Sunday Artist A Selbe Further Spencer Finch Research

Sky(Over Coney Island, November 21, 2004, 1:14 pm), 2004, Balloons, helium, string, variable dimensions, Spencer Finch, 2004

Today, i wanted to write about Spencer Finch again. I couldn't stop thinking about his work and when i would search for other artists i kept coming back to his work. I said in my last post about him that he was insane. I still think he is. I just can't wrap my head aound the way that he thinks and creates his work.

This piece above with the balloons, Finch was recreating the color of the sky over Coney Island in New Yok City. In alot of Finch's work, he uses color or recreates the color of something in a new space. Often times the color that he is creating in a new place was the color of the sky, sunset or a running river, all things that are already constantly changing. He freezes the color he chooses in time, not knowing if the color will ever exist the same way that it orginially did. This piece is the color of the sky over Coney Island on a particular day. We don't know if the sky will ever be that same blue again. He recreates these colors with balloons. He put different color balloons in the balloons to change the color and tone of it. He had to figure out exactly how much air to put in each balloon to make the colors come out the same in each balloon. I love this process because at first thought and glance it seems so simple, but it is not at all. I think that this kind of process is the same that i am working with. Making and matching the images for my diptychs seem like a simple task but it is so much harder than it seems.

After all the balloons were inflated into the mass you see above he hung it in Miami Florida. It is interesting to see the color difference and the photograph of this event is beautiful . I love this work because the idea is clear and clean cut. The process is complex, but the simple appearence of the outcome is simply delighting and at the same time astonishing. I hope for my diptych project to work and present with this ease and amazement.

ARTIST LECTURE- A Selbe -Spencer Finch

Yesterday I went to see the Spencer Finch Visiting artist lecture. I was intimidated by how many people showed up for it, the whole theater was packed;but it made sense after I had heard all of the places that his artwork has been shown.

His artwork is amazing, and the man is insane. He is so incredibly smart and thinks through every detail in his work. His thought process is so different from anyone else it is truly amazing the concepts he comes up with. There is a reason for every color, every line and every shape in his work. He showed us a variety of work that he had done in chronological order. He had many pieces that are based on colors and light, often in his work he recreates a color of something.

Even though he uses this consciousness of color and light in most of his work, the pieces are each very different and specific so i will just example 2 or 3 of my favorite pieces that he showed. One of the first images he showed was three watercolor painting side by side. They were not ordinary paintings they looked more like color swatches. Finch was traveling to Paris to see Monet paintings to do a project based off the colors in Monet's paintings. But when he got to the Monet paintings the building was under construction and Finch's plans were ruined. He then spent 5 days or so in his hotel room and he created this work. He matched the colors of everything in the hotel room and made color swatches on one paper and labeled each color the name of the object in the room. He did three of these one in the morning, one at mid day and the other at sunset/night. I really enjoy this piece because it is something so literal and simple but who else in the world would think to do that? Certainly not me. The piece is so abstract and odd looking from a distance but when you get close you see the names of the individual colors and it changes from abstract to something different.

"The River That Flows Both Ways", Photograph detail of installation, Spencer Finch

This image above is just one part of this amazing piece Spencer Finch installed in New York City called "The River that flows both ways." For this project he took 700 reading of the color of the Hudson river during a day, he turned they class windows into a timeline of how the colors changed on the hudson river. It is amazing and beautiful and the full image is below.

"The River that Flows Both Ways", photograph of installation, Spencer Finch

I really don't feel qualified to write about this amazing artist, his lecture and his explanations of how and why he created each piece leaves me speakless. The way his mind works is amazing and i am truly inspired by the way he records a place by the colors of the light, not by what is actually at a specific site. Everyone should go to his website and read about his art, and look at his art. It is truly awe-inspiring and i will never forget it.

Thursday Thoughts A Selbe 9.24.09 A Lack of motivation

Motivation:

Tonight i have none. I had big plans to do my egg shoot tonight but I am lacking motivation. Maybe it's not motivation it is just a lack of energy. I had a long day of work and then a 3 hour night class from hell so i think i'll take a break tonight and do my shoot tomorrow when i will have the energy and awareness to do it right. But i have everything ready, the eggs, the camera (battery charging), glass to shoot from below, and lots of paper towels for cleanup. Sometimes the best part of art is making a mess.

So when i work on this tomorrow i plan to shoot my whole process and the messy leftovers, hey, maybe it will be something interesting to use, who knows. I will be shooting eggs falling off a ledge, eggs hitting the floor(hopefully stopping the motion so we can see the egg just starting to crack as if hits a surface.) I may try shooting multiple eggs dropping at once.

Some people suggested that having eggs will be to easily connected or recognized as something seen before, so i am hoping that i can change that notion by creating something new and different. I feel like every a fairly stock looking image could be the perfect one if it is paired up with the right juxtaposing image. Don't get me wrong though, i really am trying to make something original out of a common object.

