Awesome Old Giant Wallpaper Book Fun!

"The Orphan and the Alcoholic"

Here are  few close-up and detail shots of one of the larger, new mixed-media pieces that I recently completed, and installed for my latest opening last night at the McColl Center. This piece, like "The Important Woman" (described in an earlier blog entry), pushes the relationship between the heads depicted in my drawings and the actual found objects that are now projecting forward from the drawings on small integrated shelves.

With my latest pieces, the shelves are getting much wider and broader and can accommodate bulkier objects. I am experimenting with scale and composition in the drawings, to see how the heads play against these larger, more present three dimensional elements. 

Another opening, another show!

So last night was another great opening at the McColl Center. I met a lot of interesting new people and got a lot of interesting, supportive (and refreshingly honest!) feedback on my current work, and on the state of the arts in general. Seeing as how we are now rounding out the month of September, the fall school session is in full swing and students from area colleges filled out the crowd with a nice buzz of energy and enthusiasm. Several of my current students from CPCC showed up as well, so here's a shout-out to all my Drawing and Art Appreciation people at Central Piedmont.

Here are some images of my latest arrangement of the studio space for the event. I am displaying a variety of older work and quite a few pieces that were started and completed while here in Charlotte, as well as a new large work in progress.

"The Important Woman"

Good news from the studio: As we exit the month of August and the remains of summer 2013 fade away, I am finally finishing some new, large, mixed media drawings! This piece is one of several that I can finally move to the "completely done, never touching this again!" drawer in the studio flat file.

As with much of the new work happening in my studio these days, "The Important Woman" focuses on the relationship between a specific human head (based on one of the many marble and bronze portrait busts I have photographed over the years) and a specific found object (in this case, the wood chalice sitting on the small shelf at the bottom of the composition.)

My goal is to have five or six new large, mixed media pieces completed by the end of October. Ah well, that's what fall is about after all, setting rather unrealistic goals...

Decadence and Distortion

This coming week I will be at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg Tennessee, teaching a one week workshop, "Large Drawings: Image and Text". 

It should be a fun and exciting time for all, and one of those teaching situations where I learn as much or more than the students. Because 1. I have never taught a class on this theme before in such a short time format, and 2. Gatlinburg apparently has a "moonshine bar"which I hope will provide libations to loosen everyone up and get some BIG gesture drawing going with non-traditional materials.

Stay tuned for images and impressions from the coming week's adventure...

In the meantime, here are some images of what was happening at the McColl Center studio this past week. Having finished a few new mixed media pieces, I rewarded myself with one of my favorite things in the world: starting a big, new ambitious drawing series. This is a dangerous reward system, in that I have a tendency to start projects well and finish them less faithfully. Hopefully posting projects to the blog, and holding myself responsible to the Internet audience thereby implied, will keep a fire under this series. It would be great to have everything I am working on in the studio now completed by, say, October... Ah well, it's good to have intentions.

So this new drawing series pairs various distorted and disfigured heads from my archive with collage material from a book on the history of dolls. It is something to ponder; as many heads and bodies as I've drawn and studied over the years, I don't think I have ever really looked closely at dolls or puppets as potential drawing reference material. Of course, the collage imagery I have chosen has something of a creepy factor about it, but this seems to be the norm when chopping up dolls into parts and putting them into a particular context.

There are five drawings started so far in the series, and each sheet measures about 2.5' X 3.5'.
I decided to keep this work within the realm of traditional "dry" drawing materials, meaning that there are no acrylic or gesso washes in the first layers, and the materials are limited to graphite, ink, collage and colored pencil. Here are three in progress (shown with detail shots) that have been sketched out to the point of having a stable composition and fixed subject matter:

And on an entirely different note, it occurred to me upon reviewing a few of the past month's blog entries that I may be giving a false impression of my McColl Center studio: that it is a squeaky clean, polished, gallery-like space. Such is not the case, at least not on a day-to-day basis. Here is a random shot of what my work table looks like in the middle of the average workday before a lunch break:

There's usually a lot of crap on the floor as well. It is important to remember that creative space is messy space, both physically and intellectually.

My installation for "Studio Party 13"

These photos show how I set up my McColl Center studio for the huge "Studio Party" fundraiser last April. This was the first big event of the residency season and all the artists-in-residence were encouraged to decorate their spaces as lavishly as possible. In keeping with the 2013 Studio Party theme "Magical Mystery Tour", we each chose a Beatles song to work with. Mine was "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which I translated into building a rather large "tangerine tree" in one corner (complete with a day-glo painting of a floating eyeball on black velvet) and lots of pink and fuchsia - marmalade walls. It was pretty intense color-wise, everything had sort of a rosy glow under the spotlights, and I was happy that it all felt very trippy without being too visually obnoxious.

I hung the long wall salon-style with a broad collection of older work from the past decade or so of my studio practice. As a interesting side note, this temporary installation gave me the opportunity to sit back and look at a rather eclectic bunch of drawings, sketches, prints, and other odds and sods that normally live in storage, and see the commonalities and deviations among them. The whole thing was a nice exercise in personal critique, to look back over the past decade of studio production and just swim around in the various visual themes and formal tendencies that keep popping up seemingly subconsciously, again and again and again...