I’m thinking about buying a Logan 660 Framers Edge 60″ Mat Cutter soon, because I like the “round bar” guide–but I’ve never used a Logan. Do you recommend this Logan cutter? I’ve always used Fletcher mat cutters–but I don’t see any good deals for Fletcher cutters yet. I wouldn’t buy a used one either, because framing is all about perfect alignment.

I think a groove-latch cutter (not permanently attached) would disappoint me–I definitely want a sturdy metal bar as a guide for the blade. I’m wondering, will this Logan cutter wobble once the Teflon wears off? For $550 I hope not. If I had time, I’d design my own cutter in Rhino3D or something. These days it doesn’t cost much to get parts made from .DXF files. In other words, I think $550 is too much money for basically a bar that rotates a blade back and forth on an axis. Probably you could fabricate the parts in China for $5 and take a big bite out of Logan and Fletcher. Maybe when I’m old and bored, right?

The Logan demonstration video isn’t too impressive–he draws *four* thick lines! You really only need *two* parallel lines–cut from line to line, then cut down your pencil lines from cut to cut. Also, bad example showing heavy pencil lines–they can damage the artwork. All you need is a faint line, barely visible in the general vicinity of your corners. And while I’m criticizing the video, it’s time to redo them in HD!

I submitted this project to Kickstarter.com, which is where Diasopora raised $189,353.

—

My goal is to help ordinary people understand and appreciate abstract art.

Blogging about abstract art is hard because there’s no “problem” to solve. Very, very, very few people go to Google and ask: “Why don’t I appreciate abstract art?”

There are various reasons, obviously. What is the market demand? People might buy abstract art to match their couch or to help sell real estate or because they know the artist personally. Or maybe they think it’s a good investment in a bad economy. Usually the reason is not “appreciation for the medium of abstract art.”

Yes, it’s an old issue. However, YouTube numbers reveal people are viewing abstract art (and artists) online like never before. So I believe YouTube presents a great opportunity to wake abstract art from its long slumber.

I’m particularly interested in the “non-objective abstract art” that confuses the most people. Confusion is actually an advantage here, as this allows an artist to present ideas (we assumed we understood) in never-before-seen ways. To reach people when they’re vulnerable.

Most people are still “open minded” about abstract art: How can you hate something so innocuous? They have yet to form an opinion.

It’s worth mentioning, a few people actually hate abstract art because they believe “modern art” is a product of “Modernism” the controversial literary movement. Yes, there was a brief period in history when visual art aimed to portray literature. But ask that strange multicolored fish (deep in the ocean) if it knows about Modernism. I don’t think you’ll get a literal answer. Truth is not only revealed while rendering 3D objects on a 2D surface using the six standard methods to convey depth: overlap, scale, perspective, shadow, etc.

So my project is to write descriptions of non-objective abstract paintings found on YouTube. I would like to recruit and pay writers to help me out. Artists don’t typically write much about their own paintings because their aptitude is painting–to write much about their own art would betray their talent, and besides that: writing about your own art seems egotistical.

Division, 2007. Mixed media on board, 12?x12?

PJ: Has Division grown on you with time, how is it different looking at it now?

Brandi: It has grown on me. I created ‘Division’ about a year ago for my senior show. I thought this was one of my strongest pieces. My math teacher ended up buying it. Division-haha. I haven’t seen it in person in about a year. Knowing a piece isn’t mine anymore always changes my experience of it. And not seeing this or even really thinking of it at all for so long makes me see it with fresh eyes. I think I always understand my work more with time. At first creation I wonder, ‘where’d that come from, what’s that about?’

PJ: Can you describe one part of it you really enjoy, or dislike?

Brandi: The architectural sketches in blue pen are my grandfathers–on an envelope from the 60’s. This piece was built around and inspired by his drawing-very sentimental. A collaboration across time and space, neat-o.

more art by Brandi Strickland

Wanna Drink, 2006.