I am going to make my first few diptychs this weekend using the egg shoot and pictures from the tunnel i took . I am going to try to take some more chaos images, but i'm not sure of what yet.. . and i will definitely take some "calm" images to create my diptychs. I have some ideas for alternative ways of creating diptychs so there will be big surprises on Tuesday when i blog after my meeting with tom.

I am considering trying to create a diptych where one piece is a photograph and the other is a physical object, i will be playing with a more sculptural aspect. I have no new images to post, but there will be lots of new excitement very soon!

Sunday Artist A Selbe 9.20.09 Thomas Demand and John Baldessari

During my meeting with Jeff he suggested two artists to me and i looked them up for this entry. They were both very relevant to the work i am doing.

THOMAS DEMAND

At first glance as Demands work, I thought that he took very formal pictures of offices and buildings. When i started to research his work i found that in one series he builds a cardboard model of a photographed scene and photographs that cardboard scene.

These cardboard scenes that he makes are life size and he removes small details from the piece, like faces in portraits and headings on notepads. It is small details that clues the viewer that something isn't right with the images.

When i first say these images i thought it was just a photograph of a place or room but i after i looked at it for a minute i realized it was different. His reconstruction of these scenes really separates the viewer from the reality.

It is interesting because a person is already removed from a scene just by viewing a photograph, but when a viewer sees a photograph of a model of a scene it is like the person is double removed from the situation.

I think that this work relates to my work, because jeff and i discussed how the action of breaking an egg is much separated from seeing an egg ready to fall in real life.

John Baldessari

-An artist from California. Jeff asked me to look at his Ears and Noses series, but i really didn't connect with it or connect it with my ideas. I found another series of his were he overlapped images and added color and imagery to make them blend together. I really like how he makes the imagery go together with lines that run through the whole images. This kind of images and how the different parts are formally linked together is what i want to try to do for my diptychs. Thanks for the great artist references jeff!

Thursday Thoughts A Selbe 9.17.09 Ideas

I have a meeting today, so have been preparing for it. I have been gathering my ideas and answering the question why...

I feel very comfortable with the plan that i have in store for this semester.

Calm and Chaos “Diptychs”

- I originally started this project because I wanted a way to deal with my anxieties.

- This project will hopefully through the process help me cope with anxieties that I experience often. I hope to be able to find myself a “calm” place in my mind to deal with my own issues.

- Why did I choose the words “Calm and Chaos” ? The two words not only roll off the tongue well but they express the parallels I want to show in my work. The chaos that I experience from anxieties and the calm I need to find to cure myself.

Visually I want to show people

- The balance that can occur between calm and chaos.

- I am going to show that through the contrast of the calm and chaos and bringing them together by the similarities in the formal aspects of the image.

The Plan

- Shooting- First I am starting with shooting some chaos pictures, then I will plan from that point. I will shoot these within the next week.

o Breaking glass

o Dropped egg

o Blurred images

o Abstraction with movement

- Time management-

o Sept 20- shoot and edit the 4 chaos ideas. Plan some calm images to match

o Sept 27- shoot calm images and combine into 4-8 diptychs, decide where to go from there.

o Oct 4

o Oct 11

o Oct 18

o Oct 25

o Nov 1

o Nov 8

o Nov 15

o Nov 22

o Nov 29

- Goals for next two weeks

o To have 4-8 possible final diptychs

o Plan after this is done

Process and Presentation ideas

- People suggested for me to combine the two images (calm and chaos) together.

- I want to experiment with different ways of presenting diptychs

So now that I have my plans all worked out, I am going to start shooting like crazy and challenging the ideas i have set forth to make them better and more . Questions i will be asking myself is:

Is this working?

How can i make it better? are my ideas clear? too clear?

Are my pictures too simple or too distracting?

How can i make this into something noone has seen before?

I am excited for my meeting tomorrow and nervous to hear what challenges i am given!

Sunday Aritsts A Selbe 9.13.09 Josef Albers and Richard Carylon

Unknown, Painting, Joesph Albers

In my last meeting Tom asked me to have a look at Josef Albers, I had already seen his work but I looked at it again. I realized that i really can compare his images to the work i am trying to do now. Albers is best known for his color theory images likes the two above. They are formal and symmetrical. I didn't compare them to my know images until i realized that formal and symmetrical are two words that i wanted to use to describe my own work.

Albers was born in Germany, 1888 - 1976, and he attended Welmar Bauhaus until it was closed because of the Nazis. He then moved to America to Black Mountain COllege in North Carolina. He ran the Painting department there for a while and then ran the deisgn department at Yale.

Richard Carlyon, Unknown dates.

Richard Carlyon is an artist who some of the richmond galleries are doing a retrospective on this week. Like Josef Albers work, i would also describe this work as fomal and symmetrical. Carlyon really focused on the negative space created in his images. He also focused on "creating without predetermined thought." This is really inspiring it me, again, because of his formal uses and also his creation project. Sometimes i get stuck in my own work because i get to caught up planning the final image. Carylon's process really inspires me to work without concerning the final image because focusing on the end product too much is usually what gets me stuck.

