Moving images.

Here is the teaser video that Dane at threesquared shot and put together for the Still Lifes, Landscapes, and Posers that opens this weekend. I worked above the line on this one.

"Still Lifes, Landscapes, and Posers" Press Release

Saturday Feb 23, 6-9 pm.
threesquared
427 Chestnut St.
Nashville, TN

clockwise: Gregory Martin, Steven LaRose, Cole Case, Mary Addison Hackett, Carla, Knopp, Nomi Lubin 

In "Still Lifes, Landscapes, and Posers", artist and guest curator, Mary Addison Hackett brings together six painters from across the country whose use of deceptively simple subject matter reveals itself to be more complex than it first appears. Her relationship to each of these painters is based on a dialogue of shared sensibilities and a respect for the process of painting and depth that each artist brings to the table.

For COLE Case (Los Angeles), landscape, water, and flowers provide a perfect mirror for the human psyche and for hundreds of years have served to reflect our obsession with beauty, mortality, brevity or fear. Case begins his process by creating small ballpoint pen and wash drawings on site. Intuitively traveling to locations throughout Southern California, Case has found the extraordinary in the familiar: cement river beds, high desert landscape, or sunflowers arranged in left over plastic water bottles. Different from the Impressionists and California Plein Air painters who made their paintings on site, Case later incorporates iPhone and iPad app technology to isolate and match specific color elements before transforming the drawings into large paintings. 
In addition to solo shows at Western Project in Los Angeles, Cole was recently included in The Painted Desert at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, curated by Andi Campognone, and Underground Pop at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, curated by critic, David Pagel. He has shown at Howard House (Seattle, Washington); University of California Irvine, (Irvine, California); and the Luckman Gallery at California State University, (Los Angeles), among other venues. He received a BA in English Literature from Stanford University and a BFA in Fine Art from the Art Center College of Design. 

MARY ADDISON Hackett (Nashville) varies her approach to painting by constructing a visual language from fragments of stored information, as well as working perceptually from direct observation. Her self-portraits and still lifes are part of a larger body of work documenting day-to -day life and the improbable task of capturing everything that filters through it. Referencing sources ranging from Camus’s doctor in The Plague, to a footnote written by19th century art critic, John Ruskin, Hackett uses the language of painting to address the ever-shifting construction of meaning, memory, and representation.
Mary Addison was a Los Angeles based painter before returning to Nashville for an extended residency in 2010. She was recently included in About Face, curated by Daniel Weinberg at ACME. in Los Angeles, and To Live and Paint in LA at the Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, California, curated by Max Presneill. Solo and group exhibitions include Kristi Engle Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); John Davis Gallery (Hudson, NY); Weekend (Los Angeles, CA); SUGAR (Brooklyn, NY); and the Amelia Museum of Archeology, (Umbria, Italy), among others. She holds an MFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from The University of Tennessee. She publishes the art blog, Process, and currently teaches part-time at Watkins College of Art, Design and Film. 

CARLA Knopp (Indianapolis, IN) describes her painting practice as exploratory. She seeks artistic revelation from both personal expressionism and from formal experimentation. These two impulses guide her investigations, and form a body of work which ranges from mystical realism to abstraction. Knopp’s Lane Marker series are loosely constructed on the subjective and pictorial theme of marked territories. By using the qualities inherent in metallic paint to create a visual conundrum both literally and metaphorically, Knopp creates optically challenging landscapes that can be read as both an invitation or a warning. 
Carla holds a BFA from Herron School of Art, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. She has worked as a studio artist for 25 years, showing her work in both juried and invitational exhibitions including the Harrison Gallery, Indianapolis; Russell/Projects in Richmond, VA; Silas Marder Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY; and Sugar, Bushwick, NY. She runs Dewclaw, an artist run space in Indianapolis and hosts a blog called Rocktown, Indiana.

