Licensed to Practice Art

Sunday, December 7, 2008

pretty much the end of semester

So the first semester is pretty much over. The guy who taught our photo seminar (Clifford Owens) leaves soon and the visiting student from the Royal College of Art in London is leavig this week. So there was a party Saturday night at a student's house. I finally left at 4:00 am. When I did, there were still people dancing and smoking pot and drinking. I was never invitd to smoke pot and I'm sure none of the folks in these photos were doing anything illegal. Here's some people (including Nozomi) dancing at about 3 am.

Dave, another first year in the photo program talks to one of last year's grads who now teaches at SAIC. Dave's on the left.

The omnisexual sculptor/performance artist Elise is on the left below trying to get lucky with her pal, Stephanie, a second year photo kid.

I'm on the right sporting the new glasses which replace the broken ones I had for the last few months. Karen, a brilliant woman with mental illness running in her family, is on the left.

Dave's sartorial splendor requires no explication.

Stephanie loves her photo being taken. Dave (background) loves everyone.

Clifford contemplates the current job market....

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Open Studio Night

This Friday is Open Studio Night for the grad students at SAIC. I won't be there for it (I have to go to Austin, the Valley and Houston to be a lawyer), but I put up on the wall the stuff I've been working on lately. Last night I took some photos of the studio. Let's hope people like the smell of bee's wax. The space smells very much like bee's wax.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Department Store Collaboration

In the Sculpture Seminar we were required to participate in a group exhibition organized around the theme of a department store. Details of the show are here: http://www.deptstore.blogspot.com/

One of the factors built into the show is that each case moves according to an algorithm and eventually some of the cases will run into one another and when cases collide, the artists must collaborate on what the cases will look like. The case I worked on collided with that of others in the class (shocking!). Here are some photos of the collaboration as we decided what to do with the collision.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Some of my classmates

I'm going to add links to some of my classmates as I go. Here are a few.

Scott Jarrett: http://davidscottjarrett.com/ Scott's a first year sculpture grad.

Nozomi Kato:: http://nozomirose.com Nozomi is a first year photo grad.

Caleb Charland: http://calebcharland.com First year photo grad.

Stephanie Victa: http://stephanievicta.com First year Film, Video New Media grad.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

What I did tonight

I have been painting some more. Tonight I made a bunch of encaustic paintings and here are some of them.

This first set is four separate paintings. The panel is 18x24 and the strip on the right is about 5 feet long. I also made the ones that follow tonight.

The white ones with text are like a bunch of others I've been making, except these have some wax on top of the gesso. Under the white gesso are action paintings in the style of Pollock, but made with wax (a little art history joke about ab ex painters and a reference to Jasper Johns, who typically uses encaustic). The prior ones used word combinations I thought were interesting or some of the spam titles I've collected. These included here are references to the Wallace Stevens poem, The Idea of Order at Key West, an epistemological poem which has always been very important to me. The uncovered drip paintings will likely be covered with gesso and words or phrases will be carved into them.

The three skinny ones in the first photo are encaustic on industrial aluminum and they all curve quite a bit away from the wall, though that doesn't come through in the photo. So each of them is kind of sculptural in the way they occupy the space in front of them.