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Sculptors often speak of Form Language when describing a piece of sculpture (Henry Moore, et.al).

Thinker, by Michael James Hawk

What is Form Language exactly?

To parse this, let’s define both Form and Language:

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Form in many ways. We all know form to be Shape, but form can also mean the Exemplar or Metaphor of an object (towards a form-ulation, or form-ulae), and it can mean the most agreed upon subjective expression (or definitional list) of an object (vis-à-vis Immanuel Kant).

Form can be akin to rows of matter, as in rows of atoms that grow beyond the point mass (like molecules). Form, when it becomes visible, can also be described as the summation of all the “faces” of a 3-dimensional object. Some etymologies also describe Form as being an outward trend of inner molecular forces.

A Language, in turn, is often understood to be a system of communication using defined symbols (lexicons, or alphabets) and grammar rules (syntax) to give those symbols meaning (semantics).

Woman teaching geometry. Euclid's Elements, c.1310

At first blush, a Form Language would be a system of visual communication to transmit Form knowledge vis-à-vis semantically provable truths.

Rather clinical.

Let’s sculpt the definition further:

Form is made up of smaller core Shapes found ubiquitously in nature and the cosmos: the point (dot), the circle (ovoid), the line, the parallelogram, the fractal, the corkscrew, the nebulae/blob, and all the 3 dimensional equivalents of those.

Cognate Forms, such as strings, molecules, modules, crystallines, organelles, organs, mounds, piles, craters, liquids, gasses, networks, fabrics, textures, trusses, arcs, etc. derive from adding these core Shapes together.

Core forms are modules for larger forms, like Lego blocks.

Forms tend to persist long enough as to be observable, and thus must cast a shadow (no matter how small), if not in space, then in the mind’s version of space: the mind’s eye. That is, trick the brain into believing it is identifying Form, and the trick becomes reality, even though it is mimesis.

Perception is Reality.

Certain Forms become known to us culturally, as humans, as animals, in utero. What we see, what we sense, are the shapes in our biological machinery, from the ovoid cell, to the retinal fractals illuminated by the sun, by the lines of veins in the eyelid, to the circles of the aureoles and eyes, to bilateralism of the body, the body itself and like bodies, trunk-like torsos combined with spheroid heads, reticulation, different animal bodies, roundness of oestrus organs, the roundness of pregnancy, stigma, stamen, ripeness, fecundity, flow-tear structures, sac-like structures, tissues, layers, folds, and ripples of tissue.

Mother/Universe, 2010. Note folds, tissue representation.

Our bodies (our modular parts) become, often unnoticed, the ultimate source of metaphors.

The landscape, too, has persistent plastic-like forms — the round sun and moon, the pebble, the portal, the window, the crater/pool, the horizon, the vertical tree trunk, branch and tap root expression, the verticality of stalks of plants, sinuous flows like rivers, winds and sands, balloons, gasses, and diaphanous pods, the sharp point, the mound, the pyramid, the cliff, the shelf, the cone.

Within this lexicon of body- and nature-derived core Shapes, we can add Shapes to create new expansive Forms, of greater complexity and size. We thus begin to make “things,” like strings, tools, machines, buildings, sculptures and so on.

When one attempts to define a particular “thing,” by listing all its attributes [Kant], we ultimately give the thing a one word label. This word is understood to represent a full description of its Form.

For example, suppose we see an Apple form for the first time, meaning we never have seen an apple before, or ever tasted one, as in the case of an infant. When the infant learns what Apple means, from its parents, and from its overarching culture, it learns the idiosyncratic grammar rules of what the thing should be. With its persistent juicy form, its waxy skin, its spheroid shape, its smell, the infant remembers this Form with the word-form equivalent APPLE.

That is, it creates a semantical word-form equivalent to the lexical form-shape itself.

As we map the universe of material objects with our full senses, we absorb, augment, and sometimes create wholesale a vocabulary of all the previous generations’ Form definitions. These word definitions of Form [invariants], exemplified by dictionaries, are very sturdy and will persist for a long time, sometimes hundreds of years, sometimes thousands.

Our vast dictionaries define Forms with precision: everything that is known in life has a Form-definition, even if the form lasts only milliseconds or is invisible, as in the case of particle physics.

Thus, a truck-form becomes “truck” since the time of its invention by the truck inventor, combined with enhanced variants of what trucks have become since then, augmenting earlier definitions. A truck is agreed upon, in society and codified in a dictionary, to be called TRUCK, until it becomes known otherwise by future generations.

MATCHING FORM TO FORM WITH METAPHOR AND NARRATIVE

In the vast dictionary of Forms, certain things share common definitional properties. They have similarities in “form.” It is a very human trait to copy forms and create derivative replicate forms vis-à-vis our penchant for mimesis. When certain duplicate forms attain meaning themselves (usually aesthetical ones) the complexity of the Form definition increases, as now the simple definition must now include metaphors, or connotative similarities, of other things related to it. Thus, families, kingdoms and taxonomies develop, where forms are ordered in relation to (and of) one another.

