Month: September 2024
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I have worked for many years now as a Play Designer. Explaining what this means is never a simple thing but I’ll try here as it may inform the rest of what I write which is still bubbling up for me as I type this. I work for a company that makes digital play and learning products for very young children. I design open playful and playable digital toys with a cast of cute characters that primarily end up on phones and tablets and are mostly played with by preschool-age kids. The job is empathy balanced with function and it…
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This is a bit of an origin story for one of the ways an image can mark a moment of change. It’s about how a titan of dust let me know I could trust myself more as an artist. … While most of my art making is connected to abstraction and intuitive mark making, I do occasionally make a more straightforward landscape or figure drawing. But I was thinking back tonight to one particular drawing that sat a bit between those two modes. In 2015 I had started making abstract drawings that I ended up calling Dots Series 1 &…
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Does art lay in wait in an artist’s materials? Is there a drawing inside every pencil, a painting in every tube? Do the artist’s hands contain the art or does it travel from the head, electric and formless, commanding the hand to make tangible from mental? In my conscious mind, there is never any fully formed art. There can be concepts, modes, structures, tools, and patterns that I choose from towards the idea of making art. But there is no plan or precognition of a final state or even its process in my head. I make choices in the moment…
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As much as digital creation comes with some facility and convenience I still prefer working with physical media. Digital has that kind of “anything is possible” promise but actually often feels like there are more limitations than what can be done with a bunch of drawing, painting, gluing, layering, blending. And my mind and body feel differently when working physically. Not just the bodily sensations of making gestures with media on a variety of surfaces but there’s a change in how I engage with the actions and presence of making things “in person”.