My Romance with Mapping

Okay, so I'm in the early stages of love with my new favorite inspiration: cartography.
It's become more than a casual fling: now I am buying books on the subject.

It started to get deep a few weeks ago when I was listening to This American Life on NPR. Author Denis Wood was discussing his new book (not yet released but I already pre-ordered it on Amazon) Denis Wood: Everything Sings, 2nd Revised Edition: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, in which he diagrams seemingly mundane details in his own neighborhood. The result is a fascinating, revealing, and often poetic look into demographics and geography... I was salivating by the end of the interview, and even went into work a couple of minutes late so I could hear all of it. I can't do this interview justice, so you can stream the entire episode from here.


I've always been attracted to art with obsessive tendencies.  Ritual, repetition, and collection seem to combine acts both hyper-cerebral and empty/meditative. It's a good place to be if you want to tap into deeper creativity (as an artist) or deeper connection (as a witness). 

This is not all-new territory for me; obsessive repetition was a common feature in my work over the last few years as I explored the phenomenon of deja vu, and its (personally) sinister role as a harbinger of a seizure.

But the new appeal is in adding the dimensions of space and time to create a diagram of some otherwise invisible truth. Denis Wood reminded me that anything can be mapped. The cover of his book features a geographic layout of carved pumpkin faces in his town. The areas of highly concentrated pumpkins correlated to wealthy areas, while the pumpkin-less deserts were confined to poorer areas. This raises questions. Is it merely a matter of the cost of the pumpkins being prohibitive? Or is there an element of neighborly expectations at work in the wealthier neighborhoods? One map of pumpkin placement is just one piece of a puzzle with infinite pieces; as more are collected and compared,  more questions can be raised, and more truths can be revealed.

While I certainly wouldn't mind copying Denis Wood's ideas as an exercise, I want to find my own systems for mapping. In my quest to develop my own cartography, I ordered some intriguing books which just arrived (Amazon delivery is the new Santa Claus, and today was Christmas).

First: 
Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information by Manuel Lima
It's a visually stunning collection of maps which go way beyond the traditional two-dimensional geographical versions we keep stuffed in our glove boxes (or used to, before GPS).
Some of the most compelling images are maps of information systems, internet connections, blogospheres, etc, which track the exchange of data between hosts. I just started delving into this hefty book, but I'm already struck by how the formerly mentioned maps resemble those of neural bonds, genetic connectors, weather patterns, and other "natural" phenomena.

Second:
Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton
Why? I love a good history book, especially one like this which describe methodologies as a window into interpreting other known histories. Also, I like the idea of working the dimension of time into a map.
While Manuel Lima's book is heavily focused on computer-rendered imagery, this one is full of hand-drawn timelines. Think family trees, geneologies, mythologies, prophetic predictions, and astronomical diagrams. Even tree rings of an ancient sequoia are included, with pinned markers to indicate major historical events. Lovely.

So, this was a long-ish post with no pictures. By my next post, hopefully I will have some images of preliminary experiments or at least images "borrowed" from my continued research.

In the meantime, I have been painting new ink-on-vellum pieces to hang in Cole's 735 Main in Lexington. People are actually buying them!

Henrique Oliveira, and other artists I want to share a bottle of wine with

The more I learn about art, the more that I realize I don’t know much. It’s an utterly obvious result: when horizons expand, the world gets larger. Amazing art is being made every day in every corner of the world; sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed with anxiety because I will never see one tenth of it. Still, there is a special kind of satisfaction that comes from “discovering” artists on my own,especially ones that make the kind of art that I feel in my gut.

        Recently,while searching for contemporary artists who work with wood, I found Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira. I was immediately attracted to his work; it is undeniably beautiful. He has amassed a large body of work, especially considering his young age and the large size and complexity of his installations. He began as a painter, but as he earned his Masters Degree in Visual Poetics (I love that this degree exists) he began working with the scrap wood he found in the slums of Sao Paolo. It is cheap, thin wood used as a sort of fencing around construction sites. It is painted, used for a few months, and then discarded. Oliveira noticed that when the thin wood was broken, the shards of wooden splinters were visually similar to his expressive brush strokes. He began assembling the scraps of wood he collected into what he called tri-dimensionals. Beyond the beauty of his work, I am inspired by his creative use of material and how he has merged painting, sculpture and installation. I only included a few images of his work, but they show the progression he made from his roots in painting to fully embracing installation and sculpture.Seeing his organic progression and growth is also inspiring to me, because I am currently concerned with merging my own 2-d and 3-d work.

