john t. unger studio

It's only life or death. It's always only life or death

The best thing that ever happened to me was the night an angry, messed up cab driver pulled me into the back room of a 24 hour diner and held a huge handgun to my head for over ten minutes, all the while describing in intricately fetishistic detail exactly what would happen when he pulled the trigger.

Why? Because it changes you, staring down a nutjob holding a gun. After that, the small stuff just doesn't get sweated. You either break, or break through to a mandatory satori of keeping things in proportion that most people never get to walk away from. It's an ice calm I wouldn't trade for anything.

The second best thing that ever happened to me was when the dot com crash of 2000 wiped out most of the design industry at the peak of my career as a freelance print designer. I went from turning away work every week to working exactly 7 days of the next year. I lost my girl. I lost my loft. I lost part of my thumb in an accident moving out of the loft. I pretty much lost it all.

Of course, the only reason I was working in offices was to fund the art career I wanted… materials, space, tools, etc. I worked eight hours in the office and ten in the studio, sleeping when I passed out involuntarily. I decided that if my industry had tanked, I was damned if I was gonna retrain to do something else I didn't want to do. I chose to make the art be my sole means of support. I built some monumentally scaled commissions working out of borrowed shop space, with borrowed gear, sleeping on borrowed couches.

It worked. I've been making my living as an artist ever since, and these days I earn triple the income I ever did from the best corporate gigs.

The third best thing that ever happened was the day my studio building collapsed under a load of snow while I was standing on the roof shoveling. I rode that roof to the ground like a gut-shot rodeo pony. The building and some pricey tools were completely destroyed, but I was unharmed… until I spent the next three months (December, January and February) without heat, running water or a stove because the natural gas line into the house had been severed in the collapse. The gas company refused to fix the line until they could bury it in the spring. I lost a few brain cells, I'm sure, by running an unvented kerosene heater inside the house to stay alive.

How was that good? The bank came out to assess the damage, saw my work and suggested I do a $10,000 commissioned sign as the down payment on the remaining two buildings I'd been leasing with an unlikely option to buy. Getting this place had a lot to do with making the art career fly. I had affordable space to work and a place for customers to find me. I don't think the deal would have happened without the disaster… They didn't want to take a loss on the property (or hold it) and I was willing to take it on at the cost of the mortgage before the building fell.

Bottom line:

The only way you can tell the difference between disaster and opportunity is to decide to make an opportunity out of every event.

Postscript:

During the second and third disasters, my friends were pretty evenly divided in their response to my choice to make the world work on my terms.

One camp said, "Dude, you're so brave to just bail on the day job and do your own thing. You're my hero. I wish I could do that." The other camp said, "Look, don't be crazy. Just take whatever work you can get until you're on your feet, even if it's fast food or something. You're never gonna make it without some cash." Really, both camps were wrong (though I love them all dearly).

I wasn't brave. Not the least bit. I was frickin' desperate, is what I was, but not terrified. I was back to that ice calm… you learn that it just ain't over till it's over, and that giving up never got anyone out of a jam. I didn't want a life of stability if it meant I had to do digital layouts of junk mail for a living. I wanted to do what I was best at, what I loved, and get paid for that. It was worth the risk. It was the only real way I could see to better my situation.

I wasn't crazy either. By the time I figured out that the design work wasn't just in a slump, that it wasn't coming back any time soon, I had about $5 in cash and $20,000 in debt. There was no way that a subsistence level job was gonna fix that… I ran full tilt towards the art career because I knew if I did it right, and worked my ass off, I could probably make enough to get out of the hole

I had to think about it again when the building crashed. That time, I almost did pack it in. It felt like my dream was a stupid idea after all, that I had just run everything into the ground betting on a long shot. But in the rural economy here, few jobs pay well enough to escape the poverty line and there are fewer and fewer jobs available anyway every year. A job wasn't gonna save me. It would just suck all the time and energy I needed to realize my dreams, while keeping me alive enough to resent it.

I remembered other businesses I had started on a shoe string earlier in life… each of them ultimately failed the first time something major went wrong because I hadn't had enough cash to keep them going. Or had they? Had money really been the only way to get them back on track, or was it a failure of creativity and nerve? Had they really failed because when faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, I'd believed it to be what it seemed, bought into it, walked away because I didn't feel able to do the so-called impossible? I decided that what I really couldn't afford was to waste all the time and energy I had put into building an art career that was just on the edge of being sustainable. I'd come too far this time to back down.

Having weighed the pros and cons of sticking to my guns, I decided to force a positive change out of the crisis. Within a month, I unexpectedly sold a few major pieces, paying off the last of my old debts with the money and having cash left over. From that moment, the art has sold exponentially better each year. If I'd given up at the moment, none of the great things that have happened since would have come about.

