Archival?

Humans, animals, plants, and other life forms live and die.  Although, even in death, these things continue to exist.  My son attends a high school located next to a cemetery.  I've always been intrigued by the irony of it - that is, children in the process of development as humans on this earth and the nonliving in the dirt - juxtaposed there next to them.  The high school is located in the small town of Strasburg, Virginia.  Many of the children in the school can trace their ancestry back generations as having lived in Strasburg and undoubtedly some have family members buried in the very cemetery there next to the school.  So, the children are not only the present mortal generation living and learning there next to a memorial to the past, they are also a continuum.  Just as a plant produces a seed, dies, and other plants grow from what it was, so go all living things.

Does this mean that nothing ever really dies?  Occasionally a lineage of living things certainly does become extinct.  But does that really mean it is finally and completely dead?  Or, does it simply mean that a thing that evolved from some other source has become somehow nonviable and has left a void to be filled by the next evolution of something new from the mass of all life?

That said, perhaps there is no death in the natural world, but only cycles of life.  Isn't a seed a piece of a living tree?  If a seed falls from a tree and another tree grows from the seed, is the new tree not just a continuum of the original tree (itself)?  That is, is every oak tree the same oak tree, every human the same human, everything that was, is, and will be - all contributing all that they are to the next?  Its enough to make you crazy.

What about those things that are inanimate - rocks, architecture, consumer products, artwork, etc.  A rock may crumble into sand, but it will be elementally intact - but never alive.  If a house is abandoned it may deteriorate - its organic parts finishing the cycle of decay and its inorganic parts continuing elementally, but another house will never be spawned from it.  The house is simply the product of a process put into motion by humans and will not and cannot propagate itself.  And, so goes an artwork.

Humans and societies, since ancient times, have tried to imbue their creations with immortality - thinking them to be an embodiment of their own spirit,  intellect, or greatness.  Some say that a work of art has a life (or spirit) - really?  Are artists god-like - breathing life into an inanimate object (much like god formed Adam from the dust of the Earth and breathed life into him)?  I believe that art simply exists as a temporary expression of an artist's intellect and/or ego and will eventually vanish from existence.  Can any of you reading this post name an artist from before the 16th century?  It's probably safe to say that few, if any, can.  For most people art seems to have begun with the renaissance - at least in as much as some of the artists from that era gained celebrity status and became memorable for what they accomplished.  For those artists who fell into anonymity, their work, without conservation, found its way to the trash heap or a thrift shop wall.  Even with armies of conservators, the great pyramids of Egypt and da Vinci's Mona Lisa will find their fate - dust.

A work of art is not a living thing.  It is an inanimate object crafted from the imagination of the artist to speak to the intellect and emotions of humans, just as a flower (creation of nature (god)) speaks to the human senses.  One will decay into dust and cease to exist.  The other, through natural propagation, will live on until the end-of-days.

As with my artwork and most of my writing, I find that this blog post hasn't  completely realized its original intention.  I meant to write about the use of archival materials in the making of art.  No matter how hard I try, these things seem to take their own course.

Photography

At a certain point in my career as an artist I wanted to paint landscapes in a more or less impressionistic style.  From an artist's perspective I've always enjoyed observing nature, but I've never enjoyed setting up outside to paint the interesting landscape scenes that I found.  I tried painting from photographic references for a short time, but found that rendering visual representations caused me a lot of anxiety - that is, I cussed a lot.   I found that I enjoyed photographing nature much more than painting it.  At about the same time that I stopped using visual first-hand and photographic references in my painting process, I began seriously taking photographs.

This is a very old (40 years) plein air drawing:

Florida Scrub Oaks, circa 1971

charcoal, pen & ink on paper

These are older paintings from photographic references:

Valley Overlook, circa 2003

acrylic on stretched canvas, 22"X28"

The Marsh at Veteran's Park, circa 2004

acrylic on stretched canvas, 22"X26"

Up until a couple of years ago I was taking snapshots with a point and shoot camera.  When I retired from my job in June of 2009 I decided to move up to a DSLR camera.  At the time the Nikon D5000 was relatively new and being promoted heavily, so that's what I bought.   I've found that the learning curve for the camera and photography in general is pretty steep.  I shot in auto mode for at least the first year and a half.  I found this web site, Digital Photography School (DPS), and it has become particularly helpful as a tutorial and reference tool.

