Praeterita

Journal and Sketchbook Class, Final Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:15:00 PDT

Marlo Koch, handmade marionettes

Yesterday was the final day of the Journal and Sketchbook class for the spring semester, taught by me and Patty in the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing department. Last week and this week, the students presented their final projects: reading aloud 4 pages from their final written movement, and showing and talking about a visual project that speaks to the writing in some way. The students in this class ranged from people early in their college careers, to about-to-be-graduates; people from different majors within the college; and people with widely different skill levels in terms of art and also writing.

Patty and I agree that the writing was very strong, and that the quality of all the visual pieces was equally high, and invariably took us by surprise in a positive way. There was lots of 2D work, comprising a variety of media, multiple panels, using text and image. There was a painting on a scroll. There was a canvas that had bits of mirror stuck to the surface. There were a number of three dimensional objects, too - probably the most we've seen for final presentations. Amy Crumbaugh's clay doll inside a cardboard coffin was amazing; Victoria Ross' dream-catcher metal hoop was great; and Marlo Koch made a set of marionettes, which she then used in a film that she made on her Iphone and projected in class. That pretty much brought the house down in class, and made the semester really end with a bang.

Full details of the students' names, and their pieces, are contained in the following slideshow:

If you want to try this combination of writing and drawing, too, you can join us at Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, for a weekend workshop in June.

Additions

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:03:00 PDT

A few weeks ago, I was considering breaking this big piece up into smaller units. But now I have decided actually to make it much bigger, by adding the cigar box prints that were left lying around during the last 10 years. If I am never going to sell this piece, I might as well make it the most impressively unsellable thing that I have ever made.

Journal and Sketchbook Class, Columbia College Chicago, 2013 final days

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Sun, 12 May 2013 19:14:00 PDT

Below is a slide show of pictures that I took in the Journal and Sketchbook class last week. The students are from Columbia College Chicago, and they include people majoring in fiction writing, art & media management, and art & design. Some of them have next to no art training, and some have quite a lot. All of them showed that in the last 14 weeks, their consideration of text and image close together in their sketch-journals has led to new ways to see their writing (mainly, as this is a writing class) and also their visual work. Thank you to the students who made this class a pleasure: Victoria Ross, Amy Crumbaugh, Lauren de Groot, Danielle Dissette, Aiden Weber, Alex Holly, Marlo Koch, Ashton Ball, John Davis, and Liz Major.

Six of the Best, Part 27

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Wed, 01 May 2013 09:00:00 PDT

Interviewee number 27 in this series is painter Nancy Charak, who is one of my studio mates in the Cornelia Arts Building, Chicago, to which I moved two months ago. (Previous interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26). Her work caught my eye because of its force and expressiveness. If you live in Chicago, you can see her work at an upcoming open studio -- after which she is moving out to the western United States. Last chance, Chicagoans!

"Orpheus & Eurydice_12," 8" x 8", watercolor on clayboard

Philip Hartigan: What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why?

Nancy Charak: For the last three years mostly watercolor on paper and on birchwood panels. I have worked in oils and acrylics on paper, panel and canvas and enjoyed the work I produced. But watercolor is my natural medium of late. I prefer to work on paper or panel, and I work much less often on canvas. I like to work into the watercolor while it is both wet and dry with pencils and other marking tools, the paper and panels display more details and sublety than rougher toothier canvas.

Philip Hartigan: What piece are you currently working on?

Nancy Charak: I am actually staring at a 36” x 36” canvas that I had set aside because I couldn’t decide if it was finished or not. Also there is a 30” x 22” watercolor on panel that is waiting to be worked on, but that one is not in the “don’t know if it’s finished” category, it definitely needs more. And, episodically, on sketchbooks.

"Snowmass," 48" x 48", watercolor, graphite, prismacolor on 140# Fabriano Artistico

Philip Hartigan: What creative surprises are happening in the current work?

Nancy Charak: My sketchbooks are a surprise to me. Even more surprising and delightful is how well they’ve been received. For the longest time I shied away from sketchbooks, thinking that each page had to be special and that notion got in the way. Then I saw how Darrell Roberts and Ruyell Ho go at their sketchbooks. They work unselfconsciously with elan and joy. I realized that was the same process I use on my other paintings, so I just eliminated that mental thing about fear of sketchbooks.

