astronaut de michael james hawk, 2011

the head, made of vashon orange water clay, hollowed, 16x12x10in.

the face: the grill : the mask

ancient? modern? hidden?

yours,
michael

beacon hill, seattle, washington state, usa

head, by michael james hawk, 2011

Of course, science has proved via many modalities that our human senses can only grasp what our biological sensory equipment is programmed for — there are other energies that the human being cannot grasp readily, if at all.

One aspect of reality that we take as a given is the human animal mammalian form, with the spheroid head on top of this skeletal weighty tree. It is from this body, this metaphor, that we, as innate logicians, compare everything. And it is from this body, with brain atop the tree, that everything else is coded as “the Other”.

head, profile view, by michael james hawk, 2011

How we love a beautiful head! The head, with the ovoid face, framed by the textured hair, with moist radiant eyes, offers quite a beacon to the rest of the cosmos. It, this beacon, says so much, expresses future intentions so brilliantly, communicates motive on all sensory channels.

Head. Tête. Cabeza. Kopf. 头. ヘッド.

I think of the heads we venerate most: Mona Lisa, JFK, Shroud of Turin, Angelina Jolie, Dick Cheney, Caeser. We take the head as a given, add our ethnic and locally historical imprint on it, give it a value as a descriptor in society, make it a meme.

Joseph Campbell, invoking anthropology, taught that our identifications with persona (the mask) is the Folk (Volke Gedanken) mythology of the Elemental Idea from which all cultures in time and place espouse, in this circumscribed human journey.

In my art, I often want to paint, or sculpt, or write even, the bones of the human journey, the Elemental Idea, before we cast our local mythologies and make unique Folk schematic categories and cultural memes.

head, 3rd view, michael james hawk, 2011

With my latest work in progress, Head, midnight black water clay bust on armature, 24 x 11 x 22″, version one, I am invoking the monumentality of the Elemental head, the thing: bony, camera-like, a design miracle in a sea of surreal miracles. With lack of face, race, eye position, aka local Folk accents, we as audience must deal with the head as a curious erect thing which casts shadow. We must connect with the reality, not often thought about, that we ourselves are things on the tableau, objects of an experiment we are not privy to.

To that, this work is a tissue of earlier artists: those of Easter Island, of the Olmecs, of the Yoruba, of Henry Moore’s reformulations and Picasso’s concretizations.

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

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Michael James Hawk
“It is your duty in life to save your dream” – Amedeo Modigliani
New Art 2011 @ http://michaeljameshawk.com
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LONG RUN : : DESTINO

Yours,
Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle USA

The human form: imbued with sub-forms which bespeak their functions.

The form, too, moves, as the life engine, in the time lapse of moments.

Yours truly,
Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle, USA

psychopomp + michael james hawk

Yours,
Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle USA

Art — that special object, imbued with actionable will of the spirit, gifted by the specialist.

uma by michael james hawk

Born into art history, the nascent artist must take risks which are real in economic and social tradeoffs, in efforts to find underpinnings and hand-holds to make artful messaging genuine and well understood.

A nascent artist feels restless somehow: that the messaging is important, that actionable visual joy must be made. A child will draw and doodle in automatic mode to learn about her intellectual learning to date, going for mimesis, humour, drama, punning, and for relaxation and emotional release.

It is utterly human to use one’s full mental and physical capacities to voice the existential moments of reality — art is humanity at high performance.

Art is appreciated and monetized and propagandized and usurped. It is the backbone to marketing and advertising and all the signification engines of and within culture. Art forms the bases of metaphor and meaning. Art is the medium of the philosopher and critic, the poet and the shaman, who recognize the temporality (surreality?) of it all.

To make art is to express your being, before you reduce your being to the fragmented taxonomies and far-flung models of all those persons trying (arrogantly) to define you.

Express your being. Witness the outcomes. Work with that.

Art!

Yours,
Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle USA

la danza by michael james hawk

knitting from 2 nites ago. masked trickster god in the time-lapsed dance of the universe — human, hermaphroditic, whirling, making worlds, akin to shiva, or legba.

yours,
michael
beacon hill, seattle

Jizo by Michael James Hawk (homage Nagare)

To quell the fears of Japanese children who experienced the latest quakes and waves, I created these Jizo and have been giving offerings daily.

