No negative is exempt from becoming grist for the graphite mill. Yes, the dental technician seemed puzzled over my request to take my x-rays home, but seeing as how I'd paid 98% of their purchase price (the other 2% was graciously picked up by my dental insurance) she could hardly protest. The off-kilter composition (of the negative, not my teeth) had caught my eye as it hung clipped against the green-tinted plexi of the light box. It seemed the perfect image to kick off a series of smaller drawings on some cheesecloth wrapped plywood panels I'd freighted around since art school.
That was a year ago.
In the interim my graphite teeth have sat atop a shelf in the studio whilst I produced much larger works for gallery walls. For whatever reasons, the diminutive 6" square format lost its appeal before I got beyond that first prototype. Tomorrow I'll go to the studio with four other small photographs and begin anew. The subject matter is comprised of a few things from daily life: baubles, wind in the marsh, a bleeding tree, and hazy self reflections.
I love the work of Brian Borrello. My first years of art school I struggled with the seeming inferiority of charcoal, my preferred art medium. Charcoal had none of the cache of oil, the "nowness" of acrylic, or the elitist credibility of mixed media. In fact, it was looked upon as a colorless tool for helping artist newbies learn the fundamentals of shading and contour line work. Relegated to a perfunctory role in the design of a larger artwork, charcoal never took center stage. I made many excuses for its use in my pieces those first years until I came across Brian Borrello. With one look at his stark motor oil and charcoal botanicals I knew that, from that point on, I had an irrefutable argument for charcoal.
Borrello, like many a Pacific Northwest artist, creates unashamedly beautiful work inspired by the forms of regional flora. As Portland likes to tout itself as a mighty progressive city, it comes as no surprise that Borrello uses the presentation of his iconography to critique the pollution of our natural resources. His drawings are stark silhouettes of leaves, twigs, roots, vines, and the like. They are shaped with a velvety black derived from a combination of india ink and charcoal. It is a living black, for it rolls and broils with tiny plumes and clouds that suggest a depth beyond the surface of the paper. It is a black that captures the imagination, and I've often thought about it when letting my mind wander at the studio. Perhaps the closest equivalent in nature might be the charred remains of a recently burned forest. That is Brian Borrello's black.
Many of Borrello's botanical forms are centered upon a stark white substrate— this comforts the eye with a composition everyone equates with stability, comfort, and religious importance. But that comfort can be short lived when one considers the brownish halo that surrounds the dark forms. This unnatural brown serves as an irregular median strip between the clean white of the canvas/paper surface and the black vacuum of the imagery. The brown is derived from motor oil and as it surrounds the drawn form a peculiar effect occurs. Suddenly, your eye perceives the image as a burned impression; as if the paper had been branded or the natural item had grown so hot it had scorched its way through the substrate and left a charred opening into a vast inky space. Simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, an entire show of such imagery tends to remind me of the reliquary room at the El Santuario de Chimayo in New Mexico. While Borrello's chapel is far more austere and aesthetically micro-managed there is, in my mind, a similar sentiment: hand-made representations of the affliction are put up on the walls with the hope of a miracle.
Since he occupies such a venerable place on my personal path to becoming an artist it was hard for me to admit that there was something amiss at his most recent show. Ars Brevis, Vita Longa at Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery was just as lovely an exhibit as Borrello has always put on, and I suppose that was the problem. This show seemed not at all dissimilar from the first Borrello exhibit I saw over seven years ago. If anything, the current work had a more diminutive scale by comparison. The imagery was indecipherable from pieces done nearly a decade ago and the only obvious evidence of Borrello branching out existed in the unsettling use of an eerie yellow-green as the background color for a few paintings. I left the show disappointed with the work for not providing the same sort of elation it had in the past. What had seemed important in terms of medium and message then seemed safe and predictable now. The motor oil had lost its burn and the forms had become simply decorative silhouettes instead of openings to the void. To be fair though, perhaps what bothered me the most had little to do with Borrello's work, for it hadn't changed over the years— what bothered me was that I had.
