Scott County Art Crawl - Oct 9th

I'll be participating in the first ever Scott County Art Crawl. Read all about it and see some of the work at http://bit.ly/bRQ7Dh.

Come by for a feast for the eyes, mind and tummy... I'll have great beer, wine and hors d'oeuvres.
You can preview a lot of my work at http://JimBolesDesigns.com.


DIRECTIONS

4640 139th St. W.

Savage, MN 55378

952 388 3762

Once you found your way to county road 42 (Egan Drive) running east and west through Burnsville/Savage/Prior Lake you can use these directions.

If heading EAST on county road 42 away from Prior Lake, do a U-turn at the Sonic restaurant (the Joppa-Glendale intersection with a traffic light), and head west on 42. Take the first right turn lane (Natchez) after U-turning at the Joppa-Glendale intersection. The Natchez turn comes up quick. Then take the 2^nd right (139^th St). The studio is a brown building with a white door and trellis in the front, and is to the right of the white brick ranch-style house at 4640 139th St.

If heading WEST on county road 42 from Burnsville take the first right turn lane (Natchez) after passing the Joppa-Glendale intersection (has a traffic light). Then take the 2^nd right (139^th St). The studio is a brown building with a white door and trellis in the front, and is to the right of the white brick ranch-style house at 4640 139th St.

From downtown savage (Savage Art Studios)  take 123rd east to Lynn Ave. Take a right on Lynn and continue on Lynn (which becomes Glendale) until to come to county road 42 (Egan Drive). Follow the directions for WEST listed above.

Here are several maps. The top map shows the location of my studio and you can zoom around to get a large view. The lower maps show the locations of the Savage Art Studios, my studio, and the studio of Chuck Burton another local glass artist.

Pseudo Triptych

The wonders of Photoshop.
Needed to see what three of my digital art pieces would look like together. So why not make a digital display of my digital art... digital lighting and all. Couldn't resist using a heavily textured digital wall to go along with my recent texture posts.

Abstraction Distraction

One of my ongoing themes as of late is determining just what level of abstraction I'm comfortable with in the process of downplaying illustrative or representational imagery. The image above is a macro shot of a white rose. Just the tips of some petals are in focus, and some softening was added too. This image is almost the opposite of what I have been exploring. There is almost no color and texture, and maybe that is why it intrigued me. Softness is a texture, and the warmness and softness together would make a nice background for a cosmetic ad or some such.

Having nearly no detail I put the image into the Topaz Adjust filter just to see what would happen. I choose all the controls to bring as much detail into the image as possible and created this sandstone-like interpretation of the rose. Of course this is the other extreme being all about texture now.

I didn't want to totally lose the softness so a mixture of both is what I went for in the image below. A little bit of Photoshop layer combinations, masks, and other adjustments resulted in this dark dreamy landscape. Kind of nightmarish I think and far removed from the original clichéd cosmetic ad background.

Funny what will be created if you just let impulses guide you. I'm attracted to this image, but afraid of it too on some level. I certainly wouldn't want to turn into another HR Giger. A nice diversion at this point. If more of these dark specters appear I'll have to pray to Monet to save me.

Color & Texture Part Two

I put away my pastels. I was making a real mess of my studio with pastel powder flying everywhere leaving a layer of dust thick enough to write your name. At $5 a stick there has to a cheaper way to experiment with color so I'm back to Photoshop.

The image to the left is a study of color contrasts. It's was hard to keep the screaming yellow in the background. It wanted to jump forward and overtake the subject, but in this case the strongly silhouetted petunias do seem to stand firm against the yellow onslaught. It helps that I down-keyed the yellow to yellow-orange somewhat (do you remember 'Screaming Yellow Zonkers'?).

Equally important for me is visual texture which is not visible in these reduced size images.  In the enlargement to the left I'm please by the harmony and balance of color. The more you enlarge a section of the image the more abstract it becomes. The interplay of shape and positive and negative spaces begin to replace 'flowers' as the subject, and that too pleases me since I don't like the portrayal of a 'thing' getting in the way of the color and texture which is the true subject.

In this next enlargement the texture of the 'painting' begins to appear especially if you click on the image to enlarge it further. It is only at this point that I begin to feel comfortable with the work. I spent a lot of time getting the digital brushes and filters to produce this naturalistic texturing. I actually spent more time working the texture than composing and coloring the image. The image started as a photo. The yellow in the background is a field of Black-eyed Susans. I couldn't resist the color contrast with the petunias and had to stop to shot them. Shooting at a high ISO begins the process of abstraction along with a shallow depth of field which creates a yellow backdrop for the purple flowers. The graininess of the ISO setting is the underlying 'cause' of the texture that I develop further with my digital tools.

