Monday, April 4, 2011

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Margie Livingston's Painting Sculptures

Margie Livingston makes awesome sculptures composed entirely out of many layers of acrylic paint:






Definitely interesting for me to be thinking about as I consider painting in 3d dimensions this semester.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

What is the Purpose of Painting?

For the new semester of BFA we received a questionnaire that contained questions about our practice and what we believed art and painting was. The question of "What is the Purpose of Painting" is one you hear constantly today as a painter--it is as if we must continually validate our existence and love of painting. Here is my take on the question:

" The purpose of painting is to cover surfaces in color. I think of painting as much more expansive than the artist in his studio with brushes and work on an easel. Painting is every bit of colored applied upon the surface of objects that alters them from their local colors. It is the human desire for objects to obtain color where there had been none prior. The walls of our houses, the surfaces of consumer products, and how everyone wants a specific color of car are types of painting. In fact, any use of color to coat a surface is painting. The strength of the high art version of painting compared to these other forms lies in its being hand manipulated rather than applied by a machine. Yet, understanding how saturated our contemporary lives are with painted surfaces (even if they aren’t canvases) can help painters realize the vitality and relevance of their art form. Some painters who wish to use painting to record events or to tell a story struggle to find their place today because digital, print, and video media hold so much dominance. Thus they emphasize painting’s long history and its lo-fi nature; which is a great strategy and I love the results very much. However, this competition is only a problem for the painter if he wishes for painting to function as media rather than the practice of an insatiable desire to cover surfaces in paint and color. I think limiting painting as a 2 dimensional medium is a mistake. I hope to reflect this idea in future plans to create installations that will include both panel paintings but also painted 3d objects (in particular sound equipment)."

Everyone knows that all art is not painting. But I think that it is equally important to recognize that the vast majority of painting is not art. If we can realize the importance of paint in our everyday lives we can free ourselves of this superstition that painting is outdated and see how our practice remains relevant. I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this position.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Indiana University-Los Angeles: Photos from the BFA Fall Semester 2010!

Here's a cross post of mine on a blog set up by my old professor Chris Barnard with a ton of photos from my first official BFA painting show:

Indiana University-Los Angeles: Photos from the BFA Fall Semester 2010!: "HEY CHRIS! The show was awesome! Here is an absurdly large number of photos! Installation shots: Emi had an awesome idea to hang a ..."

Good photos of current work coming soon!

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Crappy Photos of some New Finished Paintings

Excuse the real poor photos, this were primarily taken for my own uses, but I thought it would be good to show what I've started doing int the BFA since I have them:





They are both approximately 6' x 3' and in acrylic.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Isao Hashimoto - "1945-1998"

http://www.ctbto.org/specials/1945-1998-by-isao-hashimoto/

""This piece of work is a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world."