Emoodicon Movie: Marcie's Grand Adventure

 

Just before heading off to SXSW this year, Chris Carfi and I went live with a new site, emoodicon.com. I couldn't be more excited about it! Now I need some help spreading the word…

The animation above explains how the Emoodicon ring works. It was really a blast working with Sheharzad Arshad to create the animation. He did amazing work that far surpassed my expectations. In fact, it was kind of addictive… I really want to come up with more things that justify doing an animation!

If you can help get the word out about emoodicon, please do. Rate the video on YouTube, link to the new blog, or submit the site to digg, del.icio.us, etc. I'd sure appreciate it. There are little buttons in the footer of every ost at emoodicon.com that make it easy to submit the site to your social network of choice.

I'm pretty darn pleased with the design of the new site, but I'd welcome any suggestions for ways I could improve it. Oh, and if you'd like a chance to win one of the Emoodicon Rings for yourself, do enter one of the contests at the Emoodicon site!

Podcast Interview with Daily Confection/sheunlimited

Daily Confection just posted a really fun phone interview I did with Gary Connolly. We discussed a broad set of topics including art, business, marketing, the ways that blogging and the web in general have impacted my work as an artist and 30 foot fire-breathing dragon boats.

The interview came out really nicely. After I gave it a listen, I realized that I haven't ever posted photos of the dragon boat here on the blog, so I figured it was time… This was a fun project I did with my friend Neil Verplank to figure out what you could get away with on the Chicago River. We were having coffee one evening and, for some reason, the question came up. So five days later, we sailed the first of many dragon boats down the river just to see what would happen. The improvised flame thrower worked pretty well although you had to lean out over the river and hang onto the dragon's neck in order to light it. Like I said, fun.

 

The Mighty Dragon Boat Prowls the Chicago River
click thumbnail to view larger image.

Recycled Steel Tree for Earth Day

 

Okay, actually, since recycled steel art is still the main gig here at the studio, it's really kind of Earth Day all the time. On the other hand, a tree made of 100% recycled steel seems like just the thing to post in observance of the day. And hey, it's brand new too!

I've been playing around with the scrap pieces cut out from the Great Bowl O Fire this week and I think this tree is probably my favorite of the results so far… It's kind of a revisitation of the bottle trees I did last year, but this time with scrap steel leaves. The most remarkable thing about it is that, from a distance, it's very hard to tell that it isn't a real tree! The coloration of the rusty metal, and the shapes of the pieces, make it look an awful lot like an oak shrub.

I'm really curious to see how many people actually notice it as a sculpture when they pull into the studio parking lot this summer… I know that for the last couple days, I keep seeing it out of the corner of my eye and wondering for just a split second, "hey, where'd that tree come from!?!"

It's a little tricky to get a good photo that really shows it off (at least until spring really hits and I can plant it in the grass) so I've included a bunch of alternate views below. Definitely check out the lower left picture that shows how real it looks from far away.

click thumbnail to view larger image.

Amiable Heretic Manifesto

Hugh had a great post today in which he wrote:

Why take 50,000 words [the length of your average business tome] to say what you have to say, when 500 will do? Brevity. I love brevity. We're both in a hurry.

So I'm thinking, well, there's also a lot of people out there besides myself and the bloggers I read, with ideas needing spread. Powerful ideas that could be easily summed up in 500 words or less. And I would really, truly, seriously like to do what I can to help get them out there.

So here's the deal. If you've written a manifesto in 500 words or less, and you want help spreading the word, just e-mail it to me, or send me the link. If it's any good I'll either link to it, or post it on gapingvoid.

So here's a quick collection of some of my thoughts on how to think clearly and creatively. It's not complete, but it contains some of my favorite personal mantras for coming up with useful ideas. Hope you like it!

1. Good ideas almost always begin as heresy.
2. Life is pointless. So what? Make your own meaning. Revise to suit.
3. If you can't think anything at all, you can't think anything at all. Any limitations you place on what you're willing to consider restrict your ability to engage in rational thought. That includes, of course, limiting your ideas to "rational" ones… Sometimes silly leads the way.
4. You're only entitled to the opinions you've thought through. You can only do that if you use hard data. Opinions you adopt from others are other people's opinions, not yours.
5. Fear is caused by thinking you have an answer when in fact, you haven't done anything to get one.
6. Belief in one truth over all others debases that truth. There are always a lot of truths… don't require them to be mutually contradictory.
7. Having no good flaws is worse than having no good traits.
8. The inability to run a mental simulation of the effects of any given action is an excellent indication of a possible new frontier. Simply, if you don't know what will happen when you do something, there is no question that you will learn by doing it.
9. The common denominator of human nature is the desire to transcend human nature. What are you doing about it?
10. Why is the marketing of a product inevitably more effective than the product itself? Self-help books induce millions to buy, though few change. Appropriate the techniques by which you are manipulated into buying life-styles and packaged ideals, and use them to sell yourself the actual life and ideals you want. Learning how illusion works allows us to make illusion work for us.
11. New ideas result nearly exclusively from the combination of thoughts, images, or concepts previously assumed to be exclusive. Creation is entirely the child of synthesis and discord.
12. It's not important that others agree with you. It's equally unimportant that you agree with others. It's important for everyone to listen.
13. If an answer is easy, it's probably wrong. If an answer is simple, there's a fair chance it's right. Or at least useful.

