Potential sites for Earth Day installation

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There are some interesting choices at the mall. I particularly like the oak tree idea, as it ties in to the reading I’ve been doing on alchemy. Alternatively I have been imagining a teardrop made of the bottles suspended from an archway or roof. 

The water bottle theme got me thinking about the elements, air, earth, fire and water. How could I express them all in the piece? I realized that everyone associates the ubiquitous transparent bottle with water, fire can be expressed by using ashes, earth by using stones, and air is ever present and contained in the bottles. So if each bottle contains a quantity of each element, suspended from the tree at at a uniform height we have the plane of this earth, the celestial world is above the elements,  and below them the lower world.

The oak tree becomes the axis mundi with its roots in the underworld, its branches in the heavens. 

I dreamed about a tree with bottles hanging from it on the same plane about a year ago, and made a sketch in my book. I guess this is what it was for. 

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Earth Day Installation

I’ve been asked to create an installation for the Simi Valley Town Centre to celebrate Earth Day. Each year an average family will use as much as 836 bottles of water. Most of those bottles end up as land fill.

I want to draw attention to the problem by suspending the bottles in the air from the branches of an ancient oak. I need to find several students who are committed to helping maintain sustainable resources who are willing to get involved with making the installation a reality. Four challenges face us:

First Challenge: to collect 836 empty (and clean) 1 litre water bottles, and remove their corporate labeling.
Second Challenge: add ashes and stones into each bottle
Third challenge: to suspend the bottles from a beautiful oak tree in the Simi Valley town centre, using fishing line
Fourth challenge: When it’s over, take it all down and store it.

I can’t wait to get started on the project. I’m interested in the potential here for the symbolism of the cycle of the elements: fire, air, earth and water. Each bottle (water) will contain ash (fire) stone (earth) and air. The world tree will suspend the bottles in the plane between the upper and lower worlds.

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In the studio

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I’ve been working in the studio, continuing the glazing of Fama. I added a French Ultramarine glaze so that the figures pop out from the background more. Next step will be to add some highlights into the skin of the man and woman on their left sides, a golden glow to pick up the setting sunlight, probably using Raw Sienna, a little Naples Yellow and some Titanium White.

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I love the rich darks the Ultra blue gives me. I painted the entire canvas with a fairly dense glaze, then lifted it off with a large rag, working fine detail with a smaller rag to bring highlights back.

Here are a couple of detail shots of the piece as  it is right now. 

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This piece was mostly laid in with a palette knife after an initial figure painting with brushes. I like to use a #4 filbert for the first rendering.

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Murray and Megan McMillan to visit CLU

I spoke to Murray McMillan today to let him know that we have secured a grant from CLU to fund a short residency for him and his lovely wife Megan at the University to create an installation / performance work. 

What a treat it will be to have them stay and make one of their remarkable video installations in the gallery.  

Here’s the McMillan blog / website.

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New paintings

 

Oil Paintings and Constructs. February 5th – March 4th 2008 

The High Studio, Moorpark 

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I have four paintings at the High gallery, two that have been in recent shows and two that I have never shown before.

Frank Looks Down is a big piece, eight feet high by four wide, an Orwellian face glowering out of the canvas, and Michael Angelos is a portrait of the singer from the 90’s LA band Plexi.

The never-seen-before works are a pair of paintings of Lynn Hyndman. I particularly like the very, very dark painting, Lynn Blue which has a barely visible half-lit face concealed in an almost black background. I painted it just before I wrecked my Jeep in 1997 and never showed it to anybody.

You can see the four paintings at the Opening reception on Saturday February 9th at the High Studio in Moorpark from 6.00 –  8.00 pm.

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Mediated Objects Here, Chained and Melting

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Mediated Objects Here, Chained and Melting

Wax enchained and breathing. The organic material shrinks from the metal. Heated wax cools and retreats.

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Wilted violet, not much good for medicine.

I repeatedly dipped a violet in beeswax, wondering if it would somehow preserve the flower. Of course the violet has dried and almost disappeared, leaving the wax impression of its leaves and petals behind, sealed in the hardened wax. All that remains of it is the echo; the empty space, the hollow core.

Although the ruins of megalithic buildings have survived the millennia, archaeology often reveals only the traces of our distant ancestors. We find their broken bones and some of their artefacts, but sometimes only stains remain to show where a body once lay, even the bones being absorbed into the earth. Much of my art is about reviving and honouring the memory of our ancestors.

The violet is used for making love potions.

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Wax

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Wax is the product of the exploitation of the work of bees, and can be used for creating candles, (those pictured here are from the lecture / performance event last week) In the Neolithic it was used for sealing jars for the preservation of food, as a base for poultices, as a mould making material.

I use it as a liminal material, neither food nor excreta, neither solid nor liquid. It was found among the stones at Balfarg with the organic remains of Henbane, probably a remnant of pot-sealing. It is made to provide food storage and cells in which larvae may grow: a material of birth, not alive, nor a waste product.

Hair is equally intermediate, being neither alive nor dead. Because both are liminal materials I think they have a symbolic status that may resonate with participants in this event; their transitional state represents transformation.

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Three Wishes

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From the Neolithic period to the present day holed stones have been used for making binding promises. One once stood within the great Avebury circle, another beside the majestic megaliths at Steness, in Orkney.

It is said that if you peer through the holed stones you can see the other world. These three are my wishing stones, painted in oil on oak panels.

If you’d like to participate in a work for a performance lecture event here’s a chance even if you can’t attend an actual event.

Make a wish for each stone and leave it as a comment. I will keep a record of the wishes and use them in a piece titled “Other people’s Wishes”. I have fifteen wishes already, collected from earlier shows. I would like to have more, so please feel free to post.        

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And the rains came down…

The faculty opening reception was very pleasant, though I’ll leave describing the event to Laurence at her Kwan Fong Gallery  blog, except to briefly report on a meeting with a new student who will come to CLU in Fall. She showed up with her mother at my office on Friday to meet me and talk about what to expect at the University should she come and join us. I told her what we are working toward in the department (hopes for a new building, recent improvements including the K2 studio, our work on the new curriculum…) and she responded by telling me that she had looked at our website and was very impressed by the faculty biography pages and the range of the department’s collective experience. Not only that, but she had visited the Faculty show at the Gallery and thought the work was “excellent”.  I felt great! We’re doing well in the Art department. There’s a lot to do, and a long way to go, but we’re definitely on the right road.    

 Later, at the High Gallery Closing reception we had a nice turnout in spite of a doom and gloom weather forecast that (in fine television fashion) promoted the idea that a storm was coming in that was going to be so heavy that most of California would be washed away into the Pacific.  (((STORM WATCH))) boomed from television sets across the Southland while a luridly named weatherman who has clearly spent a very long time on a tanning bed and at his local dental office waved his arms around prophesying doom.

 

Meanwhile, in the real world at the High Studio we sipped our champagne and enjoyed good company and told stories. I enjoyed making new friends and ate a vast amount of lobster dip. Good times. 

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CLU Art reception Saturday

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The faculty show opens this Saturday at the Kwan Fong gallery. Saturday 26th January at 3.00 pm. Why not come to this event, then come over to Moorpark and continue enjoying good art and good company?

 Here’s the CLU event page. 

Posted in Announcements, Exhibits, Openings | 2 Comments