The finish print will be 20x30 and the full detail of the texture will become evident as the viewer moves increasingly closer. The final image below is closer to the desired overall style. In future work I need to further abstract the coincidental subject (flowers) to bring the actual subject (color and texture) more to the fore even when viewed from a distance. I may finally be pleased with the overall style once the coincidental subject has been subjugated (so to speak) by the actual subject.

Color & Texture

I suppose that my interest in the use of glass powders isn't just about color. When I decided to fire my glass to a maximum temperature of 1210 degrees Fahrenheit I discovered I could mix glass powder to any tone, tint or hue without the problem of certain color combinations turning brown. Typically, many warm and cold glass colors when mixed together do not yield a color in between, but instead you get brown. That's because under heat the chemical make up (metal oxides) in glass react with each other. Since the glass granules (fine powder) do not get a chance to chemically interact as 1210, you can actually mix glass powder like you would paint.

Just as important to me I recently realized, is that this temperature also gives a very fine sand-like texture to the glass surface. I like this, because if glass melts together into a completely glossy surface you lose a lot of detail, detail that is necessary if you want the finished work to gain interest as you approach it. Also since most glass artist work very hot and want the gloss look, my textured surface serves as a counterpoint to that general tendency. I like that it is soft looking and inviting. You want to touch it not because it is glass, but because its texture is inviting, something new for the senses. It is really just an expensive sand painting to put it crudely, but because of the intensity of the color and the irregularity of texture, and the design of course, it can be a much more as seen in the April 2009 blog post.

The image above was accomplished with glass chalks and regular glass frit. The glass chalks come in stick form just like normal chalks. The intensity of the warm colors is due to the fact that the chalks are more in the enamel family that glass powder. One of the main characteristics of  enamels is that they are heavily pigmented. Just a dusting of an enamel coating is required for opacity and richness versus around 1/8 inch or more of glass powder to create the same opacity and richness. Because of this the chalks enable a leap into visual color mixing that is impossible with glass powders. From a distance the small specs of enamel visually mix and as you approach you begin to see individual specs. It is the small size of the spec coupled with its intensity that enables the visual color mixing even when very close to the piece. You have to be closer than a couple of feet before you begin to see the richness in detail, detail that invites you in even closer.

The image above is of a 5x5 inch square, and is probably slightly enlarged on your screen.

To create this texture cover your glass with #1 frit. Bake it to around 1210 and hold for 10-30 minutes depending on your kiln. Do not allow the frit to round over, otherwise you will lose the 'tooth' necessary for the chalk in the next step. You now has a 'canvas' to work on. The sharp edges of the frit act as a texture like pastel paper has, cutting into the chalk and holding the chalk to the surface of the glass. Do your design on the textured surface. When your drawing is complete, bake to 1450 until most of the chalk has melted into the glass surface.

Regretfully, the chalk does not act like glass and you cannot achieve a sandy surface. Most of the finished work will be glossy though somewhat textured, albeit mostly rounded over texture and not very sandy. Since you have to fire so high the regular glass frit which was your 'tooth' will also be melted into a mostly glossy surface. That's OK though since the micro fine pieces of chalk still do show up as fine distinct pieces of color and do not melt into a amorphous blend.

I'm sure to use this technique on a future powder painting.

Powder Painting Steps In Creation

The link below is to a PDF file which shows the steps during the creation of one of my powder paintings. For this commission the goal was to create a fertile mountain valley scene. Some of the technical challenges were:

• The panel had to start at 1/4 inch thick to withstand shipping, and an approximate size of 32 by 19 inches
• Because of the thickness and overall dimensions long firing schedules were required which made it a several week process to work through all the phases of the painting.
• I wanted a lot of actual texture in the powder to give a feeling of a mountainous landscape. This resulted in increasing the thickness of the panel in some sections and making annealing the glass more of a challenge. Special care must be taken when a glass panel has varying cross sectional thicknesses.
• Multiple firings were required to build the texture, while also guarding against the powder turning to glass. Once glass powders turn to glass there are chemical reactions which can 'discolor' the work.
• Hue shifts had to be planned and balanced with each new layer and firing, because each firing made the underlying layers darker and glassier

In the image above the final stage of the painting is in the kiln and a closeup was taken of the main peak. After 5 firings the peak was standing about 3/8 inch high on top of the 1/4 inch glass. The valley is shown towards the top of the image. I've never work this thick with powder, but was increasingly intrigued by building up layers of powder, then carving into them. My sculptural tenancies were getting the best of me.

