Building cardboard flat files

—News from the studio—

A pile of my prints.

Often, when I find a need for some resource in the studio, I will build it myself. This week, while in the process of organizing and documenting all my artwork, I found that I needed some flat files to separate and store my prints, drawings, and small paintings. Here's the story of how I found a cheap solution.

I began with a bunch of free boxes. I cut them in half and shortened the width of the side flaps so I could reassemble them only as deep as a strip of 1x2. This meant that the front and back flaps also had to be cut down to the same size.

Cutting down the box using my mat cutter.

Measuring the height of a 1x2.

Side cut to fit 1x2. The end flap isn't cut down yet.

For the 1x2 strips, I found eight foot sticks made of recycled wood fiber for $2.24 each. They come coated with white primer, so they were a perfect choice. I cut two pieces from each stick for the sides of the flat file and stapled the cardboard to the wood. Now, I had two parts for the flat file: a top and a bottom.

Stapling the cardboard sides to the wood

I stacked the top and bottom pieces and stapled the loose cardboard to the tops of the 1x2s on each side, leaving the staples off about 1/3 of the length from the top so I could make a larger top flap. I only had to staple down one half of the top and bottom since the cardboard wraps around and is stapled on the sides. To make the flap, I very, very lightly scored across the top with a utility blade. When making boxes, I always score the side that bends in.

A flap cut in the top for easy access.

I taped the flaps down in the back; they never need to be opened.

The back flaps are permanently taped.
The front ones can be taped closed with less tape as needed.

And here are my six finished flat files. I've already got one in use. They are light, sturdy, and easy to stack. And they each cost me only $2.24 in materials.

The flat files completed.

The first one with paintings stored and the flap labelled.

My woodblock printing process

—News from the studio—

In today's post, I show the ten-step process that I used to make one of my woodblock prints in 1996.

St. Mark's Cathedral During an
Organ and Choral Recital

The story starts in the early nineties when my friend Mike and I managed to get admission to an organ and choral performance at Saint Mark's Cathedral in Seattle with only enough money between the two of us for one ticket. We discovered that a party was short one attendee and had left their extra ticket at the door for a poor artist like one of us and we took it. I had a sketchbook and drawing board with me and I drew the audience, the choir, and the architecture. Most of the resulting sketch was influenced by one of the pieces on the program—a movement of Messiaen's L'Ascension. As I was listening and drawing, I thought of a passage from In Search of Lost Time in which Proust describes music from a violin, as I remember, filling the room visually.

I took the sketch home and began turning it into the woodblock print you see above and I titled it Saint Mark's Cathedral During an Organ and Choral Recital.

To make this print, I needed to carve blocks of wood to roll with ink and press into paper.

This is what one of the carved blocks looked like. The blocks were destroyed long ago because they were too large and heavy to keep.

This block happens to be the fourth block in the sequence of runs using, as you can see, violet ink. If you look closely, you can see an arrow that tells me which way is up and a number four that tells me when to print the block (after the third block). You might notice that the image in the block is a mirror image of the final print.

In the following ten pictures, the print evolves through successive impressions from each of ten different woodblocks. Each run is a different color ink rolled onto a hand-carved block of pine and transferred to the rice paper by rubbing the back of the paper with barrens and wooden spoons.

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

The color is not entirely accurate, due to the fact that the value changed with each run so the auto-exposure on the camera shifted. Or maybe it's my cheap scanning equipment. Nonetheless, you should be able to see the transformation.

If you are very observant, you might have noticed my use of wood grain. Some of the blocks were topped with strategically placed pieces of 1/4 inch plywood before carving. In this way, I was able to orient the wood grain in various directions, even on one block—a trick that owes a lot to Paul Klee's ideas about visual polyphony.

Detail

But all this work does not give the whole story of the process involved. Before making the print, I had to make test prints to find the formulas for the colors because most of the colors, as we can see, exist only after two or more inks combine.

