Love your experiments by Wordle

Ah watching paint dry.
Here's a Wordle mash up of one of Bruce Mau's quotes - Love your experiments. I'm thinking the alogarythm's done quite well with it ...

Reprising a show

So when does reprising a show become a new show?

Do you call it by a new name - and if you do will all your friends expect to see something fabulous and new from you ?! (of course they will)

And will they feel duped when they realise it's a glorious opportunity to view the work they know and love all over again in a new swish location and setting?

I've booked the 6th of May to show the sign language and gesture pieces in Lambton Quarter - at deNada in Featherston St Wellington. Not a gallery but a lovely concept store run by a gutsy and savvy woman called Nada Piatek.
Between us we recognised an opportunity to work together, and I'm looking forward to the chance to have my art hanging in her store for six weeks. Six weeks!!

I've just GOT to paint some more...get those movies off my dratted laptop, pull finger, slap my hand into drawing mode, talk sternly and then dive into it. I want at least one new work in this show, and prefererably a big one. Just what I needed - a push in the right direction.

On another note - do you like the new banner ? I got sick of looking at the plain one !

Oh the 2D Life of Her...

This show was spectacular!
I was hooked by it's black and white grainy, wiggly aesthetic from the word go. As the artist Fleur Noble built and explored a world at once 2 D and 3D, we sat transfixed. Images of her and her life size puppets stepped in and out of the paper stage set - merging with paintings on easels, imprinting scribble drawings of themselves by banging their heads onto paper - and at one point talking to each other by speech bubble. She whitewashed them out only to have the puppets tear the paper and almost step off the page.
When the whole set burst into cracking and then roaring virtual flames - and the paper littered floor appeared to ignite and glow with embers we were at once in it and swallowing our instinctive reactions. Bravo for this multi media performance that explored the boundaries of film, drawing, performance and puppetry.

You can check out the interview with Fleur Elise Noble and Melody Nixon of Lumiere Reader here http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/arts.php/item/2016

Homily homily hommmmm

This morning I opened the fresh box of Hubbards cereal - and looked afresh at the little news sheet they tuck in beside the cereal... hey I thought - they're all homilies ! and it struck me, we get our little 'life prep' doses in cereal boxes these days, not just from our parents and elders (or church or where else...?). Hmmm... now there's a thought. Saving them too now. What a hoarder I'm becomming.

And one more .... This I've gotta see!

The Therepeutic Hour - Art and Art History Explained by Kristelle Plimmer... an illustrated lecture in rhyming verse. 12 -14th Feb

She may not remember morning train rides into town in the front carriage in 1973, (yeah I was in third form alright!) but I'll never forget. It'll be nice to see Kristelle in high voice and action again.

Later ... (16 Feb)

We did go to this Fringe show and it was good.
Very funny in fact. Kristelle managed in an hour of unbroken rhyme to deliver an erudite discourse on the various conflicting and confusing theorem of art historians (Kant et al), and how their approach to art and artists has shaped art history as we know it today. All presented from on high (on stilts) - very appropriate.
Accompanying slides and slide notes just added to the sense that you were sitting in an art history lecture, and at times I had to remind myself that it didn't actually matter if I didn't remember it all - the rhythm of the words was such a pleasure.

2-D Life of Her

I'm looking forward to three things this month ...

The Cuba St Carnival and being able to climb out my very own studio window and sit on my very own hot tin roof to watch the parade, and then to my birthday the next day.

To celebrate my day this year, I've booked some tickets to a Fringe show -
'2 - Dimensional Life of Her' by Fleur Elise Noble.
The show's brought to the Wellington Fringe Festival by the Govt of South Australia, and it sounds amazing. It's billed as 'A theatre production made of drawing, animation, puppetry, film, projection, performance and paper'...

I can't wait!

The pic I've included here is a still from her promotional movie for the show. You'll find the movie preview of the show on Fleur Elise Noble's website www.fleurelisenoble.com . She's done some pretty cool drawings and she plays with 2 -D projections onto 3- D objects in some very clever ways.

I LOVE the Fringe Festival.

Thinking about a comment By Hamish Keith

I'm reading Hamish Keith's autobiography at the moment 'Native Wit' (This is the HTML version of the PDF put out by Random House NZ Ltd). It's a great read (especially now I'm up to where he's working as a junior assistant at the Auckland City Art Gallery with Colin McCahon. I'm thinking on this small piece of commentary at the moment...