Let me add one another note about sketchbooks. I had a chance to go through a large number of Judith Roth’s sketchbooks, spanning her entire artistic endeavors. Judith, for all that she is totally a figurative artist who cannot work without a live model in front of her, is also unselfconscious with her sketchbooks. She avoids worry about proper fit or composition, she just dives in. Sometimes, there’s a sketch where the foot or some other body part falls off the page, that doesn’t bother her, she just flips and goes to the next page.

The sketchbook lesson or creative surprise is not only about being unselfconscious, but about quantity, about constantly being engaged in making art.

Philip Hartigan: What other artistic medium (or non-artistic activity) feeds your creative process?

Nancy Charak: I read a lot, voraciously. At the age of seven my father taught me how to speed read. I have a passion for big stories, King Arthur going from Star Wars back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Beowulf battling the monsters from the dark underworld, the new Battlestar Galactica which is quite simply the Aeneid on a giant space borne aircraft carrier, the buddy story in its migration from Gilgamesh and Enkidu through Sam and Frodo to Thelma and Louise. And of course, I’m now totally in thrall to Game of Thrones.

"Realization," 30" x 22", watercolor, graphite, prismacolor on 140# Fabriano Artistico

Philip Hartigan: What's the first ever piece of art you remember making?

Nancy Charak: I honestly can’t answer that. My father was an artist, my mother had an artistic soul, my brothers and I grew up in a house that had music, paintings, photographs in it as a matter of course. No one ever demanded that we color in between the lines. We had paper, pencils, crayons always.

Philip Hartigan: Finally, and you can answer this in any way that's meaningful to you: why are you an artist?

Nancy Charak: I suppose I could answer with one of those philosophical explanations about some sort of feedback loop. It took me a long time to actualize the difference between worrying about being an artist, and just making art. The latter is a much easier posture.

At some level and in some place in an artist’s psyche is the willingness to step into the unknown. This kind of courage is not necessarily a drive to produce something totally unique, but to see if that frontier can be approached. At times it seems like a quest, a search, a journey, and perhaps like Gilgamesh, we don’t find any answers, but just get to ask the questions.

If you liked this interview, and you'd like to keep up to date with the series, why not Subscribe, or sign-up via Google Connect, using one of the options over on the right? Thanks, and keep creating.

From the Studio

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:16:00 PDT

I was at the Art Institute of Chicago last Thursday, taking students around a few exhibitions, including the great Picasso show. The centerpiece of the Picasso exhibition, at least for me, is the section devoted to complete sets of his prints from the twenties and thirties -- the Vollard Suite, the etchings based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and Balzac's "Le Chef d'Ouevre Inconnu." There's nothing like intaglio printmaking for the variety of lines and marks and the range of tones you can make. So over the weeked I got together some materials in my studio and did something I haven't done in ten years: an etching and aquatint intaglio print.

I started with a steel plate, upon which I painted a 'coal circle' (see previous posts) design using a sugarlift solution. My recipe for sugarlift, by the way: 2 parts corn syrup, 2 parts washing up liquid, one part india ink. The washing up liquid causes the line to smear and break up, and it also captures the brush marks very well:

When the drawing was dry, I covered the whole plate with a thin layer of hard ground. After that was dry, I immersed the plate in a tray of warm water. The sugar lift solution then starts to dissolve, helped along by gently brushing the marks.

I drew some smaller shapes into the hardground on the edges of the plate, using a sharp etching needle. And I drew over the circles in oil pastel, another form of resist that will break down in varying stages when it's etched, in order to produce a variety of tones:

For good measure, I aquatinted the entire plate using an acrylic based resist and a spray bottle (normally I would use an airbrush, but this isn't currently available to me). The spray leaves a dot pattern over the exposed areas, which ensures even, dark tones once the plate is etched:

I placed the steel plate in a tray of ferric chloride, a slow-biting mordant (it's not an acid, really), for about thirty minutes. I washed the ferric chloride off under the tap, cleaned off the various resists, and this is how the plate looked:

It's actually not the result I expected, but it's still good. I thought that the circles would print much darker, or that the spaces between the etched and unetched areas might be smaller. I think that it came out like it did for a few reasons: I could have etched it for longer in the ferric chloride; the spray from the bottle produced drops that were a little too big; and despite my fears that the acrylic and oil pastel resists would break down too quickly, they in fact worked too well. All information that a printmaker stores up for future prints.

I took two proofs from this plate, one of which came out in a very satisfactory way. I might do another round of sugarlift and aquatint on it, and some drypoint. Final note: I forgot how much time this all takes! Including all the drying and waiting time (during which I worked on other things), this plate took ten hours to get to the stage where I could take a print from it.

