New Painting: "Toaster"

Here's my newest painting.  I've been playing around a lot with the compositions of these canvases, and until this one, trying to simplify. Specifically, I've been working the ochre and brown shapes around the figures to enhance the composition. My mentor is thrilled with those paintings that are most simple and contain the most implied information, and I agree. Still, I wanted to see how far I could push the shape and movement of the piece. This is sort of what I'm thinking here. I saw the vertical and horizontal lines of the blinds and drapes contrasting and framing the rounded shapes of the people and dishes. Is it too busy? Probably, but I think I have a better understanding of where I can take shapes in my pictures. 

Art-a-Whirl / Rauschenberg

Last weekend was the Northeast Minneapolis Art-a-Whirl, where artists open thier studios to would-be art buyers. It's a pretty big event. I used the opportunity to check out a few possible mentors and get some ideas. I found 2 artists that may be possibilites, and had the chance to talk to the artists. There is a huge amount of crap art out there, and its always uncomfortable to walk into an artists studio with the artist sitting there waiting to see what you think. I got a few leads and feel much better about the whole mentor process going into residency #2.


On another note, I just heard that Robert Rauschenberg died last week. Rauschenberg made art out of everything and harnessed materials into pieces that were thought provoking, visually compelling, and completely original. I've always loved his work. It's a read snub at the notion of fine art that I find humorous and beautiful. In his later life he transformed the entire notion of printmaking as well. Art will never be the same after Rauschenberg.

"Touch of Evil"

If there's a common trend to the 50s films I've been watching its long uncut scenes of dialogue. The actors do more because they have to. Quick editing doesn't dominate the way it often does today. "Touch of Evil" absolutely floored me in it's complexity. Long seen as the last classic film nior, Orson Welles got so creative and artsy with his shots (and took so much studio time and money) that the studio booted him after the shoot and altered his vision. He left for Europe and his career as a director was never the same. 10 years ago the studio re-edited the film in an attempt to recreate his vision. The movie starts with a 3 minute long tracking shot that moves from a close-up of a mans hands down an ally, backwards and up over the roof of a building and down the street past cars and pedestrians. I have no idea how he did it. Other scenes contain back and forth editing past characters in conversation, each shot composed to the maximum power of photography. It's an unbelievable film. Oh, and the story is pretty good too, with Charlton Heston in dark makeup as a Mexican cop and a very porky Welles as crooked American police chief. The story is secondary to the look and composition of the film.

New Painting- "The New Pastime"

Well, here it is: my first deliberate attempt at visual storytelling. Till now, I've left the images open ended with characters looking off into to space beyond the viewer, which allows for an open interpretation. This one has all the information self contained. I think the line with metaphor is a thin one- If I push it too far it could get stupid pretty quick. There's more to read into this image, but at the same time it might go unnoticed, which I think is great. I had a lot of fun composing this picture. The way the figures and furniture are situated created interesting shapes and movement through the piece. It was also a challenge to play with 3 separate light sources and different colors. It's not my favorite, but I'm pleased and it should lead to some interesting feedback. I'm interested to know what you think about it so leave me a comment if you have the time.... 

I'm moving very quickly to my next canvas painting as I've realized drying time is becoming an issue. I leave on June 19 for Boston, and my paintings from a month ago are still a little wet. I've got a lot of ideas so we'll see where I end up. More to come-

"Ace in the Hole"

Last night I watched Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" aka "Big Carnival" from 1951, and was amazed at how the film held up half a century later. The film was a critical and commercial bomb at the time, and for the last 50 years it has been a very hard to find cult classic on many top 100 all-time lists. Watch the film and you can understand completely why the film failed to connect. "Ace in the Hole" is a scathing indictment on the negetive powers of big media. It's no surprise that the critics felt insulted and shunned the film.

The story follows an immoral newspaper reporter named Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), who works for a small paper in New Mexico. In the middle of nowhere he stops for gas and learns of a local man recently trapped in an old mine cave in. He sets morality aside and jumps on the opportunity to exploit the situation for a major news story. Within 2 days, the entire country is following the story of the trapped man and the tiny town becomes a media circus, with thousands of reporters and people wanting to whitness the rescue first hand. Even though it's a terrible tradgedy, people in the won are reaping the benefits of all the people. A carnival even comes to town to take advantage of the people. Douglas's character controls the whole thing, and is willing to draw the situation out as long as possible by taking a round about way to rescue the man. When the trapped man dies, the whole thing crumbles. It's a prophetic tale about the power the media has to create the news, all to make a buck.