To make Forms even more complex, when a Thing has a history, has passed through that Einsteinian 4th dimension of time, it may have narratives, or stories, connected to the Form, so that, for instance, George Washington, the form, the humanoid, the corpus, was also a military general, also became a government president, is now dead, once owned slaves, etcetera — becomes a larger cultural Form than just a human form, a humanoid entity. GEORGE WASHINGTON, the general, of Virginia, circa 1776, who “lives” on in derivative forms (books, movies, statuary) describing his life, is in reality a very long and complex Form under the usual (deceivingly small) label of “George Washington.”

Form is the semantical expression of our senses to an object. Form has its roots in our vision and our touch and to some degree our taste and smell (please don’t lick the Rodin!).

FORM IS FORM: SO WHAT?

We seem to take Form for granted – a thing is evident, after all, therefore a thing is just a thing (tautology), and is forgotten when our senses move on to other things.

That white alabaster Form that we just saw in the museum, that Rodin statue, is long gone from our minds as we fly back to Seattle from New York. The real Form continues to exist in the New York museum, however: its gravity, its persistence, its location remains at the museum; it is our minds that have left the building. The alabaster stone, while breaking down every so slightly to erosion (age), persists long enough that we might think it sturdy and permanent. The Rodin is decaying, like all things, albeit slowly.

[Ponder this: imagine ALL the Rodin sculptures in existence around the world, displaying Shape and gravity, simultaneously, like beacons around the world, sculpting Space. The ultimate Rodin phenomenon!]

That, of course, is in our semantics of what, and who, Rodin-art is. This same Rodin statuary around the world is not as significant to birds, which use the available statues as perches, or to critters like mice, which use the statues as rain shelters. The lexical forms of Rodin’s sculptures are nothing more than stone objects existing in 3-dimensions, observed in 4-dimensions (the actual viewing event in Einsteinian time).

TOWARDS A GRAMMAR OF ART

How does culture imprint value and significance on a Form? That is, how does an Object, a Thing, become a Form that is to be labelled: Art?

This is where art history comes in. Art history is intimately tied to regular human history, as all sub-cultures are a subset of the greater Culture.

When populations were isolated, culture was limited to the tribe and the region. Art served a specific set of tribal functions, especially pre-vocal language, not known to others due to isolation. As migration took man across the continents, the definition of Art changed, adding elements of the other cultures encountered. When the king-warrior consolidated fiefdoms, to make kingdoms, his authority and decision-making thus defined Art (for kingly functions).

When the printing press was developed, and the middle class created, and higher education codified, the definition, and expectations, of Art changed, as culture and human expectations changed for a “quality of life,” “happiness,” and “utility.”

The rise of the individual (from Homer on through Timothy Leary) brought the individualization of Art and the expression on internal, psychological processes. In western Art, Rodin destroyed the formalism of aristocratic past, but it took 20 years of being castigated before his Truth in form, his Form Language [updated cultural definition of the greater reality] was to come to fruition – the advent of Expressionism and Modernism.

When Picasso finally was born, the expectations for Modernism were already laid down in general culture. Curators and art dealers, comprising the nouveau riche, not kings and royal transtate, defined what was good (thus valuable) Art. The world wars brought surreality to reality. Television made Form ubiquitous, and audiences became much savvier with visual Form. This gave rise to 2 golden ages of cinema — moving Form, with narrative, and music.

What does the above distillation of history mean to us, in terms of defining Form Language? That our expectations of objects, and Form, and Art, are radically different than those from the past.

IN SUMMARY

There is Form that is skillfully done, and there are rare Forms, both of which can alter the value of the object. Market makers can also affect the value, as can conventional wisdom on tastes. Taste is often defined, cross-culturally, as a function or product of the values and principles of a culture, so that by rank ordering the most popular Forms, one can tell a lot about the principles of the society.

Imagine today’s popular Forms as determined by most Google-image “hits.”

Form are all tokens of physicality of the universe, the microscopic stuff from which all cognate forms spring forth. The point mass, that first particle with no mass, and its implosion, which begot the Big Bang, in turn made matter, worlds, life, brains, culture, and art, in that order.

Form can be described formally, and culturally; first lexically, and semantically. Market makers, with market influence, using metaphor by use of Language, can define, or re-define, what Forms qualify as Art, if not under the Salvation motive, then the Profit one.

Form is what is, what can exist in the imagination, as a construct brought to life in the mind, with spatial inferences. It wills to be, and is, therefore, Logically Positive.

Form wills to be expressed within itself lexically, and also culturally — to diagram (parse) the metaphorical object-sets an Object infers is it’s Form Language.

THE FAILING OF RHETORIC WHEN DESCRIBING ART

Calabi-Yau shape, mapped in 14 dimensions

Most critics do not bother to be apprised of the current state of all knowledge, just the memes of an art industry as defined by Art’s wealth-driven partners. Beyond this tragedy, Art, as an animal communicative function, is constantly reassessing and reclassifying the reality as it is known by Artists.

If a critic does not know, for instance, the current mapping of Superstring theory in physics, which gives rise to theoretical Forms in as many as 10 space dimensions, how can the critic analyze the works of an artist who has full knowledge of the provable aspects of the theory, and the skill to translate and display the reality in graphical terms?

String Theory & the Verifiable Unified Equation

He cannot. In this case, the Artist is ahead of the critic’s base of knowledge, which typifies the strong visual artist.

