Vaccication: Houston

This week my main focus was on getting a vaccination, and it was a wild ride. I’d signed up in my home state of Texas, hoping I might get a spot since a lot of folks are disinterested in the vaccine there. After several weeks of waiting, I was offered a J&J appointment, so I took it, made flight arrangements, but three days before I was set to go, the CDC took J&J off the shelves to research adverse reactions in the form of major clotting events. At this point, I had a flight, hotel, and car booked, so I figured I’d better find an alternative. Fortunately, I received an update that I’d be getting Pfizer. Unfortunately, I hadn’t budgeted for three weeks and a second shot, so I'm personally taking it upon myself to use the UK’s strategy of prolonging second doses out of sheer necessity. If I’m lucky, the Netherlands will have its vaccination act together (looks like I’ll have to be very very lucky at the rate they’re going) and I’ll be able to get a second shot in June. Or maybe I’ll have to wait until I’m in Chicago in July. Who knows? I’ve given up on any kind of certainty over the last year.

On the bright side, Houston, unlike Amsterdam, was open for business and offered lots of fun while everyone remained fully masked. I enjoyed a full time taco diet, homemade black walnut ice cream, and world class fine art. I took the opportunity between vaccination and PCR testing to visit the Rothko Chapel and Menil Collection, both of which were wonderful excursions, and the local parks offered decent wildlife spotting thrown in with a little exercise. It was nice to be back in Texas for a minute, and made me miss the place. I tried to draw and do a little project planning, but getting more familiar with Cy Twombly and seeing Mark Rothko’s art during my first museum visit in well over a year, offered a needed injection of inspiration and new ways to think about painting. It was especially wonderful to see Rothko’s work since I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it during the generative painting process.

Mark Rothko, Plum and Brown, 1956 | At the Menil Collection, 20210416

Generative Line Painting Study III

I received the acrylic drying retarder medium and it significantly improved color fluidity and line work. It was especially good for using with the very fine 3/0 brushes. Using it, I noticed I had more control in general and was able to play with line weight more readily. I also prepared two larger panels over the weekend, and I’m now waiting for a package with flow increasing medium and black gesso to experiment with a black background layer.

This week my time is more limited, so I’m going to prepare armatures for the Protoa series. I finalized Protoa A in color. I like how it resolved as an experiment for the large scale models. I made paper clay as well, trying it on a couple of small flower shapes, but didn’t like its workability. It’s sandable, so before I rule it out, I may try sanding the small pieces to see if it’s still worth using. I may also try augmenting the traditional flour and water recipe used on Protoa A with PVA glue to make it more durable.

PROTOA A 20210409 Acrylic on prepared papier maché armature

Generative Line Painting Study II

The second of my generative paintings was again an acrylic work on reclaimed MDF panel. This version has a base coat of paint over the gesso and was drawn with finer weight brushes than the previous version. I once again had a problem with the paint drying too fast. In the next one, I’ll add a retardant medium to the paint. I may also try a flow additive, since the work was stickier and it was slightly harder to maneuver the brush across the board on the base coat; however, I prefer the result with an underlying color layer, which ultimately has less texture within the lines and also offers more nuance to the color structure.

Generative Line Painting Study I

After a bout of anxiety induced procrastination, I finally attempted a generative line study in acrylic using a gesso’d piece of IKEA furniture gone wrong...

It proved to be a warmup painting that was as much a study of technique, paint flow, differing brush and paint qualities, and color mixing, as it was an executed idea. Painting is a much different animal than drawing with pencil, color being almost the least of it. There’s greater flexibility and substantial potential for nuance, but control is significantly more difficult. In short, it’s both harder and more rewarding: offering infinite possibilities. It is also more tiring and requires some planning.