At one point Tatum states to his cameraman, "Who cares about 10,000 dead in China? People read that and pass right over.... If you want a big story, give the people an individual in crisis and tell them everything you can about the situation, then they're hooked and will buy every paper they can get thier hands on." With 100,000 killed this last week in Burma and Britney Spears constantly in the headlines, its hard not to get the point of the film. "Ace in the Hole" belongs next to "A Face in the Crowd" as 50s films with a prophetic understanding of future troubles. At the time with the rapid rise of TV and mass media, people were only beginning to understand the negetive consequences. Today, we are manipulated by the news all the time...

This is a film everyone should see. It's nearly perfect (aside from Kirk Douglas' enormous chin dimple, which dominates the movie as much as his character).

Another new image should be posted within a few days....

New Painting- "Sunbathers"

Here's my latest painting. I've been experimenting a bit with flattening the backgrounds instead of filling them with detail. I have a real tendency to overwork things, so it's been fun. I'm not totally sure about the finished look yet... For this image, I wanted to bring the ochre fro

m the bottom of the picture instead of the top, and this image looking down at the sand workedperfectly. It also forced me to work on much larger figures than previously. I took a few nights off to work on my May paper at the halfway point of the piece. Since it's been a cool spring, the cold basement were I work really accelerated (or froze) the drying of my paint, so I had to rework almost the entire picture. I ended up spending

 much more time that I should have on it, and I also found myself blending a lot more. Up close, it's much more meticulous. Somehow I need to find the balance between efficient working and interesting brushstroke. Comments appreciated-

The Look and Meaning of 50s America / May 2008 paper

Here's the better part of my most recent paper, entitled "The Look and Meaning of 50s America". 

My goal as an artist through my recent work is to view American nostalgia through a 21^st century lens and present my images in a way that provoke greater thought and challenge modern perception. In my opinion, images from the 1950s are unique in their ability to elicit a wide range of viewer response. Early on in my exploration of these images I was more concerned with finding a neutral image to paint from and less concerned with the meaning of that image. I’ve since come to understand how deep these images go. They represent an unprecedented place in history that shaped the American identity into what it is today. Through an exploration of 1950s images and films, I am gaining a greater understanding of the artistic possibilities. The goal of this writing is to examine these sources in hopes of further defining my work and answering the question, why use 50s images?

Post-War America in the 1950s was a time of unprecedented economic prosperity. Millions of young families had children and purchased land to build houses, effectively creating suburbia.  The men went to work while the women stayed home to raise the children. America became the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen, and people had reason to be optimistic about life. Few visual images capture this sense better than the paintings of Norman Rockwell, which record happy families and safe neighborhoods, and the idealized homespun quality of simple American virtues. “The minutest detail of Rockwell’s charmed vision reaffirms America’s greater purpose. Rockwell himself stated that ‘even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be’” (Caputi 6).

In reality, the decade had an equally ugly side. In these early years before the civil rights movement, white America generally pushed aside the growing issues of racism, while black Americans struggled to find equal opportunities as second class citizens. Deep beneath the happy exterior there was a growing paranoia that shaped the decade. America’s fear of communism and an escalating cold war with the Soviet Union led to US involvement in the Korean War, a brutal conflict that resulted in 2 million total deaths, 37,000 of them American. At home, fear of communist influence spread like wildfire. Senator Joseph McCarthy led an all out attack on communism, blacklisting prominent American citizens and further spreading the message that communism was out to destroy all that Americans held near and dear.

This paranoia is reflected in the themes of 50s films. “It has been estimated that no fewer than five hundred science fiction movies were made between 1948 and 1962, many of which fall into the category of “alien invasion film” (Caputi 15). The idea that sinister outside forces were out to infuse and destroy goes much deeper than science fiction. In the classic 1956 sci-fi horror film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, alien life forms secretly invade a small town. Growing in mysterious pods, they steal the bodily forms of good-natured Americans, and render them emotionless.  The film has been read as both an allegory for the perceived loss of personal autonomy in the Soviet Union and as an indictment of McCarthyist paranoia about communism during the early stages of the Cold War.