Here are some additions to the original manifesto a year later. They're mostly in random order.

1. Making people think is important. Attempting to control the outcome of that thought is immoral.
2. Almost nothing is impossible but many things are less than obvious. Almost nothing is written in stone, but many things are written.
3. In design, and hacking especially, the answers come from looking at what things do rather than what things are supposed to do.
4. A subset of the above point is that almost all the hacks I've come up with are based on using a feature for something other than what it's intended use. Misusing something because it does exactly what you need when put in a different context is the core skill of hacking.
5. When I'm told that something is impossible, my response is: "list all the ways in which it can't be done." Usually, one of those ways will work if you get rid of the assumptions about why it won't.
6. Find and exploit your weaknesses. If you don't, someone else will.
7. It's harder to be Ghandi than not to be Hitler: you don't have to be a saint, you just have to be a little better than your imagined best.
8. I love empirical data, I'm just not sure there is such a thing.

Nice work, Rachel!

Rachel Thomas sent me the following email a while back:

I'm an art student at William Jewell College in K.C., MO and I really admire your work. I've been attempting a bottle cap sculpture for my sculpture class. If you don't mind me asking, I was wondering how you attach your bottle caps to the plywood. Do you use just nails or some sort of superglue as well?

I replied with some quick, basic advice about the sort of nails I use for my bottle cap mosaics, but I think she had finished the piece before I got back to her. Rachel used hot glue and Super Glue for her mermaid.

I asked if she would send me a photo of her finished piece and here it is. Pretty cool! I especially like the way she did the tail fin… the multiple colors work really well.

If you haven't seen my bottle cap mermaids that inspired Rachel you can check them out at the new portfolio blog here and here. Or go to the bottle cap mosaic index to see all the work I've done with caps.

Technorati Tags: art, bottle cap, bottlecap, crown cap, folkart, mermaid, mosaic, outsider art

Kids Make Cool Art

My friend Maggie brought her two boys over to see the studio yesterday. I had promised them that they could try their hand at cutting out a steel drawing using the plasma cutter. I think they did a great job!

I spent some time before their visit explaining over the phone to Jacob  what kind of drawings work best for this and asked him to help his little brother with his drawing. I also showed the boys some of the drawings in steel that my daughter Mya did when she was here this summer. Jacob had brought a pretty workable realistic drawing of a dog, but in the process of transfering it to the steel, he came up with what you see below. I think the "cartoony" version is actually a lot mor fun in some ways. While Jacob worked on his drawing, I helped Simon turn his stick figure fairy into something that could be cut out from steel.

The basic trick is to remember that you're cutting out shapes, not lines… and also, that if you want to draw lines inside the shape, you have to leave a bit of steel uncut so that the piece doesn't fall out. The best example of this is the eye or nose on Jacob's dog. If the lines that make the shape of the eye go all the way around, then the inside of the eye is cut free of the piece and falls out. Another example is the sun in Simon's sculpture. In his drawing, it was just a circle hanging in space. So we added the pointy sun rays and made sure that a couple of them touched the Empire State Building. Problem solved!

Jacob is eight and Simon is five. Jacob did almost all the cutting on his sculpture after a little practice on some scrap steel. Simon was a bit more spooked by the sparks, so he let me cut his sculpture out for him while he held onto my cutting hand. It was pretty cute.

There's something pretty remarkable about the way kids' sculptures turn out. There's a real charm to the work that I could never emulate in a million years now. I just love the way they look as sculpture and the way that giving kids a chance to do something this permanent gets them excited about art.

 

 

click thumbnails to view larger image.

Technorati Tags: art, kids, children, sculpture

A Custom Fire Bowl Project

UPDATE: Check out the new photos of this project here!

Mary Abe at Garden Gate Landscaping contacted me a while back to see if I could create a custom fire pit for an extensive landscaping project she was putting together. The project called for a buried fire pit set in stone with a steel lid and a remote control gas burner. She wanted something clean, simple, modern and industrial looking that could be set into a stone patio. She wanted heavy rivets or bolt heads set into a flat lip that would surround the bowl. Mary sent me a drawing to describe what she was thinking about.

