Tag: materials
-
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…
-
A blank drawing surface stares back as a challenge. The smooth surface of a page says nothing about what it wants. A fresh sketchbook or canvas can stop many artists in their tracks. Often the way I will approach a blank page is to immediately make “random” marks and forms — scribble, smudge, glue, scrape, smear — to break up the space of the page. Because my approach to art making is intuitive, I rely on an interaction between the surface, the tools, and my hand to further the process. I react to the surface and then to my own…
-
The how of making art is a cottage industry. There are countless classes and tutorials about the right tools, techniques, and mindset for people that want to make art but feel for whatever reason that they don’t know how. More often than not, these same people are also looking for some form of permission to be creative. They want some structure, purpose, and maybe even a set of achievable goals before stepping into something that feels like it requires mastery. And belief in mastery implies that the majority of us are not masters. What a lot of people want out…
-
In my last post I talked about one of the main spaces I work creatively these days and having the tools, supplies, and various points of inspiration and connection at hand while I work. I’ve always been interested in finding the lines that join to and run through things. As a kid, my encyclopedia set and the image rich Time-Life nature, science, and anthropology volumes on our home bookshelves were a world of connections in my hands. Those books felt like they contained the universe. As part of how I make art now, I practice at finding transient connections between…