ARTblog +

chasing morning with india black ink on the plaster maquette “swimmer.”

black blood + fleeting iteration

yours,
michael

beacon hill, seattle, washington state, usa

July 14th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

muse in torsion

done in today’s sketchbook, scanned 600dpi, paint bucket with black fill in extraneous regions, paintbrush for added claw in adobe photoshop, saved as 72dpi at 440 pixel for this wordpress blog size of my choosing, managed by adobe dreamweaver.

the goal here is to canvas, 72×56 inches.

the muse: concept, the internalized myth, the pose of the moment. what can the muse give to a public? what does it give to an artist? what is the action?

yours,
michael

July 9th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

This essay is difficult to write — it speaks to the role of the artist in the 21st century, the diminished role.

What has happened since the rise of television, magazines, the world wide web and photography is that the we are beholden to the Ubiquitous Message of the Owners of the Medium. That is, we are savvy to the images we have been brought up on, and recognize as brand names.

Warhola + Late Self Portrait

For instance, the Seattle Art Museum has staged a show covering photography and ephemera of Kurt Cobain, the music artist. Along side this are the film-loops and Polaroids of Andy Warhol‘s coterie, again ephemera. For those who do not know the memes of Warhol, Inc., and Cobain/Nirvana rock band, Inc. would miss the point of the installations entirely — there is not a lot of “there” there, in terms of graphic art.

And yet, programming the ephemera of these artists is what the curators, and society, think is valid Art. Music, advertising imagery and glossy photography are the powerful mediums that promote the current messages adroitly and instantaneously. We consume this art in real-time, and consume massive quantities.

Where does this leave stand alone sculpture and painting, the chunky analog objects? The canvas window is an anachronism to the computer monitor-window, ubiquitous on portable cellular devices and laptops. Public sculpture has long been co-opted by architects, who promote geometric solutions from off the shelf building materials. The human figure, the fertility goddess, is best displayed in moving cinema (e.g. Megan Fox in the Transformer movies) than in a city park.

Megan Fox + Note the modern pose and the role of women

It is difficult to make a value judgement on this (probable) natural transformation of mediums, and messages. Stone wall cave paintings are not, and were never, portable, and we not longer hunt for survival. Mercifully, the institutional religions have lost their power over the freedom of ideas and science-based deduction, therefore the need for Special-Object Iconography is gone. For those who do crave spiritual iconography, a simple trip to Ikea or Cost Plus will garner a nicely made Buddha and the like for less that USD $20.

Factories overseas give us all the detritus we desire.

Yes, market makers will push their own portfolios: Saatchi is the new Vollard, museums will normalize the collections of the wealthy. But the illustrators in video games, in Participatory Art, rule the day. And the messages are: war games, sporting games, violence, for the powers that be, corporately and governmentally.

An argument can be made that the Special Objects of Art — these weighty graphic things — have always been sponsored by the elites. Joseph Campbell, Daniel Boorstin and others speak to the fact that there always were, and will always be, elites to program mythology; in fact it is a requirement to have elites confer the Art.

If this is true, then the clunky analog Special Objects of Church and Public Parks are no longer needed. The ubiquitous portable digital image, the cheap commodotized (and usually plastic) legacy object, cinema and television supply society’s messaging, from society’s elites, to the literate and illiterate populace.

Avatar

James Cameron is the new Picasso. This may be a normal, natural transformation, if not a good thing.

Very best,

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

July 6th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

I have written previously about Art’s potential functioning as a journaling exercise, as a sounding board for the artist, and as a personal clock, biding memory in time. Art is that attractive, relaxed graphical doodling we all respond to: visual messaging for both illiterate and literate eyes.

xochitl, sketch by michael james hawk

Artists often expand their doodling to larger scale, and over many hours, to really “see” their work: the secrets of the form lexicons utilized (the bones and structure of the work) and the grammar of the artistic result, i.e. the various meanings the artist herself can surmise.

This Art “product,” this grammatical result, is often representative of itself. It is its own Phenomenon, for an objective invisible public, to use the Platonic term. It, the artwork, often cannot be defended or defined by the artist, who may not be local to the work or may just choose to be silent about it.

Thus, the work must broadcast its own grammatical meanings as an organically special or interesting object.

Often, though, one finds critics, educators and marketeers defining the meaning of an artwork, ostensibly so the work can be more readily understood in the milieu of ideas. The artist, too, espousing details of a personal art theory in other avenues such as in biographical interviews or critical essays, influences the meaning of her artwork, albeit indirectly.

