Lighthouse words and how collage is just questions
"When is something a collage, and when is it simply a layered image? And when can you call a "collection" a "collage"?
Since my last newsletter - December - a lot's been going on.
I added a new gallery of work to my website and wrote a little bit about my thinking behind it.
For me a key part of creating and looking at visual art is paying attention to tangengies, edges, and relationships between shapes. Even looking at one relatively simple painting, my eye jumps from one part of it to another, and I'm wondering why one shape overlaps here, but not there. Is it intentional that the line on one side of the canvas echoes a line on the other? Why is the picture framed like it is? What's 10 centimeters outside the frame on the left? I love these questions, and they're the ones I'm asking myself whenever I'm making something. These questions are a part of every (?) kind of visual art, but for me they're the primary questions of collage. "Why is this piece of an old letter next to this color field, and cropping this specific found photograph?" In collage literally anything can be slapped on top of something else and that creates a relationship. But why? And how much of that relationship is intended and how much emerges unexpectedly?"
I shared my favorite ten photographs from December, 2023 and January, 2024. My ten favorite from February should show up sometime next week.
There's also a bunch of new work in my store. As always, regarding work for sale, I'm much slower at making store pages than collage works. So if you see something on my site that's not in my store, ask me about it. Odds are good that it's available.
I had a one-day show at a local brewery which was a lot of fun, if not the most successful exhibition in terms of sales or engaging with people around the work. I've previously shown work in group exhibitions, but never done a solo show. I was given carte blanche (I suppose I should use a German phrase here so, "mir wurde einen Blankoscheck ausgestellt") in terms of which works to show, how many, and how they would hang. It was an interesting challenge. I both wanted to choose a "tasting menu" of works, scattershot-style, in order to appeal to a wide range of viewers, and pick a focussed selection that told a consistent story.
Beyond the work I had prepared a talk about some of the collage materials I've collected, in which I'd tease out a story of a woman living in the DDR, engaged in a legal battle with her ex-husband who defected to the west. It's a fascinating story, and not a particularly happy one - and not at all suited to a loud, busy bar, even on an early Sunday evening. I may turn the presentation into a blog post before long, and I'd love to find a way to deepen that story and share it with an even wider audience.
I just wrapped a freelance motion design project for a repeat client which was a lot a fun, and now I'm back looking for work again. If any of you amazing people have connections, leads, or ideas for freelance or staff gigs, I'd love to hear from you.
Work wishlist:
Book cover design/illustration
Graphic & motion design for museums, opera companies, similar cultural organisations
Board game graphic design/illustration
Motion graphic design/art direction
And, of course, more collage shows
It was a good, uncomplicated word and was a very effective lighthouse word
My word for the year this year (tip of the hat to the lovely Susannah Conway) is "Show". Last year it was "bauen", German for "build", related to the word "Bauer", which is farmer. It was a good, uncomplicated word and was a very effective lighthouse word as I put proper effort into building my German and brought more rigor to my collage practice. Bauen, at least to my ears, is an honest word. A simple word, with "simple" being used positively. I chose it deliberately, based on allusions that may not make sense to a native German speaker, but make sense inside my brain. This is the crux of moving into more advanced levels of German - there's an expectation that one's vocabulary is growing and the sentences are more nuanced. One's word choices matter. A reasonable expectation.
As an example, in German you can use the verb "machen" for most any action. Machen is "to do" or "to make".
I make coffee. Ich mache Kaffee.
I make friends. Ich mache Freunde.
I make art. Ich mache Kunst.
These all work, but they're somewhat blunt. At some point when studying German (or any language) you're expected to drop machen and use more appropriate verbs. You might say instead, "Ich koche Kaffee" (cook), "Ich finde Freunde" (find), or "Ich schaffe Kunst" (create). These aren't the only options of course. I've been told that English has more words than any other language, but German is no slouch in the "almost synonym" department.
Schaffen (and herstellen, entwerfen, erzeugen, and and and...) are all more precise words for making, with more nuance and serve to differentiate art work from factory work, farm work, or other less rarified forms of creation. I'm happy to know these words and be able use them, but when I talk about my art practice, I like the simplicity of machen and, as mentioned above, bauen. I think a lot about my work, and art work in general, and approach it as an intellectual activity, but at the end of the day, I simply like making pictures. I always have. At some level I am trying to communicate, but on a very visceral level I'm just trying to make something "good" - an image, or picture that "works". That's what drives me back into the studio or into my sketchbook. The more collage work I do, the happier I am. The more I draw, the happier I am. The more I work in Photoshop or Illustrator the happier I am (though this one has a hard limit). For me collage is constantly asking questions of elements - letters, papers, images - but in the moments of making it doesn't feel rarified or special. It just feels like "making". I'm building pictures out of disparate elements. Collage generally lacks the craft needed if one built chairs by hand, worked as an artisanal bookbinder, or painted oil portraits but it's all just making. Building. Before there was no collage. Now there is.
I simply like making pictures.
"Bauen" served me well and now I have to tackle "show". A number of words were in contention, some English, some German but what put show over the top was the wordplay between "show up" and "show off". I want the word to remind me to show up every day - whether that's showing up in the art studio, or showing up and properly job hunting, or showing up and being present at home. Show off is pretty much about my art work. I tend to think that I do an okay job showing it off - until two completely different people told me that I did a poor job of publicising my last art show and that I should've been promoting it more actively. And let's not overlook the fact that this is my first newsletter of 2024. My stated goal is one newsletter per month and here we are three months in. I am not showing up to show off my work - hence my need of a solid lighthouse word.
At this point I'll remind everyone that my blog, which I do update more regularly, has an RSS feed here. If you use an RSS reader of any kind, all new blog posts will show up there when I publish them without you having to do any work at all. RSS is an amazing service that never really caught on beyond being the backbone of all podcasting, which isn't nothing.
So welcome, a bit late, to the year of "show".
Wrapping up, five thoughts, culled from the web: