Baren Digest              Saturday, 13 April 2002      Volume 19 : Number 1797


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From: GraphChem@aol.com
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 09:16:17 EDT
Subject: [Baren 17854] Re: Cherry blocks in the US? 



Graphic Chemical does carry plank grain cherry blocks - aproximately 3/4" 
thick in sizes up to 15 x 30"

Dean Clark


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From: "PHARE-CAMP,PATTI (HP-USA,ex1)" <patricia_phare-camp@hp.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 07:33:12 -0700
Subject: [Baren 17855] RE: Baren Digest V18 #1796 

I think Maria is right on, when it comes to artists of experience.  We have
to keep in mind though that not all artists are experienced and this is
where drawing from a live model is very important.  Well even for us
experienced artists we need to occasionally work with a model just to keep
our hands and memory practiced.

I'm pretty lucky in that here in Sacramento we have a couple of art centers
that have weekly life drawing studios.  They hire one or two models for 4
hours and the participants pay a meager fee ($5-12 depending on how many
show up) to pay the model.  It might be easy to get 4 artists in your own
area willing to split a model's fee (just make sure you have a very private
studio space).

As for anatomy, well it's some of the most important education I ever
received, but we didn't have live models for that!  And frankly, in spite of
my curious mind, I don't think I could ever take working from an autopsied
cadaver, so in this case photographs are the only resource for me!

Patti

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From: Louise Cass <lcass@primus.ca>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 11:49:47 -0400
Subject: [Baren 17856] Re: Life Drawing  

Hi -

I can't resist adding a bit to this discussion - re use of photos versus
life drawing
from 'life'  I've done my share and always prefer to start off with the
stimulus
provided by seeing the material or subjects for painting, printmaking,etc 

No one (so far) has mentioned landscape and still life from 'life' Unless one
is one of these determined hyper realists who are actually attempting to
emulate photography, drawing or sketching from the subject, for me at any
rate,
and I imagine many other artists, results in an unique approach with the
strange
and exciting distortions our individual ways of 'seeing' the world bring
about. I'm
convinced that no one can truly understand what another is 'seeing' - we
can come 
close but we don't know for certain. A case in point was a discovery I made
at a
large Corot exhibition some time ago in Ottawa - I'd always thought he was
a pretty conventional painter but the distortions in many of the figure ptgs
were incredible - ladies with heads that were too small and arms too large
and heavy
- -very like Picasso although other viewers were going around saying 'how
realistic'
Another encounter with 'seeing' was overheard at a huge Monet show in the U.K.
looking at a Thames river impression a visitor remarked "doesn't do it
justice, does it?"
So much has to do with expectations and experience.

I'd only recently started taking photographs of some of the landscapes (and
still life)
I'd sketched and painted and was amazed at how my eye (in the drawings) had
changed 
what I was looking at - but to me this is what hopefully was giving them
some life  and what we're all after- we are not cameras but I disagree that
photography isn't art - it's really another 'medium' - look at Man Ray for
example. Most likely the people using photographs
to work from are 'distorting' them too with their unique vision.

Apologies for being rather too verbose but I could rattle on indefinitely -
I hope tho'
I've made a point.    

Louise Cass

At 07:48 AM 4/11/02 -0700, you wrote:

>My humble opinion on life drawing vs. photo-aided art.
>
>I think there's an additional "caveat" or warning to remember. When
>photography was being developed (no pun intended) there were three factors:
>optics, chemistry and mechanical engineering. Thus I say photography is ALL
>engineering at its birth, and no art at all.
>
>No harm done, of course. Our beloved printmaking fine art also has this
>non-artistic origin--making templates to produce exactly reproducible
>images--all engineered for one purpose or another and only by accident
>producing beauty, truth, etc.
>
>What is fixed in my mind is the usual necessity that a photograph requires a
>fixed point of view, owing to the optics part. The genius beind this is in
>the use of conic sections, from "solid" geometry. I like to think it relates
>to our tiny little eye-hole called the pupil, with its expandable/shrinkable
>iris so much like that in old camera lens design.
>
>What's missing, though, in all this is the multiple points of view, which I
>think is a creation of artists like DuChamp, Picasso, Brach, the Futurists,
>and also Degas with his monotypes. And then there was Edweard Muybridge.
>
>Escher was another genius who challenges our reliance on the single
>point-of-view and assumptions that lurk below the surface of things.
>
>And O. W. Holmes, who's famous statement about the skin of things being
>recordable by photography, but not what's beneath the surface, i.e., in art
>terms, content.
>
>I prefer the multiple points of view available in, say, cubism, or comic
>books, or the new media that combine single and multiple points of view AND
>random sampling, i.e. DVD.
>
>My old friends in the art schools still teach figure drawing, and in Seattle
>there's a highly successful school for realistic art. But I wonder, what
>does real mean, really?
>
>Bill H. Ritchie, Jr