The final print has scores of different colors in it. In order to know the formulas for each color in the final print, I had to make some test prints first. Using these test prints, I could tell which area to leave raised on which blocks in order to get the inks to combine into a particular color in a particular spot on the print.

Test Prints

If you look closely, you will see that the first ten color swatches from the left in the top row are the colors of the inks I used for each of the woodblocks. Those ten colors combine to make the rest of the colors you see in the test prints. I had made a cheat-sheet noting the formulas for each swatch.

At one point, I hauled all twenty test blocks fifteen miles by foot and buses across town to a printing press. I pulled my tests and got kicked out of the art center only minutes after finishing because of an auction I hadn't been told about. After two more bus rides and a lot of walking, I made it the fifteen miles back home in time for my canvas bags to finally start ripping apart from the weight.

Printmaking is hard work. After all this preparation, only two prints were made in the laborious process of inking and hand-rubbing the ten blocks that combine to make the final image. It was the last printmaking I did before turning to painting. I had never made a print like this before. Previously, my woodblock prints involved just a few blocks and I had pulled the prints on presses. But I'd seen hand-rubbed woodcuts made with many blocks and I knew I could do something similar.  I had only an idea what the print might look like, though, and until the last few runs, it didn't look like much at all. One of the joys of printmaking—like photography or ceramics—is seeing the art for the first time when the process is complete.

One of the two final prints was exhibited in a show at the University of Washington and they are both now in private collections. There are slight differences between the two, so they are considered an edition of two unique prints. Because of the weight and size of the blocks, as I mentioned, I had to destroy them; I can't carry such things around with me in life. That means someday these two prints may be considered rare examples of my early work.


Here, again, is the finished print:

P.S. I completely lost this whole post due to either a computer glitch or user error, depending on how you might want to look at what I did! But I was able to completely redo the post with minimal variation from the original in only about 20 minutes because I back up things. Always back up things manually! It's actually the auto-save that destroyed the original post, so you can't rely on the computer to do it for you. And, as always, my new post is an improvement over the crashed one!

Upcoming group show

—News from the studio—

Two of my recent paintings will be exhibited in a group show in New York at Galerie Protégé, 197 Ninth Avenue, from July 11 through August 15.


Titled It's Our Turn, the staff exhibition features work in a variety of media. The opening reception is on Saturday, July 13 from 6 to 9 pm.

Exploring New York Modernism

In Albany, recently, I saw the large collection of modernist paintings and sculptures that's on permanent display in the state buildings. Nelson Rockefeller—J.D.'s grandson—brought the art to the state capitol in the 1960s and over half a century later, the work still resonates.

I've been thinking about this collection and, looking closer at the art, I've made some discoveries. I've found that the work has connections with important art traditions that some of our contemporary artists seem to have missed or dismissed. And I'm beginning to understand that my alienation from contemporary trends has something to do with my connection to the modernist art represented in Albany and the European traditions that fostered it, however subtly.

I'm not surprised that I feel a connection to the art at the Empire State Plaza. The collection includes abstract expressionism, minimalism, color field painting, and op art, and it hints at pop art. This is the work I grew up on. Within the first week or two of art school in Cleveland, I saw a large show of modernist sculptures from the New York School. It changed my life. A number of the artists I saw then are represented by work in the Albany collection.

But I didn't realize how important New York modernism was to me as a young artist in Cleveland in the 1980s until I started working on an MFA degree online at a West Coast art school. After getting a flavor of the West Coast's take on things, I can see that Cleveland is steeped in the same aesthetic and art history as New York City. These are the artists who taught my teachers and their instructors. And as I continued my undergraduate studies, and as an impressionable young artist, my teachers showed us this kind of work again and again.

But looking closer at the artist biographies confirmed something I've been suspecting for some time: most of the artists in the collection studied realism before turning abstract; many of them produced representational work before becoming non-objective. I think this is significant.

By the time they were chosen to contribute work to the collection, most of these artists were making non-figurative work. Aside from satisfying his modern tastes, Rockefeller probably saw that the non-objective character of the work was very safe for a space that is equal parts public, political, and industrial. But after reading the artist biographies, I realized that much of the work is rooted in academic sensibilities of objective content and realist technique. And the artists who were influenced by the more expressive styles of twentieth-century representational art created work in a similar fashion before turning to more pure abstraction.