Yours in electronic form,

Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington state, USA

March 8th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

Museums seem like graveyards. Like prisons. All that art shoved next to each other, under lock and key, armed guards, constipated docents. Not to mention the deep recesses of inventory, where the undisplayed art gets to play with each other, hidden and away from public view, while we loiter between the velvet ropes!

Met, NYC

Have you noticed the flow of the museum is like a habitrail — and you’re required to run the loop? One doesn’t really park oneself in front of a work and study it for more than a few minutes. And why? Because there is too much art to see, and one doesn’t want to miss any!

Each and every work has so much to signify, so much mood, so much narrative, but it takes time to experience it. One cannot absorb an artist’s messaging fully under rushed, self-imposed time constraints. Any museum, gallery, book, codex, index or compendium has inherent in it the potential problem of crowding.

For instance, suppose you have a nice new poetry anthology of an acclaimed but unfamiliar poet — every notice your tendency to skim through the pages in order to self-select an interesting piece — to the neglect of those poems rejected? Most foreign or challenging poems become “filler” to the poems you are already “ready” to connect with. The challenge of studying a difficult work is gone, by flip of the page. Out of sight, out of mind.

In crowding art works, too much visual stimulation and messaging are presented in too small a space, in too compact a time, to the detriment of all the works in view. How many pictures can the brain comprehend simultaneously?

Personally, I enjoy the single art work situated in a home, or in a park, or on a city street, that has been given nuanced space to exist vis-a-vis other special and non-special objects (ala composition). Under specialized siting, an art work has the potential to perform its spatial-encapsulating function, give off its inherent visual energy, reveal its actionable vectors in space. It has the potential to breathe. Crowd works abnormally close together, and you lose this space-grabbing function of art. You choke that potential.

King & Queen, by Henry Moore

In this sense, art works are architectural in that they define space, and space in turn defines them.

Museums and galleries of course are important because they offer a panoply of special objects and expose an audience to new or unknown works. The human need to collect and display objects (our berry gatherer genetics) is what drives art collecting, and the need to display a collection never wanes. It is best to recognize then that every work needs more time to be grasped, in museum or anthology, to decode the challenges put by artists. To remain flexible, one’s taste must always be challenged.

Often a work of art tends to run on, seems abnormally too long, too dense, too complicated or too idiosyncratic to maintain one’s interest — the problem of lack of concision. That is, how long is too long for a work of art before it becomes ungraspable to an audience (and thus declines in value)?

If a work is ignored because it is ungraspable, or exhausts one, is it indeed good art? Are Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, Joyce’s Dubliners, Melville’s Moby Dick or Wagner’s The Ring valid works of art? Historians might claim so, yet these works are rarely comprehended in their entirety.

In visual art, can a work be too large, too drawn out, such as Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag in fabric? Is the inability to grasp the full scale of a work from one vantage point (and one time-setting) affective (thus effective) art?

Christo, Reichstag in Fabric

These are the problems of crowding and lack of concision.

Yours always,

Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington state, USA

February 25th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

In the studio, there are different modes of creative work.

["Studio" means zeal in Latin, by the way, and was meant to describe an artist's oeuvre as well as the place of the oeuvre's origin].

There is a mode of producing art when you dive into an artistic medium with no pre-conceived idea of what you are trying to accomplish. This is pure experimentation, but rarely does anything come out polished and structurally organic, even if the session lasts for hours, or weeks. I call these experiments “sketches” — they often are not acceptable to sign off on, but can bring to light very interesting aesthetical hooks, or form/technique ideas for the future.

zimbra, sketch, michael james hawk

Sketches tend to looked rushed, tend to be flat. Brush selection seems limited. A lot of impasto muddiness (grey, tan or rose) comes from jumps of wet colour applied to wet colour(s). Background narratives are often underdeveloped. Painterliness (actionable brushstrokes) might avail itself in session-one sketches, might connote freedom of movement, freshness, kinetics. Colour selection often tends to be limited, and bright in hue.

Loose-ness is evident, versus taut control. Think of graffiti crews and their wares: they have to hit a wall fast, no time to layer up on ideas, just the sketch suffices (must suffice).

New tag behind Victrola Cafe, Capitol Hill

I tend to sketch on paper, and use gesso for inking the design, since both are cheap. If I crash and burn in a session, at least my grey muddy mess is on paper, not expensive canvas. The problem with gesso is that when it dries, it goes flat, since any illumination from water in the emulsion (seen while wet) evaporates. That is, what looked great wet becomes absolutely chalky flat when dry. One can attempt to add gloss to awaken it, or paint over the strokes with real non-gesso paint, but the thing gets to look too loaded up, too dirty. Best to throw the damn thing away, unless it’s on canvas or board, then you can put a white or black gesso wash on it and start all over again, the next day, if your not an obsessive…

*** The miracle is incorporating the sketch motions into your hand-eye brain region, so that you can re-produce the hooks or tricks in a picture (or sculpture, or song) the next time. ***

Another mode in studio work is downright plagiarism of your favourite images, to learn some things about other artists. As Picasso said, when one botches an image being copied, these errors become attributes of your own signature painting, your style. Through time, your errors become your way of drafting, your idiosyncratic messaging. If you embrace these slights, they may become your brilliance.

somber nude, 2002, by michael james hawk, a direct homage to Modigliani's Nudo Dolente, 1908

Another mode in creativity is the methodical gameplan: staging a layered painting (or sculpture, or song) from a previous sketch that needs new life. This is the mode where the actions are well understood, and there is alot of predictive validity in getting what you want. One can breathe in this mode, take one’s time — not set the sky on fire.