" saying you are an artist and believing you are an artist, with however much conviction and passion, will not make you one. There is an equation to being an artist which is beyond the power of an individual to complete however fragile or tenuous it might be, the artist and the work have to make a connection with the culture in which they come from - disconnected is disconnected. The New Zealand official cultural pendulum seems to have swung from denying arts value to a point completely the opposite, giving too much benefit to too many doubts. I sometimes feel that the complete lack of connection between what is claimed to be a work of art and the culture in which it exists is, in some perverse way, seen as a virtue. It must be good because nobody gets it. There is always a case for subsidy and subvention, but it ought not to be a permanent state of affairs"
Hamish Keith 'Native Wit' Random House 2008

I'm not sure I agree with his first opening sentence. I think we are what we want to be and we become what we want to be (whatever our bent) through focusing our passion and having the conviction to follow through and put in the hard work.

But what he says about an artists need to connect with the culture in which they come from is surely wise. His views on art are based on his experience of living and working daily with art; with a group of peers who were artists that shaped and contributed to our cultural identity and have continued to influence New Zealand artists enormously to date.

I'm mulling on what I identify with, where my connection is and (humbly) what I can offer to the culture I belong to with the emergent art that I make.

Postcards

So yeah, here are my little territory postcards. One or two I might play with as a full scale painting.

I found these

I love these paintings by Australian Carl Plate. I wish I knew more about him. I can see a trip to the library coming on.
You know when you see something and you pine a little because someone has succeeded in doing work that you aspire to? The little journeys I've been scribbling for example (which I'll bring in and scan tomorrow)... My favourite's the olive green one called 'Spring'.

The nature of ideas

Some ideas are gestated at length; the end results evolving through time spent on exploration, by following a deliberately convoluted path with the end point obscured to retain the mystery. The process is a delight and the results are often enriched by the series of trial and error discoveries and the depth of the research and thinking.

Other creative ideas arrive fully formed as lanky young concepts, lacking grace but full of enthusiasm - or like soft spoken ingenues peering out from behind a fringe. (OK enough of that syrupy prologue...)

And then some spark ignites an idea - and like a small flash, you can see the whole finished work in it's entirety. (Like a Paul Simon song).

Who's to say this is not how it should be done?

I've been spending a bit of time recently surrounded by handbags. No, not my new fetish - just the result of a serendipitous meeting, some interesting work and the opportunity to try my hand at a little creative marketing for a new friend's leather goods store.

She and I have talked at length about what a handbag expresses of a woman, what we carry in them and why... the need to equip ourselves with a beautiful receptacle into which we cram every earthly thing we may need to face the world at our best.

It's led me to think about the kinds of homilies that are shared as part of preparing for adulthood, parenting and dating - the kind of wise (or silly) advice that's passed down from generations to daughters and sons. Has it changed? What wisdom has crossed over? And what about the debunked outmoded or obscure advice? Is it still stuffed into the handbag of things that might come in handy along with the clean hanky?

The studio is beginning to be a place to stash the kinds of stuff I might use one day - you know the sort - paper, paints, wallpaper, handbag handles...

Today I'm seeing a collection of small bags (some of the handles I have acquired are art deco) and recticules made of elaborately pleated, folded or embellished paper - a support for drawing or painting that explores this notion of carrying useful wisdom as a defence against the ills of the world.

I'm not at all sure that attaching paper to these little brass fittings will work - but I'll give it a go.

So, I've begun a notebook of homilies. I want to collect them from a wide range of people and see what results.

Here's one from Sarah's mother : 'you can tell how organised a person is by the way they hang their washing'.
And one from Bob (though he credits it as emanating from certain Catholic boy's schools - and I know he didn't attend one of those) 'don't open your Xmas presents before Xmas'.

See what I mean?
Feel free to leave me a homily here that means something to you - either because you find it comforting or wise (still), or because it's ridiculous and you've exposed it as foolish.

Messing about in Wanaka

Last weekend I packed a bag and headed to Wanaka for a brief breakaway with a friend. At the last minute I threw in a pack of coloured pencils with a 'landscape' palette and a block of blank postcards.
I'm no landscape painter -preferring to gaze in awe at the Remarkables through my own eyes rather than the eye of a camera or through the lens of my own artistic attempts ... but after a day of breathing mountain air and cruising about on the back roads I did manage to tutu a little (and yes, I even took some photographs which capture some of the amazing depth of colours down there). I might work up the image on the far right into a large painting some time soon, there are some nice textural things happening in it here and there.

Deceptive entropy

An interesting thing is happening to our building at the moment.
The natural entropy that comes part and parcel with an old inner city building (circa 1903) which has seen many generations of gallery space and artistic endeavors is being amplified.

