Union College Exhibit

If you are in Schenectady, New York go see my print...

Union College Visual Arts Building 

NAVIGATING THE CURRENTS: 

100 INKTERACTION 

REACTIONS

Exhibition Dates: January 11 through March 17, 2012

Gallery hours: Monday through Saturday, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm

Prehistoric Portraiture

Here are some important things to keep in mind if you’re shooting a high profile client that existed approximately 75 million years ago.

Chose a location that can be versatile, you never know when your client is going to want to eat part of the set or an assistant.

Try out some test shots and know your equipment and settings very well. Be aware that your client might smash your equipment at any moment with his sharp claws and/or teeth.

Make sure your equipment is light and portable, so you can move quickly. You do not want to depend exclusively on available light when dealing with a fierce killing machine.

Be flexible! Sometime the end results differ from what you had in mind. Don’t get frustrated; keep working and try to stay alive!

Try as many things as you can during the shoot. You never know what’s going to happen. There may be some surprising shots to be made. Tiny arms on a giant body can be comical when paired with the right prop. 

take your camera with you...

Take your camera to the grocery store, a giant cloud might appear above the roof. 

sleeping face at Sutro Baths

I have been busy working on a major revamp of my website. I will be adding many more images when I launch the portfolio section. I have been transforming my external hard drive into something searchable instead of a pile of years of data sealed like a time capsule. I wish I would practice what I preach to my students when it comes to file naming, but if I were more organized I might have never come across this jem. I found this while I was cleaning up a collection of images of what I call the moon rocks taken at the Sutro Bath ruins in San Fransisco. I accidentally turned the image on its side and noticed the sleeping face. I just adore finding faces in the landscape, like sleeping giants hiding in plain sight. 

a certain type of devil's humor

petting

take your medicine

collage in progress

work in progress- painted backgrounds on plywood 

stabbin

massage 

cupcake

newspaper

lovers

not my fault

before & after

bowling for abominations

smash

I make no distinction between taking and making when it comes to photography. It is post-photographic age, the illusion of a pretty picture as a window into another world is so passé. In these pieces obvious manipulation forces a focus on surface rather than illusion. My photographs often become objects, where the viewer is forced to look at it rather than through it. The images in a certain type of devil's humor are collage over paint on chunky plywood. The source images came from a box of clippings rescued from the trash by Chris Peregoy. He said they were left behind when an early video artist from his school died and his office had to be cleaned out. It was an interesting collection including many images of outer space and rockets, large machines and early computers, various creatures, people in national geographic and a few 1950's quasi-pornographic images. 

North Carolina Foggy Landscapes

Worked on color correcting these images today. They are from North Carolina taken with my iPhone while at Penland School of Crafts in August. One morning after breakfast the fog was so heavy and nice coming over the mountains that I skipped out on class and just took a walkabout in the surrounding woods. Couldn't stop looking up and chasing light coming through the cloudy fog. At Penland everywhere feels like an uphill walk and I was afraid if I walked back to my room to get my "real" camera the fog would lift. So the cell phone just had to make due. I walked aimlessly for a while before I realize I was quite unfamiliar with the lay of the land and I had no signal for google maps. I began to be overwhelmed with thoughts of lions and tigers and bears and law & order SVU cases. Then I ran into a few landscape painting students carrying easels and followed my way back. I guess I didn't go too far astray but I decided that was enough of the wandering alone with your head in the clouds for me. 

searching for heaven in the stars because I miss you

I have felt an overwhelming sense of relief with the completion of this piece. I have wanted to do some sort of memorial piece for my sons but I was struggling with what to do. The idea for this image was floating around in my head for a little over a year before anything got out onto paper. In the spring of 2011, Wyatt and I visited the Cumberland Observatory which is less than a block from our house. They open the observatory to the public occasionally by placing a funny little hand painted sign on the side of the road that says "see the stars" in silver paint. It is a small observatory that was build in the 1970s on what was then the edge of town. Now the observatory is in the middle of a busy subdivision and visibility is compromised by light pollution. 

It was an interesting experience even though we didn't really see anything. As we walked home I started to think about, confuse or merge the overlap of star gazing and the idea of heaven in the clouds. When I got home I drew a circle in my sketch book and wrote "searching for heaven in the stars because I miss you" (which is written on the finished piece). 

Then in the summer of 2011 I did an artist residency at KALA art institute in Berkley. One of the first days I was there I stopped in a thrift store and bought a star guide from the 1960s. I thought I could appropriate it into my work. I did several scans of the star guide and made a screen print but it just wasn't right so I destroyed it. Nothing came of it while in California but in the summer of 2012, I took a workshop with Holly Roberts at Penland School of Crafts in South Carolina where so many things came together for me. I didn't really know what to bring with me to the workshop. I packed a hodgepodge of things including the star guide. Chris Peregoy demonstrated the Dass transfer method. I used this method to transfer a manipulated version of the star guide over an acrylic painting I did on Twinrocker paper. Then I transferred images of a fetus onto small squares of handmade paper that I made at the Lacy's house several years back. I think the fetus image is from an old national geographic but I'm not really sure. 

I'm not very comfortable with appropriating photographs but with Holly's guidance I found the confidence to steal. The fetus image is manipulated and cropped. I wanted the coloring to resemble a tintype; small, precious and loved . There was something about the gesture of the hands in the picture that spoke to me.

I traveled almost 6,000 miles in the creation of this image. Talking with many artists along the way and learning many new things. Often in making art I have found that I need to learn to wait until the pieces align and reveal themselves. Waiting is not an easy thing.