If there are multiple projects going on, you can pick what mode interests you that day, or work simultaneously in all modes, or successively from one to the other. It is nice to get that pipeline filled with projects so that you can dive in and accomplish work as per your mood and energy, come what may.

An aside: if you photograph your work in different stages, this makes you look prolific, when in fact most of the earlier strokes are long gone.

tristan, sketch, plastilene clay bust

So get to sketching, so that we might change the world, keep it sane!

Yours,
Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington State, USA

February 22nd, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

There seems to be a notion that there is a dearth of Art in modern society.

I wonder just the opposite — are we not consumed by Art, 24 x 7?

Aren’t our minds — the whole world — captive to Art?

Doesn’t our nightly television viewing define us as a permanent theatrical audience? When we listen to our iPods everyday, swaying to the melody, feeling the beat, are we not devouring the tribal messages needed to sustain us?

When dramas and comedies are delivered straight to our doorsteps via Netflix, are we not demanding art?

How much art is enough before too much of a good thing leads to obsession? Do we work 8 hours a day just to rationalize the night’s TV and DVD viewing of drama, or digestion of myth?

Where is the OFF button to our Art addiction?

Have you noticed most dinner party talk surrounds television, music, sport, decoration – basic cultural knowledge bytes with social currency (memes)?

Plato complained of Homerian troubadours and their tendency to make staid people hysterical – has much changed?

Who doesn’t adore Bono?

In the visual arts realm, does film and digital imagery satisfy the totemic need to communicate visually? That is, to view a Picasso in situ at the museum, live, en vivo: is this more satisfying than viewing the same piece on a clear digital screen, portable everywhere?

Form is the message, after all.

And to pursue this further – do we need our Bathers, Olympias and Venuses when we have artful and attractive Pamela Andersons and the like, communicating to our procreative (fertility) lobes deeply?

Are not the lyricists of today our poets? Are not the filmmakers our bards? Are not the photo-graphers our painters? Are not our industrial designers our sculptors? Who doesn’t have a Buddha, Christ, Barbie, or Teddy Bear in their home?

Does it matter that the vaunted fine-arts are in fact UNPOLISHED low-arts, and that the low-arts are actually, in function, INNOVATE and AFFECTING arts?

Think about it.

Are we art consuming whores?

Michael James Hawk
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington State, USA

February 17th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Comments (1)

muse in situ * michael james hawk

{ tonight’s kniTTing -}

xo,
mjh

February 9th, 2010 | Category: painting | Leave a comment

what of the journey within, and the discovery of self?

dios * 2010

it’s taken along time to understand that you only have one life to live, then you’re a corpse: morte, kaput.

there most probably is not an afterlife, so there is no need to hedge in this realm. there most probably is not reincarnation, so there is no need again to hedge in this existence.

if you don’t get yours now, you just wont get it — ever.

now, its taken a lifetime of reading texts, especially historical accounts, to understand that there is a list of finite roles we get to play: farmer, grocer, alchemist, physician, priest, politician and poet (existence would be fine without marketers and accountants). and there are basically two modes: greedy, or compassionate.

it is up to you to decide which role, under which mode, you choose to abide.

if you’re born with resources, you will have a secure attitude toward life, and employ metaphors that are attuned to actualization and the possible. if you are born into poverty, the metaphors are different and more survival oriented. either way, you still have to log in a lifetime of years, you must forge ahead in society, come what may, the street or the castle. you’re going to need alot of help to survive, and also to thrive.

help means altruism — in the family, tribe, community, world.

Joseph Campbell spoke of artists as the updaters of mythology — those that make the old mythologies current. that’s their product, their “saleable wares.” if you don’t have that bardic, humanistic attitude, then, according to Robert Motherwell or Henry Moore, you are simply a decorator, or a copyist — not an artist.

artists have a role in the society at large, always have. in fact, there is a strong argument that, like the rat that hits the cocaine reward button unto death, modern society is too awash in art’s pleasurable joys: witness person’s obsession with television, telephones, cameras and digital music (24 x 7 samsara).

to hone the societally-pointing messaging in art, the artist has to hone the messaging within the corpus proper. that tooling of skills is not just technical, it is also humanistic. its takes years of research and life-experience to hone the tools to update the tribe’s metaphors efficaciously. these years of struggle are roads to the journey within the Self, that model of mind.

it is common to hear artists speak of the physical exhaustion it takes to do studio practice — try sculpting or large canvas painting: you are going to exert, you are going to sweat, to dehydrate, to be sore the next day. you will. this physical exhaustion assists well in the slovenly presentation of most artists.

what is oft not spoken about is the mental exhaustion of grappling with form and symbolic visual systems on the brain. this exertion gets short shrift in the media, but it is real — as real as the physical exertion.

for example: here is a piece i am working on, a sketch, that deals with a figurative human, a metaphor. it, the subject, is in repose, with arms and hand dynamically holding on to something, or grabbing out to hold. its dynanicism, its action, is sliding downward, the brushstrokes denote a control over something uncontrollable. the head is a geometry, a logic-center, a computer, married to the flows of non-controllable action. there is a tension there.

that is Analysis One of just the kinetics.