No problem, I said. I've got just the thing in mind.

So I sent her a revised drawing, and over email and phone we hashed out the final design. The fire bowl was to be installed in Maryland and I'm in Michigan, which made it really important to address every issue in depth… once the bowl was shipped off, it would not be possible to make changes. It was important for me to be able to get photos, a verbal description and measurements of the intended site to make sure that everything would fit properly. The next three photos show the site prior to installation, as well as an amazing stone gateway that leads into the fire pit patio area.

 

 

As the project progressed, we made some changes to the overall design… in each case the changes were based on practical considerations but had to work aesthetically as well. The lid had to be thick to permanently withstand the elements, and was also limited by the sizes of steel tanks I recycled to make the pit. Creating a custom domed lid from scratch would require a machine about the size of my house and probably 100 times as expensive, so that was out. The flatter domed tank end that I had planned to use was too small in diameter to cover the opening of the pit, so I added a stepped piece from another kind of tank and mirrored the rivets used on the rim. I think the stepped look adds to the industrial look that Mary was aiming for and ultimately we were all pretty happy with that.

But then we realized that the weight of the lid was a bit unweildy… we discussed a few different options to address that. We considered hinging it to the rim, making it from copper (doable, but expensive) and cutting it in half. I was worried about cutting it because the heat of the plasma cutter would certainly warp the steel somewhat and might have made the lid difficult to fit back together. My favorite idea was to quarter the lid and hinge it so that it would open like a flower… Mary rejected this idea because of the potential danger of someone catching a shin on the sharp points. Well, yeah. But it would have looked pretty cool and I'd definitely be up for making a version like that if someone else likes the idea and has good liability insurance.

In the end, we decided to cut the lid in half and fit a thin bit of steel on the inside of one half to keep water out. I devised some guiding latches to insure that the pieces would fit together properly. As it worked out the lid held it's shape well and fit together quite snugly. There was a bit of distortion that creates a sort of fissure where the two lids meet, but with the seal below it actually creates an interesting feature that the client really liked. It's kind of like ceramic work I've seen where carved fissures are part of the design. Here's a few pics that show the lid before cutting, a detail of the fissure and the latches:

 

 

Here are a few pics of the bowl and half the lid.

 

 

And here's the entire finished piece right before it shipped out.

 

 

I talked with Mary and her client today to make sure the installation had gone smoothly and that they were happy with the finished fire pit. They were both ecstatic… The first fire was last night and went smoothly, and both of them made a point of saying that they pit had exceeded expectations and was much more beautiful than the process photos I had sent them (that would be the pics above, folks). Mary said she would send me some photos of the finished, installed fire pit tomorrow or the next day and I can hardly wait to see it. I'm told that the patina has taken on a great tone. I'll post the installed photos here when I get them.

If you like the look of the Great Bowl O Fire but want something tailored to your own needs or design, drop me an email. I'm always up for trying something new.

 

Technorati Tags: art, commission, design, fire, fire bowl, fire pit, firebowl, firepit, fireplaces, flame, garden, outdoor, patio, yard

Now You're Cookin' With Gas…

 

Had a call this morning from a guy in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina who's building a water park. He wants to fit out one of my Great Bowls O Fire with a gas burner and install it in the park along with some tiki styled fountains. Groovy. But it gets better than that… he solved a major design issue for me with a really simple idea. I love when that happens, and it's a big part of why I get a kick out of working with clients to customize my work to fit what they want to do.

I've had a lot of inquiries about whether I can make a gas-fired version of the Great Bowl. Until today, my standard answer was too complicated, I think. Frankly, I'm not 100% comfortable with doing gas fittings because of the potential liability issues. I call a pro when I want a gas line run, so when people inquired about gas fired Great Bowls, I suggested they contact a local heating and cooling contractor to fit the bowl for gas. What Ted suggested was brilliantly simple, though. He asked me to weld a 6" piece of threaded gas pipe into the base of the bowl so his gas guy could just attach it to the burner inside and the pipe on the outside. That's something I can do easily, and it makes the work on the other end easy too. Genius!

So, if you were thinking you wanted a kick-ass fire bowl made from 100% recycled material but you just weren't down with the emissions from burning wood, now you can request one tricked out for cleaner burning propane or natural gas. It's still not environmentally perfect, but hey, it's an improvement. Not only that, installing them indoors just became a lot more practical.

More pictures and pricing info for the Great Bowl O' Fire.

Pictures of the Great Bowl installed in the Landmark Resort Waterpark.