PJ: How do you decide where to go with your art or music?

Bruce: Pete, I work and work and work. I have a system, called the neo context system, where one medium influences my response time to help me act faster in another. Basically my arts cheat off of each other and are jealous of each other, but won’t admit it.

PJ: Why are you doing collage now?

Bruce: I am the best of Bruce when I do collage, and when you see it you’ll know why. All decisions, no wasted time. Scissors, glue, exacto, and like a computer it is all yes’s and no’s. 1’s and 0’s. Elecctric!!!!!

more collage by Bruce Sherfield

Spill, 2006. Acrylic on canvas, 60″x48″

PJ: I don’t know what to call these curls and strands, do you have terminology to talk about them? Or do you prefer to see this assortment all at once, all by itself? The elements seem to have various characteristics that play off each other, which is fun and draws me in.

Lisa: I think about ’spill’ as an explosion of strands, a language of fibers I had been working with for a couple of years prior to this painting. I see ’spill’ as an accumulation of discreet hairs that pour into a unified amalgamation. I had worked with similar mark making and imagery before painting ’spill’. However, up until this point, I’d been exclusively drawing tiny, meticulous animal and hair imagery on large expanses of white paper. I had been working with such a minimal palette, values limited by graphite on white paper, and with such a somber and melancholic presentation that I was ready to pan out the same concepts with color, paint, and bolder gestures. Thanks for describing it as fun – fun and humor were definitely motifs I was interested in incorporating into my work.

PJ: Memories surface all the time. Maybe as we age we remember more places we’ve been because we’ve been more places? Could you share any memory or place or situation that surfaced while painting “spill” or were you totally engaged with the paint and the brush or are you thinking only about the subject of the painting, or the structure of it?

Lisa: Memory is one of the issues central to my work. A dynamic process of fabrication rather than a storehouse of fixed images, memory depends on your current emotional state and is therefore a system of creation in a constant state of flux. I probably relived countless memories while working on ’spill’. I remember thinking about a certain recurring childhood dream and lessons by Arnold Mesches about the composition of “The Raft of the Medusa”. But I also remember feeling very present with the painting and attempting to engage various characteristics of the paint I was working with in terms of opacity, transparency and layering.

Thanks Peter, talk to you soon,
lisa
www.LasHermanasIglesias.com

PJ: Hypotrochoid halos! Was this the first in the series?

KB: it’s no. 2 of 1 so far. there may be more. i’m RIGHT in the middle of all this collage madness.

PJ: I’m wondering, do you spin the Spirograph disc first, cut out the model first, find the background first, or “D” none of the above?

KB: i usually have a huge collection of people, places, textures, etc. cut out and filed away for a rainy day so to speak. literally, they are filed… the spirograph thing i usually do last so that i can pick paper colors and ink colors that match the subject. it’s really a fast process once i figure out what i want to go with what. some of the images i have have been filed away for years and months. i just lay stuff out and find something that works and it’s “EUREKA!!!”

more of Kerri Blackburn’s art at Flickr

Over the weekend I purchased this little painting, partly because it reminds me of another painting I own, and partly because it’s a great painting.

The artist is Jeff Norris and the painting is 4″ by 4″.

He was telling me that he’s watched the Basquiat movie several times. When I saw Jeff fan through this little deck of paintings, I thought of the scene in that movie where Basquiat crawls out of a dumpster to meet Andy Warhol with several mixed-media notecard-sized paintings, if that ever really happened.

This just fell into my inbox:

For those of you who are able, please join me for an art opening at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis on Saturday, September 2 from 7-10pm.

Exhibition Project Room “Homestead”
Soap Factory
520 2nd St. SE
612-623-9176

Paintings open up the artist’s Minneapolis family-built home like a dollhouse detailing playful family lore in the form of romanticized objects and candid snapshots. Lovingly dedicated to Evelyn Schiele.

Painting detail: “Prospect Park” mixed media on canvas, 2006

PJ : Could you share with us some of the preparation that went into this painting? Did you sketch this on location?

KL: “April in South Dakota” is about a culmination of memories for the trip that I took to the Black Hills and Badlands region of South Dakota. This is one of my favorite places to visit that is about a 9 hour drive from Minnesota. Several of the images represent actual places while other forms were created as I worked with the piece. I utilize a personal method of imprinting stimuli to my memory from specific locations and then pausing in my mind to reflect and nearly meditate on the stimuli for a few moments so that I may take that reflection back to the canvas. I have been working with this imprinting method for many years and it has just evolved with me. Recently the images are reflecting more of the stimuli itself rather than the abstract representation of it. I brought all of my canvases with me on this specific trip with the intention of working more plein-air. The work however, didn’t formulate in my mind until I returned home. There is simply an over stimulus occurring there for me and it made it difficult to sit down and paint. This is one of the reasons I enjoy it so much there.

PB: What do you think of Takashi Murakami’s paintings? I read he draws in his computer with a vector program and then hires someone else to do the actual painting. Now your painting here is in acrylic. These shape contours appear carefully painted to me. To you, how important is the medium?

KL: I believe that each artist finds their own way to the creation of work and the theories and belief that go behind them are as different as each person in the world. It is truly the path to get there that is exciting. The medium to get there is another story. I fought utilizing acrylic for many years and felt I could only communicate my thoughts through the beauty of oil paint. I would today only find frustration if I attempted the manner in which I paint now with oils. I feel that my work has evolved as I worked with acrylic. The blending and pushing of the medium is no longer attractive physically or visibly. I feel it is at its strongest use when I can separate the planes and the areas with the forms. Acrylic dries quite fast and it has lead me into having very accurate lines. This has caused me to complete a painting in nearly triple the time as an oil painting as I have become so specific.

PB: It’s surprising that you are able to deliver such great distance in this series using such flat shapes. Was that important? Did you think about it, or did you know ahead of time that you would capture such expansive spaces with flat shapes? Do you tend to focus your attention on the surface, the space in the picture, or some combination?

KL: I feel this entire series is representing an evolving style. The work I was doing only a few months before was more of a bridge to this current style. I had been working toward such a flatness with my work in 2005. Now perhaps the size of the pieces themselves, being much smaller than work that I typically do, I wanted to feel more information and depth. Perhaps it has more to do with being out on vast landscapes. In the state of 10,000 lakes and trees abound it is difficult to see vast distances.

PB: Now that it’s finished, do you have more of a relationship with the actual place you painted, the painting itself, or are you altogether somewhere else as you experience this painting now?

KL: Because these pieces are fairly recent, I definitely have a strong association with them. It takes me nearly a decade to separate myself from the work that I have done. Even then, so much of my work is based upon an experience that it helps me to remember it even more. It is generally the strong relationship that I have with a place that creates the need to paint it. For example, I lived in Finland for a while during college and the work simply transformed me as an artist because of the impact the location had on me. This impact is what gives me the most momentum for creating work.

more art by Kim Leonard

When asked about using the Internet to get discovered, veteran art dealer Jeffrey Deitch said, “I’m sure the Internet’s impact is coming, but I’m not really using it to look [for new artists]. It’s inevitable, though, that there’ll be some sort of good art version of MySpace.”

So even bigshot NY art dealers talk about Myspace. Conversely, the president of Myspace (Fox Interactive Media) recently used abstract expressionism to describe his business strategy.

The serendipity and abstract expressionism of MySpace — Levinsohn said it reminds him of a Jackson Pollock painting — so far has been able to translate universally. “In many ways, that is the Internet. You throw things up there and see what works. That is why MySpace, Google and YouTube come from nowhere,” Levinsohn said. “That’s why a Silicon Valley blogger can have more traffic than Time magazine.”

Jeffrey Deitch isn’t looking at new art online, but I am.