These Jizo are an homage to the Japanese sculptor Nagare.

Yours,
Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle USA

Lord of Pull (& Push)

The vodun statement. Know what I mean?

Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle

elizabeth mae + by michael james hawk

As contemplated during a rather boring baseball game.

Yours,

Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington USA

Moral / celebratory?
Intense / relaxed?
Memorable / anonymous?

How about a lifetime’s worth of adjectives for life, discovered by you by experience, instead of compiling a list from the beginning, that linear construct? How about being okay with competing and contradictory descriptors — a non-seamless life, a grey hodgepodge, a sluff, a slog?

You have “the Life” as the hero has “the Journey” — the whole enlivened thing is between you and yourself — you the human incarnate, yourself the creator that has fleshed you into existence.

You lean your body into the membrane which is your life, push it, weave it, give it shape, give it stories, and then you perish. No more pushing and pulling.

It’s as if the life is the sculpture of brutal reality, really raw, really big. It’s as if we create very tall tales of ourselves with our actions, earthbound to the sky, such are our ideas and dreams emanating from our magical brains. Sometimes it feels like shadowboxing, beating the clarity of the membrane, trying to steer it to avenues yet untrod.

Here is the life lain out this morning. It is yours as far back as your most accurate thought so long ago, and the inaccurate thoughts also, and the misreadings and misinterpretations, the whole damn unwritten autobiography, the remembered corpus, with islands of written detritus popping up through the continuum of years.

And from this continuum: ideas fleshed out from the leaders of culture (Paz, Lennon, Tolstoy, Baldwin, Picasso et al.) whom stretch our mind’s boundaries.

But remember too, you yourself are a citizen of culture, hence you really must stretch your own boundaries, with all the means of expression and communication at your disposal.

You are the poet in potentiality. The sculptor in waiting.

Happy new year, 2011 on the recording,
Michael

Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington State USA

That wherever I do attend, with the final goal to teach Art, they must think of painting and sculpture as Sacred.

angel -- michael james hawk

The program must have the Holy Creative Spirit reflecting somewhere in the Program.

The mission must contain sharing Experience and Knowledge.

The virtues of Painting and Sculpture are extolled often.

This is a big deal for me — to see where this Art leads. My great grandparents escaped civil war in Mexico to live in boxcars and have brooms as Christmas trees. My grandparents worked in the foundries of Detroit, picked Christmas trees in Texas, onions in Minnesota, climbed trees for limb removal, cleaned monkey cages at pharmaceutical companies. They cleaned kitchens, delivered gas. They toiled and struggled.

And now I attempt to promote Art out of the petty ashes of aesthetics into messages that will bring hieratic solemnity and dignity to the human experience.

I honor them with my work, as well as my wife, and daughter, and mother, and family and friends.

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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A chronically (and possibly necessary) elite structure, it is composed of a group of experts and professionals world-wide whose daily function is to fully describe “good” Art (a valuation function) and to market this good Art (a sales function). The participants in this world are collectors, critics, gallerists and artists, as well as the institutions which support the participants such as museums, art schools, media outlets and auction houses. Entrance into this world is strictly controlled by a phalanx of gatekeepers schooled (groomed) in the conventional codes of what Art is and what it should do.

The power is top-down. That is, the purchasing power parity of works (price as it relates to value) is controlled by market players who collude to protect current values (in their current portfolios) as well as create new markets (speculation). Exclusive of the price mechanism is a codified Art History that describes creativity in universal sweeping terms, to determine the Art World’s role in affecting general history (and vice versa).

Modigliani -- of the Art World. Schooled at the Academy, extended the definition of beauty, marketed as an elite painter worth tens of millions of dollars per piece.

Artists who learn and participate in the Art World (upper case) have an insular context from which to create their artistic messaging: themes and subjects will be imbued with generalized learning and knowledge such as mythological, psychological, and technical memes, historical and literary allusions, or rarefied insights into the lives of the commensurate elite (a reportage function).

The non-institutional art world –

This is the group whose works have not benefited from expenditures in learning arts techniques or in arts education (the price of admission to the institutional Art World). As such, the Art produced by the participants is often described (by the Art World) in pejorative, non-majority rhetoric as being parochial, childish, idiosyncratic, outsider, street, naive, craft, commercial, or sub-cultural.