This study was also a reminder that acrylic paint is fairly quick to dry when working with small quantities. It can be completed in one shot, as I did here, or done using a medium to lengthen drying time. Doing it in one shot limits the scale of the work. This piece is about 40cm x 25cm, and by the end (over an hour later), my hand was very tired, and I couldn’t really stop mid-work to reflect on it without worrying that my mix was about to dry out. Making larger batches of color could be an option, though a somewhat costly one, since the purpose of the generative studies is partly to explore color theme and variation and I do a lot of mixing. Another alternative could be oil paint.

I’m basically pleased with this as a first try but overall the idea is not yet resolved.

Executing an An Artistic Process

1. Start with an idea of any kind

2. Draw in pencil.

3. Draw more and elaborate, expand, refine.

4. Land on concept.

5. Try coloring the sketch. Try alternative color. Try more colors.

6. Land on color.

7. Imagine how to build.

8. Prototype a scale version.

9. Sketch full scale form 2D.

10. Build.

11. Repeat.

Protoa A

Directions:

i. Place a clean enough drop cloth on your dining table.

ii. Build an armature with cardboard; realize you don’t know what you’re doing. Do it anyway.

iii. Cut reused paper into hundreds of strips. Put some on the table and the rest in a moving box.

iv. Make paste from flour, water, and salt. Think about how kids eat paste. Know it won’t taste good. Stop yourself from trying it.

v. Place a paper strip into the paste; note the significant mess you make. Try to remove some paste from the strip. Mostly fail.

vi. Apply paste-paper to your armature. Attempt to build the shape you envision. Mostly fail.

vii. Feel sticky. Continue.

viii. After applying several layers of paper to the top of your armature, wonder if the cardboard stilts will stick to the form. Allow to dry overnight.

iix. Find the product has not stuck to the stilts and feel relief. Feel satisfied that the dry form is very solid. Repeat process on day two on the unformed part of the structure.

ix. Repeat until pleased with results. Wonder if it is possible to follow through on this step.

Generative Line Color Study II

Generative Line Color Study II

Directions:

I. Boil hot water. Make a large cup using green tea leaves given to you at least one decade earlier and brought directly from Japan. Wonder why you never drink it.

II. Use an algorithmic music finder to choose experimental ambient music that may have been composed using a machine learning program. Note that you enjoy it.

III. Choose a set of three colored pencils with the following criteria: they are all tonally related based around a tone you do not like. Chose a second set based on the same principal, but chose the tonal range to be the ugliest related to the first set. Recognize the colors you’ve chosen were once the most popular combination for house decor not long before your lifetime. Consider the vagaries of retail design and fashion trends.

IV. Attempt to hand draw straight lines using a regular pattern of color dispersion. Ensure the lines are as close as possible while leaving a small gap between them. Notice every time your hand shakes.

V. While keeping the lines straight, also maintain the sharp tip on the pencil as you draw. Realize another color is attached to the tip of your pencil and entirely changes your color direction. Appreciate this oddity.

VI. Assess how to describe what you are doing. Find you have been inspired by Lorrie Moore, and make a note to call your mother.

Eindelijke (Finally), Spring!

Tiny Daffodil, 1 maart 2021, Harmoniehof

I took last week off from writing and working because, finally! All of our things arrived from the States. I spent the week unpacking and realizing that I can’t finish unpacking because I need furniture to unpack into… I then crawled down the rabbit hole of online furniture shopping, fantasizing about vintage teak, only to land on agonizing over Ikea shelving units that turned out to be unavailable for delivery. I purchased a bunch of stuff that was good enough. At least it was cheap, right?

This lockdown may be an endless bummer, but I can still walk through the awakening landscape, even if I can’t peruse the vintage shops. I strolled with the dogs through De Pijp, and it was glorious. I had so missed city life, and the buzz of a vibrant place. Even with the lockdown, if the weather is nice, people are out enjoying the parks and plazas that are beautifully lush. Living in the Netherlands, land of Tulips, you realize that people here are floral aficionados. In Pilsen, Chicago, there are Tamales available on every corner, here, there are plants available for growing and arranging.

