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Unlikely grounds for painting needles at convention

6/28/2013

Having spent the last several years taking painting into sculpture and sculpture into painting, I fell in love with the Saddle Up! group art show that wrapped up last week at Hot Art Wet City gallery on Main Street.

Dotted with bike seats donated by Our Community Bikes and Pedal Depot, the little white room served up wedges of unbridled creativity of local artists, in this twisted take on a show of paintings and mixed media.

Moving common objects into the rarified position of a ground for artistic expression creates something that's more than the sum of its parts — not just a painting, not just a thing. The creative effort and skill in the painting is heightened by the fact that it is relegated to a utility item, while the thing transcends its intended use to serve up a new reading, an altered understanding, a line of questioning: Why the bike seats? Why the subject matter? Is the theme simply an art of opportunity, a result of an over-abundance of available objects? Is it an intentional reflection on a cycle-manic city rich in unconventional creatives? Or is the germ of the idea a refusal to conform to painting conventions?

I love that buzzy experience of vacillating between viewing the painting-object as a thing and an idea.

My brain was a-buzz again while reading a New York Times travel feature on Clementine Hunter, a well-known New Orleans artist who was born on a cotton plantation in the 1880s.

Vancouver artist Andrea Hooges' signature narratives transforms a common bike seat. Below: works by Brandon Cotter (left) and Jenn Brisson (right). All photos by Chris Bentzen

With only some found tubes of paints and no traditional painting surface available to her as a family member of field hands, she used what was in her immediate environment to create thousands of paintings over her lifetime: a battered window shade, old boards, jugs. Presumably they were art objects of opportunity but those objects resonate with new understanding when covered in flowers and scraps of narrative about life of poor rural African-Americans.

Photo by Carolyn Ramsey/Gilley's Gallery

Crossing that traditional boundary between two-dimensional and three-dimensional work can read as an act of creative defiance, especially when the painting is at odds with the object that serves as its ground. It pushes at sensibilities, it disarms.

And it can charm. The Polka Dot House, as it is affectionately known in its East Van neighbourhood, was painted in 1992 by owner (and White Spot executive chef) Chuck Currie. (Veteran city writer Eva Lazarus's piece on the Polka Dot House here.) Only through the use of the dwelling-object as painting ground can polka dots hold the power to poke at community sensibilities.

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You can't keep a good artist down

6/21/2013

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You might have heard the hammering this week of the final nail in the coffin of a well-known cartoonist's career with the Province newspaper. After more than 30 years, Bob Krieger joined the legions of other Vancouver Sun and Province reporters who took the buyout. Jumped before they were pushed, basically.

This is all about loss. And the city's two-paid-dailies-in-one-company knows about losses. You can almost hear the flushing sound of the whole print industry swirling out of sight. (More here.)

Krieger earned his full-time union salary by his deft drawing hand, his keen wit and his honed sense of social justice. His signature squat, cross-hatched caricatures that graced the editorial pages four days a week boosted the Province brand since he was first hired on in 1981. The sweetly scorching one-panel works graced many a staffroom fridge and coffeeshop corkboard. Gone viral, old-timey style.

But Krieger's departure is less about company losses and more about what he sees as newspaper politics. He calls 'em as he sees 'em but increasingly his ideas became just... wrong in the judgment of his bosses. While it's understandable that hemorraging newspaper revenues might have a chilling effect on editorial, hacking away at a healthy dose of opinion on the opinion page is a sure-fire way to lose readers. There might be a lot of industry stats that could counter that claim, but anecdotal evidence shows that when Krieger's art was eventually moved from the Editorial page to Sports, those of us who don't speak Sportuguese stopped seeking him out. One less drawer, one less draw to the paper.

There seems to be a major logic gap here. If the publisher really is all about re-focusing toward a web-based 'paper' (read the leaked memo to staff here) then a hot one-shot original cartoon image created by a local artist carries hefty potential for page hits by local readers, whose attention local advertisers are trying to capture. If we are to assume that this is a pretty basic strategy for building readership and advertising for a regional... uh, reading product, then some other agenda is behind showing the door to this editorial artist.

Artistic expression isn't tied to the promise of wealth — this insanely pricey city's strong arts community is proof of that — but the suppression of expression can be a killer. Something died at the Province when Krieger left last week. And it's starting to stink.

Above: Some of Krieger's favourites, used by permission.

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Stumped again by basic rules of composition

6/14/2013

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It's funny how some learning moments can be instantly locked into your hard drive forever while others will keep smacking you in the face, like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.

