Painter Karen Conduff and I are meeting today to talk about our July show at Rembrandt Yard in Boulder. We both love painting from life. The role of technology in our lives is part of what we’re talking about these days.

Watching this process reminds of the best and worst thing about working with wax. One: it’s bliss. And two: it’s bliss. Sometimes to the point of distraction.

I pulled the title of this post from Insectopedia, a book of A to Z insect essays by anthropologist Hugh Raffles. Chapter Three is about artist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger who became a controversial figure in the late 1980′s when she started documenting radiation damaged leaf bugs in a series of feverishly made paintings of specimens she collected from around nuclear reactors.

Harlequin Wanze Nähe Three Mile Island by Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Here is Hugh Raffles quoting Cornelia Hesse-Honegger:

Painting, she insists – reaching back to the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner; to her inspiration, the painter-explorer Maria Sibylla Merian; to the autodidact fossil hunter Mary Anning – is research, not merely documentation. It is a way of achieving multidimensional knowledge of the subject, a way to see it in its biological, phenomenonological and political fullness. Not simply a way to express what we see, painting is a discipline through which we learn to see – to see, that is, in the broad sense of gaining insight. Through painting she is able to map anomaly, to recognize patterns and relationships across her archive of collecting sites, to realize that she has encounterd this deformity somewhere before…

“It’s a discovery of a new world,” she says. “The more I look, the more I dive into this world, the more I can connect.” If only life would allow her to spend six months painting just one leaf bug. If only… “I would like to go deep, deep, deep, deep …”

I love this reminder of how engaging and deep the material world feels when you’re painting.

If you’re a culturally oriented person who likes scientific things, you might just love Insectopedia. Some of Raffles’ essays are poetic. Others have a more descriptive, informational bent. All explore areas where human perception interacts in interesting ways with the vast and largely invisible world of insects.

Leaf and tree sketches by James McMullan

Janelle Brown – Well, being a novelist who is married to a filmmaker, this is definitely a subject that hits close to home. But it’s also, I think, one of the conundrums that’s been raised by the promise of New Economy: The rise of the Internet promised to give voice to all the artistic urges has ever had, and for a while during the boom years it seemed far likelier that you could make a living off your creative aspirations than it had in years. Anyone who ever imagined themselves a writer or artist or photographer or singer thought they had a shot at finding an audience, and making some money pursuing those “talents.” And then all that was yanked away again by the recession.

In general, I’m fascinated by the idealism of artistry, and the pursuit of the dream of a “creative” life, and how that rubs up against the reality of our shifting economy, plus the need for stability that family life triggers. I’ve seen so many people struggle with this – spending their twenties and early thirties trying to be artists or writers or musicians or filmmakers, only to hit a certain point in their lives when the reality of marriage and kids and mortgages starts to grind away at those dreams. How long do you keep trying? Do you ever give up? Or is the creative life a never-ending negotiation of time versus income versus artistic fulfillment?

Author photo, Janelle Brown

There’s a good interview with Pamela T. Boll, director of “Who Does She Think She Is?” at Salon.

A choice quote:

“… In the arts, there’s no guarantee for success. Even if you’re working at Wal-Mart, if you show up, you get paid. In the studio, you don’t. It’s very risky business. You have to create your own life and have a very strong understanding about what your have to offer. There will be a lot of people telling you that you’re just fooling around. Society just doesn’t consider an artist’s work as “work” — just like motherhood isn’t often acknowledged as being real work.”

Well, it’s too damn difficult and too painful on the one hand. I think it’s a kind of neurosis. You have to give up a lot to gain a little. There are no guaranteed results. Those are not good options for a life. But if you are willing to make a life out of it, if you can learn to hope for the best and be prepared for the worst, and see the painting itself as an extraordinary human invention, that becomes enough for you. Going to museums, taking it on, loving what you’re doing, conditioned to the failures, getting some good instruction and critical reaction, which has nothing to do with success but… with a realization of where you are, what kind of progress you’re making… and to form … a kind of community of your own with some of the people, whether it’s one other person or a group of people. Those groups represent a kind of balancing act where you can have some kind of frank, honest confrontation and some sort of shared, communal love and a series of responses; then you’re going to be okay…

And another…

Try and avoid becoming what I might refer to and an “art wold employee” where you develop these products of commercial value, where you manufacture some kind of product. That’s not what painting is about. Painting is about, for me, research, confrontation, taking risks, going on and trying to challenge yourself to get better always… It has to do really with some kind of self confrontation, continuously…

Challenges wrapped in encouragement. May they inspire.

There are good arguments both for and against the use of destructive imagery in art (yes, I think glamorized images of smoking are destructive). John H. Richardson’s personal take in, “My History of Violence,” is great and though his focus is on violence his arguments apply to all images that depict self-harm or the harm of others. An excerpt:

When I was a cub reporter starting out at the Albuquerque Tribune, I found a report in the police blotter about a pair of 16-year-old lovers who gassed themselves in a car. I about choked on how great a story it was, did a little reporting, found out they did it in a closed garage and that their bodies were discovered by the very same parents who were trying to split them up. Then I pitched it to my editor. no way, he said. I said, “What? Are you crazy? It’s Romeo and fucking Juliet!” He gave me a sad look. “If I run this story, and give it big play and a nice layout, I guarantee you there will be a copycat suicide. Maybe a bunch of them. Do you want that on your conscience?”

I said, it’s not my responsibility what crazy people do. It’s the truth and that’s what I want to write, the truth. Would you tell Shakespeare to stick to comedies? Would you tell Tolstoy to write Peace and Peace?
…

Somehow, my editor managed to resist my blinding rhetorical onslaught. He didn’t run the piece. And I thought, this little burg is just too small-town for me, baby. These people don’t understand art. They don’t understand transgression. So I went to Hollywood. And just after I got there, some guy made a movie called The Program that had a scene where some kids lay down on a highway divider as a dare—and sure enough, there were copycats out in Pennsylvania who laid their dumb asses down on highway dividers and got squashed. And the studio said, hey, it’s not our responsibility what crazy people do. These people just don’t understand art…”

You can read the whole article on Paste.

Another inspiring slide show from the NYTimes.

Favorite quote?

“Nobody wants me to do anything, so I’m just doing what I want.”

–Liz Fallon, visual artist, Portland, Maine

My husband brought these home from a beekeeper friend who has hens. The colors here – pale blue, green and tan – inspired me all week long.

‘Tis spring, dear ones. Spring!

The last day to see Emerging Artists at the Macky Gallery in Boulder is Wednesday. The painting above is one of two I’ve got in the show. It’s called Bear & it’s one of my favorite paintings I made last year.

As a painter, I’m into visual transformation. I love it when the imagination goes to work on a familiar object turning it into something else. Bear started as a large scale gesture drawing of a plum leaf. But after being cropped and painted it shifted into something dark and mountainous. It’s a friend to me.

Emerging Artists at the Macky Gallery
Date: January 14th – February 11th, 2009
Time: Wednesdays 9 AM to 4 PM
Location: Andrew J. Macky Gallery University of Colorado, Boulder.

As a passionate observer of nature’s patterns (plant symmetry, honeycomb, etc…) and a long time migraine sufferer I found this article by Oliver Sacks fascinating. It hints at the idea that there’s some kind of universal/chemical truth underlying all instances of geometric pattern and it has something to do with how we’re physically made.

A choice quote:

“There is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems — one may see it equally in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time, very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.”


Crayon Physics Deluxe trailer 2 from Petri Purho on Vimeo.