The power is lateral. That is, there are no phalanxes of critics or market makers determining the ultimate methods of creation, and the barriers to creativity are perceived to be low.

Thus young children, when they are schooled in art projects, are not part of an institutional art world except tangentially (vis-a-vis the classically liberal education tradition, an elitist concept, and the groomed biases of their art teachers). Children produce art for joy, diversion and relaxation.

Child Work -- not of the Art World, but rather good art in the context of humanity.

When adolescent youth paint the walls of a city with graffiti, they too are not part of the art world — they break the laws of various institutions to express a nascent symbology. There are no costs to materials (canvas, clay) and there are no costs to market. They participate in the joy of art making regardless, or in spite of, the barriers to joining the institutional Art World.

When adults knit or create blankets or shawls or design their own clothes, or attempt any craft/hobbyist experiment, they are expressing themselves outside the Art World insofar as they are creating objects for personal use, not to be parlayed into the institutional Art World. The expectations are not to address the Art World at all, or adopt expectations set by the Art World, but to relax and find joy and possibly functional utility.

The way I see it, the best the institutional Art World can offer is the message of humanism – that we are all in this life together, as equals, to find meaning in that which is confusing (existence itself).

The best the non-institutional art world can offer is the message of just being human, without the “–ism” after it.

All else should be suspect.

Very truly yours,

Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington state, USA

mexico + mjh

aixa by michael james hawk, SF CA

ah yes,
michael

The work is heavily impastoed, or layered up, in bright hues, and often sprout avian and insecta features on naked human bodies. The subjects are presented in their psychic world, heavy in existence. They are energy sinks in the physical space they inhabit, powerful and not at all diminutive.

Devoid of sombreros, crucifix, skulls, calla lilies, purple dresses, colonial narratives and the litany of swarthy Chicano cliches, the subjects are Mexican American reality on the psychological level. The audience cannot fixate on race, or nation, or even the cliches of the erotic. The subjects are naked, sinewy, skeletal and flayed, true animals, but triumphantly circulatory and pregnant, alive and connected. They lay in solitary monochromatic voids, or backdrops, dark scrims with textural depth, protectorates of their interior worlds.

Persons have thought certain depictions of the work as ugly or fear provoking: the lines come across as too brutalized and disjointed (not like the clean terminations of Modigliani or Matisse), there is often no supporting narrative, the brutality of purpose goes contra to the expectation of what art should be.

To be Mexican in the American milieu means to strive beyond the ocular jail of housemaid, dirty gardener, Catholic breeder, and diminutive accented folk. In the work, the Other people are modeled beyond cliches: they are viciously powerful, lacerated somewhat, in central connection with their cosmos, mathematically presented, of the Dual world.

Very best,

Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington State, USA

Soon after, the critics come.

Their opinions rise quite naturally, off the brain, automatically, in the fore of consciousness, as a quick communication: no one thinks about the opinions they spout, they just do it. The audience, the de facto critic, knows what it wants, and is quick to find comfort or discomfort in the work.

The normal timespan for addressing a work of art is mere seconds. The artist, knowing this, attempts to make “good” art that will draw the audience into a more closer, longer look. This “good” art (created within an academic-idiosyncratic calculus) is usually a statement of the times, or from the times, and is thus historical at the very least, espouses an art theory at the most.

But often good art will not draw an audience. It may need more concentrated vehicles toward public exposure, and, concomitant to that, it may need basic contextualizing and packaging of itself, with labels, categorization and overarching narratives, to entice an audience to come nearer. This subtle, necessary marketing lies always in the purview of the stakeholders: artist, gallerist, collector, curator, and ultimately historian.

So how to frame, contextualize and thus package art? That language is the stuff of rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Writing a biographical narrative of the artist, writing a narrative of the process of making a particular piece, are powerful rhetorical options in that they give a work a story-line, a communication container that is easy to remember, makes the art-experience interesting, and contextualizes the work in social trends not necessarily grasped by an audience.

The artist or agent may also choose to employ a title, easily displayed on or near the work, to frame and reference a piece, and to commence an expectation that a special object, a.k.a. an Art Object, is extant and now available for viewing.