STEVEN LaRose (Talent, OR) traces his complicated relationship with the human figure and representation back to an early interest in comics. While LaRose’s main body of work veers toward the abstract and amorphous, a successful Kickstarter campaign allows him to host a weekly drawing and painting session, free for the public, in his studio with a nude model. In turn, these sessions spent with the figure serve as a source for his subsequent abstraction. 
Steven received his MFA from the Claremont Graduate University, and his BFA from Whitman College. He has had solo exhibitions in Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Ashland, Oregon. His work has been discussed in the Los Angeles Times, ARTnews, The New Art Examiner, and The Chicago Tribune. In addition to teaching at Southern Oregon University and Rogue Community College in Oregon, he offers free figure drawing sessions to the community through his project, AnyOne Can Draw. 

NOMI Lubin (New Haven, CT) uses the personal and familiar to document a scene which reveals subtle nuances upon each viewing. Asking more questions than they answer, her paintings made from looking out the window of her childhood bedroom allow the viewer to shift focus between the interior and the exterior in a kind of figure-ground paradox. By imposing both structure and boundary where she sets about to create each window paintings in one session, she strives to translate a temporal experience.
Nomi has shown at Verge Art Brooklyn, Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Winonna State University in Minnosota, and the Bowery Gallery in New York among others. She completed her studies in painting at The New York Studio School and holds a BA in English from Southern Connecticut University. 

GREGORY Martin (Starkville, MS) is a California native whose work explores the relationship between human ideals and practice. Citing growth and decay, the illusion of depth and flatness, the “truth” of photography along with the “fiction” of painting, Martin’s landscapes become contemplative spaces in which to experience dualities and polarities within human nature, the natural world and the practice of painting.
Gregory studied visual art at CSU Long Beach and Claremont Graduate University where he received his MFA in Painting in 2002. Solo and group exhibitions include the Museum of Art & History, (Lancaster, CA); Electric Lodge, (Venice, CA); George Billis Gallery, (Culver City, CA); Ruth Bachofner Gallery, (Santa Monica, CA), and most recently, McComas Gallery at Mississippi State University where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art. 

The opening party will be held Saturday, February 23rd from 6 to 9 pm. Wine and light refreshments will be served. Parking is free.

fumbling in the dark

First off, does anyone actually blog anymore? I feel early Millennial by writing blog posts. Or that I'm too naive to be too busy or too important to blog. Then there's the privacy issue.

I accidentally joined ArtStack without thinking it through. Only after joining as a person did I realize that a profile had already been established for me as an artist, complements of ArtStack. I'm not necessarily against random sites picking up my art and using it to promote their services but as soon as MAH the person signed up, I was automatically assigned to follow 60 people, 50 of whom I have no idea who they are.  It was like being pushed onto a dance floor.

But back to real life. It's 8:04. There's a baked potato in the microwave. My potato will be shriveled by the time I make it back to the kitchen. I snacked on raw almonds and drank hot tea + an expresso today. Yesterday I spent 7 hours in the studio painting and unpainting a moderately large canvas. At the end of 7 hours I had a what looked to be some vague brushstokes and muted OMS washes. In reality, it represented 7 hours of indecisiveness.
1. enlarging a sketch of the kitchen
2. dumb brushstokes and OMS wash wipeouts
1. perceptual still life of Morandi-esque looking arrangement of cream colored vases across the room, which I specifically bought at a yard sale because I like the creamy color and because they reminded me of Morandi
1. dumb brushstokes and OMS wash wipeouts
1. back to enlarging the sketch of the kitchen 
1. dumb brushstokes and OMS wash wipeouts
1. a  different vase
1. dumb brushstokes and OMS wash wipeouts
1. perceptual still life of Morandi-esque looking cream colored vase.
1. dumb brushstokes and OMS wash wipeouts
1. the kitchen
1. the different vase again
1. dumb brushstokes and OMS wash wipeouts
1. a final defiant stroke.