At Enjoy - the gallery down stairs from me, a show has been taking shape for the past few weeks. It's called 'Landing' (Oct 30 -Nov 15) and for one of the artists at least, it's taken place outside of the gallery walls. Through subtle brushwork and paint mimicry, the artist has created an insitu simulacra which highlights the buildings aging face and tarnished surface, and without changing the bone structure; the stairs and stairwell have become a canvas.

In the morning I come to work and wonder whether that dirt, this brown wax (is it squashed gum - or worse?), that chipped lino or this rust stain was here the night before.
I marvel at the progressive but subtle decrepitude as it advances and how it only serves to highlight the existing characteristics that we as tenants know so intimately. The artist Raewyn Martyn has a day job, and so these small transformations occur at night or in the early hours. It's one of the more curious shows we've experienced this year ...and I think I like it.

Painting with brooms

Yesterday Sarah and Howard and I took over a studio in town rented by a collection of Wellington artists. Armed with large rolls of paper, some mis-mixed colours (mmmm,that raspberry really was inspired!) brooms,water balloons a 60 ml syringe( dangerously unpredictable but fantastic results) and a handfull of crapped out house brushes we tuned out from our preferred painting styles (or zoned in as the case may be)and worked collaboratively on at least half a dozen large pieces at once to the accompaniment of some damned fine music.

Sarah's attempts at paint bombs were scarily messy and we decided we might need to be gurilla (oh spellign where art thou ?) painters outside (or in some ready to be demolished or pre-renovated space) to get it right. She still hasn't got it out of her system - and neither have I. The broom almost worked but I needed more hip movement and more paint on the brush - a dustpan brush and Indian ink works better for the kind of marks I wanted. I think the upshot is that we'll do it again soon.

We looked at the results yesterday, as we put the borrowed studio to rights, and decided some were worth keeping, and some were great learning pieces which worked incredibly well when they were divided. Less is more and knowing when to stop when you're working at a large scale is still knowing when to stop !

I love the way Howard's camera/phone in all it's low tech glory has captured the movement - the stretching and the energy of the day.

A mark a day

Oh dear! July. Really? - July was my last posting... that's terrible!

On my board today I have a couple of newly prepared large canvases. They're recycled, so they have a legacy of surface textures. In this case I wish they didn't but I guess they'll offer something to the interplay, so it's all good.

Stuck on the board I also have a fragment of a poem that goes like this...

"its not the intangible that torments us, but what's right here, the familiar, current, abundant, beyond our grasp..." I've lost the source of the lines, but I suspect it's Kathleen Graber.

I feel a bit like that about my art at the moment. So Sarah and I have agreed to play at making a mark a day. With no agenda, no pressure and no back story. I've imposed a palette - because I can't quite pick up any tube with my eyes closed yet. Todays mark is predictable. (Tomorrow's mark I'm going to try not to judge!!!)

We've also planned to play soon on huge paper,(roll on Labour Weekend) on the floor of a 'wet' studio belonging to a mate, with brooms and house brushes and reject house paint and crayons. Big tools,(Brooms! I can't wait - my idea of total experimentation!) and loud loud music - any offers of good funk or Mowtown sounds - I'm definitely a taker.

Does it sound like I need to loosen up? Too right. Totally. I've been one uptight and out of sight woman for too long lately.

Mentoring's been interesting recently too.
It's not easy being told what to do (when you're me, lol) but some of the ideas have been useful, and the mirror to the crap I stash has been illuminating!

It was on the tip of my tongue to say I didn't think that mentoring was working for me. The exersizes felt aimed at exploring more of my inner world than my creative world - and for now, I choose not to paint about myself (I know all art is essentially about the self)
But in the end I think you have to find your own way in, or back, or forward to the creative place. Take the first step - the one you're afraid to take... and the best messages or tasks are ones you set yourself. A mentor can only suggest, after all.

One thing my mentor said though, which I've been dwelling on...
There is an interesting thing going on in my work about the way I confine my marks and images to spaces and within boundaries. It's worth exploring and I'm going to try and work away from that tendency by working through it more deliberately.
There's also some lovely marks on the boot polish and ink drawings I made at the life sessions (take crap materials, see the model as a person, draw what they feel. Damage the work when it gets too retentive). They're worth amplifying and playing with - as start points.

