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November 25, 2009

Resisting the Urge

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Aquatint, art, artists, etching, Intaglio, landscape, landscapes, Occum's Razor, pictorial, Sataf, Sataf Spring, spray paint, telling the story — Joshua @ 8:42 pm

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author and aviator (1900-1945)

The Urge to Do Something can be powerful.

But good practitioners of any discipline are skilled at stripping away frivolity. The famous dictum, Occum’s Razor says something like, “Whatever doesn’t support, detracts” (that is not an exact translation, but it is an accurate translation). In Hebrew they say, “kol mosif gorea” which means “additions diminish”.

At the risk of violating the above principles I’ll tell you what brought this to mind. I just pulled a print. It’s the second state of a small plate that I took with me to a hillside not far from where I live. It’s located above the Sataf Spring just outside of Jerusalem. I drew out the landscape, the hills cascading one behind the other and the hungry sky above. I etched and printed it last week, but I felt it needed some atmosphere, some depth, so I did a few things (involving spray paint aquatint) and today I pulled the second state.

I don’t know exactly what to do right now. The decision is to Do Something or to consider it Done. It might actually be finished, but, and this is crucial, maybe it needs more. There is more that CAN be done, but I’m uncertain if there is more that SHOULD be done.

Meanwhile, I’m resisting the Urge.

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October 10, 2009

The Story of a New Project – Day One and Day Two

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: art students, artists, Chaos, experience, Intaglio, Jerusalem Print Workshop, kitchy art, L Joshua Goodman, landscape, modern art, new works, Printing Process, Printmaker, telling the story — Joshua @ 10:03 am

: 17×17 cm paper tiles

It’s not always easy beginning a new project. There is even an expression, “All beginnings are difficult”. I know that writers face “The terror of the empty page”. Probably most creative people know this feeling.

It takes me time to warm up; I start slow. The first day it took pretty much all day to divide my large parent-size sheets of Arches (pronounced “Arsh”) etching paper (roughly 50×70 cm / 19.5×27.5 inches). But by the end of the day I had two sheets cut down to 17×17 cm squares. I know this sounds simple, but I had to think constantly if this would work out properly in the entire scheme of things.

Then on Day Two of the project I made a grid for the piano. I needed to cut the piano into four pieces and position each fourth into a corner. I have done several of these in the past and each time, despite my best efforts and calculations, they never fit together right. So, as Harry said, “once more into the breach!

: Piano sketch and decomposition onto a tile

I began by drawing a piano. A Grand Piano at the angle I like, a three-quarters view from the right. Then I photocopied the drawing and divided it into four pieces. Then I placed those four quadrants into the corners of a predrawn 17×17 cm (6.75 inch) square and photocopied that four times. I need a minimum of four tiles to make one complete image in the center. As my finished work will be 12 tiles (four across by three down) this should give me at least six whole pianos. (Did I say that I will show you pictures soon?)

All this is a bit complicated. That’s why it takes me time to do these projects. Nobody likes to make mistakes (they cost money!). And it’s the old carpenter’s rule, Measure Twice, Cut Once. In the end, I think I should have made the tiles about three millimeters larger (about 1/8 inch). But I hope that all will be well, with perhaps a few adjustments as a I go.

That is Day Two.

Next Step in the coming days…

Next I have to draw and etch the piano tile and make four test prints. I’ll probably print one and photocopy the others. Hopefully it will all fit together and be beautiful. If not, I will make adjustments. And refinements. Until it is beautiful.

Then the final printing and assembly.

That’s another post.

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October 4, 2009

The Story of a New Project/Background

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: Arik Kilemnick, art, art students, artists, assigned value, etching, Fractal, Fractals, hammers, hands, Intaglio, Iron, Jerusalem Print Workshop, kitchy art, landscape, landscapes, Matisse, old masters, pictorial, sans serif, Sculpture, telling the story — Joshua @ 11:53 am

Where does an Idea begin.

I’ve tried to make it easy on myself. I have a running series that I am continually working with. It’s called “The Hammer and the Hand Series”. It gives me a framework to relate to.

As you can see from my website, there are several works that feature a hand (always my left hand) and a hammer. A hammer is the quintessential low tech tool. From the first time that man picked up a rock to pound a stick (perhaps a tent peg) into the ground, rather than using his bare hand, man has been using hammers.