I am suprised by the images i found this time around. At the beginning of this process i would not have compared these two artist to my work, but now i realized they are very simlar and inspiring to what it is that i want to create.

Thursday Thoughts A Selbe 9.10.09 ideas and concerns

I feel confident with what i am working on this semester. I had my second meeting on Tuesday with Tom, and i have a list of things to do, from research, to experiments and shooting. I am turning up my own expectations for the week and trying to double the amount of work that i get done. I am planning to shoot at least 300 pictures and find some artists and articles that will help support my ideas.

I tend to refer to my diptychs as a calm and chaos. The two words roll of the tongue well and it is a simple way to describe the idea of the comparison. My plan for shooting is going to be shooting the chaos images first since they will be the hardest to shoot. I am worried about finding things to shoot that will communicate stress. I have different ideas for shooting like have blurred images, and i will need to shoot a lot and have a variety to pick from. Once i am able to get these chaos images shot, i can start shooting the calm images.

I have some expectations of my diptychs, I really want the image to be formally the same, for them to have similar patterns, colors or lines running through them. I feel this is necessary for the images to stand next to each other. It will bring the viewer in because the images will be formally similar but the content matter will be very different.

Tom made some suggestions about the chaos images. He suggested that i should try shooting images where something is about to happen. For instance, I want to experiment with this and shoot an egg dropping onto a table and try to capture to egg starting to break as it hits the table.

The images below are ones i took to my meeting the two of the tunnel are meant to be chaos, I tried to use the motion of driving through the tunnel distort the way it was capture. I like both of these images but i am just not sure if they will work. The other images i have here are my examples of calm, but i also see the problem that they can be perceived in different ways.

I think it have alot to work on. The next week will be very productive!

Three Untitled Images, Undetermined sizes, Ashley Selbe, Photography, Fall 2009

Sunday Aritsts A Selbe 9.6.09 Flickr research

When I get really tired of searching the internet for artists, I turn to flickr.com. All of us know what flickr is; a kind of community where all different types of photograph, good or bad, exist in one place. I sift through the images, all of the over photoshopped images and generic “365: 1 photo a day” projects, to find something more real. In relation to the diptychs I am planning on doing, I searched “diptych” on flickr.com. The search results were a mixer of crazy colors and some interesting comparisons. One diptych was of a farmer digging up potatoes and potato salad. The most interesting images are ones that have similar patterns within both images.

So my most recent search on flickr.com brought me to Doug Chinnery. He is a photographer from England and he works in wedding photography, and various different types of landscapes. I was looking for inspiration for the calm side of my diptychs. And a few of his photographs were inspiring to me.

I really like the way he used time to smooth out the water in the two water images. I think that it is a physical evidence of the calming of the "water" or a situation. I think that paired with the right image this could really express the feelings of being in a calm place. I also really liked the image of a plant growing up the brick wall. The color contrast between the green and the red brick is really interesting.

I really like these images and even though i haven't found an artist who is working with a concept like mine yet, I can imagine putting images like these with others that i find.

Three Untitled Images, Unknown sizes, Doug Chinnery, Unknown date, Sourced from Flickr.com

Thursday Thoughts A Selbe 9.3.09 Time to go shoot

I've been researching some different things and reading some articles on anxieties and stress. Anxiety is a feeling of apprehension or fear. I'm sure that everyone has experienced these feels at one time or another. For me, i experience feelings of anxiety more often than i think i should. What makes me feel anxious or nervous is when I am in a large group of people, a really loud place, when i'm with people i am not comfortable with. I cannot act normal when i experience these feelings, i turn inward and try to find a way out of the situation. It is not easy to shake off the feeling.

I want to express this feeling through photographing things that make me anxious. I want to take still images and some that are blurred to see what different effects and feelings i can make with the images. I am still going to start making diptchs. I have some visual ideas to start with and i plan to go out on sunday to shoot all day.

I started reading a little about meditation in different cultures. It did not take long for me to find one quote that sparks inspiration and ideas in me. The quote:

"to seperate their conscious minds from their physical bodies."

Ok so it is not a groundbreaking inspring quote but when i read it i realized that anxiety is grounded in the mind. This sparked the idea of the mind being the place for peace. It really maade me think of different ways i can orient a diptych. I feel it doesnt have to be two photos side by side. It can be an image with a square cut out the middle and another photo placed in it. Kind of like a box in a box is what im thinking. or it can be one photo above another, like the mind above the body.

So here's my plan for shooting in a nutshell. I am going to shoot both things that calm me and things that make me anxious. I am going to find different ways to create chaos in the images of thing that make me nervous. And i am going to find interesting ways in intergrate the two images together in a diptych.

I've been searching for artists or images to help inspire me with this project, but i haven't found anything that is really clicking with the ideas in my head. I found this image on flickr.com and i thought it was great. just the message in the text on the poll. Maybe thats the message i should try to send with my diptychs... its something else to experiment with. Sometimes inspirations comes from simple snapshots and not from the well know artist.

Unknown, Unknown artist and date. Sourced from Google Images