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.
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.
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.
Illustration Friday: Foggy
July 12, 2008
Let Things Be Foggy, ink on paper, July 2008.
I began this sketch during my stay in Canadian, Texas over the Fourth of July holiday. I don’t have any major shows planned or new projects in progress at this point, so I feel a mite bit purposeless. (It’s been a long time since my schedule was this open.) Plus, I’m exploring some less graphic, more painterly stylistic ground. This foggy place is the perfect environment in which to let some new ideas germinate.
See more of Illustration Friday here.
Here is a snapshot of my desk upon completing the drawing, where you can see my collage sketch:
Art 365 Documentary Preview Online
June 16, 2008
As part of the year-long Art 365 process, filmmakers Melissa Scaramucci and Cacky Poarch produced a documentary film about the seven artists. You can see a 15-minute preview online at Google Video. If you’re new to Art 365, this is a great introduction.
The film premiered in its entirety at the Art 365 opening in Tulsa last month. There will also be a screening in Oklahoma City on July 3rd.
Click here to read more about Normal, OK, my series for Art 365.
Related: Sonarta also has footage of the Art 365 process. Part 1 is below; here are parts two, three, and four.
Not What I Meant
May 16, 2008
Not What I Meant, acrylic on wood panel, 2008. Click image to enlarge.
A few years back I came into a whole pile of these 8 x 22 inch wood panels. I think they were raw cabinet doors that hadn’t been shaped and finished. Usually I paint on them vertically, so this is the first time I’ve used one in its wide format. Just in time for Illustration Friday: Wide.
Not What I Meant, detail view.
This panel was actually a so-so painting several years back. (In fact, it was one of a series of paintings I did that turned out so poorly that I realized I needed to go back to school and learn to paint. Hence: graduate school.) To start the painting you see here, I sanded the previous painting’s surface, then added the red and blue. I scratched the fish shapes away with an exacto knife (and many many blades). It’s so satisfying to transform a failure into a success.
In General, In Progress, In Situ
April 16, 2008
In General, acrylic on found wood, shown in progress, 2008.
In General will be in my upcoming solo show, Idiolect. (Idiolect is a word that means personal language.) Idiolect opens Friday, May 2, at AKA Gallery in OKC’s Paseo District. The show runs through the end of June and will be open during the annual Paseo Art Fest.
Here’s a closer look:
In General, shown in progress, detail view, 2008
Normal, OK: Pernell Foster
February 9, 2008
Normal, OK: Pernell Foster. Mixed media, 2008
Pernell Foster is fixin’ to say somethin’.
Pernell Foster lives next door to Katie Hennepin, on his grandfather’s homestead. He finds Katie’s geodesic dome offensive, but harbors a crush on her. His repressed feelings gradually steer him into organic farming.
The background of this piece is acrylic on Rives BFK paper stretched over a particle board panel. (The swirly colors represent his feelings.)
Pernell was created using the acrylic gel transfer method detailed here and here.
Normal, OK: Pernell Foster. Ink on paper, 2008
Normal, OK: Pernell Foster. Conceptual sketch, collage on paper, 2007.
This is the kind of quick collage-sketch I often use to begin a character. I bring together many visual sources and compile them into a new conglomeration. It’s quick and dirty, a great visual tool.
Scarlet Letters’ Art-Making Advice
January 30, 2008
This, another good list of creative process tips (I seem to be on a kick lately), could be boiled down to one crucial point:
Do the work. Do the work. Do the work.
I have to remind myself of this quite often.
Chuck Close Gets It Done
January 14, 2008
Brian Oberkirch over at the 43 Folders blog has a great post about Chuck Close and the process of making art. He nails something that I often find myself explaining to people who are are unfamiliar with the creative process: it’s not about insipration; it’s work. (Someone else phrased that better: one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.)
Close devised a working process to circumvent his personal limitations (some of which sound a lot like mine). In an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Close says,
I’m a nervous wreck. I’m a slob. I have no patience. And I’m rather lazy. All those things would seem to guarantee that I would not make work like I make. But I didn’t want to just go with my nature.
In addition to its visual qualities, the grid format allows Close to easily delineate his daily workload. The result is a streamlined working process:
There are no good days or bad days. Every day essentially builds positively on what I did the day before.
My biggest mental block is the giant question of “What do I do?” I don’t have trouble completing tasks, I have trouble deciding which task to complete. One thing that helps is before leaving the studio at night, I set the next day’s work out on the table, sometimes with a to-do checklist. When I know what direction I’m headed in, starting down the path is easy.