This phrase 'like a map with no edges' seems to come back and visit me from all directions lately (work, learning and art)
I've identified it through some 'work' workshopping I've been attending, as the way that I learn - like navigating a cosmos, going deep when I need to - or not, spreading broadly over a subject when I choose to, with no set directions to constrain the curiosity - and always in response to my own questions - seldom initiated so juicily or vigorously by required learning or by just one learning style.
In my art it's the same - the need to traverse a territory and learn it's terrain, building the language to speak the terrain out loud and describe it's joys as you go...
And so I'm making a mark a day in order to step back onto the map. Today's was the colour of blood.


I decided not to enter the drawing awards this year and I know Bruce Mau would be proud of me. I don't need the pressure, or the proof, or even the feeling of participation. (Well ... maybe that. I do need that, but there's more ways to feel a part of something bigger than competitions).

I realise I probably need to journal my creative practice too - writing this makes me realise how much I've missed trapping the thinking in a written format.

Soul food

Pinned up in my studio this week is an angry little drawing which vents a bit of angst - the marks are dark vigorous but they don't quite obliterate the paper underneath.
Peeking through the charcoal is a diagram, neat,orderly 'workcentric'and generated in Word.
It's a flow chart I suppose - or something similarly hierarchical. It documents a discussion I had with myself earlier this week about 'what happens if it's not perfect?'.
The fact that I felt compelled to sanatize my brainstorm into some readable form is not lost on me either! (what does happen when it's not perfect is an interesting and ridiculous extrapolation - ending with a closed door. It's good to see it as the crazy thinking it is, and let it go)

I've taken on a mentor as part of my winter of self improvement and she's given me 4 pages of tasks to help unblock some thinking and reroute my creativity. So far so good ...and so far out.

I've been feeling a bit hollow this winter, in the last post I wrote about making a process to think like a map maker - I had the intention of creating a journey without a known end... and then hey presto! I did what I always do and skipped to the end point. How could I do that ? By visualising what might happen, I preempted what could - typical.

So for now I'm going to work with the tasks I've been set and put the map making process to one side. They feel a bit 'therepy' to me to be honest - but I'm trying to be open minded and work with them. I know I need to loosen up - extend my mark making - leap off some known art cliffs and divorce the art from the rational self... and I know I need to feed my soul right now too. So I've begun to work on a list of things that feed the soul.

Yesterday I took the morning off to visit the Rita Angus exhibition at Te Papa

Rita Angus' hard edged,flattened style has never been one I've admired specifically, but the body of work collected here is extensive, and the diversity of her work is impressive. Looking at it yesterday it seems to me this show documents her internal struggle with herself and her art well. Not so much in a curatorial sense (which is quite restrained and minimally present) - more through the sense of sadness that emanates out of some of the works through periods of her life.

Her colours truly sing - especially the Central Otago paintings - the rounded hills bulging like heavy cotton velvet with that style she had of bleeding darker hues from the edges of objects.(I remember playing with that style with crayons when I coloured - in at school)

I was particularly attracted to her watercolour of Douglas Lilburn and also to the interior of Suzy's coffee shop (which I remember from school holiday trips to town with my mother)which was from her Wellington period. The honesty of her last self portrait is wonderful.

I'll go back after the holidays and look at the later rooms again - it's a big show and 3 hours didn't do it justice really.

A lot of thinking about maps

"The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as those matters in themselves" Johannes Kepler

I've been giving the idea of thinking like a mapmaker some time lately - the middle of the night seems to suit this one. Not that I want to paint or make maps per se(nothing wrong with maps - they'reincredibly cool). Its a process I want to create - a process that acts as an overlay to the end results; and which interests me, like Kepler, almost as much as creating the art itself.

What do I mean by 'thinking like a cartographer'?

Well here goes.
For a start I want to impose a map making process that will influence my making and my thinking through the length of an artistic exploration - maybe a year. One that I haven't formalised before. I'm not sure yet just how different it will be to that which I already operate within or am bound by. But I want to see what richness or learning it may offer and how the work will be influenced by imposing some constraints over and above a subject or theme. Lets make it a bit more challenging, she says.

I said in my one of my last posts that there were things I took away from the 'Beyond Words' show in March. One of these things relates to the unspoken. The unknowable, or unacknowledged. Or just the unknown. Perhaps the areas we choose to leave deliberately empty. What we don't say.
Remember?

So I though it might be possible to describe spaces like these by implication. By stealth, or by mapping the territory that surrounds them; thereby defining them. I like the idea that these spaces will be different for different people - and the idea of creating variable experiences is growing on me. Interactivity. Allowing others to build meaning in the work, literally.