The artist, to the last, possesses the most powerful option in the arsenal: espousing the message, moral and intent of a particular work, in verbiage, to educate an audience thoroughly in a piece. If the artist does not abide this choice, some other stakeholder may fulfill this parsing option.

All of this marketing, educational and rhetorical wrapping seems helpful, on the surface: here is the work, here is what to look out for, here is the context, here are the considerations in the greater scheme of things. Unfortunately, this wrapping layer of contextual information may actually intrude on the raw power of the art, as a standalone piece, a power center.

I speak of this topic as I contemplate contextualizing my own art as “Mexican American” under the primary banner of “Mexican American Artist.”

Labeling myself as such presents a real risk of inviting instantaneous stereotypes and loose associations, and a perceived narrow-fication of my offerings, when my goal primarily is to expose and persuade large audiences on the tenets of humanism.

I think, too: are we not all progressing into an unified global populace anyways, so that a subdomain label is no longer needed?

Whatever pride I may have in the historical thread of this label, however well-researched the couching of my work is in relation to Chicano art, regional California art, Chicago and Detroit art, Southwest art, Native American art, current and archaic Mexican art, the art of colonialist Spain, and modern Latin American art — even with the notable lack of Chicano and muralist cliches in my art — I run the real risk of closing the door on those I wish to initiate. This is problematic: I yearn to reveal my secret learning and artistic growth in this art journey, but the more I expound on this backstory, the more potential there is to be misunderstood as a primarily ethnic, sexual, political or polemical artist.

I am not fearful of putting an ethnic tagline out there in mainstream American media with its structural penchant for subconscious racism (easily proved) — I am still quite tempted to go that route, and pursue and promote an art theory not just universalist, of every man and woman, but one also anchored in the traditions that have influenced me. However, I am cognizant that I am much more than just a member of “Mexican American Artists,” I am of other groups as well: male, 21st century, reformed religious, existential, philosophical, and so on.

This Derrida-like deconstruction can go as far as any critic wishes it to go, and always illuminates the real and hard-fought discovery of the Self (that modern journey).

Still I wonder: what would Tamayo‘s stature be in world history, vis-a-vis Picasso, if his works were presented to the public devoid of nation-state, politics, skin color or ethnic surname?

Could that ever have been possible?

Very best,

Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington state, USA

It usually goes like this: you dive into a piece, the piece gets invested over a long period of time with your skill and passion, sweat and blood (and precious dollars). You begin to identify with the piece as a parcel of your thinking, your intelligence; an extension of your corpus. Pride swells on the brain: pride of creation, pride of ownership.

The symbology (content) itself may be gripping or stunning enough to send you, the artist, into otherworldy states (artist as audience). Anthropomorphic pieces further trick the brain into subconscious attachments and associations, such is the power of mimesis of the human face, body and gestural expressions.

When it’s finally time to divest of the piece — when that decision has been made — often it is difficult to let it go, so great are the attachments.

Consider: how can one give up so much in prototypical discovery? How can one let go of a work that may be wholly destroyed, ignored or misunderstood by another owner? How can one let chapters of one’s life be wholly expunged from the studio?

This sense of danger, this potential sense of loss, is often what it feels like in the guts of an artist.

Koan for the day: when an artist gives away her Art, into that dry arms-length marketplace, remember the pain of her bodily spiritual divestment.

Yours,
Michael
Beacon Hill, Seattle WA USA

if this force comes from without, from some teleological being, from some scripted purpose, so much the better.

art comes from all quarters within my studio, my household, as rights of passage to progress to the next plane of discovery. i touch all my roots, all my influences, feeling my way through the processes of those i deem great artists. i do this as an exercise, as a diversion, as a learning into regions unknown. it is not always fruitful — some days i have an uneasy feeling that the work was somehow wasted. but i eventually come to recognize that bad work begets good work, even if it’s just keeping the studio practice disciplined.

i have met other artists, and collectors, and gallerists, who have “made it.” i do not wonder how they did it much anymore. i can see the tradeoffs of my life to theirs, and am quite happy of what i could achieve in a similar time frame. my ambition to care about being understood by a large coterie of critics has left me. i am left to be an artist, or that person that looks for the graphic as a celebration of sight, and of thought, conceived and conscribed by creative theory.