While it’s true that the 50s were by no means a time of national perfection, I do not desire to necessarily address the true 50s in my work. In 2008 a viewer can understand the irony and humor in an image of a seemingly perfect nuclear family, and wouldn’t need a picture addressing racism, the Korean War or the Rosenberg executions to understand the true 50s. Because I see humor as an essential element to working with these images, I try to avoid overt exploration of social and political issues. This is not to say that the paintings do not speak in these ways. They certainly can, but how they are read depends on the viewer.

Even still, images from the 50s cannot help but be political. In her book “A Kinder, Gentler America” Mary Caputi explores the myth of the 1950s and examines the way nostalgia has infused and transformed partisan politics. She argues that the political right advocates for a return to the 50s as a time of wholesome American family values, while the left sees the decade as a time of cultural censorship and ignorance of social justice. It would be hard to argue against her assessment based on historical fact. I think it would be easy to draw comparisons and make strong political statements with images from the 50s, which is the very reason I try hard to avoid it. I personally find those avenues to be dead ends, even if I strongly agree with the political position. 

I’ve come to discover another fine line between irony and kitsch within the subject matter. There are aspects to the 1950s that I abhor. When most people think of the 50s they immediately center on the stereotypical: poodle skirts, saddle shoes, greasers, soda fountains and young Elvis. All these things are the 50s for sure, but I see them as clichéd 50s nostalgia in light of shows like “Happy Days” and movies like “Grease” and “American Grafitti”. Those images speak immediately to a greater 50s collective stereotype, and have a hard time being interpreted in any other way.  To me they are as empty and undesirable as the doo-wop music of the day.

In more candid images of families and people interacting, I am able to explore the issues I am really interested in and have only recently been able to articulate. The first concerns mass consumerism, which began in the 1950s and permeates every aspect of life today. I have yet to explore this strongly in my work, but I see great potential for it. In a pivotal scene from his 1957 film “A Face in the Crowd”, director Elia Kazan points to the con artistry of mass media to sell products. In a time of unprecedented wealth and success for the white middle class, media and advertising changed everything.

“Through television, Americans now led a mediated life, interrupted by the gentle (or not so gentle) urgings of advertisers, helping them see their lives in special ways, requiring special needs” (Jennings 334). Today our world remains dominated by advertisement and product, and we continue to spend our money on stuff to bring us happiness.  I am very concerned with the extent that American’s find their identity in the products they buy, and there is ripe potential in the 50s images to explore these issues.

“We are now confronted with the problem of permitting the average American to feel moral even when he is flirting, even when he is spending, even when he is not saving, even when he is taking two vacations a year and buying a second or third car. One of the basic problems of this prosperity, then, is to give people the sanction and justification to enjoy it and to demonstrate that the hedonistic approach to his life is a moral, not an immoral one. This permission given to the consumer to enjoy his life freely, the demonstration that he is right in surrounding himself with products that enrich his life and give him pleasure must be one of the central themes of every advertising display and sales promotion plan.” –Dr. Ernest Dichter, Motivations, April 1956. (Ewing 36).

The key issues I’ve explored thus far concern gender and domestic roles within the home, an area of 50s life that has changed dramatically. I’ve come to understand through dialogue concerning my subject matter with friends, family and especially my wife, that my interest in 50s imagery is much more personal than I originally thought. I have been married for almost 8 years, and with young children now occupying our house I’m learning as I go what it takes to be a parent. The process had caused me to often consider my own upbringing.

Author Mary Caputi sees the mythical 50s as a veneer for a more ambiguous reality. “Is it possible that the era of the 1950s itself utilized visual culture in order to project the image of wholeness? Was the era so contented, so happily self-contained to those living in it, or do we tend to misread what is simply the look of completion?” (Caputi 113). This idea of false perfection vs. the reality of day-to-day life as a dad and husband lies at the center of my interest in 50s imagery. For me these images are somehow part of my identity as a privileged white American, whether I like it or not. I do not wish to go back to those times in the least. Rather, I see them as a humorous reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.