Early examples from the Nikon D5000:

Winter Tree, circa 2010

Valley Farm, circa 2010

I'm finding photography to be much more demanding technically - that is, I find it to be much less intuitive than other visual art mediums.  Most of the process of photography seems to be in the "getting-ready-to-make-the-picture" and once you're ready to shoot, if you're lucky, you'll still have a subject to shoot.  The natural world slips in and out of moods with the blink of an eye.   At some point I would like to be technically proficient enough to be able to focus more on the subject than the camera and not be so dependent on post-production software to save a poorly shot picture.

Whereas my painting method is almost totally right-brained, I find that photography is a close harmony between the left and the right brain.   I've also found that what I do with a camera and what I do with paint are almost completely opposite in terms of subject and style.  The camera is filling a hollow space in my creativity.  It allows me the contact with the external natural world that is lacking in my current painting process.

These two images illustrate the vast difference between my photography and painting styles:

Shenandoah River, circa 2011
HDR photograph

Stream of Mixed Feelings, circa 2011

acrylic on stretched canvas, 12"X12"

I hope, one day, to be able to confidently call myself a photographer as well as a painter.   Bear with me while I grope my way to that goal.

Slideshow

A slideshow of some of my artwork on Fine Art America (FAA):

Process

I hear so many people say, "It's all about the process", "The process matters most.", "To understand the artist's work you must understand their process." - REALLY?  I like to watch other artists at work.  I watch a lot of Youtube videos that show artists demonstrating thier painting process.  But, these usually only demonstrate the actual act of painting - usually nothing at all to do with the preliminary thinking processes and preparation.  Process includes a miriad of tangible and intangible elements that lead the individual artist to a resulting artwork.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the "process" is only important to the artist.  What might be more important to the observer is how the artwork communicates the artist's intention.  But, even at that, the artwork may not necessarily be, and often isn't, the artist's true intention, in which case it may be completely acceptable to just enjoy looking at it.  Whatever the case, there is likely something of the artist's psyche present in the artwork that simply can't be easily defined or understood.

To have a more insightful understanding of an artist's work, I like to know something about the artist's motivation.  That is, what life experiences might have moved them toward a certain result.  For instance, knowing something of Picasso's female muses, Van Gogh's intimacy with the natural world and his reverence toward the toil of his peasant subjects, or even knowing something of how Pollock came to use his unique painting techniques and his psychological state of mind.  It's all a matter of respect for artistic integrity.  Work ethic may have the most to do with the success or failure of the outcome.  An old artist, whose name elludes me, once said something to the effect, "a painter's artistic success may be measured in yards of canvas painted.".

How an artist makes art is often as great an abstraction as the artwork itself.  Process is meaningless if the artwork doesn't communicate something to the viewer.  This is why I say that the process is only important to the artist.  What the artist brings to the process is his/her creative motivation which is the language of the finished artwork and, I believe, the true measure of its success.  But first, the artist must put in the time and at some magic moment transcend technique to deliver artwork that speaks in a clear voice.

This has been a difficult piece to write.  I may have even contradicted myself at times.  I apologize if I've led anyone down a more confusing path.  But hey, if you're confused, it means you're at least thinking about it.

Art Class

My family moved from Gaffney, SC to Cape Canaveral, FL when I was 14 years old. We moved away two months into my first year of high school. To a 14 year old boy the cultural chasm between the two places was expansive. In Gaffney a new student entering my classes was a rarity experienced only a couple of times during my 8+ years of school there. In Florida I attended Cocoa Beach High School during the heyday of the NASA space boom. As rare as it was in Gaffney to have a new classmate, it was just as rare in my Florida high school to find a native of the area. The central Florida area was extremely cosmopolitan in its demographic make up and students moving in and out of the area was commonplace.

My first years of high school were filled with tumult and anxiety. I became withdrawn and self conscious of what I believed (at the time) to be my backwardness – that is, my southern dialect and my cultural ways. My freshman and sophomore years of high school were spent trying to cover up and suppress who I was. I didn't know what it was at the time, but have since learned that I was experiencing “culture shock”. I was somewhat reclusive at home and spent hours in my room drawing pictures from photos I found on album covers and in magazines. To this day it saddens me to think about this period of my life. Mostly regretting the missed opportunities.

