The Psychogeography of Art School, Raphael’s Transfiguration, sequences, stills, what's above and what's below

Some weeks ago I gave an artist's talk. Coincidentally, the week I prepared my talk was the same week I taught Renaissance painting in the Art Appreciation course. As I traced the development of my ideas and looked at the work of Raphael (et al), I was reminded of the originary point of a longstanding conceptual / formal concern that began when I was still an undergrad student.

Undergrad studies in art school typically consist of ½ studio courses and ½ art history courses. So, as a young art student, I spent half my time working with materials and the other half writing / using language to talk about images and ideas. Through the labor itself, a dichotomous structure (shifting between sequential and holistic) was building in my mind that would make me susceptible to ideas and concerns I still pursue.

One of the art history courses I took in those early years was Italian Art. For this class, as with most art histories, we had to write a weekly one page response paper on a work of our choice. One particular week, I wrote about Raphael's Transfiguration because I found something conceptually / structurally compelling about the artist's representation of time in a 2-D medium, which is obviously not time-based.



The Transfiguration depicts a story told in the Christian Bible in which Jesus is transfigured on the mount while the disciples below attempt to heal (unsuccessfully) an epileptic boy. The painting represents what's in the text, but also represents what the text cannot – the simultaneity of two separate events.

In the gospel verses, the events appear one after the other. Through the basic limitations of language, we experience a lag as one short narrative follows the other. However, in the painting, the events appear together as they are in the real time of the story -- coexisting in a single moment. Though the eye still moves around the image creating something of a sequence, the overall impression is holistic and simultaneous. Even the separation of places (the above with Jesus and the below with the disciples) are collapsed into a single place within the space of the painting.

So with this painting and my short response paper to it, I began to wonder not only about the holistic visual representation of narrative sequences, but about turning still images (non time-based media) into sequences – turning Raphael's Transfiguration on its head, so to speak. I wondered: what if the given were the image and not the text? What if the image gets translated into language? What if there were no translation but, instead, the syntax of a collection of isolated images?

Eventually, I began to pull stills from video and arrange them into other narratives. Like The Transfiguration, these "Horizon Line" pieces are about the sequence and the still and about what's above and what's below.

Blog as archive

From this point back on the blog, the older posts act as a portfolio / archive. These posts document selected pieces that best represent the progression of my ideas and art practice.

Some work needs to be rephotographed and other pieces need to be added, but the basic structure remains: each entry is dated December 31st of the year the work was produced and/or exhibited and I update or edit as often as I'm able.

You can find older progress posts at Fiber Art Studio, my previous studio blog site.

Instance of Resistance

Instance of Resistance #10: Feral greenery in the underground city
digital photos on fabric over-stitched onto canvas
2008
3' x 4'

detail below:


When I lived in Knoxville, TN, I took these photos in the underground city outside my studio on Gay Street. Here is an article by Jack Neely explaining a bit of the history of the city below the city

This work is part of a series I call Instances of Resistance where I search out and photograph feral plant life growing among human construction / ruins.

Instances of Resistance

Instance graffiti #4: 11 feral plants, 8 twigs and 1 cross-beam in brick ruin
digital print and pencil
2008
8" x 10"

Instance graffiti #1: 12 feral plants among others in brick ruin
digital print and pencil
2008
8" x 10"

These are from a series of the digital photos of feral plant life that I printed onto Bristol Board then drew over with a soft-lead pencil.

I chose drawing as the medium because I wanted to put my own hand into the photos and make a connection between the role of subjectivity in my art practice and the un-tameable, rogue plant-life. I also thought that drawing would be the best way to animate the plants with playful and caricature-like personas.

I enjoy how these pieces invoke nostalgia (a theme in my work) with their simultaneously shadowy presence and candy-like preciousness.

Fig Leaf Loincloth

Fig Leaf Loincloth
off-loom tapestry free-woven in cotton and hemp
2008
14" x 8"

This playful little piece is part of a series I call Wardrobe for Paradise.

Psychogeography of the crazy quilt

Los Angeles Aerial #3: Psychogeography of the crazy quilt (in the fashion of Jackson Pollock)
men's neckties, hand-dyed fabrics, thread and yarn on canvas
2007
3'x 4'

This piece is made up mostly of men's neckties that I wove into a thick fabric, hand-stitched together with other hand-dyed fabrics, cut into squares, reconstructed into a grid, stitched to canvas and drew over with machine stitching. I invested months of meandering, free-associative stitching into this painting / crazy quilt. Both the long process and the final form reflect my personal response to / map of the flows and restrictions of everyday life (daily driving) in Los Angeles.

Random Pastoral Aerials

Random Pastoral Aerial #3: Flows and fissures
oil and mixed-media on panel
2007
3' x 2'

Random Pastoral Aerial #4: Pools and micro-climates
oil and mixed-media on panel
2007
3' x 2'

These aerial paintings explore my relationship to sites of city and country and to a "naturalized" view of the human imprint (in this case, agricultural) on the landscape. Like most of my work, these pieces play with ways of knowing a landscape: either through a sequenced / time-based relationship (as in walking, one foot / image in front of the other) or a spatial, holistic and mapped view. The aerials would be the mapped view. The ideas were nuanced by personal experiences (moving back to Appalachia from Los Angeles) and the loss of my imagined relationship to "the country" from afar.

These aren't paintings in the usual sense as I used processes more akin to fiber dyeing than to mark-making or brush-work. First, I allowed the paint to move about on the panel in response to my controlled motions (similar to what I'd discovered earlier with dyeing and staining raw canvases). With this process, images emerge that are simultaneously random and patterned as with other dendritic forms. Upon seeing such forms emerge, the process made it easy for me to imagine I was as much a force of nature governed by physical parameters as a collection of trees, a leaf or a city like Los Angeles. My movements and thoughts constructed the same forms as a branching tree, a forking river, a vine of ivy, a clump of blood vessels, an interstate freeway system or a cancer.

Second in the process, I deliberately filled-in the spaces created between the randomness. This way of working was very deliberate and opened the pieces up to choice, patterns and a different form of repetition.

I found the relationship between the precision and the fluidity to be meaningful during that time of transition. In fact, I find this work to be very personal as it reveals my thought processes and struggles at a time when I was trying to re-situate myself in a location that (in nostalgic recollection) I had believed to be familiar and, yet, was so utterly different than the city which I'd become accustomed and whose streets and freeways I knew so intimately.