* An amateur interviewer is saved by Borrello's expressiveness and enthusiasm. This video is worth watching if you've never seen any of Borrello's work before, but isn't recommended for people who find morning talk show-like questions to be the scourge of journalism.
For those of you just joining me, welcome. For you select few who've been with me all along, I commend your perseverance.
It has taken about a week to migrate all of my previous blog posts to Blogger. While the process was fairly free of glitches it was rife with tedium, and I'm glad to be in a position to start posting new content now. Throughout this process I've had some time to reflect on what I've written and I've come to realize that this blog breaks two of the cardinal rules of blogging.
First of all, it evades any real focus. I initially started the blog to serve as a way of updating friends, family, and supporters about my artwork. But from the outset my artwork was only one of many topics that I chose to write about. As entries were moved to Blogger I began assigning labels/tags/keywords (whatever you wish to call them) to the entries and was puzzled at some of the descriptors I settled on:
In some instances these oddball criteria actually appeared more frequently than "art" or "drawing." So it seems that this blog is more of a personality platform than a promotional tool. The inherent danger with such an approach is that one's personality might not be fascinating enough to merit much of an audience. Such an outcome might be devastating to other people, but I assure you that I'm 100% capable of weathering being outed as boring, middle-class, redundant, and fashion-less.
Another way in which this blog deviates from the venerable eight-year-old traditions of the medium is that the posts are far too long. If I'm going to write about something I want to offer more than a few pictures and snarky comments. Such an avant-garde approach will naturally limit my audience to people who are both comfortable with reading, and capable of visiting a web page for longer than thirty seconds.
So if you're a Portland resident, teacher, artist, designer, music aficionado, cultural critic, or suffer from OCD, then we might just have something in common. Welcome to my subjective reality.
The French have a saying for that moment when you’ve had enough; it translates into English as, “My bowl is full!” Tonight, my bowl is full of Apple. I’m tired of Apple’s veneer of utilitarian design. I’m fed up with the constant optional software upgrades that render my system obsolete before I’ve even started exploring under the hood. In short, I’m more than a little cross with Apple for succumbing to the Capitalist pitfall of blatantly pandering to stock rather than customers. Honestly, have they watched their own Ridley Scott commercial lately?
For two weeks I’ve been unable to easily load new posts in iWeb (and no, this does not ‘serve me right’ for using iWeb). My program frequently crashes, taking all my most recent witticisms with it. The Oz-like fellows over at Apple Core send nice emails saying they’ve fixed all the problems so that I’m lured back to clicking the Publish button yet again, only to have it malfunction.
iMad. iFrustrated. And tonight I’ve decided, after yet another game of nebulous run-around with the poorly implemented MobileMe, that I’m going to move this blog elsewhere.
So pay attention my three readers, because soon I will be leaving, and if I don’t take you with me, I’ll have to bribe other people to read my posts.
There are some things that humanity has historically been unable to resist. Gold. Silver. Puns. So I’ll just succumb and state that the Rice NW Museum of Rocks and Minerals is a real gem.*
On my second visit I was no less impressed with their vast collection of bewildering specimens from the clutches of the earth. Minerals that look as downy as cotton, as soft as ermine, as poisonously pigmented as American Apparel, fill case after glass-fronted display case in the untouched rambling 50’s ranch home of former logging baron Richard Rice.** A boulder sized thunder egg with an opal center greets visitors to the NW Mineral Gallery and one room in the main house cycles through different UV lights to demonstrate the hidden phosphorescence of some otherwise banal looking rocks. In the basement you’ll not only find the sweetest linoleum floor ever laid, but a fantastic collection of petrified wood (including petrified pine cones). I posted a few more pics on flickr should you care to explore why mineralogy has informed every hipster painter in the Pacific Northwest for the past five years.
If you have a weakness for small scale museums of oddities and obsessions then I highly recommend that you check out hiddenportland.com which has put together a charming little brochure of the finest rarely visited haunts of PDX.