 

Fractal geometry used to authenticate Jackson Pollock paintings

 

This actually makes a lot of sense. I've always (okay, maybe not always, but for a long time) figured that since art is a physical activity and each artist's body and movement is unique, there should be some way to measure the internal consistancy of a body of work to see if it was done within the same physical constraints. Looks like it may in fact be possible:

The physicist Richard Taylor has developed a technique for authenticating Jackson Pollock "poured" paintings -- by analyzing their fractal dimensions.

Taylor, who also has a degree in art theory, got interested in Pollock's work back in the 1990s. He suspected that Pollock's famously chaotic paintings -- created by the artist standing over the canvases and dripping paint -- displayed fractal mathematics: They had self-replicating geometry, such that the larger shapes in the picture were similar to the tiny shapes you'd see if you looked at closely the edges of the splatters. He put computer-generated grids over images of five Pollock splatter paintings and, sure enough, there they were: Two sets of fractal patterns, one that resolved on a 5 mm scale, and another on a 1 mm scale.

Via: collision detection.

Conversation With Hugh MacLeod

 

I just got off the phone (well, Skype) with Hugh MacLeod. This morning he posted his Skype
handle to his blog and is taking calls. I had only just added his handle to my contact list when the laptop rang and there he was. Cool. (actually, I was gonna finish my coffee first to make sure my brain was firing, but it was fine. He's an easy guy to talk to.)

For those of you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, Skype lets you make free phone calls from your computer. You should go get it right now (yes, really, there'll be a test later). Hugh is an artist (he might deny that) and marketing genious who's been at the front lines of blogging and web 2.0 since before the hype. He's also one of the people that has managed to make blogging a viable business model in ways that are more interesting and useful than the paid advertising model. What initially brought him an audience are his amazingly true and funny cartoons on the back of business cards, a series of incisive posts on how to be creative and his concept of the global microbrand.

So, was it good for me? Hell yeah, hope it was also good for Hugh. The skype call was cool because it made it easier to talk about some of the "off the record" stuff that I've long wondered. Sometimes voice can be a lot more human than typing… in fact, probably most of the time. There's no editing. So now I know a few "secrets," which is fun. And I had an opportunity to talk about some of the ideas we share without having to lay it all out online, which can be a good thing. Besides, he said nice things about what I've accomplished and hell, it's always nice to hear praise from someone whose work you admire.

I love being able to put a voice to someone whose work I've been following for so long, and who I feel like I've come to know pretty well over the last couple years through comments and emails. Hugh was pretty much the guy who inspired me to take blogging seriously as a way to increase the market for my art and design and it has seriously paid off. The global microbrand concept has worked well for me. Although I haven't yet quite reached the level of fame and fortune that his projects have, I'm making a living doing what I want and I'm able to make that happen from pretty much the dead center of nowhere…

 

Traditionally, artists need NYC or LA if they're gonna make it, and most of them don't make it. I mean, hey, the market is a lot larger in a major city, but compared to the entire world? And I seem to be able to reach the world just fine from here. So yeah, I feel like it's been a good ride and I think it's only gonna get better.

 

 

I love that one. It really doesn't describe most of my experiences in the blogosphere, but it does crack me up. Hugh is one of the glaring exceptions to the cartoon… Opinionated? Rough? Scathing? Sure. But he does actually give a shit about people. He's always been approachable, which I think has been one of the keys to success for bloggers who make it. And yeah, although we don't always agree, I think on the whole we see the worl in a pretty similar fashion. Anyway, I guess the point here is that if you have something to say, or are doing something interesting, most of the big names will take the time to check it out. And those who don't? Don't let it get you down… just refer to the above cartoon.

 

 

So here's the deal. If you've been reading this blog (or my other blogs) and you feel like you have something to discuss, or hell, even if you just wanna shoot the shit about any of the topics I cover, etc. go download Skype and give me a buzz. Add johntunger to your contact list and click the button. I haven't yet activate the voicemail feature, so if you don't get through the first time you can always reach me by email or regular phone too. I've made a lot of good friends in the last couple years through blogging, and really, it's always cool to know more about who your readers are. If people tell me what they like best, or don't like as much, etc., it makes it much easier to improve the blog.

I'm always interested in hearing what people have to say and finding ways to make my work better for them. A lot of my best work has been custom stuff that I did based on the input of clients… I see it as a collaboration, and I enjoy the process of adapting other peoples idea to my own vision. It's a cool challenge that seems to help everyone feel more involved and engaged (including me). Rock on.

Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, hugh, macleod, hughmacleod, skype, conversation, cluetrain, marketing, blogging, blog, business, humor, blogs, creativity, advertising, art, cartoon, branding, globalmicrobrand, microbrand

It's Always Nice When People Like Your Work

I got a really nice (unsolicited) review the other day on Rick Visser's Artrift blog…

Although I was initially struck by John T. Unger's 'American Guernica idea', I soon found myself altogether captivated by the quality, depth and general aspect of his work.  There is an unmistakable verve and energy in all that he does.  It was not surprising to learn that he came to visual art through poetry.  Anyone who thinks Unger should stand in the anteroom rather than the main hall would probably have thought the same of Matisse when he brought out his scissors. More:

I've only scratched the surface of his archives, but there's a lot of great writing there. If you're looking for a good blog to read about art and artists, I would definitely pay him a visit!

American Guernica Used as A Class Project

The following entry and comments are excerpted (a little bit) from a post at Oedipa's blog. You can read the whole thing here. I'm reproducing it below because it just totally made my day to read about how American Guernica had been used in the classroom, especially the student's and observer's positive reactions to the idea. Oedipa has also posted her lesson plan for the exercise for those who might want to use or modify it for their own lesson plans.

So today I had another observer come in to take notes and evaluate my skills.  This went really, really well.  After the sting of yesterday's news (that I'm too nice to my students), I went for broke. I crafted a lesson plan around "Reading Images as Text" and brought in several books.  A few of them were Paul Klee, some Giacometti, some photos of New Orleans spiritual communities, and so forth. If anyone of them even so much as whispered out of turn during class, I stopped everything and let my narrow eyes settle on them until they really got the message.  I'm mean.  Cut the shit. Watch the hell out.

Then I had them split up into groups of three and each group had to work with the images in the bookthey had to find one that they would put on a billboard on a highway to send a message about something.  I got this idea from John T. Unger who is proposing a simple open-source street art project, American Guernica. He wants people all over the country to put up billboard-sized reproductions of Picasso's famous painting of the carpet bombing of Guernica. He says, "[I]f the painting is all that's seen, it forces the viewer to make an interpretation instead of being told what to think. Being told what to think is exactly what got Americans in trouble in the first place, no?"

Anyway, I was impressed with this and I hope it catches on.  In the meantime, it made for a GREAT excercise for the class.  Each one got up and gave a presentation on the painting or photo they selected and went into great detail about how they thought it supported a theme or a message in a similar vein to the above project.

The observer approached me after class and told me how impressed he was.  This made me feel much, much better after my slight tailspin yesterday.

Comments from Oedipa's entry:

I totally understand the stress of observation days...I hate them. But this exercise sounds wonderful--I may have to try it myself soon!

Posted by: vague | December 02, 2005 at 02:49 PM

Oedipa,

Wow, this sort of story always makes my day. I *love* teaching, but rarely get to do it in a classroom situation (something to do with not finishing college and refusing to play by the rules. sigh). Anyway, glad to have been of service.

You might be interested in a little write-up I had to do of one of my teaching projects. It discusses some of my basic strategies for getting students involved way over their heads, which I've found to bring good results. Check it out here, if you like: http://www.johntunger.com/nlreport.html

Anyway, thanks for the post. It's been interesting to see how many different interpretations the Guernica idea has brought forth. Keeps me honest. heh.

Posted by: johntunger | December 02, 2005 at 06:58 PM

Hey. So glad this post brought you to my website. One of my students proclaimed about your endeavor, "oh my god! that's brilliant!!!". It takes a lot to get him interested in learning something new. Bringing your project in did it for him. So thanks!!!!

Posted by: Oedipa | December 02, 2005 at 11:11 PM

Actually, if any of you are morbidly curious, my class blog/website is http://writers.typepad.com

By going there, you can actually see or download the class excercise I had the students do around John's project. Also, if any of you have any other interesting suggestions for class projects where it helps them interpret images as text, well, lemme know. I'm open!

Posted by: Oedipa | December 02, 2005 at 11:20 PM

Nice one. i might use that myself, with a little modification.

Posted by: King Of the Hill | December 03, 2005 at 06:25 PM

What Isn't It?

I get a lot of my ideas by looking at things and wondering "what isn't it," or "what didn't I see?" For instance, the other day I was out at a friend's studio and noticed a bunch of birds hanging out on a telephone wire, the way they tend to do… And instead, I thought "hmmm… if you could train those birds to sit where you pointed, you could make them be an abacus.

I really like the idea of an abacus of trained birds. Okay, sure, it isn't very practical, but given that people have been able to train birds to do things like carry messages and so on, I'm sure it would be possible if you really wanted an avian abacus. And who knows, maybe you could even utilize their innate flocking and navigational skills to get them to do more complex math than people usually attempt on an abacus. Maybe it's a whole new way to approach bio-computing. Or not.

