Licensed to Practice Art

Friday, June 6, 2008

Camera's Back!

My camera is fixed. My favorite lens, however, is not. But since I'm going to Charlotte early next week, I asked the repairman if I could just pick up the body today and get the lens later. That was fine with him, so I put another lens on it and I'm back in business, making fascinating images such as this, once again!

A couple of days ago, we noticed that another very, very old tree was dead and had a tree guy out to look at it. He said it was probably killed by the neighbor's digging (said neighbor has been busy filling a low area in his back yard so that rain will stand in our yard rather than his and in the process killed the tree that straddles the property line. Plus he looks like he just got out of a fraternity at Enormous State U and his living room is full of the heads of dead animals that he presumably killed, making him -- all in all -- one of my least favorite neighbors -- oh, and I'm pretty sure his slatternly girlfriend who is often parked in front of his house for regular booty calls is the incompetent speller who left an anonymous note in our mailbox threatening to call the cops if our dogs ever bark again). So anyway, the tree had to come down. That's his crappy fence in the background, not mine.

Sustenance

The cards for the next show, Sustenance, came in. Kristy did the design and I think they turned out great.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

censorship is alive and well and protecting us all from art

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/police-shut-down-assassination-art-exhibition/

oodles of doodles

Camera still not fixed. Actually, the camera is, but the lens isn't, so I don't have either one back yet. Hence the oodles of doodles in this post.

This isn't a doodle, but it was lying around. These people (and one more, not shown) are having a show in a couple of weeks.

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.

Blog Archive

Friday, June 6, 2008

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Tuesday, May 27, 2008