Now all the bulb flowers are beginning to bloom: it started with snowdrops, moved on to crocuses, and we have finally reached daffodils, which remind me of growing up in Chicago. Their leaves would start to peek up through the snow in late March, and you knew warmer days were coming. They remind me of how much I love the particular shift from winter to spring that only happens in cold climates.

Apollo Land

We’re beginning to settle in to our life in Amsterdam, and the new neighborhood is an art deco dreamscape. The grand Apollo House, built in 1939, at the peak of the machine age, is just around the corner: a masterpiece of 20th century architecture by the famed Dutch architect Dirk Roosenburg, grandfather of Rem Koolhaas. The building gives the distinct impression that it has just weighed anchor in port, and the city just collapsed into form around it. Somehow it also looks both completely of its time and entirely contemporary. The surrounding area buildings, built in the Amsterdam style of the 1920s, have beautiful details too, with rounded corners and port windows and geometric forms that feel elegant and friendly in a way that later modernist architecture does not.

In addition to exploring the new area, I’ve been continuing my generative line studies, inspired by the recent frigid weather of snow and ice freezing around reeds in the nearby canal. I also began several jewelry concept sketches, and have noticed the lozenge shapes of the local deco architecture creeping into my work.

New Place

Got the keys to our new apartment, and there’s a great space to set up the studio. It opens onto a walled-off roof terrace that begs for a potted garden in true Dutch fashion. When the weather improves, it’ll be lovely to sit outside with a coffee and draw.

With all the moving, I haven’t gotten much creative work done, but I saw an interesting job posting. I haven’t brought myself to apply for reasons that boil down to myriad insecurities. That said, I spent some time over the last week researching generative design and assembling digital collages related to the request, and I’m pleased with the results. Since I may still apply, the one posted here is my least favorite.

Feathers and Curfews

Searching for small pleasures has come to be the theme of the near year under Covid quarantine measures. Here in the Netherlands, thanks to the new, more virulent, and perhaps deadlier version of the virus, we now have a curfew in addition to a lockdown, and a jarringly slow moving state vaccination apparatus. Mask wearing remains less common than in other places for reasons I can’t comprehend. There’s no crazy right-wing movement for freedom (except regarding the lockdowns), and if people would just diligently wear masks EVERYWHERE, perhaps we could be free of some of the more draconian measures now on offer here.

So it goes. Every place appears to have its own intractable problems in Covid suppression, except East Asia, which seems to have managed pretty well.

In any case, small pleasures have been on my mind: I found an Italian bakery that carries canolis just when my eldest was missing them. It’s strange what you miss when you move abroad. He hasn’t had a canoli in years. Even when we lived in NYC, it wasn’t something we often ate. For my part, along with many other people who’ve had to limit their contacts in the world, birds have become a great fascination. Before moving to Amsterdam, I probably hadn’t seen a live magpie for at least a decade. I don’t even know if they live in the US. They’re entirely commonplace here, and astoundingly beautiful. Their elegant shape and iridescent feathers are captivating. I bet most people who are used to them have stopped noticing how lovely they are. Maybe they’re even thought of as a nuisance, like pigeons or grackles.

In any case, they inspired me to paint today. Since all of my possessions are on a boat somewhere in the North Sea, I had to make do with my son’s art kit. It has one of those cheap kid’s plastic paintbrushes that are almost impossible to control. The paint itself left something to be desired in quality, and my sketchbook isn’t really made for watercolor, nevertheless, I persisted. I may not have done the magpie justice, but I feel it was a worthy attempt. This bird deserves oil on canvas.

Two: Begin. Pause. Start Again.

In between my introduction here, drafted on November 15, 2018, but unpublished until today, January 18, 2021, I changed almost everything. Twice.