Analysis Two is the color template, which evokes mood in our brains. This template is blacks and greys and whites — it is cold, clinical, catholic, universal. it has yet to be warmed up.

now, to sit back and contemplate where to go artistically from this point of the picture’s existence is exhausting: i have to run different scenarios, simulations really, in my mind to choose the next best path. forget about the fear of executing the choice correctly, that comes later. just to develop a plan takes alot of brain power, especially if the work is truly experimental yet effectively graphic and symbolic.

for this piece: do i make the head more humanoid, or not? which colours will i choose, to invoke which moody connotations? what of the background — should i start a narrative?

how many days, or months, or years will i look upon the current sketch to decide what to do next, given all the Analyses to date?

you can see the stamina that is needed in this whole artistic mental exercise.

tired, tired tired!

yours in art,

michael
beacon hill, seattle, washington usa

February 6th, 2010 | Category: journal, painting, poetics | Comments (1)

Franz Kline, the painter, once said giving away a piece of art was like giving away ones own child. I understand this: the artist tends to work with her object so intently and for so long that the object becomes an object-lesson hard won.

I often feel that is why some artists do not pine to sell their wares — they create objects as symptoms of their lifestyle, and their creations become talismans, mirrors, dynamic things. They move.

I look around my house and I see old objects that give me my memories. I can remember how I was as a person when making a particular object, can recall the time and circumstances, my significant relations then, my younger self. The memory reels flicker in my mind’s eye.

That is the real power in pictures, and in sculpture — the narratives (kaleidoscopic almost).

orchid * michael james hawk, v1

I am making an orchid picture right now, large (44×28″), rather abstract, all white. As I build it, I can see that I am building a tunnel. I do not know where it will lead, or if I will destroy the tunnel accidentally. I can feel the folds of the flower, as if I were the flower. I make constant associations to other topics in my life. I pass the time, the picture is my clock dial, I read the periodicity.

The picture may or may not ultimately resonate as a special object to other people, but for me, I will remember the whole creative experience imbued therein.

This is not economics or building salable inventory, or creating catalyzing totems for an audience. This is capturing personal memory. Art.

Yours,
Michael James Hawk
Beacon Hill, Seattle USA

January 27th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Comments (1)

the water ran in a rivulet
down the rice paper
a single stream:

it ran up & gathered itself
overcame
broke free
toward the center of the earth

ran like a crystal
to the bottom of the page
slowly
as if in thought

the surface tension rising
a vein on the page
in this light
in my eyes

i thought of the japanese ink artists
& the spirit on enso
i thought of black blood on white skin
& the imperceptible sound of the
droplet collapsing

i thought of the meditations of
painters where there is no thought
of vocation or function
or goal

when the color lives & dies
in the moment –

the moment’s painting.

ii.
i am very much like an ape
circumscribed in this time,
in nature

with a reed and a curiosity
to fling water
& see patterns
splay upon the bark

connect with the flow
of water, bark,
tree, light…

i am the human beast
fascinated by the flow of things

(i do not know much else).

iii.
the rivulet is alive
has that narrative of beginning
middle
end

divides the space:
makes it clean
sharp and mathematical

this flies in the face
of everything you have ever heard
about painting —

grace in meditation.

January 18th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

acrylics on 40 lb paper, dont ya know.

yours,
michael

January 12th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

i have often thought of art as being a developmental exercise to keep the human toolmaker and human collector sharp. that is, the artist is the lay-craftsman waiting in the wings, honing her hand-eye operations with critical practice hours.

one sees in early childhood that play — imaginative play — is important to both make neuron connections in the brain circuitry and also to learn the environment. how can one really know what a pine cone is without tasting, throwing, and stepping on one?

in this regard, how can one really know what is in the subconscious, what has been suppressed, without artistic expression?

the values may have changed since 2 million years ago: tools and totems have given way to toys and decorations, but the need to carve, paint and act is still primal, still part and parcel of the animal.

in my poetics, i take a view that there are hardly any walls separating the methods of creativity — the same rules to make a good poem are the same to make a good painting, or sculpture. the modern poets are the rock and roll troubadours, and the folk singers. the modern painters are the photographers and film makers. the modern sculptors are the toy makers, the architects, the botanists. why hearken the old forms when the newness of art is everyday?

i especially noticed this this week when walking to work each morning in rainy Seattle. i was struck at how the city trees, stripped bare of their leaves, were truly miraculous in their inherent aesthetics: bilaterally symmetric, yet fukinsei-different; branching in softly-turned forms, organic in design; wiry; moving. they were sculpture, made by the metaphoric hand of nature.

then i realized that maybe there is no dearth of fine art in the city, no lack of sculpture: the trees were alive as sculptures, the buildings and fenestrations were sculptures of the symbolic, the advertisements and graffito were the semiotic visual art of the masses. instead of having marble statues bestrewn in ancient Greece, we have today’s urban objects bestrewn about modern Seattle.