Today, I finally settled on a musical teapot. It plays "Tea for Two" whenever you pour. The teapot is just a starting point. I don't think any painter worth their weight in cobalt would admit to having a 24/7/365 seamless day in the studio, but in case you are one of those people who everything goes totally planned in the studio every single day, I'll assume you are a machine, a soulless little machine.

It's hard to define how one could work 10 hours simultaneously knowing, not knowing, wanting, but not wanting- to paint a thing, but not a thing, to paint something that is not verbal, but yet articulate- without resorting to total abstraction or the cloyingly pat, and still be excited about getting back in the studio to continue this process, but session after session, this is what I do. I was reminded today, again, not to concern myself with labels and to paint what I like.

I had a strange calmness come over me as I was working on some details, which I will admit at this stage is way too soon to work on details, but I'm busting out a bit. The teapot is just the starting point.

“Do you believe in God, doctor?"
No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.” -Albert Camus, The Plague

Los Angeles: MAS ATTACK recap.

I rue the day I thought all snapshots were created equal. I'm sparing everyone crappy iPhone photos of art. While I snapped a photo representing almost every single painter in the show, I did not write everyone's name down. My current project is to put names with paintings.

The painting community in Los Angeles rocks. Where else can you invite 12,000 people to an exhibition, have over 1000+ show up, and get to meet and gush for 5 hours without putting on your best art fair behaviour or jockeying for attention? Nada. Case in point, MAS ATTACK, a one night event with 101 amazing painters on the wall, plus more great painters in the crowd. The Artra Curatorial team of Max Presneill, Kio Griffth and Colten Stenke orchestrated the mammoth exhibition. It's a shot in the paint arm to hear artists you like and respect gush over your work every so often. Likewise, I gushed over other artists' work. Of course, it was a show of the Mutual Appreciation Society, so gushing was considered totally appropriate, but it was also a testament to the state of painting in LA. I am grateful to still be a part of that community- not just for the gushing of course, but because of the resilience and support I've experienced over the years, which in turn I hope I pass on in some way.

On the trip home, I tried to recollect names of everyone who stopped by to say hello or who ran into or met for the first time. 52 conversations and counting. I don't think I've even spoken to 52 people since doing my extended residency here. 52 might not sound like a big number out of 1000, but considering I am an introvert, it's huge. Apparently I might also be slightly obsessive since making a list of people I'd like to stay in touch with was on my list of things to do.

Welcome

My wall of suitcase paintings at MAS ATTACK.
Photo by Sarajo Frieden

My friend, Meg, helped me come up with the idea of the extended residency so as not to dredge up the usual dreary reply to, "Why did you move to ________?" The extended residency is a great answer. I completed the above paintings during my extended residency. I am here painting the (light, foliage, decay, place, architecture, objects, furniture, self, ad infinitum) during my extended residency. When I am done painting the (light, foliage, decay, place, architecture, objects, furniture, self, ad infinitum,) I will return. It's more believable than the story about my spaceship breaking down. Depending on who you ask. What can I say? My roots here are 6 feet under. I'm finally admitting that I am an expat trying to make my way back to my adopted city. And yet, it's much harder than that. Hence, the extended residency.

Speaking of spaceships and the supernatural, the Kubrick exhibition features one of John McCracken's Planks, despite the fact that it was not an actual McCracken sculpture in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you're not familiar with McCracken, the obit by Jerry Saltz  is a nice sendoff to the artist who saw his leaning planks as a conceptual link between two worlds.   

It rained. Most of the time.

The super beautiful people still shop at Whole Foods in Venice. There was a traffic cop directing people into parking spaces. I saw a gorgeous vintage Porsche. Flowers were $22 a bunch.

The ocean looked sad on an overcast day. Sales ladies on Main Street are psycho. Parking is easy.