If one doodles long enough and becomes comfortable with experimenting with forms and prototypes, a signature style develops, an idiosyncratic formulation of the hand-eye practice of the artist.

This signature idiosyncratic style is itself a form, to be reckoned with as a lexical-element in the toolkit of shape.

I can see elements in my own signature style which bespeak my many influences, and my truly unique innovations. I may be thus grouped (as invariant or unique) into taxonomies with “same-looking” art, or schools, or traditions, or nationalities. That is, I may become labeled and categorized by an “art world” comprised of all the participants in art.

This is the external (institutional) reckoning of an artwork.

What is often not spoken about in the art world is the internal reckoning of an artwork — identifying the non-rational entities (spirits) within an artist’s perception, practicing a personal shamanism. Identifying with one’s unexplored inner voice, one’s silent inner animal, one’s otherworldly spirit, is a benefit of Art rarely discussed in the machine society.

Because we as a species cannot determine what happens to us with certainty when we die, we live in intellectual darkness. We organize our lives under some faith rationale to grapple with the meaning of existence. In this grappling, rationalist roles of what we ought to be are taught by top-down expert-filled institutions, such as schools, governments, churches and corporations, so that we may become ideal “good citizens” and “marketable workers” of “good morality.”

There is more to life, however, than becoming a moral citizen-worker at the behest of persistent power. There is, too, the yet undefined universe of the personal Soul in this existence. That Soul is the non-rationalist you, as valid as any of the external reckoning proposed by patriarchal/kingly/presidential/bureaucratic-expert society.

Art can be, through time, an agent for self-analysis, and as a tool for teaching non-rationalist magic (or logic, if that is more comfortable) to those of us who grapple with the notion of existence and awakeness.

These personal totems and scripts may (or may not) translate into a working grammar within the external reckoning of criticism and market-making, but they are so important in defining that elusive Soul beyond what has been proposed for you by the agents that be.

Explore yourself in Art, beyond what has been laid out for you!

Very best,

Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington state, USA

June 14th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

xipe by michael james hawk

the god, glimpsed in the sky, june 2010.

very best,
michael

beacon hill, seattle, washington state, usa

June 13th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

el alma de mexico

June 10th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

There is a rhetorical theory (found in conventional wisdom) which proposes that to copy or employ another artist’s signature expressive style is both non-creative and absurd.

La Guitarrista - Is this too Picasso Don Quixote, or Giacometti Walking Man?

Take as an example the modern student of symphonic music composition: if she were to compose a new symphony in Beethoven-like shapes and structures, her work would be in danger of being considered sophomoric, derivative and in bad taste, since, according to critics like Milan Kundera, that ground has already been trod and given full expression by Beethoven himself, the phenomenon.

The issue of form replication and borrowed technique is more complicated than that, however. We live in a finite world of ideas, after all, circumscribed by the world’s languages and encyclopedias of thought. We also live in a material (atomic) world, with finite shape- and tonality- lexicons. So the absolute number of choices of expressive style is truly limited regardless of our romantic notion of ourselves as being infinitely creative.

That is, Beethoven took forms from his predecessors in his student instruction, and other students took forms from Beethoven, and so on, so that that cultural DNA strand of that peculiar art form persists in the general milieu of society up until the point it dies (i.e. when society no longer employees it). When we listen very carefully to the shape of Beethoven’s music, we connect to that shape, and thus we hard-wire it into our brain, not readily to be dis-learned.

Often, when I paint a picture, or sculpt an artifact-idea (sketch), some observer will liken my work to that of another artist’s style and work. For instance, if I paint an unfolding flower at large scale, regardless of the flower type or impasto effects, someone will call it “an O’Keeffe.” If I use driblets and sprays of paint of many viscosities to flesh over my own signature drafting style, someone might call my work “a Pollock.” If I make rounded figurative forms with abstracting flourishes, it tends to “look Diego Rivera.” If I sculpt a figurative form super thin and tall, in a painterly, abstract way, it looks “Giacometti.” And so on. Such is the power of memes and cultural DNA.

While I do believe that one challenge for an artist is to ultimately make an art statement updated to the times (thus de facto distanced from the exemplars), learning what is materially in the milieu is necessary and unavoidable. I call these lessons Rights of Passage for the painter or sculptor, because when one relaxes as a student of form and copies the techniques of what is available, one actually LIVES the creative experiences of others. One becomes the doppelganger, if you will, and gets first-line knowledge of the technique.

