Saturday, February 18, 2006






Natures wonderful enhancements

Thursday, February 16, 2006






Unfinished Installation: 27 wire cubes 3' square all suspended but for 1


Model for a much larger scale


Untitled


Dealing now with reflective surface as another element

Untitled (the combination of illusionism and illusion)

Rectangles as mentioned below hanging in the drawing show

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Donald Judd



Untitled
1992
Woodcut on Japanese laid paper Mitsumata, in oxide of chronium

On the justification of specific measures taken to create as well as value certain ideas.

I am interested lately in work that seems to come from a sensory connection, an overall experience taken from the object itself. In reading through some of Donald Judds thoughts I have found many similar ideas in my own work. He says that the first two necessities in creating a work are to create a new reality and a new wholeness; the only things they [a work of art] can claim to be whole are themselves. A person thinking, feeling and perceiving is whole. The dissimilarity in a work preserves the identity of their distinct qualities within the wholeness. Judd is seen as a skeptic, I am not a skeptic per-se, though I do agree with what he says about thought and feeling being two dissimilarities of a whole, even one and the same thing, feeling as the process of thinking to fast to be thought, as the experience of a work is both thought about and felt at the same time. “Things that exist, exist and everything is on their side. By existing the things that exist have beaten the odds. Existence alone is sufficient to develop a personal interest on the part of the viewer especially when the qualities [characters] are specific, escaping familiar categories making this existence interesting.”
I enjoy the idea that a work of art is a hypothesis materialized, an aesthetic proposition, or as my painting instructor puts it, an investigation, rather than a formal/final statement. “You have to look and understand both, in looking you understand, it’s more than you can describe, you look and think and look and think until it makes sense, becomes interesting.” Judd believes in illusion as a natural condition of vision, a physiological effect. Illusionism as a constructed effect for the pictorialy indoctrinated. In other words the illusion one sees in the rectangles I created from the shadows of mylar (soon to come), as opposed to the illusionism of space I created in the abstract dot painting. “Illusion is the way things are, illusionism is the way things aren’t” I do understand this difference, but fail to see the significance of it in a hierarchical light. Though I do feel more inclined toward illusion these days for perhaps, I think, its immediate reality, or because it refers to nothing that’s outside of itself, or maybe even more so I am interested in applying both to invoke the sensation of the difference of the two. I am very interested in developing space as a main aspect, as it has begun to grow from the walls with wire and surface in the cubes of the courtyard, space has become for me a dynamic component rather than an inactive element. It’s true that just a few years ago I dismissed Judd along with Stella and Whiteread and others of a like mindedness, and so am a bit shaken by the sudden bounding enthusiasm I have found in their work, an enthusiasm I attribute to an understanding, an understanding I attribute to a maturity of the eye and a willingness to appreciate (as I do both, say, Caravaggio and Kline). This appreciation is necessary for painters on any side of the spectrum i.e. figurative versus abstract, or rather artists of any and every medium, in order to come to an understanding of their own work.