This strikes me as a difference between the Albany artists and my teachers—and hence, me. My teachers and I are the first generations that began their studies, and their art making, directly from the standpoint of American Modernism—much of it quite abstract. Though we enjoyed being completely immersed in American modernism, most of the artists in Albany appear to have been born in other countries, or their parents were. Many of them studied in other nations, even if they were born here in the USA. So they were immersed in something very different before creating the work we see in the collection in Albany.

The collection of modern art in Albany illustrates what happens when artists make art in a new environment, drawing on well over a half-century of expressive modern art and long traditions of academic drawing and painting, as well as European, South American, and Asian cultural traditions. The artists in the Empire State Plaza collection brought these past traditions to New York City, and drew on them as they explored new territory in their work.

My teachers didn't study as much realism. They learned some representational drawing and painting technique, and taught us some. But we didn't have the opportunity to bring traditions from other times and places to a new center of the art world and create something uniquely American like these modernists did. We seem to have started where the modernists left off, without going through the process they went through to get there. And perhaps that's one reason we've been struggling with art in America since the 1980s.

The American vernacular that we see in the Albany collection reminds me somewhat of other American art forms that are derived from traditions across the ocean. Music, in particular, yields great examples in jazz and bluegrass. It's no wonder that Rockefeller and others wanted to share New York Modernism with the world as an example of American strengths. But it is worth remembering where our New York Modernism came from.

When Paris fell to Germany in World War II, and when artists fled France and many other countries to come to the United States, New York City became the center of the art world. Much of the work in Albany can be traced back to Italian Futurism and French Art Deco. The creative émigrés who settled in New York brought European abstraction and Surrealism and melded it with American mural painting that had risen in importance with the WPA. The new work reflected American ideals and Rockefeller was keen to re-imagine the modern art traditions from an American standpoint of industry, progress, freedom, and individualism.

A lot of the work in Albany, however, has roots in countries that did not share as rugged a view of individualism as we Americans favor. I am struck, in particular, by the formality present in the Albany collection. For the most part, the work contrasts with that very personal flavor of abstract expressionism that privileges introspection and subjectivity over universality. Over the years, the American spirit of individualism has produced quite a lot of art that is so arcane that the work can only be understood in relation to the personal vocabularies of the artists.

Most of the work in the plaza, however, can easily be read within a collective visual vocabulary. Some of the work can even be traced back to the constructivism of more socialist cultures. I find this to contrast with some of the prevailing trends of self-absorption that I see in much of our contemporary art.

Rockefeller, himself, was very interested in international art. He was active as a philanthropist in France and Greece. He brought French architecture to New York and used ancient Greek concepts in Albany. He approached Matisse, Picasso, and Rivera for the mural commission that eventually went to Jose Maria Sert. He collected European art, which he brought to his office in the Capital and to the Museum of Modern Art in the city.

Rockefeller was shrewd enough to seize the opportunity to appropriate European modernism, encourage its transformation into something uniquely American, and then gift it back to the world. For Rockefeller, the concentration of New York City artists in the Empire State Plaza illustrated that the State was the center of the art world, and showed how international the State was.

The paintings and sculptures in the Albany collection illustrate how long-standing traditions in art can be transformed in innovative ways into a new art form that is uniquely American. But, somehow, I think, this transformation must have been a little too radical for us who followed. Somehow, I think, we may have lost touch with some tradition in our inheritance of modernism.

Perhaps the freedom of modernism made it too easy for us to be lazy with the fundamentals we learned as young modernists in art school—fundamentals that became ends in themselves instead of means to working through difficult representational compositions. W.H. Auden said that our ears crave familiarity while our eyes crave novelty. Maybe that's why visual arts have strayed so far away from the traditions that fed them while jazz and bluegrass seem to me to have kept some of the flavor of West Africa and Ireland. Or maybe it is because the options for visual artists seem so easily to bleed beyond the rules.