To actually feel the anatomy of a flower by painting the folds, stigma and stamen at a large and vibrant scale, like O’Keeffe (and others) did, proves exciting indeed, and is one of many Rights of Passage for the life-long student of form.

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

To explore messy drip action with many paint viscosities, like Jackson Pollock (and others) did, is indeed a revelation into actionable expressionist freedom and “loose” painting.

To abstract the unity of the human corpus ala Pablo Picasso is also a true revelation, a psycho-logical compartmentalization that feels very natural.

She Loves Me Not, 2009 by Hawk

Harold Bloom, Friedrich Nietzsche and others have brought to critical theory the concepts of being your own man, away from your influences and idols and gods. That somehow one must deny one’s predecessors to overcome them (God is dead!). While this may be true, in philosophical growth and actualization toward existential thought, we can never escape the DNA strands of form language the human race has produced since it first made tools, weapons and artifacts for worship.

When I see Picasso’s Guernica, I see Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1500). When I see Giacometti’s elongated bodies, I see totems from ancient Oceania and Africa (c. 500 BC). When I see Pollock’s No. 5, I see ancient Persian rug design (c. 600 AD).

We are all captive to the DNA of our species, physically and culturally — that finite corpus.

Very truly yours,

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

June 4th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

clarissa + ink on paper

June 1st, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

Views of The Brute, sculpted by my aunt, Mary Carmen Cervantes.

This Brute is actually not for primetime — it’s a quick maquette for another sculpture, which came out later (and is incredible).

I present the brutish maquette here to show that sketches and maquettes can be very powerful sculptures in their own right. This piece has power, and the focus of intense contemplation.

Are you Art-in, or Art-out?
Michael

May 26th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

last night i experimented in photoshop, and realized i hadn’t done freeform expression, experimentation come what may, in a long time. that is because I have spent this past year painting on sketch-ideas already done, self-selected and self-edited from the previous years.

ideas become projects.

amante + michael james hawk

this happens in the artistic life: you find yourself in a phase of being lulled, internally, and gently, into joyous freeform sketching and ideating. after awhile, you begin to identify interesting new ideas, ones that have fire and energy. automatically, it seems, the next phase starts: you step up your focus, pushing, pulling, and polishing the best of the new ideas, but being mindful now of an audience greater than just yourself, whomever, and wherever, that audience is.

the mission has changed from joyous experimentation in sketch form to making more strategic, pedagogic implementations, ones that can clearly express an art theory. those implementations are the brunt of daily studio work.

if my art theory expression ultimately communicates with your internally developed art theory, then i have done my function. if i rattle you from your normal thought-stream into another world, i have done my function.

my function as an artist is to keep the humanistic forms alive, beyond commercial and business and new world man messaging. my function is to try like hell to keep the older, sacred, always perfect forms alive, of those who have preceded me.

i may be entirely insignificant, but the mission is exactingly clear.

advance always!
michael

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Michael James Hawk
“It is your duty in life to save your dream” – Amedeo Modigliani
New Art 2010 @ http://michaeljameshawk.com
ARTblog Editorial @ http://michaeljameshawk.com/artblog
RSS Feed Connect @ http://michaeljameshawk.com/artblog/?feed=rss2
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May 25th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

I’m a needlepointer. That is to say, I am as significant a painter and sculptor to society as a needlpointer is. Which means: I work in anachronisitic arts, with anachronisitic processes and materials. I am at the end of a cycle, beginning with Manet and Courbet, and ending around Warhol. After this time, cinema (which is moving photography) and digital conceptualization are the robust arts which carry the load of humanistic messaging, and the dross.

dina + by michael james hawk, 2010

I saw James Cameron’s Avatar the other day, on a 13-in tube TV with contrast almost completely gone. It did not matter: for all the hype of the digital art, it was the story that was significant. The story, made alive by 3 or 4 simultaneous arts, proved to be a juggernaut in worldwide messaging. The humanistic cat was let out of the evildoer’s bag, set upon the screens of most countries in the world. This is art made potent in conception, execution, and distribution. This is the power that Cameron, the artist, has, over say what Picasso had, with what Vollard would allow, and what could be mimeographed in expensive art books. The plastic arts have been polished to the point of computer-generated light and shadow, as we wend our way toward virtual (immersive) reality, and the poetic battles therein.