Whirlwind for Turner, 2007, by Henrique Oliveira

Tapumes, 2009, by Henrique Oliveira

Bololo, 2011, by Henrique Oliveira

      Last fall I made an installation out of string and light (click here to see my blog post about it). Before I began, I wanted to research installation artists who work with string. (I like to be prepared during critique to acknowledge specific inspirations; if my teacher points out that my work is similar to an established artist, I want to be aware of those similarities.) I stumbled upon Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. She uses string to fill spaces, often obscuring or revealing other objects in the process. These installations have a spooky, dream-like quality. There is a respect for the simplicity of the medium which gives the work a sort of innocence and purity.In my installation, I tried to achieve a similar respect for material, by using nothing but white cotton string and no other visible materials or hard ware. I was thrilled to see one of her small vitrine-like installations at the Armory Show in New York.

In Silence, 2009, by Chiharu Shiota

TobiasTovera is a San Fransisco-based artist. Visually, his paintings are similar to my ink paintings; they might be the closest thing I have seen to how some of my own art looks. His use of color is a bit more clear and prismatic, and his images have fewer figurative connotations than mine, but I admire his use of scale and space.

Deepening Undercurrent, Pigment on panel, 5' x 5', 2008, by Tobias Tovera

AdamFrelin was a visiting lecturer this year. He was by far my favorite out of all the artists who have visited DAAP. He is open to all types of media, and his work is infused with intelligence and humor. There is something poetic about it, in the way that his work offers satisfying connections and also raises questions,to keep the viewer engaged and inspired. It’s like the perfect appetizer, which tastes really good but keeps you hungry for more. Go to his website; a lot of his work is performance or process-based, so it needs to be explored to be appreciated.

Mirror Ball Roll (One), 2009, by Adam Frelin

There are countless other artists that I have “discovered” who have inspired me in less direct ways. Some of my recent favorites include Leandro Erlich, TroyAbbott, Slinkachu, Isaac Cordal, and Gregory Scott. I discovered these and others from magazines, the internet, and from my classmates and teachers. A few of them I saw for the first time in New York, either at the Armory or one of the satellite shows. (All of these, plus a lot more, are featured on my Pinterest "Favorite Artists" board. Yes, I know, Pinterest is a time-suck, but it's also a handy way of keeping track of things I might otherwise forget.)

It is hard to describe the type of inspiration that can be had just from looking at interesting art. Often it is like reading a menu when you are really hungry. Occasionally it feels more like jumping jacks; it gets the blood flowing and the heart pounding. Sometimes it feels like a jolt of caffeine which wakes me from a stupor, and which makes me want to stop writing this blog post and go make some art.

RESEARCH, my new best friend

Research is not a pleasant word for most students. It conjures images of bleary-eyed long sessions in front of the computer, hours lost in the stacks at the library, taking detailed notes so the works-cited page will be complete... NOT fun.
But research for the artist is fun, and pretty much necessary. To me, it's has become a valued part of the artistic process. After the initial inspiration, it's the next step. Sometimes a little research will turn me off to an idea, and that's okay, because it always opens me up to a million other ideas in the process.

As a kid I used to love the glossy pages of the family's multi-volume encyclopedia and the dictionary. I would sit for hours and look through them, loving the way the information was organized, in alphabetical order with no consideration to topic. This organization combined with arbitrariness is still intriguing to me today, and is often a major device I use when communicating with my own artwork.

See what I mean? Volume 19: Excretion through Geometry. You can't make this stuff up!

 My new favorite gadget for research is the iPad. I use Google Image search, look up the topic I want, and with just one touch I save the image to a folder. I can access the folder easily and quickly and take it anywhere, even places without internet access, and have those images ready for reference.Why is this so great? First, I can edit and delete these photos anytime. Also, I can flip through them easily with a slideshow or thumbnails, and zooming in on the details is no problem. Also, in the course of any normal web browsing, I can save any intriguing images to be looked over later when I need a little inspiration.

Just in case you were wondering, I never just copy these images into my work. I just select bits and pieces, such as color palettes and perspectives, to use in my process. I recently wanted to do a series about circus freaks, presented as vintage side show posters, which were actually showcasing very mundane exhibits, in order to illustrate the hypocrisy of xenophobia. I haven't done it yet, but I have about a hundred examples of vintage circus posters ready to go on my iPad when I'm ready.

See? Fun! Just as a note: it took me ten times longer to search, save, and upload this image onto this blog than it would have for me to find and save it on my iPad.

Research is a multi-faceted process, and in actuality, it never ends for an artist. I'm always observing and gathering new visual data, both to support existing ideas and to form new ones. It's easy to get stuck in a routine where you don't just LOOK AT THE WORLD around you- I try to stay out of that routine.

One more thing: just in case I haven't made it clear, research for me is more than just gathering visual data. I love to know the history of things, people and places when I put them in my work. If I'm making up a subject out of my imagination, there is still always a link to the real world (it's unavoidable) and I can't help but assign a story to my new subject. Why? It helps me convey the message, and it's more fun.