At the Chicago Art Institute today

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:30:00 PDT

So today I took 10 students to the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Journal and Sketchbook class. I asked them to look at work in the American art galleries from the nineteenth century to the middle of the last century. The main reason for this is that these pictures are mainly concerned with stories containing narrative content, which are relevant to this class. The following are some of the paintings the students picked to talk about. Two of them, I can't remember the names of the artists, but they include work by Sargent, Cassatt, Whistler, and Ivan Allbright.

Recycling

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:02:00 PDT

Today in the studio, I'm starting by making a 12 page folded book from a single large etching that I made maybe 10 years ago. The actual medium was sugar lift aquatint on a steel plate. Trim, cut, and fold, and voila.

Six of the Best, Part 26

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:00:00 PDT

Part 26 of an interview series in which I pose the same six questions to artists of all types, to find out their individual mechanisms of creativity (previous interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25). This interview is with Seth Friedman, a sculptor living in the Pacific northwestern United States. I first encountered him via Twitter, a sort of throw-away social medium that led me in fact to a website full of work that combines hefty materials like stone with real wit.

"I Like Arabia and Arabia Likes Me," 2011, Persian travertine, 14" x 22" x 17"

PH: What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why?

SF: I feel like Richard Simmons’ to rocks: pretty much any kind will do. My special affection is saved for marble (Italian Carrara/Iranian red Travertine, if possible) and granite found in rivers, people’s side yards close-to-the-street, and highway rest stops. I occasionally cast the carved forms in brass or bronze to explore the potentials of hollowness and/or raccoon-envy (shininess). There is nothing I’d rather be doing than carving. That said, I have almost no access to where the forms come from, a consideration that leaves me constantly stupefied, grateful, and desirous for more.

PH:What piece are you currently working on?

SF: I just started on an 800lb block of Yule marble (used for the Lincoln Memorial). I am somewhere between easy joy (in hammer swinging I could be mistaken for a smaller, scrawnier, Jewish John Henry) and freakish doubt (at whether it will go anywhere). It is the same story every time.

"Hi Shit Her," 2012, Calcite, 9" x 12" 5"

PH: What creative surprises are happening in the current work?

SF: I have been carving white marble for the last two years. I hate white marble now. This has led me to think a lot about how to deface, or leave defaced (usually the stone has writing/surface markings on it from the quarry/transport) the end-result.

PH: What other artistic medium (or non-artistic activity) feeds your creative process?

SF: I guess I should confess to being a book polygamist (right now: Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island; Sue Coe, Malcolm X; Mark Strand, Reasons for Moving; Henry Miller, Selected Essays; and J.Crew (only partially kidding)). Dissecting how I read, and trying out new word forms and letter spacing to violate the process, fills many of my quiet moments.

"Oh Charlie Brown Charlie," 2013, Carrara, 10" x 28" x 16"

PH: What's the first ever piece of art you remember making?

SF: Until I was 38, I never tried making anything that might be called art. In 2008, thanks to severe malaise and my wife's constant prodding, I carved a rock from our backyard. I am still amazed that (a) the result did not suck, and (b) the waking door to my recurring dream (a house under the house under a house) was accessible. Since then my family/dear neighbors have tolerated the noise, debris, occasional cursing, and my confusion/elation. Blessings.

PH: Finally, and you can answer this in any way that's meaningful to you: why are you an artist?

SF: When I was a little kid, I sat in the classroom and heard adults talk about their jobs/life. I thought that being a fireman/policeman/doctor/adult would feel like I imagined it, embodied. Then I got to adulthood and wondered where the magic went. I found it again in making art.

If you liked this interview, and you'd like to keep up to date with the series, why not Subscribe, or sign-up via Google Connect, using one of the options over on the right? Thanks, and keep creating.

New phone, new camera

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:25:00 PDT

... and new panorama of my studio.

Handmade books with students

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:46:00 PDT

Last week in the Journal and Sketchbook class that I teach at Columbia College Chicago, I showed the students how to make four different kinds of artist's book: the accordion fold, the start fold, a folio from a single sheet of paper, and simple pamphlet stitch in a paper signature.

Click to embiggen

I also loaded the table with sheets of handmade paper from my studio -- Japanese papers, Indonesian papers, Thai papers -- plus glue sticks, cardboard, needle and thread, and lots of crayons and watercolours to add images to the books that they created. This is the third year that my co-teacher and I have devoted an afternoon to this activity, and it always gives the students new thoughts about their final written and visual projects, which are due in four weeks.