I tried to schedule 4 studio visits, but due to time constraints, only got in one visit. Had coffee and/or breakfast with about 5 people. Bonus: While waiting for a friend at Urth Cafe, I ran into my former yoga instructor on a Friday and got in a yoga class on Saturday. Bonus #2: On the way out of class, a woman called out my name and it turned out to be another artist who I've been swapping show announcements with for years. LA is crazy small. Westside, baby.

Moments after departing from coffee with a fellow painter, I received this text highlighting our conversation:

I like pithy advice. Text on. 

Later, the conversation went like this:

It was not the best photo of me. 

My friend, Rochelle and I went to Caravaggio and Kubrick at LACMA. We took tourist photos of The Rock. I'm not posting those out of respect to Rochelle and Japanese tourists everywhere, but I laughed so hard I cried.

Caravaggio

Meanwhile, back at The Overlook... 

Observations and Random Acts of Blindness

Everything in between. Tiny oil sketches from my kitchen. 

Avoid doing evil (what is deadening, what drains you)
Cultivate what is skillful
Purify the mind.
This is the teachings of the buddhas.
-from The Dhammapada Verses 183

I.
I've been thinking about the act of looking and seeing. More than usual. Many people aren't able to see- to really perceive what is in front of them, or perhaps, they are, but they don't take it to the next step and think about what they are looking at and why.
II.
I'm obsessed with making tiny oil sketches from my kitchen. Smaller than even the previous small work, they are 6 x 4 inches, oil on gessoed panel. I've cut a number of panels and primed them. I'm painting them around breakfast time or right before bed. Two things. One, I am calling them sketches to differentiate between the stretched linen paintings. I know we're still in a bigger is better world, but these little sketches are absorbing. Why? I thought about that in the tub last night. It all comes back to mortality and death and chaos and order. Deal.
III.
In between school starting, working in the studio, and misc prep work for some upcoming exhibitions,  I attended Jered Sprecher's talk at Vanderbilt last week. Although I met Jered a while back in LA, I hadn't heard him speak in depth about his work. It took me back to the process involved in abstraction regarding the references, remnants, signs, signals, and signifiers that appear on the surface of a painting, and the backstory, whatever that may be. It prompted me to reflect on my roots and where I am now. It also made me realize that listening to someone talk about abstraction, on the surface, might sound more interesting than listening to someone talk about paintings containing identifiable objects simply because with abstraction, the odds of being 100% certain of what you're looking at is not a given, and thus the artist talk can serve to enlighten. Maybe it's the obvious gap between language and surface that people feel is more conceptual with abstraction. Maybe people don't see the gap with figurative work.

Jered Sprecher at Vanderbilt University

I've lost count how many times I've heard people dis flower paintings and representational work since moving here. I realize not everyone pans flower paintings as if they're the black hole of intelligent thought process, but still... they're good scapegoats. Long ago, I remember my own bias. To me, representational work was more opaque than abstraction. I wanted there to be more, but for whatever reason I didn't have the patience to get there. I obviously no longer feel this way and at times feel like I've crossed an invisible barrier to the other side. Nowadays, I'm more prone to be bored with theory, as though in the long run, it's not a sustainable form of energy. I think about this quite a bit, sometimes smugly.
That evening I caught Rebecca Cambell's excruciatingly beautiful post on the HuffPo. If you have a moment I encourage you to read it.

Rebecca Campbell, "Lay your burdens down," 2012, 12" x 20," Oil on Canvas, Image Courtesy of LA Louver.

IV.
I like that the Roman numeral four looks like an IV.
VI.
I attended the Perceptual Painters exhibit at The Kentucky School of Art. I started writing a long post about it and by the time I got around to getting over the the fact the the entire back wall of the gallery was completely unlit and in darkness, I was too tired to talk much about the show. Carla and I met at the gallery. It was a 3-hour drive for me and about 2 hours for Carla. The show is in two galleries. The second gallery was well-lit. After we quit casting about dim-witted one-liners about not being able to see a show about perceptual painting, we walked over to the second gallery which was bathed in light. It was a pleasant excursion, in part because it's always a treat to see Carla, but it was nice to see work by some painters that were new to me. It was also a brilliant reminder that if you're running an art gallery, please light the gallery and treat the work with some respect. I'm talking to you, Huff Gallery at Spaulding University.