The Empire State Art Collection reminds me that, however new and innovative this work was half a century ago, the rules still mattered to the modern artists in the collection. Classical realism, European modernism, ethnic traditions, and centuries of culture fed into this work. And for me, it is validation that my insistence upon constantly revisiting traditions outside my training is worthwhile, and that there is a reason that objective content and the art of other cultures resonates with me in my own work: it was present in the work I cut my teeth on, no matter how simple or abstract it seems to be.

When American art gave us the freedom, in Rockefeller's 1960s, to make something as universal as a circle and call it art, it opened the possibility for artists to reject cultural and historical conventions. As a result, however, many artists are doing work that is neither related to a long tradition nor universal, and which reflects a highly personalized vision. The challenge for me, now, is to hold on to tradition while finding an American vernacular that speaks to me and that I can speak through so that my work genuinely communicates my experience in twenty-first-century America, and does so in fresh and innovative ways.

Earth Pigment Palette

Last summer, I posted a lesson plan for making a color wheel starting with secondary colors. Today, I'm going to demonstrate making a color wheel using just earth pigments.

I made this wheel using black iron oxide, a couple caput mortuums, a couple red earths, haematite, and several ochres. I added a little bit of beech charcoal to the deep blue on the right and I also mixed in titanium white throughout. All the earth pigments are essentially iron oxides. The medium is acrylic.

You can make a complete color wheel using just iron oxides and white. Iron oxide comes in yellow, orange, red, violet, and black. The black can be lightened into a blue by adding white. That's how I got the blues above. And then you can mix the yellow oxide or the red oxide with the blue to get green or violet. That's how I got the greens above. The violets in the wheel are caput mortuum and black iron, but I could just as easily have made them with black and red.

Here are some iron oxide pigments I formed into round pastels to draw with. You can see the huge range that we can get with iron oxides.

A good project for students is to make a color wheel like the one I made using yellow oxide, red oxide, black oxide (Mars Black) and a white.

Then they can make a painting using this limited palette. They can use oil, acrylic, water color, or gouache.

I made this painting using just terra rosa, yellow ochre, a mars or ivory black, and titanium white. Four pigments was all I needed.

Some dry earth pigments don't mix well with linseed oil. Since I used acrylic for my wheel, the dry haematite, caput mortuum, and one of the orange ochres worked okay, but these three in particular have trouble getting along with the oil. It doesn't stop me from playing with them, however. I love playing in dirt.

Qualities of Oil Colors

It seems like collectors will buy almost anything at an art auction, but a couple things remain very constant: collectors like something that fits in the home (often a large home) and they look closely at the quality of the materials used. It's important for artists to understand how oil paint works so that paintings are dry in time for shows and so we are sure the paintings won't fall apart on the wall.

It's also important to know about pigments so that the art is visually effective. In my recent paintings, I've limited myself to a palette of earth colors that works for me and I'm constantly learning about these pigments. There are a lot of things to consider, so it makes sense to limit your palette so you can get a handle on all the characteristics of your paints. I'm a rule breaker, so I need to know how far I can push things. In this post, I'll define the qualities of oil colors that affect the way paintings are made and how they look.

Color

The kind of pigment you are using affects many characteristics in your paint. The most obvious is the look of the color itself. Chemists have developed ways of categorizing both visual color and pigment chemistry, but the best way to determine the paint color is to get used to the paints that are for sale and look at your paintings under various lights. I make charts and color wheels. After you buy and use enough paints, you will have your favorites and you'll hope that they never go off the market.

Color Names

You can't tell what you are using simply by reading the name a paint company gives a tube of paint. Two tubes with the same name might be made from different pigments. Or similar pigments can have two different names. Some paint colors are called hues, which means that they look something like the real thing but are cheaper. A Cobalt Blue Hue looks like a Cobalt Blue but doesn't contain cobalt.

A lot of paints are no longer made the same way as the originals. So an Ultramarine Blue today might not be the same kind of Ultramarine people used a long time ago.

