The Value of a Good Critique

In your creative life, how often do you seek out an honest and knowledgeable critique? 

Most artists are vulnerable creatures.  We make up new things out of assorted sources, imbue them with our personal vision, and then place them out into the harsh glare of an uncaring and often hypercritical world. To think of seeking a critique is always somewhat fraught with pain and fear.

I present my work to the group at the InterUrban ArtHouse's ArtMatters Critique Night on May 1, 2013 at the Vintage House in Overland Park, KS.

We do the best we can, but many times we just can’t figure out (or don’t realize we haven’t figured out) the Ultimate Best Possible Solution to the creative problem we have decided to tackle.

We can’t “see the forest for the trees,” because we are too close to the subject.  In my dog-show circuit days, we called that being “kennel blind”: you can see the problems with other people’s dogs, but you are blind to the problems in your own dogs.

Recently I have participated in several, extremely helpful critique sessions, focused on either my artwork or a science fiction novel I am writing. Different fields, different media, and from different sources. The photo above is from a notable recent evening (more to come).

But in each case I not only discovered solutions to problems I’d been having with the work in question—I  also became highly energized to leap back into the work with even more focus than before.  If you noticed I hadn’t been posting here recently, that is why.

FINISHED (Part One, anyway)!

Last week, late in the day before a trip out of town, I thought I possibly had finished a project I've been working on for quite some time.  It took some living with it, but I think--yes--this part is finished.

This is Nine-Part Herbal Fantasy--Light Cycle. Stand by (but don't hold your breath) for Dark Cycle.

The project began with a series of line drawings, first sketched in pencil, then finalized in ink.  I scanned them, assembled them in an Adobe Illustrator file, and began applying color.

Here's an ink drawing for the "Flower Arch" section.

 

An early view of the original Adobe Illustrator color build of this piece made an appearance on Artdog Observations in January.  I showed pieces of it in the works in February. At the time, I actually thought the Dark Cycle would be finished first.

I shared this image in February.

Why two cycles?  It's actually not that complicated.  

As I was doing the color builds, I realized that some of the sections were coming out considerably lower in overall key than others.  I couldn't decide which version I liked better.  Yes, I confess: indecision actually was the inspiration.

A comparison of two sections, built on the same "base drawing" and adjusted one each for the two variations, may offer a glimpse.

Here are Light Cycle and Dark Cycle variations of the "Herbal Arch" section (mirrored, you may note).

One of the developments that came up very late in the process of putting the piece together was an idea that developed at my newly-resumed Monday night Art Group.

Corners and sides are tilted inward.

Toward the center, everything lies closer to the base level.

The bases of the sections do not lie flat, except for the "rootball" center.  The others are tilted: higher toward the outside, down to base-level farther in.

IMAGES: All artwork and photos are copyright (c) 2013 by Jan S. Gephardt. You may re-post them without alterations and with attribution and a link back to this blog post; otherwise, all rights are reserved.

Ernie Button's "Vanishing Spirits"

Visual experiences are where we find them--and they can literally be anywhere.  Part of "seeing the world through the eye of the artist," (one of my mother's favorite phrases), is to pay attention to the visuals around us everywhere.

I'll give you a case in point: Ernie Button.

When was the last time you were inspired by dirty dishes?

Ernie Button is quite a wonderful photographer, as you can see if you wander through his website (I recommend it!).  But he didn't get picked up by National Public Radio until he neglected to do his dishes.

As Audrey Carlson described it, in her piece The Wonderful World of Whiskey Art, "Ernie Button was putting a Scotch glass left out overnight into the dishwasher when he noticed something — a white, chalky film on the bottom of the glass. He held it up to the light and, upon closer inspection, could see a series of fine, lacy lines running along the inside of the glass."

Aberlour

Having spotted (sorry) this interesting visual effect, he did what artists do: he explored it. Photographers, as their name suggests, work with the medium of light.  

Button shined different colors of light through the residue, looked at it from different angles and with different backgrounds, and--being a photographer--got out his macro lens and took pictures of it.

Dalwhinnie 122

As you might imagine, a scotch enthusiast could find this project irresistible.  While he seems, from a quick overview of the images posted in his Vanishing Spirits portfolio, to favor Aberlour (at least for his photos), he has documented his willingness to try other brands, such as Balvenie, Dalwhinnie, or Glenfyddich.