I did a bit of hunting and I found an interesting essay here by Nat Case titled 'Art is a Tool, Maps as Pictures'. Nat talks about the intersections between art and modern cartography - 'art' maps and 'mappy' art.

Then I talked to a friend about what making maps meant to him; about his Fine Arts Masters project which was based on map making and which included mapping emotional journeys,instances and interpretations of mapping. We also talked about his latest project in which he's exploring cartographic iconography and typologies within a graphics context as they define national identity, both for New Zealanders'as
individuals and of New Zealand as a global entity.

Here's some understanding I've come to -just some of the early thoughts I've had (that I want to expand on over time) about mapping. My thinking's certainly not comprehensive and it's definitely not based on deep knowledge! But here's the things that I've taken from the little exploration I've done so far.

I think they might make some interesting points that could support a process. I won't say steps - it doesn't seem at all linear to me so I'll bullet them.

• maps define boundaries(in a physical sense, so do supports like canvas or paper,and gallery spaces or viewing points) Metaphysically maps lay out where the edges of things are.(I like that. I need to know where boundaries are.)
• they describe relationships
• maps argue for things
• maps are political
• a map has or has not got a sense of authorship or voice, and it CAN lie
• maps can be functional (some thinking says a map must be functional to be good)
• maps are subjective interpretations which are in turn interpreted subjectively but which attempt to describe information objectively (sometimes)
• an instance can be a map (and so can a sensory experience - mapping to a memory for example)
• maps do not necessarily reside physically in space or time (woa!)
• maps can be wordless,directionless,wayfinding devices,internalised,remembered,
indelibly etched and imagined.
• maps sometimes have keys

What does that mean for a process?
It probably means I'll define elaborate or discard each of the characteristics I've described as being 'map-like' and look for ways to build them into a set of perameters to work within.

I'm thinking initially, there are some obviously simple responses like - use the whole space. Involve the space in the art and the art in the space. Allow the pieces to be built up like fragments in a non linear sense with some element of dimensionality to them - even if the work is still canvas or paper. perhaps it might mean they could be moved about and composed by individuals to narrate their own interpretations of provinces. Allowing multiple perspectives,simultaneous open ended stories.Perhaps with set boundaries like a limited colour palette.

Some thoughts...What could a key be? what about scale?

This looks like fun. Tell me what you think.

Thinking like a cartographer

I've been off line from my blog for a little bit - computer troubles mostly and Life intervening again- I left my job last week (happy/sad both and a brief experience that was full of rich learning) ... my horoscope at the beginning of the year described my career as a cross between I Claudius and The Sopranos thus far - what's with that? This blog's not intended for analysing so we'll leave it there. Suffice to say I feel at home in myself again today and I painted a new painting on the weekend that I think is OK)

It's my first day back in the studio - pulling together the threads of my illustration work again and knowing now how much that knits in with my art, both informing and feeding it.
In the interim I've had some time to think and dream about where to next - so the technological black hole has been productive too.

Sometimes you have to sidle up to ideas; they show themselves out of the corner of your eye - hide in the recesses of your dreams, and then disappear when you look at them full on. Tricky things... you have to be so careful not to expose them too soon or they melt away.

So...
What if you treat ideas like a map maker and come at them obliquely from all angles?

By describing all the things something ISN'T, (like that great Michaelangelo quote/story 'I simply chipped away everything that wasn't David') or by defining the parameters of what it might be, could you not create a space for something to exist? - like using reference points or coordinates to point to the centre and define/describe it.

I'm thinking that this would be an interesting exersize in order to reach an unknown endpoint. I'm not sure if I'm making sense - I've read poems that do it - each stanza coming from a different viewpoint or idea, seemingly unrelated, collectively making the whole a story but never quite saying it overtly.For example Kathleen Graber in her book 'Correspondence' and Michael Ondaatje is a master of it.
I'd like to experiment with the idea, but first I'll need to define my tools. Hmmm... playtime !

Lu and I at Red Gallery in Nelson

Here's a pic of the lovely Lucy and me at Red Gallery, at the opening of 'Flick of the Wrist' in February.

More things I'm thinking about

"We don't just think with our brains. We think with our bodies." Jürgen Steek

"It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it." Robert Motherwell

"It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception." Robert Motherwell

Five minutes

To write some thoughts.

Things I want to remember and build on:

• Camouflage - how else do we hide? (disambiguation - what a cool word!)
• passages of light
• metaphors for movement and change
• independent of thought - what is that? - automatic?
• What else contains memory but chooses to obey?