Color Sources

Paint pigments, today, come from two sources. There are natural pigments that are collected from nature and there are synthetic pigments that people make in a workshop or laboratory. Even the ancient Egyptians made synthetic pigments, so there's nothing wrong with them. Sometimes they are much better than natural alternatives.

Pigment Types

There are also two basic types of pigment compounds. The first type is the organic pigment. These are carbon-based, meaning they are usually derived from plant or animal sources in nature or they are chemical dyes when synthesized by people. It's easy to confuse organic with natural. But, as in "organic chemistry," organic pigments are those that contain carbon. They can be natural or synthetic.

The second type of pigment is an inorganic pigment. These are the earth or mineral pigments. Inorganic pigments can also be either natural or synthetic. They essentially contain metals such as cadmium, cobalt, manganese, aluminum, and iron.

Occasionally, the distinction between organic and inorganic might be unclear. For example, Sienna contains iron and also, as a clay earth pigment, contains decomposed plant matter. Another example is Graphite, which contains carbon but is considered a mineral. Maybe that explains why a graphite pencil falls between charcoal and silverpoint in character.

Particle Sizes

I prefer the way inorganic paints look. They have much larger particle sizes, usually, than organic paints and I think that makes a difference. Some of the synthetic organic pigments are so pure they look unnatural and garish. They seem to have a "chemical" look. If you glaze with an inorganic pigment that is roughly ground, you can even get a nice grainy look to the paint. I suspect that earth pigments are rougher on my brushes, though.

Shade

One of the main characteristics of color is shade. Unless it is really neutral to your eye, each color has a bias toward one of its two surrounding hues on the color wheel. This undertone color is the reason you can buy, for example, an Ultramarine Blue (Red Shade) or an Ultramarine Blue (Green Shade).

Temperature

Directly related to shade is temperature. It's a good idea to have a relatively warm and cool pigment choice for every hue. For example, you might have a red that is more magenta and a red that is more orange-red. If you have a cooler and warmer choice for each hue, then your mixing possibilities are better. Temperature is also very important for constructing lights and shadows.

Value

Nothing is more important for rendering form than value. You have to step back from your canvas to note the relative lightness and darkness, or luminosity, of your paint colors. This is because your pupils will open up when you look at a violet and get smaller when you look at a yellow. So, to your eyes, everything becomes a middle value. In reality, however, when you step back, you will see that the violet is very dark and the yellow is very light. It is important to mix your colors on a grey palette instead of a bright white one, or you will have trouble seeing your values.

Saturation

Saturation is the intensity or chroma of a color. Essentially, this means how vivid and bright it is. Some colors are intense. Some colors are dull, muted, and greyed. Some fall in between.

Tinting Strength 

When you are mixing your colors, you will find that each has a relatively stronger or weaker tinting strength. I have some reds that require only the tiniest dab of paint to significantly change another color I add it to. Tinting strength depends not only on the kind of pigment, but also on pigment load, which differs by brand; some brands mix a lot of oil with less pigment and charge less.

Density

Density is the mass of the pigment. If you buy a tube of paint, it is measured in volume, but if you buy just the pigment with no binder, it may be measured in weight, instead. A denser pigment weighs more than a pigment with less mass in the same size tube. Pick up a lead white at the store and you will feel the difference (then put it back on the shelf and buy a nontoxic white). A tube of inorganic pigment will usually weigh more and may also be more opaque.

Opacity

Opacity, or translucency, is the covering power of a paint when placed over another color. A paint may be very opaque, semi-opaque, semi-transparent, or transparent. Opacity and other characteristics can be affected by the pigment's density and particle size.

Oil Content

In the process of creating a usable paint, some pigments require more oil than others. People sometimes use a measure of oil absorption to describe the amount of oil added to a pigment. Of all the characteristics, oil absorption seems to be the most vague in documentation online, even though oil is the essential property of oil paint. It might be easier to think of fat or lean paints in terms of oil content. This simply refers to how much vehicle is likely to be in the paint—the oil to pigment ratio out of the tube. Oil content doesn't necessarily relate to the thickness of the paint.