*I’m not the only punny one. Check out this article where they manage to get in, “It will rock your mind and salt your appetite.” Why would they write that? And how could they follow it with the fact that the museum is only “a stone’s throw off Highway 26”? Funny how puns are only funny when you’re the one making them.
**Fact check please. I believe this to be true from some informative labels I read on my first visit but I was also monitoring twelve children during that visit and must admit the possibility that this may have weakened my recall.
My weekend consisted of three days filming with The Company in the foothills of the Oregon coastal range. Thus far, The Company consists of only four diverse dreamers harboring the vision of a full length movie. Nevertheless, I suspect it will bloom into many more folks than that by the time we’re through. Grandiose labors of love tend to attract other dreamers. The various trials and tribulations, from the screenwriter’s perspective, can be followed at I’m Not Arguing That With You.
For my part I was asked to get lost. I lay down in spider webs and organic detritus. Dirt was kicked upon me by those closest to me. I was made to cry.
My initial viewing in my Beginning Design class left me with impressions only, and I wanted to revisit the film after a few months of dealing with typography, grids, and visual hierarchy. I’m assuming that I don’t differ from most fledgling graphic designers (an acceptance of reality that undoubtedly does separate me from the majority of fledgling graphic designers) and I’ve been using Helvetica as the default font for every project I’ve taken on.* As many of the eccentric pillars of the design community** mention in the film, Helvetica is clean, ubiquitous, and safe to use on just about any project. It won’t make waves and you’ll appear to know what you’re doing. Really, if it’s good enough for the majority of corporate America, it’s probably good enough for my homework assignment.
Now, if you’re reading this and not a graphic designer, then you’re probably scratching your head at this point and wondering if it’s even possible to make an hour and a half movie about a font. I assure you it is. Helvetica is such a powerful cultural force at this point that whole books have been devoted to it (in a cultural critique kind of way, not in the sense that it is the font for the book, although there are those examples as well). One of the most interesting things my instructors stated in the afore mentioned design class was that an understanding and appreciation of typography is “what separates the designer from the desktop publisher.”
Statements like this seem to be bandied about in the design world all the time. As Helvetica points out, designers are an opinionated lot. Ironically, they are all right in some way so, like most heated debates, the question over Helvetica’s prominence and use will continue ad nauseam. In the meantime I will be sharpening my typographic vocabulary (ascender, serif, x-height, et al) and compiling three fonts that will work for every*** project, and three fonts to perpetually vilify. Watch out Comic Sans, I’m coming for you.
*But I only used Helvetica in the beginning: in every instance but one (when I was designing a movie poster for Helvetica, appropriately enough) it was transformed into a different font that seemed to better suit the content. I don’t want you thinking I’m a one-trick pony so early on in my career. Becoming that pony takes at least a few years in the professional world.
***Ahhh, type crime! You never just hit the bold button to fatten up some highlighted text. Big design no-no! This just adds weight to all the edges of the letter forms without a commiserate handling of the white space between the letters. Such an action brands you as the amateur that you are. It’s akin to using iWeb as your web design and blogging program.
The storm came to me in a dream. In this dream I was at my teenage home again and the whole world had dropped into black and white. The house was dramatically lit from above but all around it was a great expanse of darkness. I wished to tell my father that I was going to walk a friend home but, for some undecipherable reason, felt slightly afraid of doing so. I opened the screen door to call into the house but then shut it. Working up my nerve I opened it again, and promptly shut it. The air was warm and damp outside. From far off in the darkness I could hear claps of thunder closing in on the house. A third time I pulled on the screen and my father, alerted to some noise at the door and perhaps suspecting one of the cats wished to be let in, appeared in the kitchen with an inquisitive look. I told him that I would walk my friend home and be right back. He nodded ascent and went back to work on his project.
I do not know which friend it was that waited for me on the lawn; her head up watching the sky as it flashed intermittently around us. The thunder came closer. She was familiar and yet unidentifiable as any person from my past or present. I walked this woman into the dark and out of the light illuminating my house. After some time I returned from the darkness alone. Somewhere in the darkness my friend had returned home safe just as I now was.
