Be suspicious of things that make sense too quickly

This remains as one of my favorite spoken words of all time. Shake the dust.

“For the ones that are told “speak only when you are spoken to” and then are never spoken to. Speak every time you stand so you do not forget yourself. Do not let one moment go by that dosen’t remind you that your heart, it beats 900 times every single day and that there are gallons of blood to make every one of you oceans. Do not settle for letting these waves settle and the dust that collect in your veins…shake the dust.”

Order is.

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Workspace

05.22.12

Photo Credit: Christina Park

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My Top 5 Historic Art Masterpieces

#5: Improvisation 28 (1912) | Vassily Kandinsky

Last one! This one is really sick.

A 19th century Expressionist artist who was one of the first artists to investigate the theoretical possibility of purely abstract painting. 

Kandinsky may have been a synesthete-i.e. someone who “hears” colors and “sees” sounds. Whether he was or not, his work clearly depicts how he strongly linked sound and color. His early study of the work of Whistler convinved him that the arts of painting and music were related: Just as a composer organizes sound, so a painter organizes color and form. Kandinsky was particularly interested in the music of the Arnold Schomnberg, who around 1910 introduced a momentous change in musical history. Schomnberg eliminated the tonal center and treated all tones equally, denying the listener any place of repose and instead, prolonging the tension of his music indefinitely. Kandinsky believed that if music could exist without a tonal center, could art exist without subject matter?

Kandinsky gave his work musical titles, such as “Composition” and “Improvisation,” and aspired to make paintings that responded to his inner state rather than an external stimulus and which would be entirely autonomous, making no reference to the visible world. 

In his work Improvisation 28, the colors leap and dance, with different colors expressing different emotions. He believed that art’s traditional focus on accurate rendering of the physical world was basically materialistic quest. Art should not depend so much on the mere physical reality. He hoped that his paintings would lead humanity toward a deeper awareness of spirituality and the inner world. Rather than searching for correspondence between the painting and the world where none is intended, the artist asks us to look at the painting as if we were hearing a symphony, responding instinctively and spontaneously to this or that passage, and then to the total experience.

Art History | Marilyn Stokstad

Question?

For artists and designers, the tree is a sort of muse. An inexhaustible source of study.

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Studio Homework Day 2 || Perfection Loop

05.22.12

I’ll be around. Known but not seen.

My Top 5 Historic Art Masterpieces

#4: Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) | Jackson Pollock

The splatter paintings in museums that I never understood became so much clearer after studying Jackson Pollock. 

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is perhaps the best-known artist associated with Abstract Expresionism. In 1950, Time magazine described Pollock as “Jack the Dripper”. 

In the fall of 1946, Polluck had begun to work in a renovated barn, where he placed his canvases on the floor so that he could reach into them from al four sides. Polluck’s unrestrained gestures transformed the idea of painting and the way that artists viewed the canvas. Polluck painted by moving around and within the canvas, dripping and scoring commercial-grade enamel paint (rather than special artist’s paint) onto it using sticks and trowels. Pollock’s urgent arcs and whorls of paint have been described as chaotic, but he saw them as labyrinths that led the viewer along complx paths and into an organic calligraphic web of natural and biomorphic forms. Pollock’s all-over composition lacks hierarchical arrangement it has multiple moving focal points and it denies perspectival space. Yet, as the paint travels around the canvas in arcs and ellipses, it never escapes the edges of the canvas. There is also a top and bottom. Like a coiled spring, the painting seems full of anxious energy that is ready to explode at any moment. 

Autumn Rhythmn is heroic in scale: It is almost 9 feet tall by 17 feet wide and it engulfs the viewer’s entire field of vision. According to Lee Krasner, Polluck was a “jazz adict” who spent many hours listening to the explosively improvised bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Art History | Marilyn Stokstad

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Frame

05.18.12

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4 Hours of Funk

05.19.12

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Nourishment for the mind and soul. The food of freethinkers. 

Photo Credit: Justin K. Kim

05.18.12

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Drip

05.17.12

Studio Move-In