thus, the human need to create and make objects of specialness is always robust, but our categories and descriptive taxonomies become rather anachronistic, and quickly.

well i say: cheers to the design of the pigeon dove and the moving flock! cheers to the maudlin weeping willow! cheers to the Chrysler building in NYC! and to the deep warm palette of Modigliani! and the pregnant forms of Arp!

yours always,

michael
beacon hill dmz, seattle, washington, usa

November 21st, 2009 | Category: journal, poetics | Comments (2)

i look at how hard i work on a particular piece, and realize how i forget the efforts made to get the piece to that point of being.

a piece is a commitment of body and soul.

such a life: to take the spirit of inspiration through its cycles to a conclusion which announces the work finished (for the time being).

working into the belly of a piece to find a deep systemic unity, where all the loose ends, or most of them, tie up into a statement of existential power.

i grow as an artist, but not as a producer of things, rather an adventurer who is a life-long learner in trial-and-error experimentation. i am a student, programmed to experiment, forever more. there is no truncation of career, or education — i am in for the long haul, and i will call the long haul LIFE.

who knows the efficacy of this life’s work? i do know that it is a blissful path, a selfish path, to look for form-meaning, emotional meaning, emotional commentary. i carve the material experience to find new objects, bring them to the fore. of course, original innovative meaning is elusive — you have to really stretch across the rockface and make the most fearful maneuvers to get up to that ledge.

i stare into the piece, and it is the beating heart of the spirit, the great human spirit. it echoes all that is possible in the human realm. it is a tribute, really, a celebration of the cosmic mystery we sometimes claim is truth. i call this thing my Next Great Expression. it is a part of me, materially. it is a collage of my interior being, with the current available resources.

yours, in artful process, towards an artifact,

michael
beacon hill, seattle, washington state, usa

November 15th, 2009 | Category: journal, painting, poetics, utility | Comments Off

most days i don’t look at art as “art” — this concept out there, with a singular title. “art” the word is deficient, lean, anemic…

art is so staccato, too, linguistically, as a gutteral, as a reference for something that is apparently so grand in concept.

art seems the very tip of an iceberg: the iceberg being the creative soul in the expression of humanitarian truths. there is that function of humanism often not described vis a vis technique and clean mannerism. art is a vocation, unpaid and thus un-heralded, that reorganizes the human schema in real time. art functions as our humanity on display.

art is the employment of expression for the gains of speaking truths and revealing metaphorical worlds.

take away art and you have no spielberg bicycle scene, no last chord of “a day in the life,” no coquetry of a square dance. you have no spatial-time transitions of an octavio paz poem or the solemnity of a lehmbruck pose.

art is the stock of all that was and all that can be, with that human signature. it is graphic, of the other side, the other realm, looking back at ourselves in questioning terms.

art is the by-product of art-full processes and a dedication to those processes. art is a symptom of a creative. art lives beyond definitions — it casts the sun in brand new ways that nature proper has not lain out.

here is my favorite art: mother humming to her child, person humming to themselves doing dishes, child dancing to music naturally, comedic body language and dance pratfalls amongst close friends, persons drawing in the sand with their toes, child using found sticks as toys or faux-weapons in a type of theatrics, person learning scales of a guitar or piano or any instrument, the kid who makes her first sundial, fort building, symmetry in biology and cosmology, viewing ground patterns from aircraft window seats, comics, the heartbeat of a lover when there is nothing else to do, hearing rhythmic breathing of sleeping persons (keeping time), made up ghost stories.

yes, complex chord constructions, large complex disciplined art groups, extravagant costuming and staging, special sound intonations and sweeping graphic stretches in space akin to architectural statements are grand, but these are the mere by-products of everyday art.

art is that breathing life of kinetical joy of your childhood into the visible world. it is the portal to all hope. imagine hope without art’s symbology?

yours,
michael

September 9th, 2009 | Category: journal, meta, poetics, utility | Leave a comment

I poured this and chased it in Vermont granite patina with nickel specks. It is 18 inches, and on hold while I contemplate why I love the cubist cuts of the stone.

How to mount to plinth? Whatever is cheap or free, of course. That requires looking in the scrap bins at the local lumber shops, then drilling and adding steel rods into the legs which will in turn be drilled into the plinth.

Then the piece will collect its energy, and name itself. I loved how Noguchi spoke of metal chromed forms being truly invisible, reflecting their total environment but not themselves.

I love reflections of metal to eye.

The best,

Michael James Hawk
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington State, USA

July 14th, 2009 | Category: sculptors, seattle | Leave a comment

Plastilene maquette 18 x 7 x 4 inches.

Here is the slideshow of all the iterations:

Cheers,
Michael James Hawk
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington state, USA

June 21st, 2009 | Category: sculptors, seattle | Leave a comment

My dear friend and fellow artist Joe Kight of New Orleans responded to a foto of a piece I sent out via email titled VITAL (below):

Joe asked: “this is really cool…. is it light? or electronically created?”

I had to laugh, because I have forgotten where the boundaries lie between substrates. That is, sometimes I forget HOW THE PIECE WAS DONE — IN WHAT MEDIUM (a modern problem).

