The Work of Art

Day 5 (7/30/11)

Today I am going to drift away from biking and Guerilla Art and take a look at the “work” of art. This morning while cleaning the litter boxes my wife made the comment that she should be doing some work. In truth she had been working on her art all morning. Then, when I went to the post office and a young man from the neighborhood made a comment about supposing I was spending the summer relaxing. I answered with some flippant remark about being ready for school to start so that I could have a break. If I had said I spend my summers making art he would have felt that his suspicions had been confirmed. I got to pondering on why even we as artist sometimes see what we do as insignificant. Artists are a unique breed in that they can feel guilty for doing art work as well as not doing art work. I suppose it all comes down to monetary value. If I was selling my work and making money it would be easier to justify. At this point I am just putting them in the basement and running out of space to store them. When I first started doing Guerilla Art it was an attempt at creating art without having something I would have to store. The first couple of years went well but at a certain point rebuilding them over and over again started to take its toll. I tried to change the constructions each time but the materials kind of dictated the form and they tended to always turn out looking somewhat the same and it was a lot of physical work. By the time I was done with the larger ones I would be covered with sweat and dirt not to mention all types of biting insects. Most people wouldn’t have worked that hard to make money but for me it was a labor of love. I am lucky as an art teacher my teaching can pay for my addiction. Making art is indeed something that would be impossible for me to give up. It is the people who have to make a living off their art that I really feel for. After years of going to school and perfecting their craft they may or may not be able to make a living from their craft. In many cases these artist are forced into taking other jobs to pay the bills while burning the midnight oil to do their art. I realize that historically this has always been a problem. Who as an artist hasn’t heard the familiar, “But you like doing art” usually from somebody who is trying to get you to do something for nothing. For the most part I do like doing art but as I tell my students when they start to get bogged down, “Art is 25% inspiration and 75% hard work. Over the next couple of entries I am going to take a look at a couple of my paper pieces and the process (work) of making them.

Camp Life

Camp Life

Day 4 (7/5/11)
Most of the time we go camping so that we can kayak, bike or do some other type of physical activity. However, there is something to be said for just the simple pleasures of cooking over a fire, relaxing and enjoying your surroundings. This camping trip illustrated that premise. We had a great time kayaking and we even did a little biking until the heat, horseflies and impending rain drove us back to camp. The rain never did come down very hard or long but it did give us an opportunity to just sit around and enjoy camping though. After cooking up some chicken pudgy pies over the fire we finished it off with some dessert pies. All of this we washed down with a nice bottle of Merlot. We spent a lot of time being entertained by the nuthatches and chipmunks. There must have been a family of nuthatches in the trees over our Tepee. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that we had procured the tepee site again this year. Anyway, between the nuthatches putting on an aerial display in the trees and the chipmunks scurrying around our feet we had quite a show. We also took some time to build some cairns around our campsite which the chipmunks seemed to enjoy climbing. We decided to try to film them climbing the cairns so with a little persuasion and a lot of patience we finally got our shot. It was nice to just relax and although we enjoy the physical activities there is something to be said for just savoring the experience of camping.

No Chipmunks were hurt in the makeing of this movie.

Last Plunker Standing

Day 3 (6/22/11)

Last Plunker Standing

As the old saying goes, “A bad day…” is certainly true of the bike trail. We had planned on going out on the trail earlier in the morning but just as we were about to get the bikes out it started raining. We waited for the rain to stop then headed out. As you can imagine it was kind of wet for building but great for riding. Every trip down the trail is a new adventure. This time it came in the form of some Sand Hill Cranes. As we were riding along, a sedge of cranes started making a tumultuous uproar on the other side of the railroad tracks. When we first stopped two flew right over the top of us. One circle around and landed again. In an attempt to get a picture of them I decided to wade across the ditch which turned out to be almost knee deep. By the time I got across the water and up the tracks they had wondered off and I caught just a glimpse of the baby.

