In 1980 I received City of Madison funding to create a 30 foot wide mobile and an accompanying painting through an art grant. The mobile hung in the lobby of the University of Wisconsin Mechanical Engineering building for several months. The entire structure moved with air currents and was sensitive enough to be set in motion by one person blowing.
Geese were constructed out of brown wrapping paper from patterns I had designed. The structure was wire, concrete, and bamboo. Each goose was connected to the others so as one turned they would all turn in the same direction. The "V" formation could open and close and geese would line up appropriately.
The accompanying painting was an abstraction derived from the flat pattern pieces of the pre-formed geese. My intention was to inspire appreciation for idea and execution, transformation of materials into final product, as well as a greater understanding of possible sources for abstract art.
Years ago I had seen and greatly admired a painting by Maruyama ‰åkyo in the The Arthur M. Sackler and Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.. After returning home I promptly began working out paper patterns to construct a goose that would make me feel somewhat like what I felt in looking at the painting and I have been playing with bird patterns ever since.
When I was a child I made figures of all kinds out of paper so I'm drawn to the idea of creating volumetric shapes out of flat material. I like the dramatic transformation, the idea that something totally new can be created from material bearing no relationship to the ultimate form. In the case of the goose however I was paying homage to subject and inspiration by working in paper.
In "Sleep" I focused on the activity of sleeping: the physical restlessness and mental restlessness of dream states. This was part of a Window Series sponsored by Brave Hearts Theatre in Madison, WI. The piece was back lit at night and incorporated transparent and translucent scrims with "floating" cut-out figures.
My mother spent a year in China after graduating from Carleton College with a degree in International Studies. According to family stories, she was on the last boat out before the Communist take-over.
As a kid, I was exposed to Oriental art and was particularly interested in the Chinese and Japanese traditions. As is my way, I try to stay true to my origins, my home region, and my love of place as I explore art ideas. This figurine reflects my interest in the Tang horses of Chinese art history while paying homage to the moose of the north woods and it's representation in the area pictographs I had come to love as a child.
In 2006 I began a series of pieces exploring the idea of building images since I saw so many of the graphic forms within my images as parts of a whole. My graphic forms added up to create an image but they were also capable of being separated from each other and from the whole. This thinking emerged from my Artist in Residency on Isle Royale as I struggled to depict waves and water in motion. My graphic shorthand sketches often said more about the nature of waves than did the more complete tonal renderings which even at their best "froze" the active surface of the water in a final image.
I realized that the way we read imagery requires that our brains unify the visual experience and that we create the whole in our minds. This idea inspired me to create paintings and drawings that incorporated multiple planes and parts which when combined created a sense of pictorial space that in fact was also real and actual space in each piece. These pieces were three dimensional. These images were sculptural and changing light angles or a change of viewing perspective altered the sense of each piece in subtle ways.
This next sequence of images are examples of my play, my experiments with image building, making images as physical constructions.
Private collection
Ideas come from ideas. Since I was working with images as parts I broke down the idea of a landscape into the two essential elements: that which is above the horizon, and that which is below. I found that I could bring two colored rectangles close together and my mind and eye saw them as a landscape.
The void between the two shapes became the horizon and my sense of distance to the horizon changed as this void became larger or smaller. I may be guilty of trying too hard or trying to be overly clever but the idea of using the void between panels to represent the horizon appealed to me. The horizon is an idea, not a thing or place. We can never reach it and people of differing heights see it in differing locations. It is something we all believe in but it does not technically exist.
I like the idea that all of us believe in and bank on something that does not exist. We depend on it for orientation. In fact, a pilot must either see or have an instrument representation of the horizon in order to maintain proper orientation of a plane. It is possible to upset a persons sense of balance and orientation by changing the way they see horizons. We have faith that we are properly oriented based on our belief in something that we cannot prove exists. The horizon is an idea that we all believe in and bank on yet all experience in an individual way based on height, visual acuity, depth perception, etc.
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I live near a lake that freezes over each winter. The landscape can appear quite severe and empty. With many of the pieces in my horizon series the orientation of each image can rotate 180° and the piece still reads as a landscape. Roll your cursor over the image to see what I mean. Let your eyes rest on the image that appears for a bit and allow your mind to relax.
Private collection
Private collection
This piece was an experiment with aerial perspective using mylar to soften the image of a painting beneath an image created upon the mylar surface.