I look forward to the day when basic rules of composition come naturally, but until then I will continue to waste a lot of time and materials creating visual fields that are uncomfortable, underwhelming and just... wrong, somehow.

Take this photo I took a couple of weeks ago. (Please!) Why do I insist on hacking up the space with a dead-centre subject? I literally can't see the forest for the trees here. It takes this special kind of inability to reduce this giant 500-year-old living Sitka spruce to just another stump.

But the bigger problem here is lack of scale. I may have felt insignificant beside this ancient giant organism, but it sure doesn't show it. I'd like to blame my basic lack of compositional abilities on my focus on patterns over subjects, but that's pretty much a cop-out.

Meanwhile, Mr. I Don't Take The Photos managed to capture all the scale and detail in one take, and was clearly not fixated on including the whole trunk in the view-finder.

Scale can be critical in an art practice. It's everything to Ontario photographer and artist Edward Burtynsky, who captured China's massive scale in Manufactured Landscapes (Burtynsky talks about the Canadian landscape inspired him, in this Ted Talk.)

I have to remind myself that scale is not about size, but size differential. This 20-year old table-top spruce bonsai "developed" by a German bonsai master (below) possesses its own tiny might. But here again I'm a little lost. Would including the hand of the grower (stunter?) emphasize the scale or reduce the potency of the image?

As an exercise, I've been wrestling with scale using four-inch acrylic cubes. In this one, a toy airplane gives a mass of orange wool gains scale — and narrative.

Does understanding scale take some innate way of seeing the world, as in Burtynsky's work? Or is it just about learning to avoid the usual mistakes, like getting sucked into iPhone's panorama camera feature?

Or scribbling 18" instead of 18' on the back of napkin that resulted in an underwhelming Stonehenge prop:

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That's one mother of another need met

6/7/2013

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In case you want to know, this is a picture of what is called beaching gear — at least in Prince Rupert, B.C.

It's the kind of passing sight that makes a city girl demand that the car we're in be stopped and reversed. Now. Because even though I had no idea what I was looking at, I knew that this was another fine example of one of my favourite truisms, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Photos must be snapped so someone who knows about these things could explain.

I found just the guy, a cousin-in-law. He knew the owner of this curious object well. (It's a small town.) "Oh, that's in Seal Cove," he said. His buddy needed to be able to tow his... (I want to say seaplane here, but that might not be right)... out of the harbour, and this Caddy, with its front-wheel drive, was just the jalopy for the job. But how does it stay up, with only two wheels?, I asked (and then again, not quite getting it). It was finally established that some metal bits forged to the front end provide enough counter-weight for the thing to balance on two wheels. An engineering feat!

But what I really liked about this innovation was the extra effort the inventor made to make the beaching gear more, uh, seemly, I guess: the retrofitted tail lights; the back-end paint job that tied it all together. For some reason it reminded me of the stump of a leg; you know some vital working parts are missing but it's heeled over nicely.

Objects like these straddle that satisfying space between utility and art. Here in Seal Cove, it was pretty much overlooked, but plunk it down at MOMA and now we're in a conversation with more legs than this beaching gear's wheels: artist intention, context, use value versus art value, etc.

There is a certain soulfulness in these intriguing/peculiar objects that squeeze into existence between the tight parameters of lack of money or access and a pressing need. This school bus re-purposed as an underground... (tornado shelter? food cellar?) also packs a visual punch.

I'm intrigued by the happy accidents that can turn a necessary invention into an art object or an artwork into a functional object after the fact. On a grand scale it leads to some of the most enduring, visually interesting cities, like the narrow labyrinth of streets of Tokyo that trace terraced rice fields or the watery thoroughfares of Venice. This slow, organic development of an urban landscape is at odds with the speculative profit-driven mega developments currently rapidly changing my city's landscape.

But our need to negotiate these monolithic structures will result, over time, in inventions that contribute to an increasingly vibrant culture. We get glimpses of that with every passing pedaller working for Shift: Urban Cargo Delivery here in Vancouver, or as far as Bangkok's streets teeming with ever-advancing Tuk-tuks.

Innovating out of necessity creates human connections, from one guy's beaching gear in a sleepy cove outside Prince Rupert, B.C. to corporate shifts on the streets of Paris. (Take a video ride-along below:)

Image from vancouverfoundationawards.ca

Image found posted on www.modderpoel.nl

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Unlikely grounds for painting needles at convention

You can't keep a good artist down

Stumped again by basic rules of composition

That's one mother of another need met

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