Inside Outside: Installations

As a visual artist accustomed to typically hanging two dimensional paintings on walls in traditional settings, I jumped at the opportunity to exhibit at Tom Burtonwood and Holly Holmes' Home Studio/Gallery, What It Is. Their space offered me a chance to present my work in configurations that I've thought about but haven't been able to realize until now.
Years ago as part of an exhibition I had suspended cut out canvas figures around pieces of furniture. It added a different dimension to both the space and the furniture. This is the same idea that I wanted to reexplore at What It Is. On both the front and back porches of Tom and Holly's home I arranged free standing figures in front of two larger paintings. The front porch features a grouping of collaged canvas figures mounted on wooden stands called Walk-Abouts, that I described in an earlier blog, stand arranged in front of a painting called 'Show Time.'
Behind them is a piece comprised of small cubist collaged portraits that I call 'Cosmo Girls' because the features (eyes, noses, and mouths) were cut out from my daughters' Cosmopolitan Magazines. The piece itself is created from an old dresser that disassembled and cut apart.
Next to the Cosmo Girls is a small self-portrait homage to Alexander Calder made from recycled bits and pieces.
In the dining room is an assemblage of framed Cosmo Girl portraits that I call 'Boxes' because they are mounted in free standing boxes and frames. Although they are stylistically quite different from the other Cosmo Girls assembled in the old dresser, both series evolved from the same source: Cosmopolitan Magazine.
On the back porch is another painting/figure installation. But these figures called 'Remnants' are collaged drawings that I also described in an earlier blog created from disparate parts of cutout drawings that are secured together with string instead of glue. They are suspended on dowels set in front of the painting that titles the show, "Inside Outside.'
And finally, in the backyard, are a series of large panels that I described in an earlier blog. They were originally created as part of set for a production of 'The Three Penny Opera.' Here in the backyard I've arranged them in a semi-circle and placed some Walk-Abouts where actors would stood to once again break up the space. In the actual theatrical production the panels were meant to be the backdrop in the show. In this presentation they are to be the focal points.

Cosmo Girls

I do most of my furniture shopping in the alley and about twenty five years ago I found an old dresser that I took home. All I had at the time was a lot of black paint so that's the color I painted it. Eventually I painted the top and the handles light blue. It was used at various times by all of my kids but eventually ended up in the basement in my studio where it occupied a central location as a repository for my daughters' Barbie Doll collection and community. As one would expect, as my daughters grew up they visited Barbie less and less, and finally not at all. Meanwhile, the dresser remained where it was as my own clutter grew around it.
Recently as I was scrutinizing my studio's limited storage space I realized that if I removed the dresser I could actually create a lot more space. After so many years it was difficult to contemplate but with a heavy heart I placed Barbie and all her friends and contents into a plastic bin and emptied the dresser which I then took outside.
The dresser was quite old when found it and showed its age even more in the daylight. I couldn't bear to leave it in the alley destined for a landfill. But on the other hand because of its rickety condition I couldn't give it away either. So, what to do? As I was leaning on it one of the lose panels came off and before I knew it the old dresser more or less came apart with much of a fight. I kept the drawers because they were still in good condition and I noticed that there was not a sign of particle board anywhere to be found.
As I looked at the sides of the dresser they actually looked like small shelves, just big enough to support some smaller pieces. As I looked at some of the panels that had come off the back of the dresser I realized that if I cut them into squares they would fit on perfectly on the shelves. And that’s what I did.
But what to do with the squares once they were cut? A few months ago I had created some collages made from cutting apart pictures that I found in my daughters’ discarded Cosmopolitan magazines ( I assured them that I only looked at the pictures and read the articles). I loved the results. Using only the eyes, noses and mouths that I cut out magazines I painted and created collaged portraits that were at once cubist, abstract, and surreal, and quite beautiful, or so I thought. I decided to repeat the exercise using the wooden squares
What pleased most was that in the end the dresser was not discarded or wasted. Every bit or almost every bit of it was transformed into something entirely new, a different kind of energy.

REMNANTS

I have always viewed my work as ongoing conversations, as works in progress and therefore always susceptible to change, sometimes with a capital C. As a writer might find him or herself constantly editing words over time, so too do I as an artist. I feel compelled to return to my work not only as a point of reference but as a point of departure as well.
I had accumulated dozens and dozens and dozens of drawings over the years: pencil, pen and ink, water color, acrylic, all works on paper. Some I felt were resolved but others, in spite of all the years, did not age as well, or at least my taste had evolved and I was not satisfied with what I saw. During the past 10 years I had begun experimenting with collage, initially cutting apart older etchings, and then some of my drawings as well. But about 6 months ago I decided to try something completely different. Instead of cutting works apart and then reassembling them again with glue I decided that I would tie every part together with a three inch piece hemp string. I call the drawings Remnants because they were assemblages made entirely by tying all of the ‘remnants’, the disparate parts, together. I completed all of the pieces in a fit of creativity over the course of one month, and discovered that the sum of all the parts makes each piece whole again.