if the theory harbours a holy ghost, a creative spirit, a bodhisattva, a guild of helping hands, maybe i am a participant. if there is a syndrome, genetics based, hormonal based, that makes me a creative, so be it. if i was socialized to act out expressively through media, then i guess that happened, to the point of theorizing about it in blogs, on some future internet, where electrons vibrate signs in perpetuity.

signs. our cultural manifestations. cross-infecting our learning.
michael

this vague art mission, where the next day brings studio work of figures & blobs, of lines & spaces, for retinal play, and that synthesis of vision and thought in the brain.

thank god for History and the history books, to put this all in context — the role of artist, the real role, the changeable role as per the freedom to think.

bleary art morning, with these painterly and clay, stone & metal artifacts about, their gestures torquing space.

intellectual sculpting. if only a public might agree from time to time.

michael

mother by michael james hawk

this is an hour-long 3-layer acrylics sketch on simple newsprint, done 2 nights ago. working title mother.

my mother is indeed passionate and at times a mexican bull, as are many of the matriarchs in the family, so i can see why i made the nanosecond calculation to call it mother.

giving titles to works is problemmatic: there is an argument that a work should stand on its own with no reference by the artist, to mitigate influencing or biasing a (standalone) work; and another argument, which states that marrying a narrative to a work gives it powerful dimensionality vis-a-vis cultural grammar, and sets the expectation to an audience that Art is indeed present here (a not-so-subtle clue to begin analyzing the piece).

cheers,
michael

beacon hill, seattle washington usa

Stuff that decorates the environment.

Art is Beauty, after all — right? At least true Art is — right?

Murakami's My Lonesome Cowboy

What of Performance Art, then, and Political Art, Polemical Art, Edgy Art, Challenging Art? These forms are often ugly by conventional standards, are often repulsive, and often challenge our basic assumptions of reality.

Shredding the Pope: Prescient? Needed?

Some critics believe, espouse, that real Art should be devoid of the idiosyncratic and the personal, and rather should contain lessons for the universal, the catholic, man. Who cares of personal Art statements in the world at large? This kind of feral atomized expression is regulated to sub-categories like craft art, outsider art, primitive art, children’s art, or of simple journaling and sketching: stuff not ready for robust bardic messaging, not solemn enough for the powers that be.

Marc Quinn's Angel. Not appropriate? Says whom?

The feeling is that Art should be pristine, unblemished, should have even flow, continuity, pastoral resonance. That which fails the Beauty test is simply not Art.

Often you will hear curmudgeons espousing one Art over another (very Plato-esque) — for example, many who love Classical music viscerally hate Hip Hop, and vice versa; some readers of poetry elevate the quaint and pastoral reckoning of life over the hard beating narratives of slam and street poetries. And so on.

Flav A Flav post Public Enemy. Don't let the buffoonery fool you.

Still other critics allow for more liberal innovations in Art, from comedic clowns that challenge kingly edicts and authority, to political musical and theatrical satirists, to cross-burning and pope shredding pop music stars — those that go against the grain of staid entrenched thinking. Some of these critics even contend it is a requirement of Artists to come off the lofty perch and challenge the evils amongst humankind — that it is in fact the job of the Artist to attempt correctives in erroneous and dangerous thinking.

Madonna's Like A Prayer. Right time in history?

Will Ferrell as George Bush. Good for his public safety? Or are comedic artists specially exempt?

So what to do: bliss out, or engage?

I bring this up because once in a while I will attempt to move my Art into challenging and polemical stances, to test my role as a known artist in my circle of relationships. What I often find is that with each Rights of Passage project, I lose people who are offended by my overt, or subversive, challenges to the status quo. I lose admirers. I take on sacred and sacrosanct objects and beliefs and, even though the projects are carefully wrapped and defined as Artistic Endeavour, I tear at persons modes of thinking, and they shirk, sometimes forever.

I must admit, that can hurt, to be shown the plank. I understand more and more that being a well-researched and informed polemical artist, or opinionated artist, loses a lot of audience, and personal relationships. At first, I would offer apologetics, but now I understand that that is the Game of the Artist: researching, pursuing, synthesizing, making a statement.

Maybe my skin will continue to get thicker, as I slough off those who do not read, or care to read, or were never required to take any humanities in college, or were born into resources and remain forever prodigal.

Duchamp. Vexing the Royal Transstate with Dada.