Some things happened in my junior year that began to slowly lift me from my self-imposed malaise. The first semester of eleventh grade I registered for an art class. It was a waste. The teacher was uninspired, my classmates were uninspired, and the classroom setting was not at all conducive to making art. I don't remember a damned thing I did in that class. But, I could see out the door window across the commons to the OTHER art classroom that was actually designed to function as an art class. It was windowed from floor to ceiling all across the front and I could see the teacher moving from one art table to another, smiling with encouragement. The students actually appeared to be happy with what they were doing. My second semester I made a point of signing up for that class.

As I sat on a bench in the common area of the art department waiting for the first day of my new art class to begin, a thin, very animated guy walked up to me and began speaking in an excited heavy French accent. He was insisting that, if the subject should ever come up, I was to be sure to request that Liquitex paints be purchased for use in the class. I remember this because of the way he said “Leek-wee-tex” - if you can imagine the French accent. I later learned that he was French-Canadian from Montreal and both parents were French immigrants. His name was Robert and he and I became “friends-in-art” for the next year and a half of high school. Robert possessed a rare innate creative ability and desire as an artist. After knowing him for a short time, I knew with certainty that he would either be a homeless artist scratching pictures with a rock on the sidewalk, or he would be a tremendously successful artist. Over the past few years I've learned from newspaper and magazine articles that he is the latter. His commitment to his artistry was then and is now unwavering and uncompromising. To this day I am still inspired by his dogged persistence and love for art.

I came to be friends with several other students in that class and subsequent classes. A few of us were together for most of our junior and senior years of high school. We fed each other with enthusiasm and inspiration. Art became my social savior and I came to realize what it meant to be an artist.

Ms. Edgar was my mentor and teacher in those high school art classes. She entered us into community art exhibits and took us on field trips to such places as a pottery studio where an older gentleman produced pottery and his wife sculpted in clay. We spent a day at a university theater watching a production of Shakespeare's “Henry IV” which was preceded by a very avant-garde performance piece set to Beatles music. We also attended several sidewalk art shows which were very popular events in central Florida during that period of time.

One of my proudest moments in high school was winning two gold key awards at a regional scholastic art exhibit in Miami that Ms. Edgar had, unknowing to me, entered my artwork. My parents and I drove down for the awards ceremony which took place in the banquet room of the Burdine's department store in downtown Miami.

Upon my graduation from high school, Ms. Edgar continued to teach her art classes. My younger brother (six years my junior) was also her student. My friends and I went our separate ways and I bumped into just a couple of them for a few years after that. I never saw Robert again after graduation. He has since published several well received photography books and exhibited his work in highly respected galleries and museums in the US and abroad.

My acceptance as an artist in Ms. Edgar's classes pulled me through a period of anguish and insecurity. I look back at those years as being the most formative in my life as an artist. Our lives take turns – sometimes very sharp turns. You may be left dazed and bewildered, but if you keep your senses, you may right yourself and find a truer course.

Gaffney

I was born and raised for the first 14+ years of my life in a small mill town in Northwest South Carolina near the North Carolina border.  Gaffney was located in an area known as the Piedmont, or more commonly, the foothills of the Smokey mountains.  Cotton was grown on the farmlands surrounding the town and fed the local textile industry.  It was a self sustaining industry from the production of raw materials to the production of finished consumer products.  The people of the area either worked directly for the textile industry, or were in some service industry in support of it or the people who worked for it.

My father was an auto body mechanic who worked for Stephenson's Motor Company, the local Ford dealership.  My mother was a homemaker and sometimes worked in the textile finishing industry doing piece work. Our family was at the lower end of the economic scale.  We went without many things, but my mother managed the household frugally and was able to provide the basic needs of the family.  Both of my parents were school dropouts – my father only finished the sixth grade and my mother the tenth.  My father was a natural leader and managed to do well despite being under educated. He eventually became foreman of the dealership's auto body shop.  He had also distinguished himself as a squad leader during the Italian campaign of World War II – receiving two Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in two different battles.  Though we probably teetered on the brink of economic disaster, my parents gave us the security we needed to explore our own worlds.

