Teaching Drawing I

Well, I start teaching a drawing 1 class on Monday. I have not taught drawing yet, so I am a little nerves. I have a solid guideline to follow and my syllabus is the combination of many others and my own spin on what I want the students to get from the course. I was talking to a friend of mine, and he suggested that you can not teach a thing like drawing, you have to just give the students something expecting to get them to think. He suggest that I continually challenge them by getting them outside their comfort zone. Call it challenging a students assumptions or call it teaching, I would say that this is the same thing. I think you can teach a student to draw, up to a point. There are techniques you can informed them about like the ideas of contour line, quick gesture drawing, and cross hatching. There are tools you can expose them to, like conté crayons, drawing pencil assortments of 6b, 4b, 2b, hb, and 2h; and vine charcoal stick assortments of 4 mm, 6 mm, and 10 mm. Exposing tools and introducing techniques are ways of teaching students. Taking on the student's assumptions just part of that teaching element. Also, I think exposing the students to other artists and the visual culture in general is an important component to empowering the student to further their own pursues in the arts.

Craig Dongoski

Ran across this artist looking at a Nashville gallery named Tinney Contemporary. Craig Dongoski was among some of the artists in the gallery, but the work struck me as doing something similar to my work. Read Dongoski's thoughts on art (I took from the gallery website) 'I am an artist working in multimedia technology while rooting it in the conventional practice of drawing. My work derives from investigations into the grey area between drawing and writing. The physical action of both practices has been a source of compelling curiosity for me. The relationship of the spoken and written word has led me to explore the connection between the drawn mark and the sound produced while inscribing. The execution rate of these drawings is exceptionally slow. Visually and conceptually they are connected to and assimilate with geological time and sound waves. My working method is inverted: rather than responding to a sound that yields a pictorial result, I am responding to a visual (line) that yields a spectrographic result. I also see these works as internal expressions. The slow and obsessive nature of the process literally places me within the work at a microscopic (microphonic) vantage point.' I need to take lessons Dongoski on writing artist statements. This one is a gem. If I find enough of artists doing this kind of work, I think it would be time to organize a show around this type of work. Declare a movement or something.

The CADD Art Lab

I have been accepted to the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas gallery. The CADD Art Lab is an unique space that Dallas has innovated. The gallery draws from all the member galleries to exhibit art and now the space is doing juried shows for graduate students.

UPCOMING EXHIBITION (info taken from CADD website)The 2009 Dallas/Fort Worth/Denton Graduate Student Exhibition at Art Lab, presented by the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas. The exhibition will open Thursday, July 16, with a reception from 5-8 p.m. and will be on view until September 3, 2009CADD Art Lab :: 1608-C Main Street, Dallas, TX 75201 :: tel: 214.741.1075 hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m., Open until 8 p.m. on Thursdays.CADD Art Lab is located between Neiman Marcus and the Joule Hotel in Downtown Dallas.Validated parking is available at Dal-Park Garage, 1512 Commerce St., before Ervay St.

Dallas Arts Revue

If you want to know a good site to find out about the art scene in Dallas, visit the Dallas Arts Revue. It is a really handy site for going-ons in the Dallas art scene. The gallery listings are great for those unknown gem shows that you likely will not see on other art sites. I say I don't like the taste of the critic, but that is really a generalization. The site promotes the local art scene through reviewing the little talked about shows and upping the profile of artists in general. Also, the photographs of the art shows and art work are amazing.

Artists Deadline Pages

A good way for artists to make a name for themselves is entering jury shows. I am trying to get myself together to enter a few more after my MFA show next year. However, I am looking at submitting to journals very soon. Here are a list of open call sites.

http://www.theartlist.com/
http://www.artcalendar.com/home.asp
http://www.artopportunitiesmonthly.com/
http://www.artdeadline.com/
http://artperk.com/
http://www.artweek.com/
http://artdeadlineslist.com/

Back to the Future

30 x 30 digital painted print on dibond

So, I have been encouraged by outside influence that I should return to my 2006 style of text art paintings. I have thought about it and I am on the fence with this idea. I think my work is more complex than my old work, but at the same time, that minimal look appeals to me. I like the digital source with the add paint overlay. I saw an artist at D Art Slam that was very minimal. I felt I had a kindred spirit. Should I return to this old work? Did I solve everything I set out to do in making this type of image? I am not sure.

Layered Effect of Time on Art

Time and the age of the viewer effects the impact that an art work can make on the viewer. The film, The Breakfast Club, impacted me a great deal when I was High School and College age, as it was intended to do. Now in my mid-30s the impact has shift, do to the fact that I no longer have a 'heart.' No, just the ideas and issues in the movie seem to have less importance than they use to. So, the best moment to see the movie is in your teens and early twenties. I think the same can be said about the novel, Catcher in the Rye. I wish I had read the book when I was a teenager, because by the time I was twenty, I knew that book had already passed its peek impact period for my life. I wonder if works by painters and sculptors impact an age group more than any other time in ones life. I am sure their are examples, but at the moment this example escapes me.

What the Bleep

The movie has been out for a long time, but I just got around to watching, 'What the Bleep do we Know." I like the ideas in the movie, but the presentation made it nearly unwatchable. It was like as if MTV and any local news channel created a package and call it a movie. It was sound bite after sound bite, with this random animation all through the movie, and plus, the movie tried to jam this lame narrative down the viewers throat. I would have rather watched a string of interviews to get a better picture of the ideas being purposed. The ideas really were about having beautiful lives through self determination.
This was an artlessly produced film because the imagery and story line were just noise clumsily trying to illustrate the points of the interviews, but the editing of the interviews (although in sound bite form) was artful, because the truth of the ideas could be striped away easily. A better film or art piece, one does not have to do the work to strip out all the noise. The elegant forum is apparent with the meaningful content.