Licensed to Practice Art

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Anne Truitt's Daybook

I just finished a book that I'm going to rave about for a minute. Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, by Anne Truitt. When I was an undergraduate English major, I took a poetry seminar with Susan Wood, who is an extraordinary poet. She asked everyone to read Truitt's book, which is a journal by a visual artist, which didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time. Truitt was one of the first minimalists, though she herself eschewed application of that term to her work. She is also known as one of the first color field painters. Mainly, she make blocks of sculpture and would paint them with something upward of twenty delicate coats of thin paint. She gave them titles, unlike other minimalists, that suggested a narrative which was not obvious in the work itself, or which may at best have been hinted at obliquely in the work. At any rate, she was a painter and scuptor, not a poet. Susan Wood pointed out, however, that art is art. And Daybook is about Truit's life as an artist, as a woman, as a mother, about aging and surviving on the scrapings that artists typically make (even though Truitt was frankly massivly successful, she had continual money problems as she raised three children on her own in the sixties and seventies and eighties). And although she was a painter and sculptor, she is one of the very finest journal writers I've read. She could have easily been a writer rather than a visual artist, if that's what had appealed to her. Here' she is when she was about 85. She died about 10 or 12 years ago and published Daybook in 1980 or 1981.

Here's a link to an interview with her: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_9_40/ai_86647180

Here's another: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/tranSCRIPTs/truitt02.htm

And here's some of her work.

Still no camera

My camera is still in the shop. I am reduced to doodling. I think I may send this to the camera repair guy and tell him that if he doesn't fix it soon, I'll have to send him drawings like this every day until he fixes it.....

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Emmit Gowin

Well, I slammed my camera pretty hard into a hard-wood floor, so I can't put any photos up. It was an accident. So I decided that I would just talk about a lecture that the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, sponsored about a week ago. The Photo Forum group had Emmit Gowin come into town and talk about his work. I wasn't really familiar with it, though I had heard his name for years. Turns out he's a very engaging guy. I don't know when this photo was taken, but he still looks pretty much like this.

Here's a brief bio:

Emmit Gowin, who was born in Danville, Virginia, received his M.F.A. in 1967 from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied with Harry Callahan. Gowin's photographs feature his wife, Edith, and record her changing features and their life together. Also a landscape photographer, he has made aerial photographs in Mexico, Czechoslovakia, and Japan since the 1980s, documenting the scarring of the land by military test sites, pivot irrigation, gold courses, and fresh battlefields. Gowin has received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1977 and an NEA fellowship in 1979, and teaches photography at Princeton University.

Ann Strader, Museum of New Mexico, Museum of Fine Arts.

I've always been a fan of Harry Callahan's photographs of his wife, so I'm not surprised that Gowin, as his student, took up the same subject (though he used a different wife, obviously). His early work was about his family and he made very good use of familiar tropes.

He said some pretty interesting things, including something to the effect that the purpose of photography is to reveal secrets, and if you haven't given much of yourself to the work, haven't revealed much about yourself, you haven't done so much.

He's also quoted elsewhere as saying "Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to." That certainly comes out in his environmental images. He has been photographing nuclear test sites and there is an uncanny feeling that he's actually photographing another planet. He makes beautiful images of the most horrific subjects.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Here's a cool optical illusion. Up close it is clearly Einstein. Back away from your computer as far as you can and see who emerges. I had to get about 10 feet away. I have no idea why this works, but my guess is that the other image is superimposed in the picture of Einstein. Or maybe they were the same person. Who knows.

weekend plans at the beach?

You can never tell with this kind of thing, but a friend swears this photo was taken on Matagorda Island (near Houston) on Mothers' Day weekend. So if you're going to the beach for Memorial Day Weekend, you might want to (as he put it) "mind your step."

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

happy gumballs

I was accused of making gross photos so I decided that I would make the gumballs happy and see what happened.