From My First Ceramics Class

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:08:00 PDT

Fired terracotta tiles. Made in 2011. Rediscovered 2013.

Print Installation by Allison Hyde

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:21:00 PDT

I was in Chico, California, a few weeks ago, accompanying my wife to a reading she was going to give at the CSU campus there. We took the time to visit the Janet Turner Print Museum, which houses a good collection of prints and has regular exhibitions of prints and related material. The show that we saw was by Allison Hyde, winner of the museum's national print competition last year.

Hyde works with objects that she collects or finds, often things that bear traces of a long association with people's lives, such as furniture and luggage. She makes serigraphs (a posh word for screenprint) on transparent fabric, which were hung on wires across the gallery and lit from behind a la Christian Boltanski. First of all, I liked the courage it took to take something that is so instantly associated with a well-known artist (the lightbulbs and the hazy monotone images being a signature of Boltanski's style) and using them in a way that fulfilled the purpose of her own work. That purpose, it seemed to me, was to illuminate fragments of the past without them revealing all their meaning at once.

She also included a dresser retrieved from a house after a fire:

Given that she adds carbon-related matter to the surface of some of her prints, this added to the haunting feeling of the show, and the sensation that we had stumbled upon the soberly preserved wreckage of past lives.

In another part of town, Hyde was also showing a piece in a joint exhibition at 1078 Gallery. It was a single monoprint, created by inking up the floor of an abandoned house, and later piecing together the giant rubbings that resulted.

It dangled from the wall like a piece of old wallpaper, and once you looked at it closely, you saw all the traces and marks of life that had been picked up by the print. The difference in scale between this and the work at the museum doesn't obscure the fact that Hyde seems to create work that is consistent in its concerns.

The space is a beautiful old commercial building in Chico, and like the Turner Print Museum, it's worth looking into if by any chance you ever pass through this part of northern California.

Older work still works

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 08:58:00 PDT

I showed this piece at the Open Studio recently. Its from 2007 but I still like it enough to show from my studio. I even managed to sell a similar one which is always good when it happens

Looking at them again made me realize that thankfully there is a connection between my new work and the old pieces. The content may be different but the preoccupation is the same. I mean the manipulation of the source imagery and the desire to explore the effects of memory in printmaking.

Sometimes that connection between different periods of work becomes lost during the process of making. Putting up these older works enabled me to see the thread.

A New Print

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:48:00 PDT

I'm currently working on a print that I'm getting ready to send to the Global Print Exhibition in Portugal. The exhibition is in August, but the deadline for getting it to the museum is the end of April (get yer skates on, Hartigan!).

I'm working on something that's an extension of the Lucerne Project idea -- people I've never met in a place I've never been. In this case, I've been to Portugal, but not to the north where Douro is. Rambling a bit here, but the point is that I've decided to juxtapose images of luxury hotels in Douro, which is a touristy region of Portugal, with images from the anti-austerity demonstrations there last year.

Here are the first prints coming off the press, showing the interior of a hotel room, much altered via digital printing and xerox enlargement first:

Medium: paper-litho transfers. The overprints will be etchings.

Where were you when Picasso was shot?

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:05:00 PDT

Of course, Picasso wasn't shot. But he died forty years ago today (April 8th), and although I was very young at the time, I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard the news. I was eleven, I had returned home from school and was watching a British early evening kids' programme called "Blue Peter", and they announced that this very famous artist called Pablo Picasso had just died. They showed one of his paintings, and tried to talk about the picture and the whole event in a way that eleven year olds could understand. I don't remember what the picture was, but I think it was a Cubist painting, so the presenters did something right. I think this may have been the first time I ever encountered the name and the work of Picasso.

In honour of the great man, here's the Picasso painting that will always be the one I return to:

"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," oil on canvas, 1907

At SF MOMA

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 08:00:00 PDT

While at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art last Monday, I saw good things and bad things. Bad: the room of mainly British art from the last twenty years (above), in a room stuffed with Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jenny Saville, and some others. Also bad: painting from the 80s, with the exception of Basquiat:

There's a big argument to be had here, but my patience was worn thin this time with work that I've tolerated more in the past, and I think it was because of the tedious unseriousness of the work, particularly in the painting of LaSalle, Clemente, Schnabel, and others. The slapdash nature of their whole enterprise just seemed unacceptable after looking at rooms with pictures by artists like Diebenkorn and Thiebaud (joky, but also serious):

And a classic Philip Guston abstract painting:

Even the Piet Mondrian picture, unfinished at his death, was fascinating because it still had the tape that he applied to the canvas and moved around to fix the composition:

And a set of Ray Johnson collages:

He's described as an outsider artist from the 70s, but his work seems more sophisticated than that to me. I first heard of him only recently via artist friend Bill Evertson, who met Johnson in Paris and is an enthusiastic proponent of Johnson's work. It was a surprise to see the work for the first time, and to discover how complex and layered it is.