Some oil paint has more oil in it and some has less. Though some manufacturers add more oil so they can save money, the amount of oil in the tube depends somewhat on the qualities of the pigment. Some pigment particles mix or suspend well in oil and others are difficult to combine with oil. I've found that some pigment and oil mixtures will change in viscosity when left to sit or when stirred. Also, some oil colors seem leggier than others: you can get long strokes, almost like lines of ink, with some pigments, while others prefer to work with shorter strokes.

Some paints require only a small amount of pigment to color the paint, and so require a higher ratio of oil. Some pigments are dense and soak up a lot of oil. Other pigments don't need as much oil to make a paint. Some pigments help the oil oxidize and dry, while others do not. Furthermore, oil itself can be fatter or leaner depending on the kind of oil. Manufacturers may also add inert ingredients like calcium carbonate as a thickener and binder, and this will affect the oil content in the tube.

As you paint, you will want to thin your paints with more solvent and less oil at first and then gradually increase the oil you add and decrease the solvent. How much of each you use depends upon the paint you are using. You can determine the oil content by working the paint with a palette knife or brush and getting a feel for fatter and leaner paint.

Utrecht makes a white that reminds me of printing ink. It's great for adding highlights in the last stages of a painting. This white contains titanium and zinc like other whites, but in using it, I found it to be way fatter than any of the other whites. So the fat and lean qualities of individual paints vary quite a bit by manufacturer. Oil content, along with characteristics of a pigment, affects workability, drying time, sheen, and the likelihood of the paint chipping and cracking.

Film

Without experimenting and doing more research, it's hard for me to say how the paint film is going to turn out in the long term. As a grad students, my cohorts and I have spent most of our time starting paintings. When we finish one, we usually turn it in still sticky. Even though I've done hundreds of oil paintings, I've yet to varnish any of them. As a result, we spend very little time studying the surfaces of finished work. In general, however, the dried paint can be hard or soft. It can be hard and then crack, or it can be soft and then crack depending on how flexible or brittle the paint is and what is under the paint. Or it can turn out just right.

On a side-note, if you have to roll a painting, roll it with the paint side out. It's counter-intuitive, but the reason is that the paint stretches or contracts over time depending on how the painting is rolled, and you want to roll it so it heals back to normal when unrolled. If you roll the paint side in, then you will crack the paint when you unroll it to a larger surface area. The same concept goes for leaning a painting on board against a wall.

Aside from cracking, crazing, and chipping off, the paint film can yellow due to the content of linseed oil, and it can be spongy if you use a cheap oil that doesn't oxidize right. If you are desperate to get the paint to dry and it won't, even in the sun, you can resort to spraying it with Bullseye shellac every day for a week and the solvent may sink in and oxidize the paint all the way through. It's better to avoid this, however, since the paint may crack. With the right paints, your painting can be dry in several days.

Gloss

You may want to use some kind of varnish on your painting. Wait a number of months after the painting has dried. One reason for varnish is to protect the painting. Another is the fact that different paints dry to a different degree of gloss. Some paints dry shiny and glossy while others dry flat or matte. Gloss is also affected by the surface you paint on. I did a number of portraits directly on hardboard without any primer or gesso. My teachers would have been very annoyed if they knew, but I loved the way the oil soaked into the board. It gave me a drier, oil-pastel or egg-tempera look. And I loved the faster drying time and the fact that I could build up gloss as the paint got thicker.

Drying Time

Some paints dry faster than others. Some of the organic reds take forever. I once threw away a study that still had reds that were as wet as the day I painted them a year-and-a-half earlier. I wasn't sure which brand of red I had used, but I had my suspicions and haven't used it since. Some pigments seem to stay wet a long time. On the other hand, some of my handmade earth paints are so dry, they are almost like pastels. You can dry your paints faster by putting the painting in the sunlight.