The PDF is around 2 meg in size and may automatically jump to full screen mode when you open it. If it does, then to leave full screen mode just hit the Escape key. When viewing the sideshow click on any image to advance to the next slide. The color, as always, will vary from monitor to monitor.

Hope you enjoy the sideshow!

Here is the PDF.

Glass Powder Painting : Part Two

This is the scene of the battle ground. At least that is what it seems sometimes. Over forty jars of glass powders, various sorts of sifters, brushes, other make shift application tools, and the ever faithful kneeling pad. For this exercise I pulled in my vacuum - a little hand held unit in the upper left which was sold at Radio Shack for vacuuming keyboards and computer parts. You can see the texturing at the bottom of this painting done with the vac and brushers. Kind of like impasto painting, but in my case I've learned that it means that I'm just taking things too far.That is, it just really isn't my style. The thickness of the powder is just lay after layer of indecisiveness. It is nice to know that an impasto-like approach is possible, but that is not what I'm after.

This adventure was a battle to get closer to finding my style. You can clearly see the carving effect in the image to the left. The more I worked on this piece, making it increasingly representational, the less I liked it. The image was getting in the way. I found myself studying how to create the illusion of waves trees etc and totally lost focus on color.

This image got dumped in a jar. About 2 and 1/2 pounds of powder which I'm sure I'll use for some experimental purpose some day.

It is too easy to lose contact with why you are doing this in the first place, and for me that is simply the celebration of color. Part of a growing nuisance is that Bullseye is making more and more striker colors. That is, until the glass is fired it just looks whitish which makes seeing the color in your painting impossible. It's like painting blind. I use my fired color swatches (in the top left of the top image) to guide me, but you just can't interact with colors on your 'canvas' if they go on white.

To the left is the 'canvas' after I dumped the image. The painting surface has been texturized by kilnforming it on lava cloth which is a commercial cloth-like product used in the furnace and kiln building industry as a flexible refractory material. When you fuse onto it you pick up the texture of the material, making your glass look like a canvas surface. My reason for doing it was to create a rough surface so I could  try out glass chalk sticks. I believe ceramists have had these glazing sticks for some time which apply on a rough surface like chalk would. However, during my testing the lava cloth surface wasn't fine toothed enough. You need something like a sandblasted surface. But hey! Why not use a white powder fired to the regular powder painting texture. That would be a great surface. I'll have to try that.

The canvas has a integral copper/gold frame. The frame was kiln carved at the same time as the lava cloth was used to create the working surface. So, you have an integrated frame and working surface done in one firing. How cool is that!

So now back to work. Color... pure color.

I love the sensation have having a field of color then dropping in spots of its complement/opposite. Somehow the sensation is exciting. I can't explain it. You have this perfect field of cool blues, violets, and lavenders, then PLOP... you drop fiery orange right into it. My eye goes POP. Then you drop in more. Then add a few drops of yellow, and yellow-green in a way Pollock would be proud.

But that is sooo odd to me. I can recall how I laughed contemptuously during my freshman year at the abstract expressionist. I thought it was pure nonsense.... and that is what it is. It isn't logical right brain realism. I use to worship highly refined drawings, but now run as quickly as possible from any trace of a subject. I just want the kinetic and visual experience unhampered by thought. Just me in motion and responding, and most definitely not illusionary representationalism.

So then... what to do about scale? Yes, I can make little 2x3 foot powder paintings, and what a collection of unimpressive nonsense they would be. Can I really make 8x24 foot glass powder paintings? Yes, of course, but at what cost. Where would I store them. Would any gallery want to display a 500 pound painting - glass is heavy after all? Should I just do regular paintings.... not sure, but I don't think so.

This will require some thought.

Is this really just an exercise in absurdity. As defined at Wikipedia "Aburdism - a philosophy born of existentialism, regarding the philosophical concept of "the Absurd," the clash between the human tendency to seek some inherent meaning in the universe and the human impossibility of finding any".

In my case... to strip everything down, to find the most essential source of motivation, to then engage it as purely as one can, then only to realize that the motivation leads nowhere.

Perhaps when I laughed at Pollock all those years ago it was really not contempt, but rather I unknowingly recognized the absurdity of a painter (and of painting) having gone too far. Pure expression over composition and thought, stimulus-response over calculated technique, sensation over reason.

Am I searching for a middle ground, or, am I beginning to lose faith and will resort to our clinging need of a representational subject?

I am probably taking all this way too seriously.

In the end I trust laughter and play. Does my work make me smile or frown, lighten my spirit or lay it low with incessant investigations and self examination?

I trust that I don't want a subject, but I don't yet know the form I am seeking.

Is color enough?