There's also a big retrospective of photographer Garry Winogrand's pictures, which is worth seeing if you're in 'frisco before June 2013.

Back in San Francisco

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:46:00 PDT

I'm back in San Francisco for four days, with esposa-escritora Patty who has some readings here and in Chico this week. On Sunday the 24th, we were at the Portuguese Artist Colony on Sutter Street, for a reading and live writing event:

"Live writing" means that audience members voted to select a writing prompt, and then the four invited authors were given ten minutes to write something, which they then read back to the audience, who voted again on which one they liked best.

That last picture shows the four writers writing, while the girl on the right sang some light hip hop songs to keep the audience entertained in the meanwhile. Three of the four drafts were actually pretty good, considering the conditions of writing. Naturally I'm biased, but Patty's was still the best, as I indicated on my voting slip:

Hers didn't win, but it was a fun thing to do. And in the second half of the evening, she read from The Temple of Air, held people spellbound as usual, and sold some books.

I haven't had time to research the history of the Portuguese Artist Colony yet, but there were framed drawings all over the room and the adjacent bar and library by some pretty solid artists from a hundred years ago, such as Ernst Stoltz:

What I do know about Stoltz is that he was born in Augsburg, Germany -- the same town as Bertolt Brecht -- then he immigrated to the US in the twenties. You can tell even in my average looking photos that he was a talented exponent of German expressionism.

A Painting by Ravenna Taylor

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:16:00 PDT

Decay of Sound, 2013, 22 x 24 inches, Oil, Canvas, Wood

This painting by artist Ravenna Taylor is currently part of an online exhibition of her work, which you can see here. In an exchange of comments via Facebook, Ravenna mentioned that a lot of people liked her older work better, so I decided to do an experiment: I went to the online gallery, looked through the images on show without looking at any dates or titles, and chose the first few that caught me eye. It turned out that in each case, I was drawn to the new work.

There are many things I like about this painting. I like the way it plays with geometric abstraction, but loosely -- nothing is drawn with a ruler, nothing is rigid or too straight, all is marked out by the patient movement of a hand and a brush, putting down mark after mark. It's possible that the idea or the selection of shapes starts out planned, but it doesn't look that way in the execution. It all looks like the artist was alive to how putting one shape against another shape might change the balance of the composition, so that one or two shapes found their way onto the surface unannounced, like last-minute guests at the party who arrive with just the right bottle of wine in their hands. It's a contemplative painting: the squiggly shapes on the left (which might be derived from sound waves, maybe not) move the eye quicker over the picture plane than the squares and segments on the right, but on the whole it's a slow picture. A picture that takes its time. I like the colour selection, too, with the muted, bleached out tones inviting sensations of rest, and just a couple of lines of dark red to provide a hint of warmth.

Matthew Collings said something recently about how abstract painting often depends on context for its effect and its meanings. So that patterns and forms that are unbounded by the edges of a picture do indeed look like they might come from a pattern-catalogue, but once they are surrounded by some white space, the eye reads them differently, and looks for values in them other than the pleasure of pure repetition.This painting does that for me: enough balance to satisfy the human need for proportion, and enough space in it to invite that urge to return to the site of something inexplicable.

Six of the Best, Part 25: Kevin Swallow

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:30:00 PDT

Part 25 of an interview series in which I invite artists to respond to six questions about art, process, and creativity (previous interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24). Kevin Swallow is a Chicago painter and printmaker who works in several subjects at once, mainly depicting the urban landscape (I have to confess that I own one of his screenprints). If you are in Chicago on March 22nd, you can see Kevin's work at an open studio event in the Cornelia Arts Building, on Chicago's north side.

"Golden Lights," oil on canvas, 30" x 24", 2013

Philip Hartigan: What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why?

Kevin Swallow: I spend most of my time painting. For a long time I used acrylics and recently started using oils. I also work in photography and mixed media/screen prints.

Philip Hartigan: What piece are you currently working on?

Kevin Swallow: I typically work on a few things at once which are usually part of a series. This allows me to create more harmony between each piece through color and form. I’m currently working on four different abstract paintings in oil. There are references to figures, maps, and aerial landscapes which connects these paintings to some of my other work. I’m also experimenting with a new color palette which has been fun.