Then I was looking at the big sign in in my friend's yard, which says "antiques" in huge letters and "pottery" in kind of smaller letters. Because she's a potter and runs her parents old antiques store, which also happens to have some of her work in it. And it occurred to me, because of the birds, that if she were to line up a series of her pots in uneven heights along the top of the sign it would be more interesting. And maybe people would stop in more. Well, I would anyway. And of course, it would be easy enough to use pots that had been ruined in the firing, since there always seem to be a few that go wrong. So it wouldn't really require any sacrifice, really, other than climbing up there. That's a more practical idea that came from the birds.

And of course, when I was a kid, I used to think they looked kind of like musical notes and wouldn't it be cool if you could train them to arrange themselves to write out the notes they sing when they're chirping. Maybe not so practical again.

But then, it might be cool to do a fence that spelled out the notes of a common bird song by arranging little metal birds on the rails of the fence. Back to somewhat practical. Done right, it could be really nice, maybe bringing in some plant and tree forms into the steelwork, etc.

So the upshot is, I try to misread any clichés I run across. How can I hear it wrong but better? How can I creatively misinterpret things? How can I see the things that aren't there? And then, once you're clearly out of step with what's in front of you, it helps to focus and see where that mistake can lead you. It's a fun game, even when you don't bring anything great home from it. One of my all time favorite tag lines has been, "I see lot's of thing that no one else does. Some of them are even really there."

One more example of paying attention to good mistakes: I accidentally typed "playwood" once when I meant to write plywood. But playwood is so much better. It describes the material and it's uses far more accurately, to my mind. Because with a little plywood you can make just about anything, quickly, cheaply etc. I've been calling it playwood ever since.

There are no Synonyms

But there are things very much like synonyms.

Right, just a little finicky language geek humor. My buddy Marc Dubey had a nice subtle jibe that he would aim at people when he caught them in a moment of imprecision… "yes," he'd say, "That's just like (insert item here)." His point being that while there may have been a similarity, the two things were very much not the same thing. As in, "Having a good excuse to go war is just like having an actual reason to do so."

I love working with pattern, metaphor and visual similes in my art. But choosing the one, specific thing to use is of huge importance also. Henry Miller always went way out of his way to choose exactly the one right word to capture his meaning. Sometimes, in order to make sure he had the right word, and not just something pretty close, he would have to make the word up. heh. But it was always definitely the right word. I love that kind of precision.

Technorati Tags: words, language, simile, metaphor, poetry, henry miller, humor

well, it probably seemed like a half-assed idea at the time…

ie:  It probably didn't seem like a good idea, but maybe one that would work anyway. Not exactly the way to make all your decisions, but often better than making no call at all. also know as improvisation.

What Goes Into A Bottle Cap Fish

I took these pics a few weeks ago as I was getting ready to make the four new bottle cap fish for Vale Craft Gallery. This is what it looks like when I'm sorting beer caps for my mosaics.

 

           

 

Actually, this is a lot better than the way it used to be. I recently went out and got these cool translucent tubs at the local dollar store and that makes the whole process much easier. I can now actually see what I have, and I can stack the containers. In the past, I was keeping the caps in coffee cans. Though it may have given me more points for reuse than new plastic stuff, the coffee cans sucked, especially because I could never tell what color or brand was in them.

Anyway, it takes about an entire day to get through sorting about two paper grocery bags full of caps. It's a lot of extra effort, but I think it's worth it. The one thing that most distinguishes my bottle cap pieces from those of other artists is the fact that I use that caps as solid colors or color blends, rather than just nailing them on in a random fashion. I also lap the caps, smashing only half to three quarters of the cap in order to preserve them as a textural element. It's easier to smash the whole thing flat, but then uncolored edges of the cap kind of diminish the color. I've mostly been sticking to fish, mermaids and other things that have scales in order to make the texture really make sense. One of these days I'll do an 8 foot long Chinese dragon in reflective blue and silver… That'll be something to see. I'm just waiting till I find the right source art.

The other thing that makes a big difference when you're doing work with beer caps is what kind of nail you use. On many of the cap mosaics I use standard gold linoleum nails from the hardware store. But I also order bronze, copper and stainless steel nails from a shipwright's catalog… I find that coordinating the color and style of the nail head with the design on the cap adds a great deal of richness to the overall work.

If you're in the Chicago Area and would like to see some of the bottlecap pieces in person, check them out at Vale. While you're there, be sure to see Mark Brown's sculptures also— They're freakin' amazing.

Vale Craft Gallery
230 West Superior Street
Chicago, IL. 60610
312.337.3525

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Friday: 10:30am to 5:30 pm
Saturday: 11:00am to 5:00 pm

If you don't know what you're doing, speed up so you'll have time to figure it out before anybody else does.

PSA

I was never in the habit of forwarding email to my entire mailing list— in fact, about once a year or so I have to tell someone that I will block their email if they continue to forward me every little thing that comes through their inbox. I do send links to specific people when I find something I know they are interested in, but there's no reason to assume everyone else is interested in the same thing.