Many years ago the owner of high end, period furniture store and gallery stopped by my studio for a visit. Although he enjoyed my work he thought that an exhibit of paintings would distract too much from the store’s focus, the furniture. As he was leaving the studio he noticed a painted figure hanging up in the corner. It was a piece that I had cut out of a painting that was damaged after being accidentally torn. I ended up cutting up the canvas into smaller canvases but kept whatever figurative fragments that I could. I initially dismissed the piece as nothing consequential but he said if I had more of them maybe we could build a show around them and hand them up around the furniture as installations. And that was that.
I eventually created a whole gallery of these figures that were suspended in different configurations amidst the furniture and all over the gallery. It was like walking into a theater full of the actors `in tableau. After the exhibit closed the question was what to do with all the pieces. They were too big to place in file drawers and to flimsy to store upright so I decided the next best place would be to sandwich them between the beds and mattresses in our house. And that’s where they remained undisturbed for the next 20 years.
A couple months ago, I decided to revisit them and discovered that that some had not aged well, some were in need of repair, still others were in reasonably good shape. I was going put them away again but then it occurred to me that, in actuality, these pieces had actually anticipated my work with collage by a good decade. In many cases I had glued various pieces of canvas together to create collages. Suddenly I began to see these pieces in a new light.
I brought them all down into my studio and began to repair, repaint, and rework each one, not really knowing what I would do with them when I finished. I just knew they needed some new ‘love’ after so many years of being hidden away. I ended up building some bases that allowed me to set them up as freestanding pieces and within a short time my studio was becoming more and more crowded as more and more figures began to assemble.
I call them ‘Walk Abouts’ and for now and for the time being, and for the sake of my very limited space I have suspended them all together on a clothes line. And there they will remain until a new venue finds them. It’s better than being sandwiched under mattress any day.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to design the set for a production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's 'Three Penny Opera' produced by Paul William's Chicago Opera Group. We had the usual budgetary and stage limitations to contend with. The set needed to be light and portable but edgy at the same time. I built a 10' crucifix that doubled as a clothes rack, a 10' gallows, a 10' long fence, a large shuddered window that opened and closed as well a door and door frame. But the most memorable pieces that I built were the a series of 8'x4' styrofoam panels based on pen and ink drawings by George Grosz, the German Expressionist, who was commenting on the material excess, greed, decadence, and debauchery that he perceived was so pervasive in undermining society at the time of the Wiemar Republic in the 1920's. The panels served as backdrops that were moved around on stage in various combinations. On their reverse sides they were painted as black brick walls which when lined up together were quite convincing.

The Meandering Life of a Painting

The Meandering Life of a Painting
Whenever I believed that I had ‘completed’ a painting I would engage in a ritual that I practiced for well over thirty years. It required that I set up my heavy free standing masonite panel somewhere in an evenly shaded patch of ground, drape a black cloth down the front of it, bang a nail in the center, hang up the painting, and sometimes enduring a full range of weather conditions, snap four Kodachrome slides and then repeat the entire process with a role of Kodak 100 print film. It was a tedious sometimes arduous process that had me constantly battling the wind and flapping cloth panels, or snipping away frayed or errant strings of canvas. I could really have used an assistant. A week or so later I would get the pictures back only to discover that the images were flawed because I forgot to adjust the camera properly.
And then everything changed over night with the advent of the digital camera. Actually I was a bit of a slow learner. I still persevered with my traditional set up, slides and prints until I could no longer find people to process them any longer. Suddenly I was left with only one choice : the digital camera. What surprised me above all else was easy life as a photographer suddenly became. Suddenly there was no need to set up anything in order to photograph the paintings. I could shoot pictures virtually anywhere and then crop them and make other adjustments on the computer. If the picture was flawed I could easily rephotograph and upload it in moments instead of weeks.
Since the early 1980’s when I moved to Chicago I had diligently been documenting my work. As I had said earlier whenever I completed a piece I would try to photograph it. However in almost every case I would no sooner see the slide than I would detect some compositional flaw that needed addressing. Once correction would reveal the need for another correction and over time completely new image would evolve and on and on, With all the changes and constant rephotographing I began accumulating hundreds and hundreds of slides that marked the progression of virtually all my paintings.
Although slides are wonderful, they are useless without a projector. And that’s why I have decided to digitize them.
These images that you see represent of a few but by no means all of the stages of development of a particular painting that I've been working on off and on since 1985. You can see how the image has twisted and turned over the years. Ironically as I revisit the various stages I feel a tinge of regret at having painted over what looked to be a perfectly fine painting. Yet regardless of how good or bad they were, the bottom line is that the current painting would not exist without having made all those earlier stops along the way. Although many images are now buried and invisible under the layers of paint and color, they thankfully still exist digitally and as slides, and like life, art goes on.

Photo Collages: Unknown Identities

A number of years ago on one of my daily alley junkets I came across an old cardboard box next to a dumpster. It was full of cards of some sort but when I picked one up I discovered that it was an old photograph. As it turned the box was full of photos that someone must have thrown out. They may have come from an old photo studio.
The pictures, themselves, looked as though they were from the early 20th Century. All were black and white and sepia, and the thought of them being tossed into a landfill or destroyed in the rain was too much to bare. So I brought the box home and stashed it on a shelf until I could figure what to do about them. I saw them as time markers that needed to be protected. I thought donating them somewhere.
But over time as I would study them I began to see them differently. I had already begun to cut apart many of my old etchings and drawings and turning them into collages. Why not experiment with these photographs as well? At first I was tentative. They were quite valuable (at least to me) and fragile after all. But the more I cut the more interesting the results. I literally mixed and mashed parts and pieces of photos of people from different periods, genders, and ages together to create entirely new and strange identities.