"Strapped," oil on panel, 18" x 24", 2013

Philip Hartigan: What creative surprises are happening in the current work?

Kevin Swallow: I often use abstracts as a bridge when developing a new series of work. This process sometimes helps me develop a new color palette or concept. These particular abstract pieces have been freeing because I didn’t do any pre-planning or sketches for them. I’m been adding layers, drawing with oil bars, scraping and adding textures. The painting process has been more intuitive where I react to the shapes and textures -- often rotating the canvas to allow something new to emerge. Some of the surprises have been that references to figures and animals started appearing. I also recently finished some pieces using a new format; where I broke up the canvas into three sections. The idea was to combine my various subject matter -- cityscapes, rooftop water tanks, abstracts -- into one piece. I did a couple that focused on city imagery and a couple that featured cameras, but all of them had abstract sections which lead me to the paintings I’m currently working on.

Philip Hartigan: What other artistic medium (or non-artistic activity) feeds your creative process?

Kevin Swallow: Music has always fueled my work and creative process -- whether it’s the stories in the lyrics or just the feel of the music itself. I also get a lot of ideas for paintings by shooting photos. I travel often and am always inspired by the different shapes, colors, materials, and styles used in architecture. Or, if I’m just looking for some inspiration, a long bike ride along the lake or walking around the city clears my head and gets me in the mood to paint.

"Transitions,", oil on canvas, 24" x 36", 2013

Philip Hartigan: What's the first ever piece of art you remember making?

Kevin Swallow: I used to draw all the time as a kid and still have some of that art. One piece that stands out for me is a large portrait painting on canvas I made when I was about 9 or 10 years old. The art teacher hung it in the school hallway with a engraved plaque that had my name and grade on it. Unfortunately, I never got to keep it and don’t know whatever happened to it. That was over 30 years ago so I’m sure it’s long gone.

Philip Hartigan: Finally, and you can answer this in any way that's meaningful to you: why are you an artist?

Kevin Swallow: I enjoy creating art for myself – I feel that I need to. If I go a week or more without creating anything, I feel off. Finding more and different ways to have others enjoy my art is also one of my goals. It’s always gratifying when someone I don’t know wants to buy an artwork of mine and live with it in their home or office. I also get a lot of satisfaction from exploring my ideas and feel a sense of accomplishment from finishing a piece or series of work.

If you liked this interview, and you'd like to keep up to date with the series, why not Subscribe, or sign-up via Google Connect, using one of the options over on the right? Thanks, and keep creating.

My First Printmaking Class

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:11:00 PST

My first printmaking class was in London in October 1995. It was in the studio of a great German printmaker called Thomas Gosebruch, which was on the second floor of a warehouse building next to King’s Cross railway station. There was no heating in the building, but thanks to England’s mild climate it never got too cold in there. It was an eight week introductory course to intaglio etching, covering the following techniques: drypoint, hard ground, soft ground, traditional and non-toxic aquatint, and photoetching. There were three other people in the class: an artist who had a studio in the same building; and a couple who came from south London and just did the course out of interest. I seem to remember they got into an argument with Thomas about money after about five weeks, and they dropped out.

The studio was in a room about 12 feet wide and 24 feet long, with windows on one side that looked straight across to another wall of warehouse windows. I can still remember exactly how the space was set up. Starting from the west end of the room: two big metal sinks, one with a wooden box above it for use as an acrylic-resist aquatint box; a cabinet next to the entry door containing little round cartons of hard ground and soft ground; and then lining the walls all the way back round to the sinks were glass-topped work tables, and filing cabinets with lots of drawers in them, topped by a variety of print drying racks, and with shelves beneath them all stacked with all the tools and supplies needed for a printmaking studio. The centre part of one half of the room also had a work-table on it, with stools along its sides where we could work on our plates. But taking pride of place in the other half of the room was the printing press: an iron behemoth, made in Germany in the early twentieth century, with a five foot long bed and giant rollers operated by a heavy, iron, hand-cranked wheel.