This admirable broad-mindedness has yielded a growing trove of images that range from the celestial to the otherworldly to the weirdly interesting.  Since he only posts the ones he considers most aesthetically successful, it has taken him about 6 years of drinking scotch (it stretches my credulity to think he'd buy top shelf scotch and not drink it) to amass the current collection.

I wish him many more happy years of photography . . . and a stout liver.

At L: Balvenie Double.  At R: Glenfyddich.

IMAGE CREDITS: The photo of the dirty dishes is courtesy of a Real Clear Science blog post by Ross Pomeroy, "A Scientific Argument for Cleaning Dirty Dishes." The images for Aberlour, Balvenie Double, and Glenfyddich are from the "Whiskey Art" post (although they also may be seen on Button's portfolio, along with Dalwhinnie 122.  Many thanks to all these sources!

Fun in the Freight House Neighborhood-Part II

I had a wonderful day, between lunch with a good friend at Lidia's Kansas City, and a stroll through two of Kansas City's great small art galleries on Baltimore St. near the Freight House, in the southern part of the Kansas City Crossroads.

Julia Fernandez-Pol's Lily Pad Light is rich with texture.

The two galleries are similarly named near-neighbors, the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, and Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art.  This entry focuses on my visit to Sherry Leedy's gallery.  In an earlier entry I talked about some fascinating artwork I found at Leedy-Voulkos.

The Texture Tour
The artwork that really spoke to me at this gallery all seemed to be playing with texture in one way or another. 

In the artwork of Julia Fernandez-Pol, it is the actual, physical texture of the oil paint, which I'd guess must have been applied with a palette knife, that is the most riveting aspect.

For me, the rich colors and textures in these images added up to a delicious visual feast that rewards the eye on many levels.

Mark Lyon's Michael Rees

The textures of Mark Lyon, on the other hand, are created as two-dimensional visual texture, and created in a most unusual way.  Lyon describes his evolution into using the "machine-assisted" "humidrawer" technique in an interesting essay on his website.

The artwork appears to be a large photograph, from a distance.  Move in closer, however, and you'll discover the amazing patterns within. 

My favorite, I think, was the portrait of Michael Rees (shown at right), because when I looked very closely, I realized the areas inside the eyeglass frames had been rendered like a spiral moving in from the frames to the center.

To give an idea of how these textures work, I pulled a couple of examples from Lyon's site.  These are two different renderings of an eye, one using only black lines, as in Michael Rees, and the other using both black and white lines on a toned surface.

Mark Lyons 2-D texture created with mechanical help: Left: black and white lines on a toned surface; Right black lines only. 

IMAGE CREDITS:  Many thanks to the Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art artist pages for the images of Julia Fernandez-Pol's Lily Pad Light and Mark Lyon's Michael Rees (click on the artist's name for images; the image pages themselves don't seem to have a URL).  The "eye detail" images are from Mark Lyon's website.  Many thanks for all!

Fun in the Freight House Neighborhood-Part I

It's been a great day, between lunch with a good friend at Lidia's Kansas City, and a stroll through two of Kansas City's great small art galleries on Baltimore St. near the Freight House, in the southern part of the Kansas City Crossroads.

Cactus Flower by Rhonda Nass, from Leedy-Voulkos.

The two galleries are similarly named near-neighbors, the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, and Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art.  This entry focuses on my visit to Leedy-Voulkos.  In a later entry I'll talk about some fascinating artwork I found at Sherry Leedy.

Desert Fascination
The Art Center's Front Gallery is filled with wonderful images of desert wildlife (both flora and fauna) from the "Vanishing Circles" show.

The show features "portraits" of endangered or threatened species of the Sonora Desert.  It is presented in cooperation with the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

Edward Aldrich's Brown Pelican

It is a departure from the Leedy-Voulkos' more usual type of contemporary art--more representational in a "realistic" manner.  But it does any organization good to "shake things up" a little bit, even if that means showing what some might consider more "traditional" art forms.

The 29 artists whose work is included in the show certainly present a visually gorgeous show.  The animals, from highly endangered pupfish to more widely-distributed ospreys and burrowing owls (whose habitat in the Sonora Desert is nonetheless disappearing), are beautiful, exotic, and presented by artists who know their craft deeply.  The desert plants, many rather bizarre-looking to midwestern eyes, become objects of awe and wonder in some of these artworks.

Otter by Sheridan Oman

Art of a Desert Recluse
Continuing the "desert theme" in an adjacent gallery is another collaboration between Leedy-Voulkos and the Arizona museum.