First, I quit my job in NYC, left half of my family in Brooklyn, and headed to work in the Texas Hill Country. The rest of my family came six months later. For two years, I continued designing jewelry, but had to learn silversmithing, so I did. I worked with superb craftspeople who taught me everything I now know about metal-smithing. It was an incredible opportunity.

Over the summer of 2020, the political winds of the United States, which had been chaotic for several years already, began making me very nervous. The Coronavirus pandemic and white supremacist nationalism fomented into a sea of social unrest unlike anything I’d seen in my lifetime. My family found opportunity abroad and landed in Amsterdam just before New Year’s Eve, in the midst of the pandemic. Before we left, we were optimistic and excited to start a new chapter in a beautiful European cultural capital; a dream we’d longed to realize for over a decade. A week later, while still quarantined in our new home, I watched the U.S. Capitol insurrection unfold on January 6, 2021, ushering in the first violent transfer of power of the American presidency in history. It’s hard not to wonder whether we left just in time. January 20, 2021, two days from today, will be telling.

I now find myself within the arc of a historical cataclysm, and a personal one. Art will be the way through.

An Introduction

Draft Written: 11.15.2018

Sometimes, someone tells you to do something, and you think, “Well, that’s a good idea. Okay.” So here I am, writing a blog. For the record, I’ve been keeping a list of blog post topics for a few years. I don’t plan to write about any of those topics here. Instead, I’m going to keep this simple: Processive is a blog about my work, and primarily about my art. While my career has focused on design, my art is more personal, and therefore, a more compelling subject for writing.

I imagine most artists are compelled to make art because it’s an emotional outlet. That’s certainly what I find for myself. These days, I paint ugly things. I love painting ugly things. I love ugly colors and textures that I hope land somewhere between disgust and disturbance, or maybe just outrage. That’s fine too. It’s an outlet for anger. I find there’s a lot of anger in the world these days, and it is reflected in what I choose to express.

Landscape From 100 Years After Today

Draft written: 11.15.2018

I started this painting several months ago, after discovering an unused workroom in the basement of my building. Despite the dust, the cracked and ancient linoleum flooring, and my new friend, Louise (a trusty wolf spider who hangs out on a substantial web near the window) it’s quite cozy. It lends me the flexibility to paint in the larger formats I prefer, and it’s less cramped than the office space I’d been using. There’s also a real advantage in not having to pack up my project as soon as a layer dries so my husband can get his underwear out of the closet.

In any case, this work, which has resolved towards an abstract landscape, came out of a desire to paint in beige. Beige is an unsung color. Bland. Boring. Banal. Beige. It is the perfect color for our time: polite, unimposing, mealy-mouthed, always speaking to false equivalencies, failing to stand for anything or stand up to anyone. I like it with white to make it even more serene and I like it against black for contrast. While some may disagree, I believe yellow ochre is beige’s friend in neutrality, behaving as the stronger personality in a milquetoast world.

My mind tends toward the sculptural and I’m more comfortable in three dimensions than in two, which is some of the fun of painting for me, but I can’t work without relief. There must be texture, there must be shadows that are dictated by the light falling on the canvas at different times of day, not just trompe l’oeil indications of it. In this painting I’ve used pumice and Extra Heavy Gloss Gel mixed into the paint. I also love using a palette knife to build up the surface in different ways: it can be very smooth, or used like mortar, or made to act like shoes peeling up the surface of hot tar. I’m currently in the phase of this painting where building is key. When I began, I worked to slick the surface with smooth waves of paint coating across the canvas, but now everything is about additive texture.

There’s an amazing painting in The Whitney Museum’s collection. I forget the name of the artist now, but she painted a little every day over several years. It is an enormous work that weighs around a ton, and wasn’t even displayed until the Whitney moved into their space in the Meat Packing District because it was so difficult to move and mount. Frankly, it’s amazing the canvas was strong enough to hold all the paint. That is the level of texture I dream of one day achieving. But not with this piece.