Feb 25th 2010

This entry is about an exercise in writing about other's words influencing ideas in my head. I find their thoughts comforting while working with my own processes producing art as something that can be repeated to center focus.

One morning, walking to work, I began to think about what Donald Judd calls "competent art". Judd wrote in his notorious, polemical essay, Imperialism, Nationalism, Regionalism (1975), in it he says, "Competent art made in a place should be shown in that place." Judd advises not to fuss about the "spirit of the place", and as a practical matter, work should be shown in the place its made, going as far as to call 'imported art' an absurdity.

Given his particular context--the essay explores its titular concerns--in which its written, I'd agree with Judd, and so, I thought about the microcosm that is glorious St.Petersburg, Florida. And in thinking about what makes my mundane walk to work exciting, I became fascinated in the idea that my town is a ready-made object, just ripe for the plucking of content. I observed this for the beginning of the 2010 year, and I resolved to produce work about where I am, and about my localized environment. As awareness in this interest grew, I rethought my approach to my practice entirely in terms of my available resources. I share with you a portion of the physical walk; a beauty and resource I've ignored all along. With a particular eye to the visual textures and how they change, I'll pass over, walk on top of, and aesthetically hover over the very ground I walk on, in a cinematic way, of course.

So I made this video, to capture the 'what' in the why; a process of think/create/think again. I've connected this video sketch to a painting I completed in 2008 that draws on a similar thought about the same kind of walk. In this post, please see the painting enclosed. Notice the bottom portion of the composition. In the past I've painted imagery drawing inspiration from various kinds of movement. The angularity of the green lines on the yellow plane mimics the hexagonal tiles of the video work I filmed of the walk. The reason the shapes in the painting disconnect owes to the notion of motion with the movement of walking. The idea I can appropriate found imagery in my work of art related to my habitation of St.Petersburg is an idea present in my senior thesis. I find this to be an excellent source and a abundant resource for future work.

A Paige of my Favorite City, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 40 in., 2008



The St.Petersburg, Florida Walk
Uploaded by chemistrynotes. - Arts and animation videos.

Part 1: Peer review/Common thread

Sarah Gerard recently wrote about Kirk Palmer, my colleague at Eckerd College and showmate for our upcoming exhibit at the Morean Arts Center. In her article, entitled Local artist Kirk Palmer paints himself into the homeless image, Gerard, a blogger for Creative Loafing, *tbt, et el., portrays Kirk as a transnational citizen, military servicemen, and visual artist, who takes his local environment and transforms its components, variables, and symptoms into subject matter to explore

Nowadays a painter, Palmer is producing work that confronts our common reality and explores situations of identity. To paraphrase Gerard’s closing: Palmer’s work resolves a visual essay of hope and compassion for his city’s homeless, the Other, or the humanist by looking at despair and the grieving process as a common thread among human experiences. He consolidates appropriated materials--both found and personal--into recognizable imagery for painting.

I thank Ways of Seeing, by John Berger, for using materials borrowed from Walter Benjamin. Berger says, by way of Benjamin’s work, that when we view a painting, we are aware that we're seeing the product of the artist’s skill and creativity. To see is to touch, but not necessarily with your hands. When I visually reach for a subject, I situate my self in relation to it. A painting is that kind of encounter. Through these means, we are also aware of our role of looking. Alan Watts would call this the, “echo of existence.”

Kirk understands the historical tradition of the portrait painting and its metaphorical context as mirror. His style is draftsmen-like, representative, and uses a straightforward approach in its depiction of imagery. Indeed, Kirk places himself in the paintings by depicting his own visage. While the interchangeable historical counterpart of the portrait is the landscape, both formats are indelibly linked. Allow me to clarify this phenomenon: take for example the world of biology and natural sciences. In this world orientation for an organism is gained in relation to the place in which it is located. So, in order to understand the behavior of an organism you must study its environment. Likewise, Kirk’s collection viscerally marks the artist’s environment -- Saint Petersburg -- by mapping a cognitive spectrum of feelings about his localized landscape. Kirk paints himself in so we can identify with the Other -- the Other in Kirk’s works being ourselves.

Palmer also resolves his internal issues by confronting ideas like homelessness; the nuclear family versus individualism; and the American concept of ‘Freedom’. Palmer’s canvases carve out the despair in the causality of issues pertaining to the breakdown the American family and, by extension, the sense of community.

“There’s a lot of tension”, says Palmer. “I’ve never quite encountered these problems (in other countries) the way I have here, locally, in my own community.”

