Art 365), he creates evocative paintings incorporating stylized characters and street-influenced calligraphic line. He and his partner-in-life Amanda Weathers-Bradway recently set up shop in OKC’s Plaza District.
This morning I got a text from Dylan instructing me to “check out Juxtapoz.com.” Sure enough, the Juxtapoz blog is featuring a group show of train car designs that includes a piece by Dylan. (That guy in the green hoodie on the red car? That’s Dylan’s.) The Train Car Project will be on display at Papa B Studios in Brooklyn, October 10-22.
Paho Mann is an old friend and colleague from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. A precise formalist photographer, Paho has long been interested in typologies — objects that are of a category and also have unique characteristics. My favorite series of his is the re-inhabited Circle K stores, a staple of Albuquerque’s accidental non-architecture.
This week Paho’s Junk Drawer series was discovered by a New York Times blog called The Moment, a kind of digital-state-of-the-union roundup, followed by Kottke.org. Here is a transcript of the email I sent him upon learning this news:
YOU HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED BY THE NYTIMES BLOG AND [redacted] JASON
KOTTKE DUUUUUUUDE THE ENTIRE INTERNET KNOWS YOU NOW OMFG YOU ARE
FAMOUS
Splendid job, guys. Keep it up.
Xerox Transfer Workshop at Untitled Artspace, OKC
October 8, 2008
Gift, oil and alkyd on canvas, 2004 by Joe Ramiro Garcia. Click here to visit the artist’s website.
I mentioned in an earlier two-part post that there are many ways to transfer an image from one surface to another. Untitled Artspace in Oklahoma City is offering a workshop on one of these methods, taught by visiting artist Joe Ramiro Garcia.
Xerox Lithography Workshop
October 18 - 19, 2008Joe Ramiro Garcia will teach a two-day Xerox Lithography Workshop on Saturday and Sunday, October 18 and 19. The workshop will have sessions from 10 am - 6 pm each day. Xerox lithography involves using a Xerox copy of an image and transferring it with gum arabic. Garcia is a Santa Fe-based artist and exhibited his art at Untitled [ArtSpace] in May and June 2007. … Supplies will be included.
If you’re in the area and interested in this method of image transfer, a workshop at Untitled is a fabulous way to leapfrog into some new work.
Normal, OK Characters Appear In Nimrod
October 3, 2008
Two characters from my series Normal, OK appear in the Fall 2008 issue of the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry. To purchase a copy, follow this link.
Normal, OK: Peoria Jenks. Mixed media, 2007.
Peoria Jenks, 72, carries on the family tradition of bootlegging. (Opteemah County is dry.) She does not sell to “drunkards.” One day, while having her hair set, she overheard a call on the salon’s police scanner noting suspicious activity at the Slim Pickens Mo-tel. On a hunch, she went over. Onlookers say she got a shotgun from the trunk of her Dart and walked purposefully past Sherrif Ardmore into room 112. No shots were fired. Ms. Jenks reportedly walked out shaking her head and saying, “Not in my town. Not in my town.” The headline in that week’s Porcupine read “Meth Lab Seized With Help From Locals.”
You can learn more about the people of Normal by reading the book.
My series of works titled Normal, OK was part of the Art 365 exhibition sponsored by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. Art 365 travels to Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to open on October 15.
“Know Thyself” Reviewed in Daily Oklahoman
September 30, 2008
Know Thyself, a show of self portraits by Oklahoma artists, is showing at the IAO Gallery in OKC through October 10. Here is a review by John Brandenberg for the Daily Oklahoman. Snip:
Sarah Atlee pokes fun at herself by exaggerating her laughing teeth to the point viewers may think she’s going to come out of the picture plane and bite them in her acrylic “Self Portrait: For the Record.”
rraarrr.
Special thanks to Romy Owens for inviting me to participate in this show.
RAINN Benefit Show Tonight at IAO in OKC
September 29, 2008
The IAO Gallery in OKC is hosting a one-night-only event of art and music to benefit RAINN, The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. This effort is headed up by the marvellous DJ Ostara and includes an auction, poetry reading, DJ sets, and more. Tickets are $10.
Here are just a few reasons to support RAINN through events like this.
Betty Louise, mixed media on masonite, 2007.
Betty here will be a part of the show tonight. There’s a secret little connection here that I’m going to go ahead and release. In 1994, musician Tori Amos* cofounded RAINN as a means to overcome the experience of her own sexual assault and to help others through that process. It happens that Betty Louise here is based on two themes: the suffragist Amelia Jenks Bloomer, and the lyrics of a Tori Amos b-side called Humpty Dumpty. There, it’s been said.
*Yeah, Tori and me used to be real tight. We grew apart over the years. I haven’t heard her latest album yet, so maybe a spark or two could be rekindled. Never say never…