Perceptual Painters at Huff Gallery and the Kentucky School of Art

VI.
I attended an estate sale yesterday looking for a small, used pochade box. I did not find one, which is  fine, so my cigar box will continue to suffice, but while ambling about a neighbor's home, I realized I like my home, and my house of a thousand props, even if it does have a Formica kitchen counters and needs some TLC.
VII.
I'll be traveling to LA for an exhibition and during my trip  I'm supposed to be focusing on what it would be like to move back and live there again. I would miss my props, these things I am surrounded by and that I paint. As much as I like the desert, I don't see myself painting the desert. Maybe I would. I don't know. I'm not sure what I would coax out if I were to relocate to a new old environment. On the other hand, change needs to happen. Shoot. I already questioned this concept of change 2 posts ago.
VI.
I'm desperately trying to save Son of Night-blooming Cereus, technically, an Epiphyllum oxypetalum, the offspring of a 100-year old plant that did not make it through my mom's depression. She managed to save a cutting and I finally transplanted it. A year later, though, it's no longer thriving. I bought cactus potting mix today and took a few new cuttings. The lady at the garden center had never heard of it and had no idea about how to care for it or how to propagate.
VII
Yoga, day 22. My body still loves me.

Yes, it's a bit like this right now.

Two and a half years later...

I finally found the box of cd's and dvd's that had my yoga practice cd in it. I still am not unpacking the box.

Yoga Day 13.

Today was a twofer. I went to flow practice. It was great. My jumps back to plank felt perfect and I lowered down into Chaturanga Dandanasa as though I was born to hover. Hip openers are still the bane of my existence, hence, a tattoo on my ankle written in Japanese characters that means "patience." It only means patience when I look at it with my legs crossed in pigeon pose. Otherwise it's gibberish. I could have chosen a turtle or some other symbol for patience, or criminy, even gothic lettering that would have looked like I did time, but I played it safe with the Japanese character thing. Oddly enough I was inked years ago on an MLK holiday and my plan was to get a new one every year. At some point, a Japanese artist told me it meant endurance. He thought I was into scarification because I had a fresh scar from a drunken shaving accident on the opposite ankle. At the time, I was doing a residency in the Netherlands, as was the Japanese artist. Although I don't drink anymore, I don't shave while standing up either. I've thought about camouflaging my oh so trite Japanese characters meaning patience, but the story of pigeon pose + drunken shaving and endurance still makes me laugh, and the whole package is just too good of a reminder about a lot of things, so I don't. However maybe another tat this MLK.

But back to my twofer. I am practicing at a new yoga studio that has an amazing introductory offer, so after my amazing flow class I stayed for the super amazing restorative class. Props. Props. Who's got props. The instructor was so good I cried. Embarrassing yes, but there I was in a triple supported child's pose getting a bit teary as she talked about acceptance and change and that part of change was maybe accepting where one was. Ouch. I'm not a particularly touchy-feely person, though I'm sensitive as hell, but that was a little to close to home, literally speaking.

On the way home I stopped in a new vet to check out their boarding facilities for the furry guy. Everyone seemed nice and the place had a good vibe. I feel like we're the family that keeps moving or changing schools when the kid gets in trouble. He's really a good guy, just special.

Art and Yoga

I've been practicing yoga for about 13 or 14 years. And here's an un-yogini thing to say- I wish I had been practicing consistently for 13 or 14 years.  My MO has been to practice for a couple of years and then drift away due to injury or changes in my schedule and then I suddenly realize that it's been weeks or months or a year since I practiced, and I begin again, or I start running and then I drift away due to an injury or changes in my schedule and then I suddenly realize that it's been weeks or months and so forth and so on. It's a pattern I have had for about 14 years. On the bright side, I am consistent.