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From: "marilynn smih" <marilynnsmih@hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 08:56:40 -0700
Subject: [Baren 17857] Re: Baren Digest V18 #1796 

In reality most of us seem to be doing the same thing with our images, 
making them our own.  I have an abstract bent and love working with cubism 
and adore escher and the greatness of this work is that it is not a photo 
but more.  Where you get your inspration is up to you but each good artist 
owns the work in their soul and does not just render, but makes it something 
more.
Now if i can keep the bugs in our little garage in Cabo from eating off the 
ink on my prints I might get this new series finished.
Marilynn




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From: Myron Turner <mturner@Ms.UManitoba.CA>
Date: Fri, 07 Jun 2002 11:51:03 -0500
Subject: [Baren 17858] Re: Life Drawing  

I'd like to join Louise in her reservations about some of the things people 
have been saying about life drawing.  Years ago, when my wife decided to go 
back to school to study printmaking, she lamented to her instructor (a 
friend of ours) that she'd never learn to draw figuratively; this very wise 
woman said that the point was to learn how to draw like 
"Susan".  Eventually, my wife moved into photo-based work, eventually into 
video, and just this past week was nominated as one of five finalists in a 
prestigious Canadian film and video festival.  The moral of this tale is 
that each of us has to find the forms most suited to our talents and 
sensibilities and secondly not to feel that the weight of the world is on 
your shoulders because you have problems with representation..  I recall 
reading once that Frank Stella couldn't draw figuratively.  But he invented 
new forms and found the means to express them.  Without the invention side 
of the equation, he would never have been Frank Stella, however well he 
might have been able to draw or achieve certain technical results.  So 
that's the first basket into which I would put my creative eggs.

The discussion of life drawing had its mirror in the recent concern with 
making a living from one's work, both sharing a materialistic 
basis.  Certainly it's great to make money from your work, but should that 
be the reason for the work?  I've know many well-known Canadian artists, 
writers and composers.  Rarely do they earn their livings from their 
work.  Most visual artists are lucky to make back their expenses.   They 
teach, they wait on tables, they do commercial art, they scrape by, they 
have husbands, they have wives, they get the occasional grant, sell the 
occasional work, occasionally inherit something from the family estate, 
finally collect their old age pensions.

Myron

At 11:49 AM 12/04/2002 -0400, you wrote:


>Hi -
>
>Unless one
>is one of these determined hyper realists who are actually attempting to
>emulate photography, drawing or sketching from the subject, for me at any
>rate,
>and I imagine many other artists, results in an unique approach with the
>strange
>and exciting distortions our individual ways of 'seeing' the world bring
>about. I'm
>convinced that no one can truly understand what another is 'seeing' - we


Myron Turner
  http://www.room535.org/mt/
--land safely in cyberspace--


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From: Wanda <robertson@canby.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 10:11:18 -0700
Subject: [Baren 17859] Wallpaper 

Last Tuesday I had the good fortune to see a huge wall of hand-printed multiple
block, multiple color wall paper! The Portland Art Museum (in Portland Oregon)
has an exhibit up called "Stuff of Dreams: Highlights from the Paris Musee des
Arts Decoratifs". All kinds of things - furniture, screens, paintings, ceramics
etc. But the wallpaper is this huge 12x20 panel of 2x2 foot blocks of block
printed scenery. A sort of jungle/plant/distant scenery thing. It is really
amazing & well worth the trip to the museum just to see that. I plan to go back &
take a better look. It is set up so that you can get really close to it. I love that!

If you live anywhere close - go see it!

And Michael Deman - be sure to let us know how your wallpaper is coming along!

Wanda

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From: Louise Cass <lcass@primus.ca>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 17:24:37 -0400
Subject: [Baren 17860] sorry about that 

Sorry to make a long message even longer - don't know why it printed out
like that - or did it for everyone?!
L. Cass
http://www.LCassArt.com

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From: Julio.Rodriguez@walgreens.com
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 16:23:30 -0500
Subject: [Baren 17861] Re: 04/12/2002 04:23:36 PM 

Myron, I enjoyed very much visiting your site and looking at the large
range of work. Your work clearly reflects the progression from the early
Munakata influenced woodcuts to photo-influenced prints to finally the
digitized image.  To break the images down to their very basic black &
white shapes is very interesting concept to me.  In a way very similar to
the day-to-day task I am faced everyday of translating business needs into
computer jargon and finally into hundreds of lines of programming code.
Bits & bytes as we say in the business.

I also agree with your assessment of the many reasons why people do art and
their fight with priorities. Thanks again for sharing the works .

Did anybody here attend the SGC in New Orleans and would like to report on
it for the newsletter ? Photos are welcome.

thanks........Julio Rodriguez (Skokie, Illinois)


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End of Baren Digest V18 #1797
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