Wikipedia entries

I've been browsing through Wikipedia and find that it is amazingly accurate in many areas, and less so in others. I had hoped to add something about Hans Memling, a flemish painter, but find that the entry is so knowledgeable and thorough I would have nothing to add. On the other hand, it seems to me that the entries for "Encaustic" needs much improvement. The suggestion to add "Damar Varnish" to beeswax could actually be toxic, since Damar varnish contains turpentine solvent it should never be heated as it would release toxic fumes. I'll plan to change that to the more correct "Damar Resin" or Damar Gum, which is the pure form of this tree sap.

There is no entry on Damar Varnish or Resin, perhaps that explains the confusion on the entry. Perhaps I'll introduce one as a stub, I'm certainly no chemist, but it seems like I could get something started on this.

Also, there is a confusing line about metal tools being used with the wax medium before it cools. You can use the tools whenever, even after it cools, but a more common technique is to heat the metal and use it to manipulate the cooled wax while the tool is still hot. Semantics, maybe, but seems like that could be improved.

Also, the description of Casein paint as "glue-like" is curious. I think of glue as Elmer's consistency and the casein paint that I use is more like guache, or even oils. Should probably research this a bit to see if there is a glue-like variety available.

Coincidence?

Isn't it strange how whenever you are thinking about something, things just start showing up at your door? Friday, not one day after I decided I was going to start experimenting with sounds in my art, the Washington Post Weekend cover story Sound Ideas is all about local experiemental sound bands, where to see and hear them and who they are. Becky and I went to hear The Caution Curves at the Black Cat in DC that night. They also interviewed my sound instructor Steven Antosca whose Contemporary Music Forum I'm planning to see today performing at the Corcoran.

In Sunday's NY TImes there was also a story about MFA art-metal bands, it's about technology and the way heavy metal bands are experimenting with sounds combined with an almost classical aesthetic.

Also of interest to me in today Times was a story about traditional vs. computer animators at Disney. The advantages/disadvantages of using computers to create artwork has long been part of my career in art. It seems like it can be a divisive issue among artists, we're typically not the type to want to sit in front of a computer all day... but then again, it's so much fun all the stuff you can do digitally :-)

Defining Beauty Through Avedon caught my eye as well because of it's interesting undertone. It seemed to be attempting to counter the idea of fashion photographers representing the embodiment of the male "gaze". Avedon definitely sought to portray the beautiful, but he also found beauty in unlikely places, like the portrait of Debbie McClendon.

This summer I read Wendy Steiner's "Venus in Exile" and it was a fascinating take on the male "gaze" and the subsequent banishment of feminine beauty from art for much of the last century. The Kantian sublime, in her view is a male disinterest in all that is decorative and human. When you look at a Picasso or De Kooning nude, you don't see a figure, you see Picasso and his virtuoso brushwork. To think about the woman who posed would be a distraction...

Steiner equates the decorative as a feminine virtue, "decorative" is a quality which Kant specifically singles out as beneath beauty. Perhaps that explains why I had trouble finding the Avedon story online, turns out it was in the Fashion section, not the Arts...

A little about my work

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about the strange path that my artwork has taken through the years, from painting to digital and now painterly-looking digital work with a little 3D thrown in. Yesterday I bought some sound recording equipment to help me add sounds to video work, yet another path I'm taking.

Talking with other artists at GMU it seems like my story is not so strange after all. In fact everyone in our program is doing all kinds of things. Lisa Diaz is teaching Digital Printmaking, where we create plates digitally and then print using a traditional etching press. My other studio class is taught by Steve Antosca, a music teacher and composer who is teaching us how to use traditional tools to add music to our video and animations. It seems like in the fine arts today there is so much crossover between mediums that it gets harder and harder to break artists into different classifications.

For example, I worked on a piece of artwork this summer which combines photography, digital printing and encaustic. I "paint" in Photoshop so in the end, what is my medium? I'll post a picture above. Feel free to comment on what I should call this sort of work. "Mixed media" is a common term, but I find that usually implies collage or found objects. I feel like I painted this, in fact it was "painted" digitally, but what you see as the finished work was partially printed. Adding to the confusion, I glazed and painted encaustic onto the print.

Encaustic is a wonderful medium, it consists of bees wax, damar resin and pigment. Damar is clear tree sap from Indonesia that is commonly used as a varnish for oil paintings, it hardens the wax and gives colors luminosity and depth. I find it really adds interest to the print and gives me a workable surface that I can manipulate as I wish. By using it I've replaced the smell of oil paints and turpentine in my studio with that of honey and bees wax.

Encaustic is one of the oldest mediums still in use for painting. Some of the only examples of early rendered paintings are egyptian portraits like the Faiyum mummy portraits. The colors are so perfectly preserved and fresh that they look as if they were painted just minutes ago rather than 2200 years ago. It's an incredibly stable medium that can be reworked hours or years later by simply heating the surface again.

I think it's interesting how the lines between the disciplines have blurred so much over the years. Here I am working on a Digital Fine Art MFA, working with the one of the oldest mediums around, plus music, photography and video. I'm really glad that the GMU has so much cross-pollination between the departments, to the extent that we have to have different departments at all!

Yep, that's the best I could come up with on short notice for my first blog. At least it's better than BeautyKRX90001 or whatever "beauty" derivative is still available on blogspot.com. Why beauty at all? Well, as luck would have it I have an intense interest in things beautiful, in fact it's been a main goal of mine throughout my life as an artist and illustrator, to create beautiful images I mean.

Years ago, I chose to study illustration because it seemed to me the most direct way to produce work that I enjoyed, particularly figurative realism, and make my living as an artist. Today I am enrolled as a MFA student in the Digital Fine Art program at George Mason University.

Today it seems like there is no shortage of readings and debate about beauty and I hope to use this blog as a place to gather my thoughts and write down what I have found in my research. I would also like to share some of the artwork I have been developing which explores various conditions and the limits of what we consider as beautiful.