My older brother, Mike, and I were less than two years apart in age.  We were, in every sense of the words, brothers and friends.  Together, we explored our environment (Gaffney).  Life for a child was much less politically correct in those days – the 1950's and 60's.  There were two unbreakable rules – be home for dinner (lunch) and be home for supper.  Otherwise, we were free to roam as far as our feet could take us in the span of time between meals.  We lived our lives outdoors, close to the things (good and bad) that enriched our life experience.  Mike and I lived and played hard in those early years in Gaffney.  I'm sometimes surprised at the abundance of memories I have from that place during such a relatively short period of time.

So, what does this all have to do with making art?  Everything, if I believe what I've written in my “artist statement”.  I also believe that there are two distinct forms of life experiences – those experienced as children and those experienced as adults.  More succinctly, those experiences from before and after obtaining a driver's license.  As children, we move through life more slowly and with greater opportunity to gather our immediate world with all of our senses.  We are immersed in the natural world and we are able to experience it up close.  We experience many things for the first time – hot/cold, soft/hard, beautiful/ugly, good/bad, harsh/kind, et-al.  These things are indelibly imprinted consciously and subconsciously in our psyche.

I've chosen to use “obtaining a drivers license” to illustrate and delineate the point at which this immediacy of life experience changes to something less immediate.  When we get behind the wheel of a car, we have put ourselves in a kind of insulated space – zooming through the world at a pace too fast to absorb much of what's outside our sealed cocoon.  After a while we resign ourselves to using less honest stimulation for experiencing life.  Consider kneeling on the cool ground beside a slow running stream to quickly plunge your hand into the water to retrieve a small minnow and have it flutter in your hand until you allow it to splash back into the stream to continue its life and you yours.  Consider then, flying by the same stream at 70 miles per hour and hardly even noticing the stream.  This doesn't necessarily mean that we don't continue to have a rich life experience, it's only to say that it has changed.

As adults we begin to think more abstractly.  Sometimes gathering sensory information becomes subordinate to gathering money and pursuing a career.  I sometimes think art is a rebellion against that – a way to plunge our hands back into the stream to capture the minnow.

Technique

Well, maybe not entirely about technique.  Until now I've only posted examples of my works on paper.  I thought it might be a good time to post and discuss a few of my paintings.

I work mainly with acrylic artist paints and sometimes latex house paints  on various surfaces.  I think the support I like most is birch plywood panels which I prepare myself.  I also paint on stretched canvas panels, fiberboard, and canvas sheets (Fredrix brand).  Lately I've been using surface abrasion to take back paint layers.  The hard surface of the wood panels seems to work best for this process.

I have one painting in particular that shows the effect of surface abrasion.  I have one other piece that I haven't yet photographed.  I'll put it in a separate post at a later date.  Anyway here's the one I've completed using this technique.

The Day the Sun Was Square

acrylic on birch plywood, 24"X24"

This painting started with a lot of raised lines (texture) on the lower layers.  After the abrasive process is complete, the surface is very smooth and flat.  Most often I use a small wood rasp that looks much like a fine cheese grater to cut back the layers.  The painting started much like the earlier drawings - with no forethought to subject or direction.  As it evolved I began to be reminded of the scene outside my upstairs studio window.  The scene is a wall of tangled woods with the back porch roof in the foreground.  I added the "square" sun as a kind of rebellion against the paintings seeming representation of a familiar visual image.

The next painting is latex and acrylic on a Fredrix canvas sheet.  For the painting process I mounted the sheet on a drawing board to give it a firm support.  I used mostly a large palette knife to apply the paint.  I may have also used paint markers (Elmer's) for the finer lines - don't really remember.

Blackbirds

acrylic and latex on canvas sheet mounted on fiberboard, 16"X20"

After the painting was complete, I removed it from the drawing board and mounted it to an equal sized fiberboard panel using PVA glue.  The title comes from my own narrative impression of the painting.  In this case I was reminded of a flock of blackbirds or starlings fluttering in a bush or tree.

The next painting uses very traditional techniques.  I used acrylic paints and maybe a little latex house paint applied with brushes to a small square stretched canvas panel.  Again, the process is very extemporaneous with no forethought to subject.

Ghostwriter

acrylic on canvas, 12"X12"

As with the others, the title is my narrative impression of the the final result.  In this case I see ghostly figures and linear marks that appear as impressions of abstract writing.  I'm sometimes surprised at what figures manifest themselves when the subconscious takes over.