But to supply humanistic footholds, at all costs, to those ready to find their eternity though Art, now — priceless.

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

This week's sketches: more rights of passage

Here we are, in a Motherwell, Kline and Belkin mood, and then, wipe thine brushes on a $2 Ikea tablecloth, create a Japanese Enso, stretch it over a cheap frame from Ross (gifted to me).

Photograph it, resize it, blog it, reference it from the server back to me.

Rights of passage, homages to the others.

Michael

Does pre-defined Art, that smallish art hidden in its nascency, uncommissioned, promote and extend the human altruism needed to survive?

Images, signs and colours.

I posited this early this morning as I walked through Chinatown on my way to work — texts, advertisements, graphics, illustrations, photographs, graffito and sculpture inundated my visual space, cramming my subconscious with signs and symbols.

Cute little brown bear, of childhood.

The waves of calm.

Most visual items were lexical symbols and phrases of many languages, some phraseology had business-like grammars, and some expressed positive expressions of mood, koans or aphorisms. Some of the symbols were fully developed graphical ideas denoting non-verbal communications like smiles, transcendental ideas, or mimetic narratives of good living, subliminally comprehended by my unconscious (until I brought them to the fore of my consciousness).

Note the family icon.

I remembered how powerfully, and profoundly, Art can act like a transmitting beacon, a magical signal, pulsating lessons to the public, of humanism over ignorance. Yes, we can call it social psychology, or marketing, or architecture, but all of this is grist for artistic understanding (and application).

As I photo-graphed the street scene around me, looking for the symbols barely present in my conscious, I began to theorize how all the components of the scene added up to mood. Here are some quick thoughts on the aesthetic deconstruction of the city scene:

1. The blue sky as a background is brightening, is the whole connotation of what blue represents — a blue domed-ceiling backdrop of the present scene.
2. The trees are towering and dynamically flowing objects, green and salubrious in the scene of no green grass (only grey cement).

Wiry natural skygrabber.

Phonemes, or words? Pretty whatever.

Nice shape to look at? Nice colour too?

Comic characters = trickster gods.

The fish pillars of Chinatown.

The whole mise en scène reveals the Dual cultural values of this particular domain (neighborhood, city, state, and nation, in this time), and promotes a mood which may affect behaviors of the citizenry.

Love in this message, ultimately?

Yours in semiotics,
Michael

la bailarina, version2 (sketch2) as informed by dali, et al.

i mean, we are the same animal homo sapien, we all speak language, we all use myth, we all read histories which themselves are distillations of epochs transpired. and further, we all are born, eat, shit, fuck, sing, ritualize, work, shiver, starve, play, make art, and die — our limited experiential template from which to build societal and cultural ideas.

the north american iriquois indians speak of the longbody: that fount of self-history from your infanthood to your now. that is, you are a composite of all you have been, not just the last 10 years of your life. when it comes to art history, i feel the longbody, although i am not a single individual ego, carving out my life, rather i am a collective consciousness, carving out the well-worn forms of this world from a tribe of artists that never ceases to end.

to wit: when i see old sculpture, i see recent sculpture. when i see cave art, i see modern art. when i see monoliths in art (picasso, matisse, et al), vis-a-vis their marketing machines, i see thousands of artists and their just as valid art statements affecting human lives. i see the history of form of the species. i see the metaphors laid down by influence of the body, the animal, the landscape, the cosmos, the organelle, cell and quark. i see the ritual doll as being the early stone venuses (willendorf, lespugue) as well as the modern-day barbies. i see the pregnant forms of fertility in all epochs as being the same sketch. i see the history of man imbued in the tools, wares and art objects of the corresponding art history. i see the story of ourselves in deep review of our past.

i bring this up as i relate the work of this week, transforming an ink sketch (let’s call it sketch1, below far-left) into a more mature picture with colour, layers, action, composition (let’s call it sketch2, below far-right).

i received great response from sketch2, more than sketch1. sketch2 is a digital sketch enhancement done in a software program adobe photoshop. it is not yet a painting, yet persons think it is when they see it on the web. i was intrigued that the response was so good so fast, and i questioned why this was so.