By the same token, I've never been very interested in blogging about what everyone else is blogging about this week. I'd rather write my own stuff, take some time on it and talk about something I know. Because of that (and a hectic schedule) I don't post as often as most link blogs. I'm okay with that if I can post in greater depth. On the whole, the studio blog is about me, my art and broader ideas on art and design which have influenced my work. It's pretty rare that I find something that seems like it should be "forwarded to everyone."

Larry Lessig's 2002 presentation at the O'reilly Open Source Conference is one of those things that should really be sent to everyone. It's a flash presentation of a speech in which he outlines how copyright has changed since 1774 and why it does more harm than good to current creative workers. He explains it better, more thoroughly and more entertainingly than I really can. He also came up with what he calls a refrain, repeated throughout the presentation to remind you of his four main points from several different contexts: 

1. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it.
3. Free societies enable the future by limiting the past.
4. Ours is less and less a free society.

Personally, I'm behind Larry 101% on this— I feel that copyrights and patents have never existed to protect the rights (or income) of artists and designers. Instead they protect the distribution channels between the artist and the public. Publishers, movie studios, record labels, etc. claim that without copyright there would be no new creative work. In a word, this is bullshit.

I made art before I was able to make a living at it. In fact, when I did still have a day job, I spent most of my money on artwork or art supplies rather than rent, food or utilities. I'm not going to stop making art if someone "steals" my ideas, or does work inspired by them, or even mass produces them in a factory. I'm going to do what anyone who really lives for creativive work would do: evolve, adapt, retool and make something new, innovative and different. I'll work harder, because that's what I actually enjoy in life. The same as I would do if no one copied my work. That's the point of being creative, isn't it? To do new things, not to endlessly flog the same idea for eternity. I like to take credit for any innovations I can claim, and it's nice to get paid so I can continue making stuff, but the real point is in the doing of the work.

The question Larry asks at the end of his presentation is "what are you doing about it?" What are you doing about the fact that our society, culture, country, legal system are all becoming increasingly restrictive? That's a very good question. It was an impoprtant question three years ago, and even more so now. Especially because this isn't just about art. Art is a luxury… I don't think people should live without it, but they certainly can. But IP law extends to household products, medicines, cars, computers, software, etc.

Please watch the presentation. And then think about what you're going to do about it.

Technorati Tags: Free Culture, Technology, creativity, Creative Commons, copyright, patent, Innovation, Ideas, Lessig, opensource, free software

via Presentation Zen

Human Anatomy Resources for Artists

When I arrived in Chicago, my back was so out of whack that I could barely walk… too much work, too little sleep and way too much heavy lifting this month. Britt sent me off immediately to see Tommy Jenkins, a total freakin' genius massage therapist who managed to make me feel almost human for the first time in a long while. He's opening his own space soon and he mentioned he would be interested in a line art wall sculpture depicting musculature. A day or two later, it occured to me that some of the anatomical illustrations I've seen of human musculature would look absolutely amazing if done in marble mosaic— red marble with white veining is exactly the right color to do a portrait of the muscles of the upper body. I got totally excited about the idea and called Tommy up. He likes it too, so I'm hoping we'll be able to work out a commission. I'm in and out of Chicago enough that we could do part of the project in trade, which would be really great.

So I spent a good part of the day looking for anatomical illustrations today and stumbled on some great resources that would likely be of use to other artists as well.

The National Library of Medicine has an amazing collection of large images online, scanned from historical anatomical atlases. Some of the images are beautiful, some eerie, a few are dowright spooky. Probably the most interesting thing one notices in the course of browsing the whole collection is how differently the human form is treated in different times and places, even within the context of scientific illustration. Some of the differences can be chalked up to artistic style, but there's a pretty wide variation in the degree of objectivity and subjectivity. Most of the drawings are done from corpses, while some are more fanciful (see Giambattista della Porta's album on physiognomy which attempts to explain human personality traits by relating animal's heads to human facial features). On the whole, it's very much worth looking at all the images available on the site to get a broader view of the human form and the history of our own knowlege about our bodies.

NLM also links to a few collections of images hosted elswhere on the web. The Anatomical Plates of Pietro da Cortona, hosted by University of Iowa Libraries is an amazing example of art and design applied to scientific ends. The plates are beautifully laid out and the poses and attitude of the figures are handled masterfully. I can't believe I've never seen these before. Props to the libarary for putting together a very nice looking site to host the images as well, though I would have been a wee bit happier if it held yet larger images and loaded a bit more quickly.

Below are a few samples of images I particulary liked. I would encourage anyone to follow the links above and really explore the broader collections.