Cranes



Stormy



Another Rebuild

Keeping it Fresh

Day 2 (6/20/11)

New build

I went out early this morning. It was threatening rain so again I almost had the trail to myself. My big plan was to rebuild what I refer to as the “Totem build” but when I got there it was the one time that had a hiker (we will no longer refer to them as walkers since walker has become an obscenity in our vocabulary). When I first hit the trail I saw some material lying on the side of the trail so I took some time to make a small build. I haven’t had a lot of luck with builds that close to town surviving very long but I thought since it was small I would give it a try. I worked my way up the trail until I got to “K build”. It still had one tie standing so I took some time and reconstructed it. I also started working on “Giacometti build”. Finally on the way home I stopped and finished the “dangler”.

K Build

Giacometti Build

Dangler

On the Road Again

Day 1 (6/19/11)

I was Framed

I can’t believe it has been four years since I started being the scourge of the bike trail with my despicable building Aar Aar Aar. I also can’t believe that it is the middle of June and our first trip on the bike trail. Well, it’s been that kind of year. The trick this year is going to be keeping it fresh. The first year was easy, everything was new and the Christians were an endless source of writing material. The second year I concentrated more on the plants and animals. Year three was just lame and fortunately I was saved by our Baltic cruise. That probably explains why it is the middle of June and I am just getting started. It rained hard all morning so we weren’t sure if we would make it out or not. As it turned out we pretty much had the trail to ourselves. Most areas were still too wet to build but when we got to where the old tripod build stood I decided to go for it and rebuild it. Eileen documented the build from start to finish and took some really fun pictures of it. The only build that I saw that was still standing from last year was dangler but the dangler had fallen off. I will have to take a look at that when it dries out a little.

In the Beginning

Summer of 85 (Mill Dam)

I want to go back to the start of my directional spraying technique and take a look at some of the art that influenced the pieces I am doing today. I had taken a summer independent study watercolor class where I intended to do on location “plein air” paintings. Things started out well and every morning I would pack up my bicycle with my equipment and some snacks and set out to find something new to paint. After a couple weeks I happened across a set of Dr. Ph. Martin’s Concentrated Watercolors while perusing an art shop. I was totally taken with the intensity of the colors and started experimenting with them in my airbrush. I had used the airbrush in college but tired of the mixing and cleaning that went along with using the tube acrylics which were pretty much the only option in the early years. It didn’t take long after finding the concentrated colors before I was spending all my time with the experimenting with the medium. It wasn’t until years later that I found out that the watercolors weren’t lightfast. The good news is that I had only sold a few pieces and was able to warn the people who bought them to keep them out of the light. It was during this time that I started to notice the subtle effects that I could achieve by spraying the colors on from different directions. I experimented with different types of paper to try to bring out the color effects but could never get the kind of texture I needed to achieve it to its fullest. By then we had moved to Minnesota. Here I met an artist friend Chris Hindle who suggested my taking a papermaking class with Walter Nottingham at UW-River Falls but that’s another story.

Summer of 85 #1



Summer of 85 # 2



Untitled

Untitled #1

Untitled #2

More Leaves

9/14/06

As I warned in the beginning of this blog, order is not going to be a major priority and things might get a little random. In this segment for example we are going to go back to the fall of 2006. It was the weekend of September 13th and 14th. Cedar Grove had just been hit by a huge wind storm. The sound of chain saws cleaning up trees and branches could be heard everywhere. We hadn’t lost anything major in our yard but there was debris everywhere. I set out to make some paper to commemorate the event. Out of this endeavor several new techniques were born. As any artist knows, often you just go through the motions in hope that some happening or discovery will spark an idea. I had an instructor along the line who referred to them as happy accidents. This day brought a couple. It was the first time I pressed leaves into the surface of the paper to represent the leaves that were blown everywhere. I wanted to produce a paper piece that also illustrated the energy of the storm so I started whipping the wet paper with willow branches to give the surface a windblown effect. After working out some issues it became an effective way of texturing the surface and I have used it in other pieces since. After it was dry it still didn’t quite have the action I was looking for so I sprayed it with a special whirling technique, again developed for these two pieces. I then applied some molded leaves to the surface in a way to represent the blowing leaves. Until writing about my later leave pieces I had kind of forgotten about these and it was fun to revisit them.

9/13/06