to me, i sketched both versions without regard to any subject other than i was doing studio experimentation where anything goes. however, as the backstory, i had been sketching dancers for about a year. also, i commonly use gestural sketches to map out motion, and view the lines as sculptural armature — the bones of an image subject, which must hold the weight of the actions (as a skeleton holds the muscles). furthermore, buried deep inside me is a lifetime of learning (the longbody), and with that the copying of great masters such as dali, miro, picasso, and the cave painters of antiquity.

sketch1 and sketch2 borrow the lines and ideas from these particular artists, but i was not consciously aware of them as i sketched, only upon retrospect.

i was amazed at this retrospective recognition, in that what is me — my style — is still a delicate amalgam of what i have seen and studied earlier, but with michael james hawk touches. i DO see my originality in certain decisions of executing the image, but i also see the borrowings and homages of other artists whom i have encountered.

i hadn’t thought of salvador dali for maybe 30 years. yet, i see what influence he had on me in becoming an artist, making that leap. not only me, but his influence changed the scope and purview of psychology, changed middle class tastes and sensibilities, affected marketing and advertising, brought the magic of dr. seuss and public education, made SURREALITY = REALITY. this was no small feat! and since i was born in the “time after dali”, was schooled in the loose stylings of dali, warhol, crumb, seuss in the general milieu of society, i really was conditioned by society’s institutions to draw this way. and i have, with la bailarina, sketch2!

being an art historian, i also recognize specifically joan miro, pablo picasso, and the cave painters of lascaux (and others) in sketch1 and sketch2, artists who all borrowed and shared the longbody “form zeitgeist” from each other (with the exception of the cave painters, who borrowed from other artists in their distant longbody).

none of the artists were in a vacuum when their studio work was being done. some of the best original thoughts of picasso are direct copies from antiquity, picasso stylings and all. that picasso became the first living millionaire painter, selling a picture for a house, growing a franchise, feeding a newly nascent media machine, buffeting nouveau riche collectors who in turn sat on museum boards, makes picasso the giant monolith of culture, a meme, that he is. but in actuality, picasso is a painter like any other, hitting on themes of the artist’s longbody. picasso, to his credit, made primitivism common knowledge, which in turn affected society, possibly by laying down the psychology for future colonialist pullouts of the 20th century.

examine the following as they relate to picasso’s work:

A Picasso? No, Hypogeum statue, 2300 BC

A Picasso? No, an Amlash Rhyton, 10th Century BC, Iran

A Picasso? No, A Venus by Giambologna, Florence c1540

one last aside on surreality:

when i did the sculpture below last year, as an unconscious homage to wilhelm lehmbruck, i was amazed that persons called my sculpture “dali like.”

Poeta -- Dali-esque?

now lehmbruck is not well known, but dali is, and so persons, quite rightly, associated the lines and forms of my piece to dali, that cultural icon, for the understanding of applied surreality.

what i realized this week was that salvador dali probably influenced lehmbruck and his work in their contemporaneous time, or vice versa, and that they both in turn borrowed from giacometti, or vice versa, who in turn borrowed from the sculptors of oceania and borneo, who in turn borrowed from the totemic archetypes of antiquity (the stacking of family member visages one on top of the other in rank order).

so as you can see: when one creates an artwork, one has within one’s subconscious all the form knowledge from the ancients to the contemporaries, making new discoveries in art rather difficult (and rare).

very best,
michael

beacon hill, seattle, washington state, usa

yet i am still an artist.

el bailarin masculino de michael james hawk

i’m in the midst of a lifestyle which can allow for a painting, sketch, poem, journal entry or sculpture in 10 seconds. materials awaits me. i can flesh out mere vague inklings of ideas and feelings not yet fully formed. i can sketch almost subconscious energy, without knowing where i am going, and not feel risk or reward — just chalk it up as studio time, wrap myself in studio learning.

this is the best part of art: living with it, holistically.

when it is devoid of all pressures to display, sell, rationalize, defend; devoid of thoughts to self-rank and categorize; devoid of reckoning its utility and function, it is art that is freeing, like a bird that flies in patterns of play and joy, not survival.

art that is not part of a pipeline, not regarded as a product, not regarded as inventory, not regarded as derivative of the complexity of my persona, is the ideal art of living the joy of the calling, despite the loud machinations of the society outside which scream “thou shalt.”

unspoken unwitting art: rare moments, to be sure.