As a printmaking "major" back in the day, who is incorporating more and more printmaking concepts into my own art, I deeply appreciated the Sheridan Oman show. 

Oman worked at he Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum for several years before retiring to the desert to create engravings of desert animals on copper plates. 

He never had a show during his lifetime, but his monochrome prints fill the Opie Gallery at Leedy-Voulkos, and are well worth a close-up look.

The Art Center has several other shows running simultaneously with these.  Please see their website for more information.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center for the images by Rhonda Nass and Edward Aldrich.  I am indebted to the Covington Gallery for the Oman "Otter."

The Clematis Variations

My walking buddies, L-R: Jake and Brenna

It all started on a dog walk in April 2012.

A neighbor of mine planted clematis vines, and since she's a fine gardener, her vines grew and bloomed. 

I've always liked clematis flowers and I'm fascinated by vines and the way they grow, so I took pictures of my neighbor's flowers, brought my pictures home, and started sketching.

This is Purple Clematis.

Part of the process of figuring out how to develop a new piece of artwork is exploring variations.  With the clematis images, I thought the variations all turned out in interesting ways. 

White Clematis I became an edition.

Because I print the pieces from Adobe Illustrator files, after adding a color build to my scanned line art, I can create small limited editions of multiple originals. Each piece in the edition is individually cut, sculpted, assembled, signed and numbered.

The computer images also allow size variations, and repetition of design motifs.

The White Clematis Panel series further explores the possibilities of repeating a design, combined with paper sculpture.

IMAGES: all photos and artwork in this post are the intellectual property of Jan S. Gephardt.  You may post them without alterations, and with attribution and a link back to this post.  Otherwise, all rights are reserved.

Storyboards of the Ages

A few months ago, I wrote a post about ancient animations.  Apparently, just because they were limited to painting with mineral pigments on cave walls, that was no reason for early cave painters not to dream of ways that their pictures might move.

Howard Terpning's classic painting, The Storyteller

I've always believed that storytelling is one of the oldest art forms in the human repertoire, so it's not surprising that artists intent on telling stories should have come up with what we call a storyboard, to tell tales of linear sequences of events.

The term "storyboard" apparently originated at the Walt Disney Studios during the 1930s, but the idea of a sequence of images that tell a story is much, much older.

Some of the earliest examples I've been able to find come from Egyptian tombs.  There is a particularly well-preserved tomb in Thebes from the 18th Dynasty: that of Menna, whose title was Superintendent of the Estates of the King and of Amen.

As Superintendent of the Estates, part of his job was to oversee various projects for his master, and these were lavishly illustrated on the walls of his tomb.  Here's the one for the harvest:

The tomb mural Harvest shows ancient Egyptian harvesting methods in a storyboard-like sequence.

The Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, finished ca. 193

Trajan's Column, 113 CE

Some of the all-time top champion storyboarders of the ancient world were the Romans.  

The distinctly phallic triumphal columns dedicated to Emperors Trajan and Marcus Aurelius feature elaborate, realistically carved sequences depicting the highlights of their respective campaigns of conquest.

As you may be able to see from the photos of the two columns, they feature a winding spiral of images, going up like a "spiral storycase" from bottom to top.

This is a detail from the Column of Marcus Aurelius, showing the army and some of its plunder.

Not surprisingly, it's pretty hard to see the details of all the panels when you're squinting into the Roman sunlight, looking up at the original columns.  This viewing difficulty inspired several efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries to create plaster casts that could be viewed more comfortably. A beautiful set of casts from Trajan's Column is on display at the Museum of Roman Civilization, presented up-close and at eye level, so you don't have to miss a thing.

The Museum of Roman Civilization in Rome has plaster casts of each panel on Trajan's Column displayed in correct sequence at eye-level, so visitors can see them more easily and in more detail.

  

IMAGES: Many thanks to Robert Milliman's blog, "Also Out of My Mind!" for the image of Howard Terpning's The Storyteller. The photo of part of the Egyptian tomb mural Harvest is from the blog "A History of Graphic Design," by Guity Novin. Wikipedia provided the full-length images of Trajan's Column and the Column of Marcus Aurelius.  Paradoxplace provided the detail from the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and Wikipedia provided the image of the Museum of Roman Culture's plaster castings of Trajan's Column.  My deepest gratitude to all!