In sculpture, clay forms are anachronistic, like quaint china patterning. Brancusi, Noguchi and Moore ushered in Ikea design, which lives ubiquitously in our apartments. What we once needed sculpture to do – elucidate, venerate, compel – is at once done with current sculpture vis-a-vis garden-store Buddhas, Gumby dolls, and F-18 aircraft. An alabaster David is no match for the real intensity of a chromed-out Ducati motorcycle (or they may be nearly equal).

I may conjure emotional symbology with plastic materials, and these may attain velocity in the world with my art theory (of which this essay is), and with digital photographic distribution of the image via Internet, but Cameron, Bono, and Ikea can do so much more to move society.

Very best,

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

May 21st, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

Fine-art paintings were stolen from a Paris museum today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/20/paris-art-theft-picasso-matisse ; http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/portfolio/2010/05/20/cinq-toiles-de-maitre-volees-au-musee-d-art-moderne-de-paris_1360754_3246.html et al.

L'Olivier pres de l'Estaque (Olive tree near Estaque, 1906) by Georges Braque.

These events are amusing to me — great art, objects of dead artists, ossified corpses, spirited away in adventures of their own. If I believed in sorcery, I could imagine Picasso and Braque egging the thieves on, enjoying the mise-en-scene, Modigliani with drink, Matisse a pipe.

Stealing art for monetary gain. Stealing the rare collected artifact. What were the motives of this heisty clan: are they art historians, pining to enjoy good art in their apartments? Are they old family members, needing to commune again with family objects? Or are they cretins, looking to extract monetary value in the cretinous over-populated world we live in?

I’m pulling for the art historians, and the old family members!

Michael

May 20th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

sometimes the act of painting — the creative mode, the visioning mode — will bequeath a metaphor that is powerful. it’s like building inspiration from the core outwards, but not knowing it is inspiration until it becomes fleshed out, takes form.

sometimes one paints just to exercise the subconscious bones, keep the lobes of the brain limber. one turns the curve here, delves into illogical colour there, breathing, keeping time. the image is upon you, as retinal magic itself, as if seeing the sun for the first time. you notice a theme, perhaps a face, perhaps a narrative — and you keep digging. it’s a total exploration for you: you might as well try the tightrope wire with no prior experience, what the hell.

then the narrative crystallizes, and you see the integrative mythology before you.

now, how does one act when one comes to the power of myth organically, from within? i will answer you: you are in awe.

dios -- acrylic on cotton, 54 x 38 in.

such is the case with this picture, named dios, or god. if form is function, this is indeed god. this isn’t the avuncular sage with long beard and sandals, or the bespectacled mad alchemist genius, or the salubrious healing mother. this is something quite different, yet passes all the tests of what god would look like, if given any thought.

look above into the cosmos, the radiant fire, then look at yourself, mere components of the fire. look at the animal being, devouring animal being, or plant life, or life: animal eating its tail.

that is dios.

yours truly,
michael
beacon hill, seattle, washington, usa.

May 5th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

Acrylic on board, 65″ x 48″, heavy impasto.

Our plasmatic expression from the primeval atom.

Attack always!
Michael

May 4th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

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

The husk of the human being, withered from the maelstrom.

Yours,
Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle WA USA

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

Easter is here in Christendom. It must surely be felt outside of Christendom, such is the brute power of the religion on the world.

The crucifixion of an Exemplar, by collusion of right-wing orthodoxy and the state, and the mythology of a slaughtered political prisoner resurrected to a higher metaphysical plane (courtesy of the apostle-poets), juxtaposed to an Easter bunny provider of chocolate and fluff, interposed into modern society circa 2010, is enough to make one actually AVOID an integration of meaning as Easter now stands.

So many (contradictory) signs and illustrations of ancient rituals — besmirched further by a Vatican-led aiding and abetting of pedophilia — leads to utter ambivalence, at the very least.

Welcome Good Friday. Welcome Easter.

Christo, 96x48in, (2000) Michael James Hawk

For a change, let us speak of this calendar ritual in the language of Signs, to see if we can gain less paradoxical clarity or insight.

The wooden cross, two straight lines at right angles to each other, the symbolon, is universal in its attractiveness. It is like Euclidean geometry, or natural quartz – there is an harmonizing quality to disparate lines terminating at a perfect point — at the heart, or nexus. Crosses give structural strength, and come in handy in building trusses, houses, skyscrapers, and windows (and for hanging up wet clothes). This is the lexical meaning of the cross — it is an interesting mathematical object.