Permanence

Once a painting is dry, most conservators and artists recommend getting it away from sunlight as it can fade the colors. Some pigments are lightfast but others are fugitive when exposed to light. Conservators can remove frames from old paintings and see how much the paintings have faded by comparing the paint hidden under the rabbet. But you can find ways to avoid this problem by using quality paints with excellent permanence ratings. Some organic pigments, particularly those that are plant-based, are very fugitive. On the other hand, my local museum has very, very old pieces painted with what looks like indigo but they don't look faded at all.

Toxicity

As much as we take care of our paintings, we also have to take care of our health. No oils are nontoxic so artists need to always consider safety when working with painting materials such as solvents, mediums, and pigments. Use extra care with those labeled toxic, and avoid toxic chemicals altogether if you can. In the next post, I'll show how you can get a very large palette just out of earth pigments and iron oxides, which are all nontoxic.

Aside from choosing safer solvents and paints, another good practice is to keep the turpentine covered and clean your brushes only when you are finished with a painting session, instead of cleaning every time you want a new color on the brush. With oils, you can wipe the excess paint off and go straight for another color without cleaning. The little bit of muddying that happens won't be really visible, but it will actually strengthen the painting by mixing the colors every so slightly. And you can start your cleaning with an oil or lactate instead of turpentine and finish your cleaning with a brush soap instead of going crazy with the turp.

Conclusion

As a graduate student in a very challenging painting program, I've found myself constantly studying the chemistry of paints and pigments to get a better handle on my tools. Some people say that inorganic pigments behave one way and organic pigments behave another way. In the end, it's more important to know what characteristics to look for in the paints on your own preferred palette.  While settling on my favorite brands and colors, I've explored the eighteen qualities that I defined above, and I think that should give us a pretty good picture no matter what pigments we use.

Fans of Art on facebook

—News from the studio—

Last year, I decided to move my regular art news postings from my personal facebook to a community page. Fans of Art is dedicated to news about art making, art administration, and art education. If you "like" the page, you can find new posts in your stream throughout the week, and I will be increasing the frequency and number of posts in the coming days. Check it out!

Ten thousand days

Today marks 10,000 days since I first started art school. I began studying art at Cuyahoga Community College's Eastern Campus on September 23, 1985. The Tri-C art department is in an old 1970s building that used to be called the Interim Building. Classes were held there while they built the Main Building which opened just before I enrolled. The Fine Art department, appropriately, remained in the earlier, temporary building. It was a comfortably ugly space that reminded me of the art room by the boiler in my high school basement. A utilitarian structure, the Interim Building fit the landscape of abandoned 1950s military bunkers that surrounded our campus. It became my home for two years.

I still remember the first day, sitting in the old gallery listening to Bruce lecture endlessly on what to expect as art students. Everything, down to how you sharpen a pencil, was new. A quiet but talkative, slow-moving, bearded man, he had an adage for every situation. If we tried to protest, he would open his eyes wide and say "ah!" and stop us, somehow compelling us to wait for him to say something, even though half the time he'd just leave his mouth open, as if we were meant to supply the words ourselves. He challenged everything we did, saying, "now do another, do it bigger, make it as big as the Statue of Liberty." I would never again make art without thinking deeply about what I was doing, every step of the way.

The other dominant personality in those days—and he's still there today—was our drawing, ceramics, and printmaking mentor. Mike is no less responsible for my discipline and aesthetic than Bruce. I'll forever picture him, toothpick in his mouth, wild hair, laughing so hard he'd splash his coffee on the floor. At the museums, Mike taught us to see art, dismissively waving away one painting in passing and stopping before another where, animating his whole tall body, he would exclaim with ecstatic praise, "this is art!" Whenever we'd get him to do the same in a critique of our own art work, we'd realize we were not simply creating assignments.

Mike, like other teachers there, is a working artist. Many of the students, too, were local artists developing their craft in what was really more of a workshop environment with us students the apprentices. Studying art at Tri-C East was a unique experience for a Freshman who'd been eighteen for only a month. I was surrounded by students of all ages, from teens like me to artists in their 70s and probably older. I was working with people from other countries and other ethnicities, and it was a huge relief.

