Ekphrasis Workshop

Today is the ekphrasis workshop at the Portland Art Museum with instructor Joseph Bradshaw. As part of the workshop he chose six pieces for a tour. One of these is Megan Murphy's Pause. The first question we tackled was the mood, and somber was the answer. We discussed the kind of music it would play, had it a tune. We looked into and around it. Then I gave the background information. Something is so nice about holding out on that for a while, to give the piece a chance to speak.
When Joseph held his hand up to "Pause" Laura, one of the participants, said "I can see your reflection in the mirror" and we all took a breath in. His shadow was large and black against the greenish gray paint, but even closer to his body than it's shadow was the very subtle reflection of him in the mirror.
A piece that stands right next to Pause was also included in today's tour, it is Almanac by Marie Watt.

I had so many things to say about this piece by the artist who calls herself "a Cowboy and an Indian" having both Wyoming rancher and Seneca turtle clan roots. The thing people noticed that I hadn't considered was how the stack of blankets is precarious and imbalanced. How it looks like it could topple over and crush you. When we walked around it I noticed for the first time how a stack of blankets made of bronze seemingly totters atop the blankets made of wool. It really is quite disconcerting. Which is why the calm and serene presence of Pause on the adjacent wall balances out the area in just the perfect way.

Megan Murphy ~ Pause, Not Unlike Dan Graham

Pause by Megan Murphy is this week's selection at Fifty Two Pieces. Perhaps the intention of the artist is to have you take a moment to consider life, life and death, the time between life and death or all of this. Words may float through your mind or images of what your life has been and what will be happening next.

Dan Graham's sculptures can have the same effect. The image above is of one of Dan Graham's sculptures currently on exhibit at the Whitney Museum. Yesterday I spent two hours with this and other works by Graham. Reflections fascinate me, making me think about reality and perception. Dan Graham's sculptures are not unlike Megan Murphy's Pause. They can have you take the time to visualize yourself, here but not here. Standing near one of his sculptures you see a system of enclosures. You bump up against yourself and the world as you have constructed it. Stand there and you can pause and reflect about life and reality. And then of course you can just have fun too, another aspect of life.

Pause, Megan Murphy

Megan Murphy made this "object" in 2002. It is oil painted on mirror. It has a rhythm of letters in bands that move from the left to the right, or the right to the left, across the middle, throughout the piece. I don't know what direction they move because they are laid on top of eachother in an unreadable stack. The closer you get the more clear it all becomes, but the term is relative because there never is clarity.
There is a shine throughout the middle that you see if you step back, it is almost in a human shape, as if the halo of light from within has hips and a head.
Megan Murphy made this piece the year her mother died. Some say it is about that short period of time between life and death.
No doubt about it, it has a haunting quality.

Raymond Saunders ~ Jack Johnson, Then and Now

Raymond Saunders painted this image of Jack Johnson in 1971. That was a year after James Earl Jones portrayed Johnson (thinly disguised) in The Great White Hope. Johnson was a famous black American heavyweight boxer. He was the first black American boxer to win the heavyweight title.

Saunders has reprised this image in works he is creating at Magnolia Studios in the Bay Area. As described in Magnolia's newsletter...

In new unique works on canvas, wood and panel, acclaimed Oakland-based painter Raymond Saunders incorporates digitally printed elements into mixed media images which are densely layered with lyrical pencil drawings, spray painted vases, gauzywatercolor pomegranates, coffee grounds, torrents of dripping oil paint, collaged paper ephemera, and various other ingredients. Prints on recycled plywood from Urban Ore form the foundation for several of the works, lending a readymade texture with which ink and other media can interact. Saunders can be seen nearly every day bringing work back and forth from his studio, where elements are applied by hand, to Magnolia, where new elements are incorporated using a large scale flatbed printer. In some cases these elements have been scanned from older works and it is difficult if not impossible to tell which parts are hand-painted and which are printed. Also in the works are a series of mixed-media Saunders etchings which combine traditional copper plate etching with collaged elements.

Here's a quick video showing the printer adding color to the image.

Family is the Incubator

This post is about families, and how they create the foundation of an artist. Saunders' Assemblage seems to have been inspired by childhood memories. There was a Kiki Smith passage about this as well, and here is something I found while researching yesterday's post:
When asked how he developed his style for writing dialogue, Mamet said, "In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, based solely on our ability to speak the language viciously. That's probably where my ability was honed."
I spent the last four days at the Country Fair, with a fair "family". They get together once a year and create the Rising Moon Food Booth, they camp in a cluster and work and play together. They are all artists, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and some come along solo, like me. The kids run around freely all weekend, even the little ones. Everyone is surrounded with scenes like this one:
I took note of the kids. I hope when I have children I can bring them up to run wild and free and take in all the creativity out there, to push it back out into the world. I hope I can give my children some sort of memory they can quote when asked how they became creative, even if, like Mamet, they have to use the words miserable and viciously.

Raymond Saunders ~ Dr. Faustus

"Dr. Faustus", you ask? How can Raymond Saunders be associated with Dr. Faustus? Read the chalk like writing on the image above and you'll see that David Mamet wrote a play about Dr. Faustus. Mamet asked his long-time friend Raymond Saunders to do the broadsides for the play that was originally performed at the Magic Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005. Saunders created a painting in which he depicted this visual musing on heaven and hell. Trillium Press then created twelve pigmented prints each of which had added handwork and collage. The augmentation was typical of Saunders' art practice. Each print is unique, much like individual performances of a play. Below you can see nine of those twelve images. For you Mamet buffs out there, Raymond Saunders also created the broadside for the original production of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway back in 1984.

Raymond Saunders ~ Red Star, Jasper Johns and Robert Colescott

Just so you know, Fifty Two Pieces operates 7 days a week, 365 days for one year only, vacations included. Both Amy and I are away from home this weekend. She put her posts together early; I chose to wait. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? Fortunately tomorrow for me which is now today is three hours earlier than Portland Daylight Savings Time.

So, here is Raymond Saunders after a full day in Brooklyn and a trip over to Governors Island which required transit through Manhattan. Yikes, Raymond Saunders was born in 1934 so he's been around for some time. Painting, creating art, doing his thing so to speak. Doing his thing is the important part here. In the 1960's at the height of the Black Power movement, abstraction was the focus of the art world. Artists like Raymond Saunders who made color field paintings or assemblages were not treated well by the movement. Saunders was criticized for works such as his 1970's Red Star, shown in our post for the day. Saunders defended his penchant for Abstraction that looks to Jasper Johns' symbols and numerals with this statement ... "racial hang-ups are extraneous to art."

Here's an excerpt from Raymond Saunders' Black Is a Color published in 1967.

Some angry artists are using their art as political tools, instead of vehicles of free expression...An artist who is always harping upon resistance, discrimination, opposition, besides being a drag, eventually plays right into the hands of the politicians he claims to despies--and is held there, unwittingly (and witlessly) reviving slavery in another form. For the artist, this is aesthetic atrophy.

Certainly the American black artist is in a unique position to express certain aspects of the current American scene, both negative and positive, but if he restricts himself to these alone, he may risk becoming a mere cypher, a walking protest, a politically prescribed stereotype, negating his own mystery and allowing himself to be shuffled off into an arid overall mystique.

Racial hangups are extraneous to art, no artist can afford to let them obscure what runs through all art--the living root and the ever-growing aesthetic record of human spiritual and intellectual experince. Can't we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?

This wasn't exactly the position of Robert Colescott from Week 20 here at Fifty Two Pieces.