I entered the house and my father beckoned me to sit down on the sofa. He had made something for me— fashioned it out of clay. It would be an aid to me in the days to come. Whatever it was glowed brightly in his cupped hands, and he told me a brief recounting of the creation of the world as he held this strange light. It wasn’t a creation myth from any culture I recognized but, somehow, it seemed plausible. My father is an unfailingly honest man and I knew that this story must have been something he’d encountered in his studies.
He walked carefully with his gift over to the sofa and set it down on the cushion next to me. It seemed to glow from an inner light as it lay on the couch: a living light that flickered in strength. Here was a tiny sculpted baby such as you might see in a seasonal creche with closed eyes and rounded terra cotta form. But unlike those static devotional sculptures this one held its own light within it. I looked closer. There was something else. . .
It seemed that the storm was on top of us now. The thunder rattled the branches of trees and shook the windows of the house. The muggy air had become a conduit of electrical current.
It was breathing.
In the flash and snap of lightning I could see the little chest rise up and down. What sort of gift was this that my father had fashioned? I could hear the wall of rain coming out of the darkness, moving across the neighborhood roofs towards our house; carried on a wave of sound and energy.
I woke with that dream rattling about my mind and the old Victorian house I call home creaking and popping under the power of a summer storm breaking the night.
I find the strangest things sometimes. I’m no Davy Rothbart mind you, just someone with a tendency to stare at the ground.
More often than not I find lists. One of my more recent finds was this scrap of paper next to the library catalog. It instantly made my typed inquiry of “Volvo repair, brake light” seem a bit prosaic. I tried to conjure a picture of the woman who wrote this: respectably edgy, tattooed, pixie-like PDX mama (recent mama) concerned with jump starting Junior’s cerebellum while traveling the globe in dodgy hostels full of “real” people. As the portrait became more and more vivid I realized that this fictitious hipster parent that I was creating said more about my perceptions of Portland than it did about the actual person who might have penned the list. Almost immediately I began to feel a tad arrogant. Portland isn’t just a hotbed of young, Leftist, caucasian urbanites, and only a blatant elitist would state such a thing.*
I turned back to my search for car repair manuals. Naturally, all the Volvo items were checked out.
* A blatant elitist or Dave Hickey, who proclaimed Portland the land where, “the White People won” at a speech he gave here a number of years ago. Every person in the audience was mildly outraged in a socially appropriate manner.
Everyone I know grapples with efficiency in some way or other. Efficiency is a slippery construct that promises more reward in just about every aspect of life if only we knew how to be more masterful with our time. Now, as many a sage person has pointed out, it is really our perception of time that is the problem, not how we micromanage it. As I cannot profess to being a particularly wise person I’ll just overlook that line of thinking and continue with analyzing efficiency.
It has been my experience that one only considers their efficiency when they are already overwhelmed. This would be an example of inefficiency. Caught up in the panic of potential failure lists are made, priorities set, and sleep minimized in order to realize the unreasonable. But the truly organized person rarely finds themselves in this state; they’ve already made the lists, set the priorities, and consequently enjoy a high level of operation with grace and time for sleep.
I’ve met a good number of people and most of them fall somewhere between hyper-efficient and criminally incapable. While the criminally-incapable are better fodder for scriptwriters in Hollywood I’ve always focused my attention on those rare ubermensch that I encounter. What is it that makes them so productive?
Thus far I’ve only come up with a few observations. The most efficient people tend to display these common behaviors:
1. THEY LISTEN TO BEN
“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” quoth Mr. Franklin who was, by all accounts, a powerhouse of productivity. Everyone I’ve ever known with remotely comparable intellectual prowess to Mr. Franklin has risen early and gotten straight to the day’s work. The flip side to that obviously being by 9pm they’re ready to pack it in, making them miserable bar hoppers and lightweights of late night conversation— but I hardly need to state the inherent disconnect between beer-steeped evenings and productive days, right?