This is, of course, an extension of the “Hand” series. This started because of two bits of information that came my way over the years. The first was when Miss Bennett (see previous post) mentioned that the best draughtsman in school has a thousand drawings of her left hand. So, since High School I have known that the way to draw well is to draw what’s close at hand. Literally.

Sketchbooks of the Old Masters

The other piece of intelligence that came my way was when I learned that the Old Masters had sketchbooks where they had drawn thousands of versions of hands in various positions. Then when they had a composition that required a right hand extended and foreshortened to the left, they just reached for their archive and pulled out the closest variant and they were good to go.

So my left hand, being close, serves as a model. And when I wanted to extend the idea, I turned to that First Tool and started the “Hand and Hammer” series.

Now it turns out that I have a plate from the old “Hand” days. Three years ago I started a new working of the old idea. Rather than print one large (it’s about 50×70 cm / 19.5×27.5 inches) print, I decided to cut the paper into tiles, each of which are about 17 cm square (6.75 inches). Then (and this is another unrealized idea from the past…like about from 1972, November) I decided to print these tiles as Ottoman or Armenian tiles where the single tile is not visually complete or even readable, but the whole coherent image comes from the joining together of multiples (and multiples is almost essentially warp and woof of printmaking).

The Hammer and the Piano

grand-piano-2021a Extending the idea of a hammer I decided that a piano had hammers and might be more visually interesting than a simple hammer. And a piano references another deep interest of mine, music.

Bartok said that the piano was a percussion instrument and the music he wrote with a piano part shows this clearly. The piano is banging and crashing. I believe he even specified that the piano should be placed in the back by the tympani. The reason the piano is so percussive of course is the hammers. Eighty-eight hammers at the tips of the fingers.

Amazing!

Like I said, this was started three years ago; I printed one printing of the “Hand” on twelve tiles each about 17 cm (6.75 inch) square. I drew, etched and printed a separate plate with a piano in the corners, but wasn’t satisfied. I put it aside to rest.

Until this week.

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September 27, 2009

Too much art

Filed under: General Discussion — Tags: art, art appreciation, art for sale, art students, artists, galleries, kitchy art, serious art, unknown artists, Van Gogh, visual artists — Joshua @ 6:21 pm

Kitch Sells

I think there’s too much art. There are lots of artists creating lots of art. I heard today of a student who made bookmarks which she sold on the street in Florence (Italy) to earn her way through art school. Ostensibly she made kitchy art to sell to tourists and serious art to sell to who knows who.

I don’t know who buys serious art. I sold a piece once to a priest from LA. I never met the kind friar, but I know he was a serious person. I was proud of him for buying work by a little-known artist. It takes someone special to do that.

There is a lot of really great art out there. I would even say a glut of great art. I think artists who aren’t selling should stop trying. Many artists I know have day jobs driving taxis or working in old folks homes. This is wholly legitimate and it indicates not the artists’ worthiness as an artist, but rather peoples’ worthiness as art appreciators. Rejection is hard for a sensitive soul. Art appreciators on the other hand think nothing of dismissing good work with a flip of the wrist. It’s easy. No trouble at all.

Buskers

Did you see the article (I think it was in the NYTimes) about the violin virtuoso (Joshua somebody, if memory [partly] serves) who played for an hour at a subway stop in Washington DC? He regularly commands tens of thousands of dollars per concert appearance. But he made less than $100 in an hour or so or of busking. THAT is a comment not on an artist, but on art appreciation in our society. In the same way visual artists who have menial jobs to support serious work should not be valued (self-valued I suppose I mean) by their income or job-grandeur. Someday perhaps (and this is a big perhaps) somebody will dig some “hobby” out of an attic and find a treasure. I’ve seen several galleries lately that have been showing the work of naive or insane or native American artists who only recently have been “discovered” to great acclaim. Now that they’re dead.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe there is a lot of valid, worthy and serious work being shown. But I’m pretty sure there is a lot of serious work not being shown as well.

Even the Art Industry Needs Content Writers

I have a friend from art school who told me she stopped doing art in favor of writing content for magazines of the art industry. She simply didn’t know how to store the ever accumulating piles of paintings and drawings. And it’s true. What do you do with stacks of stuff that nobody is interested in or that you don’t have time to find somebody interested? Can you imagine what would have happened if Van Gogh would have stopped painting and gone back to preaching or gotten a job as a street sweeper?

It happens all the time.

Attic Art

As for me, I make art for my children. For some of them it validates their own proclivities. For some of them it’s something to find in the attic fifty years from now.

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