too rare.

yours,
michael

sujata by michael james hawk

there are a lot of aphorisms and platitudes in describing the artist’s role: to aggrandize, mystify, inspire, make romantic the artist’s vague vocation, especially in a secular world. the bottom line is that few artists get the necessary monetization — by wealthy sponsors, or sinecures — to carry on the personal brand, the dream. what we view as true art are remnants of wealthy commissions and evangelized marketing. fine art is the product of an art world: chattel.

children of course learn their environment naturally through art. they take to art as easily as play. art is the beginning blocks to knowledge. the art world cannot use children’s art as chattel — it is too innocent a journaling of society, which is complex, cynical, misunderstood, and reckoned as a sociological reality at large scale. society, modern society, does not value childlike innocence as highly as marketable adult themes and narratives. some art will pine for infantile feelings, symbols and desires, but they are hard to monetize, ie. make more important by fashioning derivative products and franchises.

art is rather like a lonely personal religion — idiosyncratic mantra for inspiration in this life. it is sacred in that regard, outside of monetary concerns and academic historical canons. art without sacred introspection is pornography, or shallow — of industry, of machine. art that deigns to be anything but a holy messaging of our humanity is not art, but something else disguising as art.

in the milieu of objects which survive in tangible form, only objects which inspire transcendence into a higher reality, another plane of feeling, a resonation, a vibration of the mystery of the universe we find ourselves inhabiting, is art in the truest anthropological sense. thus, old tools of antiquity, old bones of early man, old pottery transfigure through time and space into fine art by the humanity they tell in human development, not just by aesthetics and not just by their rarity.

arts of skill, ars, which inspire in the name of the human family can be fine art. those that are pretty but cannot inspire the story of our collective experience are something else, like industrial design, portraiture, journalism, personal journaling, historical accounting, mapping. they perform similar functions to skilled fine art but lack the specialness of invoking the visceral fears and joys of the collective human experience.

the fact of the matter is that narratives of myths long anachronistic begin to lose the narrative power of fine art, and transfigure into antiquated art holdings, which are valuable to study, from an historical reckoning of knowing where world cultures have come vis-à-vis the more globally unified messaging of the new myths today. for example, an old titian view of christ, that commissionible, barely resonates in a secular world, a muslim world, a buddhist world, and any other world not of christian expertise circa that time. often, like homer’s Illiad and Odyessey, surviving the centuries from destruction or erosion allows a work to be revered as the exemplar. if not for alexandria’s great library, homer would never have been known, and that cultural DNA would not have mapped itself over space and time.

i have realized, being an artist, and reading art theory, that art must show love of humanity, have a humanistic intent, to ameliorate the suffering of the general public — which is us. is must be bardic, pedagogic, inspiring, provoking, out of love. it must draw out reaction that when analyzed reveals the archetypes of the human condition, else it is a communication for a domain public, a small gathering, instructive but not bardic.

then what of personal non-bardic art? that i call studio work, experimentation, release of energy, therapy, mapping of hand-eye, pursuit of imagist goals, the path.

yours,
michael

here is version one of a raw analog sketch, without the model, charcoal on newsprint, working title “get behind me” (after white stripes’ song ‘blue orchid’):

get behind me -- v1 sketch

quick! photograph it, tease it in digital for version two sketch:

get behind me -- v2 sketch

expand the horizons, try the filters, settle on version three for bold graphic potentiality, in digital:

get behind me -- v3 sketch

next day, day 2 — work on v1 analog, get nice new skin resolution with this new version four, charcoal on newsprint:

get behind me -- v4 but really the real analog v2

paste v4 to facebook, update this blog, then (of course) go back, import to digital, flip horizontal axis, cut and change angles, add new arm, and a cosmic star, becomes version five:

get behind me -- version 5 of ideating

re-flip this digital v5, now it’s version six:

get behind me -- version six

clean up a little, oops – paint bucket spill, roll with it, end tonight version seven:

get behind me -- version seven

wow, new angles, but need days, or weeks, to decide on paint commitment and those costs. will post all this now to this blog, and reflect on it, wait for objectivity to come back, then go for the acrylics on canvas (someday).

and so it goes!

michael

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

black blood + fleeting iteration

yours,
michael

beacon hill, seattle, washington state, usa