2. THEY DO THE HARD STUFF FIRST
Nobody wants to hear this but it’s true— the most productive people tackle the difficult tasks early on in the day when they’re most rested, alert, and capable. Every corpuscle of your being may pull you towards checking your My Space page upon first waking to see who has been at Your Wall, but really, shouldn’t you finish that business plan first and then reward yourself with some mind-numbing internet drivel?
3. THEY SEE THE WHOLE PICTURE
Some people make lists and other write plans. A select few (whom I’ve never encountered) are rumored to keep every aspect of their lives neatly inventoried and prioritized in their head. Chances are you aren’t one of those people. Like other mere mortals you should write what needs to be done down. The simple act of committing your commitment to some tangible form, be it paper or pixels, grants it importance and helps establish what should follow what. Every highly efficient person I’ve met follows this rule in some form or other.
Now some people turn making lists and establishing priorities into yet another monumental chore that has to be done. I’m sorry for them but, if they have to be chores, then do these chores first (see THEY DO THE HARD STUFF FIRST above).
4. THEY HAVE A UNIFORM
This one will be an affront to all cool, hip, and creative people out there but I’ll type it anyway: the most productive people seem to wear a sort of uniform. They find one outfit that they like wearing, or they find an outfit that will work for nearly any social occasion, and they stick to it. They buy many copies of this get-up and keep them together in one place. Like a chef or hazmat worker, they are all business. No time waisted shopping, browsing Cosmo, puzzling over what to wear, or sorting clothing for the laundry. It’s worked for personalities as disparate as Einstein and Pollack so it may work for you. Head on over to the craft store and purchase fifteen white tees for twenty five dollars to complement your fourteen pairs of pleated khakis—
Flickr and I have been strangers for too long. Therefore, I spent the morning culling a few images from my recent jaunt to the Bay Area and offering them up to the masses.
As I was traveling with adolescents I felt it safer to bring my hearty SLR with Lensbaby as opposed to my frail but versatile digital SLR. Such foresight was rewarded when my camera was mispacked atop a mound of duffel bags and fell out of the back of the van before we even left the school driveway. Twenty minutes of personal panic ensued when my shutter failed to work, but eventually I realized that the batteries had been jarred in their housing and needed to be reset.
One of the most amusing things about using only a Lensbaby on a trip is that you are constantly explaining to people why you can’t take a group picture in front of the fountain, forest, waterfall, wild animal, etc. Despite many profound insights into the history of lenses, the artist’s vision, and the ingredients of the sublime I’m inevitably given a frustrated “what’s the point” look that silences any further explanation. I’m not offended. People are welcome to want prosaic group photographs just as I’m welcome to photograph moss and lichen. In the end, who can say which will provide a finer recounting of experience?
After feebly attempting to coerce comments out of you and coming up with so little response you may have believed you’d been party to my leaving the blogosphere for good. No such luck! I have been absent, to be sure, but for many a good reason which I will present in brief:
1. I had to produce nine painted paper-mache Commedia dell’Arte masks.*
2. I was uncovering the mysteries of “layer styles” in Photoshop in order to finish my assignments for the dubiously named Photoshop Expert class I was taking. To date, I would characterize myself as more of a Photoshop user than expert.
3. I was planning a graduation ceremony.
4. For nine days I was part of a class road trip in which I guided eight adolescents down the state of Oregon and into the Bay Area.
5. I only just returned from a three-day teacher retreat on the Salmon River.
6. I was finishing a web site for a client that had to go live before any other computer-related activities could take place (such as writing this for you to read).
My hope is that these will all serve as adequate excuses for my absence. I wouldn’t want to set a bad example and have you decide to disappear for the next few months. After all, this summer has big things in store for me and mine— it would be a shame for you to miss out.
* With the help of family and friends who were guilted into service by a desperate and sniveling moi.
While Subjective: The Artful Life was put to rest some time ago, posts about the art and process of Jeffrey T. Baker continue on in an updated form here. Thank you to all who have taken time to visit Subjective over the years.