I think that the first plate I worked on was a hardground etching on a steel plate. I misunderstood Thomas’ instructions about drawing into the ground, and I pressed so hard that it was effectively a drypoint before I even put the plate into the acid. When I pulled a print from the plate, it looked more like a cross between an engraving and an open-bite etching. This gave rise to a moment that has become part of my stable of anecdotes: Thomas looked at the print, and said to me in his German accent: “You haf compleedly misunderstood the entire prozess.” One of the other people in the class also had something to learn. To etch the steel plates, we had to slide them gently into a tray containing hydrochloric acid (!), which instantly began attacking the surface of the plates and releasing highly toxic bubbles. Part of the process involved wearing heavy duty rubber gloves and masks while we stood over the tray and brushed the bubbles away from the surface of the plate with a feather. Well, one student forgot the instruction about “gently placing” the plate in the acid, and he dropped it straight in there, causing us all to leap back in shock as these giant waves of acid sailed through the air towards our clothes and skin. As you can imagine, you did not want this stuff to hit either your clothes or your skin.

After I finished the eight-week course, I signed up straight away for another one. By the middle of 1996 I was taking private lessons with Thomas, and within two years I was using his studio as my own printmaking studio. Now I’m in my seventeenth year of making prints, teaching some forms of printmaking, and recently I was invited to take part in one of the biggest print exhibitions in the world. And it all began on a rainy Thursday night in London, in a chilly studio overlooking the junkies and the prostitutes who haunted the streets around King’s Cross station.

Six of the Best, Part 24: Svava Thordis Juliusson

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:35:00 PST

Part 24 of an interview series in which I invite artists to respond to six questions about art, process, and creativity (previous interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23). Svava Thordis Juliusson is a Canadian artist who takes unprepossessing objects, and makes them into installations and sculptures that magically discover their hidden sensuous capacities. You can see her a picture of her studio, too, at the art blog Hyperallergic.

"Avalanche (white)"

PH: What medium do you chiefly use, and why?

STJ: Since 2008, I have been working primarily with materials that are composed of plastic, various sizes and colors of cable ties, clothing tags, fencing and found plastic.

The cable tie - an ordinary, utilitarian object - was the original catalyst and soon after it became the building block for constructing singular objects and/or for connecting one thing to another within installations. Because the material, in its original context, is not precious, I approach making the objects and installations in a direct and intuitive way. It’s sort of like drawing with my eyes closed, or drawing with my body. And though I have an idea/concept of what I want the work to look like, I can allow the material to dictate or guide the process until the right shape, or a narrative that makes sense, emerges.

PH: What piece are you currently working on?

STJ: I’m actually working out some ideas in aluminum - another abundant and ubiquitous material. It’s the start of a project/investigation, which draws from scientific graphs, charts and mythological narratives around earthquakes.

"Install B"

PH: What creative surprises are happening in the current work?

STJ: I am surprised by how great it is to come back to working with metal. It’s shiny - said the gold fish - and immensely satisfying to manipulate. I started my formal education as a jeweler, so the process, the material and its potential is familiar.

PH: What other artistic medium (or non-artistic activity) feeds your creative process?

STJ: Reading, attending openings, going to the theatre and surrounding myself with other artists talking about art, feeds, not so much my process, but my need for an aesthetic experience. Sitting in my office at home or in the studio looking out the window, walking, taking long baths and/or doing laundry helps me focus and direct my energy on my work.

"Aluminum" (work in progress)

PH: What's the first ever piece of art you remember making?

STJ: It was a pencil drawing of a scene from Chaucer on a 4 x 6 piece of drywall for a grade 11 English class project. Our teacher asked us to respond to the text in whatever way we wanted, so I drew. It was awkward and provisional but I do remember feeling confident and very happy to display it.

PH: Finally, and you can answer this in any way you want: why are you an artist?

STJ: I honestly don’t know what else I would be. I am compelled to make stuff, to examine my environment and respond to it, critically and aesthetically.

My First Oil Painting

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:19:00 PST

The first painting I made with oils was probably when I was fourteen years old. It was on a piece of A4 (=US letter size) canvas paper, and it was a pointillist-style picture of the sea, painted from the cliff top near Whitley Bay in the northeast of England where I lived.

I don’t remember where the picture ended up, but I do remember that the paints were in small tubes inside a wooden box. I got them from the daughter of an old gentleman who was an amateur artist with lots of materials that his family got rid of after he died. The paints were in an ancient balsa wood box with a small clasp, that gave off a smell like old vinyl records when you opened it. I got some brushes and a traditional painting palette, too—the kind with a thumbhole so that it rests against your forearm.

I can even still remember the colours I used in the painting: ochre, ultramarine, and a cyan colour that I mixed from pthalo blue and white. Why do I remember that? I don’t know. It was not a good painting, not the sort of work that you would take one look at years later and say: Hmm yes, no wonder he turned out to be an artist. But I still remember that first oil painting, despite all the paintings that have come along after it.