The central room was an all-purpose hub. Sometimes we'd have drawing or design classes there. Sometimes we'd meet for lecture or watch the one favorite art film the library owned. Always, we had critiques there. But often it was simply the lunchroom and general hang-out spot, encircled by the other rooms: ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, the wood shop, life drawing, the gallery, and Bruce's office. Here, all the different personalities came together and taught me almost as much as my classes did.

Over in the Main Building, it sometimes felt a bit like high school. More people my age were over there. But in the Interim Building, it was a tangle of humanity ready to teach me things that I couldn't learn from kids my age. Relieved of the stresses of freshman-year-rebellion conformity, I was free to concentrate on creativity. I was at school seven days a week, from morning until night. The only reason I worked was to earn money to buy coffee, gasoline, and guitars.

Within the first couple weeks of school, we had a field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art. I don't think I realized, until recently, what a gift this museum was. I can trace the core of my aesthetic to my experiences as a young art student seeing shows there. Our destination was an exhibit of New York School Modernist Sculpture.

I was going to ride with Terry. He and I had started together this same quarter. I remember him sitting over by the door of the gallery on the first day of classes and I made a note that he was probably the only male in the class close to my age. He was a muscular guy, and I wondered if he might be a football player, but it turned out he was a weight lifter. We were both taking the same sequence and we quickly paired up in creativity and adventure.

On this day, Terry and I jumped into his light blue Chevette, and, with Alice Cooper playing in the homemade speaker boxes in the back, we zoomed off ahead of the others to the museum. Since we beat the rest of the class, we walked through the show on our own. Everything was so strange and seemed so silly. We made fun of all the sculptures saying "that's not art!" Then we returned to the lobby just as our instructor, Margaret, arrived with the class.

As Margaret guided us through the exhibition, she showed us the work in ways I never saw art before. At each sculpture, when she finished opening our eyes, Terry and I would look at each other, dumbstruck. That night, as I pulled into the driveway at home, I hit the brakes and jumped out. My parents had decided that very day to take all the old bicycles from the garage and put them at the curb for the trash collection. It was a pile of wheels, and spokes, and pedals and it resonated instantly. Two days later, Terry and I had a large-scale bicycle sculpture assembled and spray-painted silver on the lawn outside the art rooms. When we arrived at our Fundamentals of Art class, the other students came in with their found-object sculptures in their arms and placed them on the tables. Margaret had to go outside to see what Terry and I had made.

We titled it Birth, as a joke, mostly because Wading Antelope didn't seem to fit. Margaret, of course, found ways that it evoked birth, and, in a real way, it was a birth for us.

The sculpture went on to be exhibited in the Main Building and the school newspaper wrote an article about us. Some twenty years later, I ran into Margaret at an opening reception for one of her shows, and I reminded her who I was. She remembered me and the art vividly and introduced me to the people around us as one of the guys who created this amazing sculpture composed of hundreds of bicycle parts.

Art Walk Campaign

It's almost inevitable, it seems, that a visual artist gets called upon to do some graphic design. Over the years, I've worked in graphics and printing many times. In 2004, I created this advertising campaign for the Murray Hill Arts Association in Cleveland. It was a great year for attendance.

The theme I used throughout the advertisements and publicity materials was graphic images of people's legs all walking in the same direction. There are men and women and boys and girls of various ages—which you can tell from the clothing and the size of the figures. A number of the figures are carrying art that they purchased.

This was the 25th anniversary of the event, so the 25th was featured prominently. Below are stickers we used to seal the box lunches that we provided attendees.

After that year, I moved out of my Murray Hill studio. A few years later, I learned that they had continued to use this design in later art walks.

Academic Drawing & Painting

Many modern artists of the twentieth century had strong technical training in painting and drawing before they turned to more abstract forms of art. If you go to a museum, you can often see traces of classical training in their abstractions.

Here are some academic drawings and paintings I did in art school.