Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters by Hendrick Avercamp, 1608

Then a funny thing happened with some of the artwork from the Rjiks Museum Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters by Hendrick Avercamp, 1608. I started messing around with this image found on the museum website. The Rijks Museum has been encouraging artists to work with images from their collection. I was happy to oblige. This particular scene matched some thoughts I had about social media.

The environment shown here of a whole town out on the ice together. All classes mixing outdoors enjoying Holland’s national pastime of ice skating. According to Wikipedia, there is much more going on in this painting than a casual observer of our generation would gather. I like the metaphor of this particular painting to describe what our current society may be missing. This painting has in it layers of activity including candidly cultural scenes along with some indiscretions. More importantly is the idea that this painting was a “motion picture” of its time. People would sit by this and “experience” each event and be reminded of the activities, while the rumors of finding the hidden circumstances could be a scandalous conversation to share.

What happens in 2008, four hundred years later? I picked the year (2008, with its digital camera time/date stamp in the lower right corner) arbitrarily, but also as a particular time when Facebook started to really become more commonly used. With social media, video games and a more cerebral, less active culture… the same spot is quiet and deserted..

Other variations include “People as Weapon” a murmuration that points to the real culprit in violence.

Isolating the people of this scene, and making a rubylith mask alludes to special effects in film. In how we are accustomed to seeing a special
feature about putting people into a scene, or taking them out an our convenience while telling a story.

A System of Words - self portrait

Is This What I Do? Or, is this What I Am?

Some *more* Thoughts.

“Is This What I Do? Or, is this What I Am?”

~ thoughts

“I am offended. The Art World Favors Dead People.” ~ thoughts

“Is there any art form that is so powerful that it cannot be surpressed?” ~ thoughts

Non-Gnostic

“No Special Knowledge… Non-Gnostic”  ~ thoughts

********************

Unmanageability of Visual Culture

a series of repeated "frames" with stencil of a bone.

Thinking of the reality of a still life. It is no longer alive, it's “still/dead” and waiting there to be painted. Put upon multiple frames, reminds me of the video culture we have become. Unless it moves, people tend not to look at it.

other quotes to think about:

Christopher Stackhouse:

Insidious Reproduction of Art

Unmanageability of Visual Culture

Crowd-sourcing Quality

Macha

Current Culture Tools

Guy Kinnear

find: Flaneur

see: Walter Benjamin -

Phsychogeographic Review (blog)

Charts of Knowledge

WTF

My thoughts lately have been about using graphic design as an expression. I have looked up the term “graphic expression” and it's not necessarily a widely used term in the arts, but it does help me start to place myself in a “conversation” in the art world. 

I am not a street artist, and not of this generation with their willingness to be out on a ladder, up a wall or over a fence to make a statement. But I have realized that the artworld is very influenced by artists who bring a digital/design sensibility to their art. This is a genre where I am curious how far I can go. 

I do have things to say in respects of symbolism or semiotics of how our society accepts certain truths such as “guns kill people.” I feel like there are numbers of icons like the gun that people jump to conclusions instead of thinking it through.

Why The Firearm? WTF — a flag that questions our view of weapons.

I thought if I was to make more iconographic objects like flags and shirts that start to question our stance on weapons. If we didn't have guns, murders would happen via blunt force trauma, like hammers or stabbings with knives etc.

APU Studio 5 - July 2015

Studio #5 at APU this summer. I jammed in all of the different work that I brought. This configuration allows me to parse out the different items, and speak to how I arrived at some of these visual conclusions.

One area, the unstretched canvases to the right are based on maps from throughout my life. Then the back wall is balanced with the print on plywood panel, which is a direction I feel strongly about due to its employing digital aspects with analog mark making too.

The framed canvases on the left side of the back wall is an entry into a world where I can explore some humorous tendencies that I am finding very fulfilling.