I'll be back again with more pieces of art and other discussion topics,

Steve

Darkness

There are a few pieces of my artwork that I am told are dark or even disturbing.  I don't see them that way at all.  They are simply responses to something unpleasant that found its way into my life - a dream, a news event, an experience, something I read, a story I was told, etc.  These are sources (life experiences) that need to be expressed in art just as much as the light beautiful things.  I see it as an expression of cynicism.

There needs to be some cynicism in society.  It protects the naively idealistic among us from the nefarious forces at work in the world.  Optimism should carry a "caution" sign.  It's good to say that "the glass is half FULL" if it is believed to contain something good - with the hope that it will eventually be filled.  However, it is also important to "see the glass as half EMPTY" when it is suspected that it contains something that will kill you.  I usually catch a lot of criticism for what I've said here.  But, I don't really care.  There needs to be a balance of naivete and cynicism (i.e., optimism and pessimism).  We do, after all, live in a world of good and evil, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, et-al.  It is the persistently naive with their heads in the sand who will find themselves unexpectedly sodomized.  David T. Wolf said that "Idealism is what precedes experience. Cynicism is what follows.".

I'm digressing.  I have a couple of pieces of artwork that I want to post as examples of my "dark side" art making.  The first is a little doodle that portrays an innocent looking little figure who has met with a shockingly horrific experience.  I've found that women have the greatest response to this piece.  I think it must be their nurturing instinct.  They may want to sooth the violently anxious lines of the drawing, or place a tourniquet on his bloody arm.

Injured

paint markers and pen & ink on paper, 8"X10"

The second piece is my response to the beheadings carried out by Islamic militants during the past decade.  My brother had sent me a Web link to the video made of the beheading of Nicholas Berg.  The mere thought of the act conjured mental images so horrifically appalling in my imagination that I could never bring myself to watch the video. The drawing is a somewhat satirical approach to the subject.  I think this is because I realized I could never hope to put the emotion into the piece that it deserved.  I think the disturbing quality is simply established because of the implied emotional detachment.  The attitude of the piece is derived somewhat from the Jonathan Swift short story, "A Modest Proposal" which is a satire on England's response(or lack of) to the Irish potato famine.

Heads Stacked Neatly

pen & ink on paper, 9"X12"

Thanks for reading,
Steve

My Epiphany

For the most part I work very extemporaneously.  I leave the conception of a piece to the subconscious in the form of a brief period of meditation followed by a very automatic process of rendering, I allow myself to find an image.  The images take many forms - they may be figurative, portraits, or abstract mind-scapes.  This process grew out of a peculiar circumstance.

I retired from my job just over two years ago.  Approximately a year prior to that I decided I would like to find a way to create art while at work.  So, I bought a drawing pad and put together a small drawing kit.  It all had to be fairly portable.  On breaks and during lunch I would find a quiet place to sit and doodle.  At first it was somewhat frustrating - trying to come up with imagined subject matter.  One day I had the notion to abandon the idea of a concrete mindful subject and just let the drawing happen.  This was an epiphany - an awakening for me.  I had read about psychic automatism (free association) as practiced by the surrealists and abstract expressionists, but had never imagined how I might incorporate it into my own artwork.  Now, since retiring, I have also incorporated this method into my studio painting.  However, I still like the spontaneity of the drawing process.

These are examples of my drawings from about 3 years ago:

Haunted Room

paint markers on bristol, 9"X12"

Nonchalant

pen & ink on paper, 9"X12"

We're All In This Together

pen & ink on paper, 9"X12"

In two of these drawings you will find figurative elements within the abstracted forms.  The titles are my own narrative impression of the pieces.

More soon.

First Post

An introduction -  My name is Steven Barrett.  I live in Toms Brook, Virginia, USA, which is located in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  I've lived my whole life in the South and the past thirty years of it in Virginia.  Probably more than anything else this Southern heritage has shaped my life into who I am.  It would seem that the thread from which you are woven makes the fabric of your creative muse.

I've always believed that knowing something of an artist's life is to better understand their art.  Something is lost (not understood) by not knowing who they are.  So, rather than being a faceless art robot, it's my hope that I can reveal a little of myself here and provide some insight into my motivation as an artist.