But Kirk is not an advocate, or an activist, and his work is not aimed at fixing the homeless problem. Kirk does, however, discern larger issues in a highly aesthetic and political way. This subject matter, for Kirk, is highly personal. Ms. Gerard captures Kirk’s feelings in the article; especially his reluctant trespass, crossing the line into voyeurism. Like many artists, he uses photographs as visual aids to construct paintings. But the fieldwork involved in capturing the homeless resting, curled in the nook of a downtown building, can be dangerous. If one asks for permission, there is understandably less tension, but consequently the role’s dynamic changes.

Gerard portrays a Palmer as an artist whose usage of regional mise en scène and social dynamic, as inspiration, cultivates ideas that return to where they’re made. The art retains a kind of hometown flavor when locally exhibited. This method provides the dramatic impact on hot-topic issues, such as homelessness, symptomatic of a class system which champions individuality, over-specialization, and aggressive competition as standard human values worth exploring. It’s clear from Gerard’s article that we’re asked to question everything we see, especially what it’s like in another’s position.

Joanne Mattera Art Blog: Marketing Mondays: How Do You Define Success?

Joanne Mattera Art Blog: Marketing Mondays: How Do You Define Success?

See My Lines pt.C, digital image, dimensions varible, 2010.

brutal weather

See My Lines pt.A, digital image, dimensions varible, 2010.
See My Lines pt.B, digital image, dimensions varible, 2010.

Update (work in progress)

Plastic Morean Fields, 30 by 48 in., Oil on plastic over stretcher, 2010.

The Four Colours of the Morean Walls

Yellow Wall, Oil on linen, 18 by 24 in., 2010
Blue Wall, Oil on linen, 18 by 24 in., 2010
Purple Wall, Oil on linen, 18 by 24 in., 2010
Red Wall, Oil on linen, 18 by 24 in., 2010

Morean Fields drawing series

Epic Hole graphite, conte, & pigment on vellum, 2010
Pregnant Void graphite & pigment on vellum, 2010
Themed Park 18 x 24 in., graphite & ink on vellum, 2010
Unconfirmed Space 18 x 24 in., graphite & pigment on vellum, 2010

GO NUCLEAR Wired Magazine Jun, 2008., pg 150-1.

Along with images from the upcoming show, I will also post relevant imagery to visually explain why I've chosen this particular approach. Also, the visual compendium will display the coordinates of how I see myself in the historic art/cultural slipstream, and provides a starting point for further discussion, or essay.

Here, a magazine uses words and imagery to push a message about environment and politics. The use of words and their placement impends an argument equally as effective, if not more so then one simply reliant on visuals. The addition of words adds another planar field for the viewer's consideration. This method of depicting images will be used in a series of four drawings on vellum.

In addition, this advertisement functions as a ready-made, a contextual marker in art history; comrade Duchamp, thank you. The blog Two Coats of Paint, a blog by Sharon Butler, ran a post entitled "Artists are at their most canny and resourceful when backed—or painted—into a corner" it can be found: Here. In this article two thing struck me. The first relates to my show's subject, theme, and technique. Bulter quotes Artforum writer Colby Chamberlain in saying, "Arguably the two key artistic inventions of the twentieth century are abstraction and the readymade." Chamberlain goes on, "The two inventions have on occasion converged but remained distinct. In the twenty-first century, however, artists have begun to treat the history of abstraction itself as a catalogue of styles open to appropriation. In short, the readymade devoured abstraction whole."

For myself, I found these two processes wrapped together for the duration of the thinking, planning, and construction phase of my work. The second notion that struck me upon reading Chamberlain via Butler is: "The secondhand status of a readymade sunders abstraction from its aspirational and emotive content, whereas the uninflected appearance of an abstract painting curbs the readymade’s penchant for mischief. (To this day, nothing accommodates the definition of 'art' so comfortably as stretched canvas.)" It occurred to me that anything can be subverted, then reappropriated as the subject matter of art. And if the ready-made is in fact in tension with the context of the stretched canvas, then the idea of the field may act as the vacillation between paintings placed in a gallery and the appropriated space outside of the institution's gallery walls.

The ready-made space of the Morean Fields will be at the center of my current visual work. I plan to understand my internal, pychological space as an artist by relating the safe place of my visual wanderings and ponderings out in the open. My transparency is mirrored in my choice of materials. I chose basic, classical, and academic materials to transfers my images: Vellum. The drawing's translucency is hyperbolical of the transparency so my organizations strive in perpetuity to achieve in arts communities. The work is bold, with tight dark fonts consisting of lines drawn in graphite, which juxtaposes the landscapes in the background. The difference between the light landscape constructed behind the font gives room to an absence. This lack between the words and imagery is consistent through all four images, and composes the focus of this series and others to come.

Timm Mettler

Large Plastic Morean Fields

T.Mettler Plastic Morean Fields, 30 x 48 in., 2010, Oil and China marker on plastic, over wooden stretcher