It's not exactly like starting from square one each time, but it's close. I lose flexibility, stamina, and lightness when I am away from my mat. The good news is that I have surprised myself by being able to do a pose that for years I thought was difficult or have no recollection of being able to do. Conversely, major breakthroughs like Bakasana and Tolansa are a distant memory, though I do remember feeling giddy. On a more positive spin, I've learned patience and my current philosophy is wherever you go, there you are. 

I tried a popular yoga studio when I first moved to town but it was insanely crowded and everyone was chatty and although I had lost about 3 months of practice while packing and moving across country during The Great Devastation of 2009-2010, it felt like 3 years as I made a feeble attempt to adjust, which means I didn't. I wasn't in the mood for chatty or crowds, and with only one tattoo, I felt oddly vanilla. After losing my balance in a headstand and practically collapsing through a second story window, I decided I wasn't ready to be social and I went back to running and a haphazard home practice that wasn't very much of a practice. Goals being goals, I decided to take a break from running and start off the new year with yoga again. Painting is a solitary activity. I am a solitary person. I thought I might be ready to interact with humans again. I found a new studio that looked less trendy.

I was a bit wary of the new yoga studio at first. An alignment class held poses for 15 seconds, (yes, I counted). The deep stretchy class seemed a bit too casual, and whenever I approached an instructor at the beginning of class asking if they did adjustments, they said not really. But here's the interesting part- I've learned some new supportive poses using props, which in the past I had dismissed as wimpy and I've learned to work my way into some poses from inside out instead of outside in (which in a way I liken to how I teach drawing- first by observing positive space, then observing negative space or contour, until finally you've settled into a reasonable representation of the thing you're drawing).

I'm on my way back to feeling the benefits of a consistent practice and bonus: I feel fabulous in my striped yoga pants I found on sale. Yes, gear is a good motivator. The secret is to keep up this momentum after next week which is when everything kicks into high gear. I'm scheduled to teach 3 classes this spring, I'm taking a few art trips between now and March, and I have applications in progress with January deadlines. I'm also curating a show, I'm in a couple of shows, and I need to plan some studio visits for when I'm out in LA. My life is full, not busy, but I remind myself that's it's good sometimes not to give too much of a flying fuck. The secret is to keep letting go of what's not contributing to the work and to keep investing in things that do contribute to my life as an artist. I love simplicity.

I'm on the 3rd painting of the new year.

Easy does it. Nasmaste, Bitches. 

Alla Prima

One of my goals for the New year is to commit to an Alla Prima practice. Wait, you say. What about toiling days and weeks on end over a painting by building the surface through scrapping, exfoliating, indecision, moments of clarity and in general, the mayhem and Protestant work ethic we've come to know and love.

2013. The Year of Letting Go.

My goal then is to start and finish every painting within a couple of sessions, or as long as I can work wet-in-wet (say, on a larger painting).

I realize I may break from this, but it is a goal and I'm very excited by the first 2 paintings of the year.

DETAIL from the First Painting of 2013. 

Also, let it be noted that I'm practicing yoga seriously again, setting aside an hour every day. Flexible body, Flexible Mind.

And we're off...

Dear Ms. Hackett,

Thank you for submitting your materials to ______ for review.  I am most appreciative of the quality and seriousness of your work.  Regretfully, we find that it is not a good fit with our contemporary program. I wish you the very best with your future endeavors.

Sincerely, 

Blah Blah, 

Director of Contemporary Art

Blah Blah Blah

Blahblah, Blah

bla.hbla.blah

****

Addendum: I should add that the perplexing issue is one of being a good fit for their "contemporary" program. Perhaps I need to ditch the late 19th century props and add some more buzzwords to my statement again. Or go back to abstraction. There's always that. Contemporary. Jeesh. Like what- as opposed to an anachronistic program?