This piece was created electronically on a computer using various Adobe software after hours of experimentation and trial-and-error learning. It is a sketch, version 60, if I recall. It is a mock-up of a yet-to-be-produced acrylic painting piece 108 inches x 96 inches, on canvas, smooth and flat, no painterliness (more photographic). It is meant to be highly graphic, an explosion for the eye. It is actionable, rising; a wave, a burst, pure energy-release of something (my tribute to the NY School).

When I composed it, I was thinking of a canvas on the wall — the wave form itself denoting the size of a canvas 108 x 96 inches-square. I worked on all those versions to its current simplicity (what is profound really is all the stripped information actually missing from the final wave piece).

This VITAL composition is actually LIGHT — as phosphors on a computer monitor. If I were to print this on the laser printer, etcetera, the hues would change, since a computer monitor lightens up color, especially large color fields. Often, I have to re-calibrate my screen colors to my printing device with augmented hue-vaules and print many comps to get the feeling of the original idea. The screen is my main audience-device (I think), thus I have become adept in computer composing with the inherent backlight.

In painting the game is much different. One has to deal with dark opaques immediately, and runny transparencies, drips, muddiness, greys, stipples, lines and cracks. An image has texture and vibrancy right away, but under less artist control, thus more costs in time and materials. Thus slower iterations on ideas.

If I were to paint this VITAL image, I would have to re-create the backlightedness of the computer piece, which would be difficult since the shear size of the piece will cast reflections from ambient and strong light sources. Thus, there will have to be white-tinged transparent layers in the color field (masking). The finished piece will also require special lighting to cancel ambient interference on the idea. VITAL would also be a fine “photograph” print at that scale, flat and graphic off a large-format printer. Thus, the real future of VITAL is unknown.

So to answer Joe’s question: yes, VITAL is living (in potential) as electrons, is indeed light (projected), yearns to be a large acrylics piece (museum size), lives as printed inks on glosscard 14 inches x 11 inches, and would do well as a large-formatted C-print output (or some other substrate I have yet to discover).

Or to map this all to an equation:

IDEA (neurons) = FORM (electrons) = WORK (implementation) = LIGHT (reflection) = FINISHED PIECE (of the paint/sculpt/print/photo/screened/projected variety).

Very best,

Michael James Hawk
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington State, USA

June 9th, 2009 | Category: painting | Comments (1)

June 6th, 2009 | Category: painting | Leave a comment

Harnessing the freedom of creativity. Imagine that any idea is yours for expressing, collating, collaging, producing in any mode possible. That is the potential in creativity. It is boundless, whereas resources to produce creative things are not boundless. Hence tension.

I sketch alot, but rarely do I implement in paint or bronze. Why? Simply money, and time, which again equates to money. I have accumulated massive sketch books over my life, filled with ideas that jump off the pages. Do I implement said sketches, or do I spend my time with new sketches of new ideas?

I do both, but mainly I sketch new ideas, as that is the first level to transcribing creativity in general and also the cost is nearly free, which fits my budget.

Here are these sketch books laying around: they reveal my hand-eye, my process development, my continuance of themes, a.k.a. my style. They are my method to illumination. They are not salable or marketable or that kind of work — they are in fact not in the capitalist mode of thinking. They are in a mode of thinking whose definition escapes me. I just live this day, create this day, listen to the drumbeat, the heartbeat, follow the rhythm through the shoulders, the arm, the hand, the fingers — to the substrate.

It is my idiosyncratic script, my hieroglyphics, my totem-writing, my symbology. It is my history. It is my autobiography. I can see that I yearn to see graphically. I can see that I like to manipulate lines to create space. There is architecting there.

Here is another humorous fact to creativity: start a sketch into paints on a canvas, and then you are sketching all over again, but now there is the slight third dimension (the height of the paint), the new vibrancy in hue, and the textualization of the idea in different brush patterns. Again, alot of paintings sit in my house in various stages of inertia — they just reveal the sketch point of unity-level-one, or two, or three. They are there to be worked on, like the damn sketch books.

Same with clay and plaster and the sculpture side of sketching.

Same with the writing (I think of Walt Whitman here, always revising the same book throughout his life).

So I awake to this new day, and see that all the potential to dive in is there. I am addicted to my own internally-derived television, where I am the programmer.

Yours,

Michael James Hawk
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington State, USA

May 30th, 2009 | Category: journal, painters, poetics, sculptors, utility | Comments (1)

What is sculpture exactly?

Yes, it is creating objects — things – in space, with those 3-dimensional x, y and z axes.

Yes, it is something studied, something that casts shadow, something which calls attention to itself.

You have as examples the art of antiquity, which is regarded as sacred today (even if Greek statuary was akin to billboard advertising that day and age; even if certain religious artifacts may have taken only 30 minutes to create; even if suggestive objects were made simply for carrying water or foodstuffs).

You also have the megaliths from ancient peoples: architecture, to house ceremonies, tombs and rituals: the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, Stonehenge, Machu Pichu, the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.

You have regaled decoration, as in Roman Renaissance sculpture: the modeling of importance, kings and queens, gods, popes, nobility.

There is sculpture, too, that bespeak historical events — capture the narrative of evolving man.

And there is sculpture that speaks to luxury, images for extra-cultural diversion.