Works on Paper by Picasso at the Art Institute

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:51:00 PST

This new show has opened at the Art Institute exploring the links between Chicago and Picasso. Actually, the starting point are the large holdings of works by Picasso both in the museum and by Chicago collectors. The actual exploration that emerges from putting more than 400 of those works together is mostly about Picasso's creative process. The great things that reflects on the lenders is that a) they made the works visible to the public, many for the first time, and b) they allowed all sorts of interesting reflections and contrasts to emerge.

I just filed a piece for Hyperallergic that goes into those connections in more detail. For now, what I'm left with is still the strong impression of how dominated the exhibition is by works on paper. There are paintings and sculptures, of course, but each of those pieces is informed by the smaller, more intimate works in the drawings, sketches, etchings, books, and so on. I was particularly thrilled to see the complete Vollard Suite, together with some proofs of the seminal prints. Look at the detail from the Tauromachia print:

So much intaglio work is contained in just that small section: hard ground line work, much scraping back, heavy engraving, some drypoint, all drawn loosely, but forcefully and with a series of corrections that always arrives at a strong decision.

I liked seeing these stage proofs of a small etching, too. They offer a glimpse into the 'mistakes' that are common in the printmaking studio, but which are rarely included in a Picasso show:

And there were images familiar from full size paintings, but clearly tried out either before or after in etching form too:

Two more works on paper caught my attention: this nice doodle-style drawing from the 1960s:

... and this page from a book of his own poetry that he published during the war together with some drawings (the text and images are lithographs):

It's a great show, as good as any Picasso show I've ever seen. It gives me another reason to feel lucky to be living in Chicago.

Learning from Students

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 06:45:00 PST

In the Journal and Sketchbook class yesterday (which I am co-teaching with writer-wife Patty at Columbia College Chicago), I saw lots of good things, and some new things.

Bear in mind that this is primarily a creative writing class, with drawing activities used to heighten a writer's "seeing in the mind". In other words, most of the students are writers first, and drawers second (if they draw at all). I taped photocopies from some of the students' sketch-journals to the walls so we could talk about them, and it was interesting to see the different ways they are putting text and image together on the page:

Patty and I also ask the students to prepare a ten minute presentation on an artist-writer, or a writer-artist -- basically they can choose anyone for who uses text and image as a way to feed the process of their chief creative practice. The canonical examples for this class, then, are writers like ee cummings, Franz Kafka, or DH Lawrence, who did a lots of painting and drawing, or artists like Gauguin (who wrote a lot), or Frida Kahlo (whose Diary is filled with writing and painting). But these students came up with some really interesting choices that we had never seen before, including:

Courtney Love (!)
Ken Kesey
Tim Burton
Swoon (street artist)
David Shrigley (English cartoonist)

That's quite an impressive and unusual list. I will definitely post about their findings once the presentations are done (mid-April).

And at the end of the class, one of the students showed me a journal she had prepared over Christmas break, and therefore not as part of this class, but which is absolutely the sort of thing that would be a great final visual piece for the class. She spent a few weeks in San Francisco, and in addition to writing in the journal, she collaged maps, tickets, little bags containing samples of local sand and earth, pieces of grass, and a shingle from the roof of the place she was staying:

A New Place

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 06:58:00 PST

I moved studios nine days ago,and am currently in the middle of setting things up in the new space. It's a process that will probably take until the end of the month, which in turn means that I won't get seriously into making new work until March. This is one of the reasons why I postponed moving from my last studio in Wicker Park, even though that one had been very unsuitable for me for a long time: I hate the whole moving thing, the waste of time involved in packing up boxes, throwing things out, moving, and unpacking the boxes at the other end.

But it's done, and now I have a clean slate to set up a new space in the way I want, and to try to get it right this time. The ceilings are very high in this space, so no more scraping the flesh off my scalp like I did many times in the previous space. I've got a printmaking area set up already (see photo above), and on Sunday I decided to give it a test drive, using an etching that I made in 1998:

It's a four inch x four inch copper plate, with a deep aquatint on it created by a combination of sugarlift, and marbling the plate by dabbing it onto stop-out resist floating on the surface of water in a dish (to create that swirling pattern).

The print that I took from the plate was as crisp as fifteen years ago:

So that's another piece of great advice that I got from my printmaking teacher in London: to preserve copper plates for a long time from oxidization (which turns the plates green, like statues left out in the open for centuries): coat the plates with a thick layer of vaseline.