X does mark the spot. Roses, and climbing vines, hang nicely from Xs. So do drying fish and meat.

So do criminals.

The crucifixion yards of Rome were dramatically arranged so the public could take in the visceral sight of criminals rotting on the crosses of state-sponsored death. The state gave a grammar of fear to the mathematical object.

Juxtaposed to this, we have the sly Rabbit-provider, an animal, anthropomorphized, to human scale, bringing merry and good cheer as an antithesis to fear and sin. The rabbit, as we know, is smallish, quick, a thief, mammalian, and a gallant sexual reproducer. It is fertility itself. It is warm and fuzzy, and provides not just mythological chocolate for the children, but actual protein and warm shelter to starving human hunters.

The rabbit, in real terms, is a gift from the cosmos.

The graphic grammar of rabbits assisting in Easter’s accepted rituals says a lot about us as human signmakers — the need to balance fear with joy, blood with chocolate.

To create the Dual missing in the stark crucifixtion myth.

via UPI.com

Ah…such is the life in Semiotics and Signs.

Very truly yours,

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

April 1st, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment

lourdes, v1 sketch, acylics on board, by hawk.

Sketch done Tuesday night, without model, avec acrylics on board.

It seems that the gestural technique with impasto layering allows for 3 dimensional action, of a certain corkscrew force, from within the torso, in time. The stern eye sockets, the raw nakedness, bespeak the inner beauty of woman, and all that we ask of her. The fact that the palette is so alive and cool is striking. That her name is Lourdes belies the Hispanic cliches of warm brown sunny palettes and subservient hospitable stereotypes (worthy of our gardeners, housekeepers, nannies and prostitutes).

Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle WA USA

April 1st, 2010 | Category: painters, poetics | Leave a comment

what is the portrait of the ultimate artist?

what does she do? what does she look like?

what expectations must she meet to be deemed with such platitude?

what do we ask of any artist, really? must they entertain: make us somehow greater (transcendent) than our terse, circumscribed selves? must they dream aggressively, beyond ourselves — in stead of ourselves?

who is that ultimate artist: to the layman? to the academic? to the artist amongst other artists?

in a logical positive light, those artists who are the exemplars will be so by their rank in the global marketplace. think of the madonna franchise, the michael jackson franchise, the beatles franchise, the picasso franchise, and hudson river valley school. Think of the michelangelo legacy as it relates to the image of Christ, the khmer legacy of the views of buddha, John Milton’s imagery of hell, walt disney‘s escapist forms, the mythologies spun by james cameron, steven spielberg and george lucas.

teddy bear? pooh bear? barbie? Baywatch?

what’s the common thread to all? is there a universal expectation of what the gifted artist is supposed to do?

to what end does the artist work for?

if it for escapism, for transcendence, then hollywood, madison avenue and the music industry are doing their job admirably. if it is for spiritual transcendence, then all the artifacts of all the religions and spiritual trends suffice. if it is for truth, then truthful statements would stand up in the test of time, in imitations, aphorisms and cliches. if it is educational, then those forms which teach should be productive and alive.

what do we ask of the artist, then, in our schools, in our colleges? what tasks do we beset them with?

That is, we tell engineering students to build bridges and new software. we tell business students to perform under the GAP methods of accounting. we tell marketers to find innovations in sales techniques. we tell dentists to be competent in tooth care. we tell priests to inform a flock. we tell teachers to teach well.

what do we tell the artist to do?

for every madonna juggernaut, thousands of artists never find their audience. for every form which rises to the surface of the collective global consciousness, thousands sink an unnoticed death. if there is indeed a gambit for artistic success, it is one with very long odds. Hardly rational.

what comprises the Ultimate Artist –

those that create catalytic change? those that engage society by challenging the semiotics, lexicography and grammar of truth? those that are avuncular and pedagogic in relaying art’s potential?

would the ultimate artist be a leader? be adept at mythology, psychology and comparative religion? could sway audiences with special subliminal and social-psychological tricks? be familiar with all psychological assessments, with all color theory, all advertising theory, rhetoric, politics and propaganda?

would this person have the skill set of a maximal communicator?

michael
beacon hill, seattle, washington state, usa

March 28th, 2010 | Category: poetics | Leave a comment