I personally think sculpture is all of these, but much more, as well:

I view all life as material – of stuff (atoms, molecules, DNA strands, organisms). I view the act of viewing, seeing with our ocular eyes, as material – the physics of light reflecting data to our sensory organs. I deduce that life is a material passage.

Seeing an object, sensing an object, recognizing it, makes an impression: I opine over it, classify the object in words and taxonomies, put the object on an objects list.

In the milieu of all objects, from people to animals to fenceposts to barns, from lakes and mountains to rifle and archer’s bow, from the common fork and spoon to the wine or cola bottle, I see sculpture. Most material stuffs contain Platonic design-elements and thus elegance — worthy of a sacred label like Art. I may be attracted more to rare objects, extinct objects, imaginative objects, encompassing objects, engrossing objects, seductive objects, symmetric objects, mimetic objects, portable objects — and I may call them Sculptural Art. But if I let my classifying system down, and look at all material items as potential Sculptural Art, I can hold reverence for materiality itself: life for life’s sake, design for design’s sake.

I used to be confused about what the significance of material being was, about the existence of a god, or many gods, but what does it matter? Some truths we can be sure of: that we are made of stuffs of the universe, share the same elegant physics as stars and suns, share the components of the wave, the particle, the fractal. We are of the soup we see, and sense. We are held as equal particles in this particle universe which is measured by telescopes, microscopes and animal eyes.

I have written previously about how the Mickey Mouse doll may be a more significant objectification to society [in monetary and utility-happiness values] than all of the Picassos ever created. I have also written that the Stealth Bomber may be the most elegant sculpture ever created (regardless of its function). I have come to an understanding that the value of a friend or family’s work of art is more significant than the elegance of the Hope Diamond, the Mona Lisa, or any work of skill by an unrelated artist, because the familial object is imbued with a personal history and thus it becomes an historical artifact, an antiquity. I rank my daughter’s clay sculpture of a dinosaur at age 2 to be the most significant object on the planet, since it is an antiquity of my own genetic antiquity, and is also mimetic in the pure Aristotelian sense. I may love Picasso’s works, but let us be confident that the family and friends of Picasso love the works much much more.

Here are three photographs of some of my favorite sculptures I have ever encountered. They could be housed in any museum, and fit the most stringent definitions of What is Art?

Very truly yours,

Michael James Hawk
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington State, USA

EXAMPLE 1

This is a Mexican ex-voto statue for “Holy Death” [spirit to the drug lords], circa 2009, artist unknown. Offerings include cigarettes and cocaine, visible in the nose. As an aside, the very first human art was by augmenting a skull, circa 50,000 BCE. In Mexico, Jose Guadalupe Posada brought the Calavera into style as a modern Mexican idiom circa 1910.
Foto by Carlos Villalon/Redux for CNN

EXAMPLE 2

This is a “Heritage Doll” used in post-abortion therapy circa 2007, artist unknown. Note the utter simplicity but effectiveness, akin to the fragility of the Strawman.
Foto by Tom Schierlitz for The New York Times.

EXAMPLE 3

These are HVAC pipes near the amazon.com headquarters near my home in Seattle, 2009, artist (aka industrial designer) unknown. They are 18 feet tall, and extremely sculptural, and very well sited against the art deco building.
Foto by Michael James Hawk.

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April 16th, 2009 | Category: poetics, sculptors, utility | Comments (2)

I am working on a plaster piece tentatively called The Bather or The Swimmer that rests on the floor or plinth mid-torso up (a bad plaster pour blocked the legs from setting plaster in the lower hemisphere = a nice serendipitous botch). Previous fotos of it can be found here: http://michaeljameshawk.com/artblog/?p=204

It is currently drying out, the water inside it is evaporating daily, and thus it is becoming lighter in weight, with a fragile bisque-fired quality (versus a soap-stone quality). It is still plaster-white in colour.

My choices are many, to make a piece: first pick a subject, then a narrative vis the pose, then an overall style, then a skin texture, then the colours, then the varnish type, then the plinth setting. That is 7 dimensions of decision-making.

All 7 final decisions must lead to a Unity in space and time, a visual clock of Otherness, an Art.

In The Swimmer, I am struck by how the grooves from the rasp tool look on the skin surface – furrows, which play with shadow. What to do: sand the furrows down to a nice polished skin, or leave as is? What statement am I making with either choice?

And for colour: I like the white, it seems holistic here, especially sitting on black granite as the metaphor for a pool of water, but I need to experiment with colour choices, to cover my bases. I use Adobe Photoshop on the computer for that, to make mock colours.

Often, I will see a colour I never would have experimented with, and go with that in patina.

Herein I have embedded 3 example fotos of The Swimmer: the first is natural, the second plays with light, the third with blue and experimental shadings. I often use red and bronze filters to flesh out colour ideas too, but didn’t add them here.

So, here I am, needing to choose the skin texture and the colour. I really don’t know where to go…yet. Like usual, I probably will feel my way, take a risk, even to the point of ruining the piece. If I do ruin it, my brain will remember what not to do the next time, but in the subconscious, where it counts.

Yours always,

Michael James Hawk
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington State USA

March 12th, 2009 | Category: sculptors, seattle | Comments (1)