Sunday, January 6, 2013

the new year

Happy new year; the first of the two new years.  We have made it a point to celebrate the Chinese new year as well, so we are in the month-long period of the transition into the new year.  The snow and cold are here and will surely melt with warming weather in the months to come.  This ephemerality--especially after not having any noticeable or lasting snow last year--is apart of the beauty of the cold months here in the midwest.  Everything is brighter with snow, trees without their leaves hold the potential of new leaf growth in the spring; most everything around us here is some shade of brown, white, or gray with slush.  Even the bare pavement has been bleached white with salt.

Though my thinking is entrenched in the cycle of seasons, time, and my surroundings, very little is new.  A cycle suggests repetition.  Though we proceed through time our experiences (in the studio and out) are more complicated than a simple diagram of moving forward.  I have yet to perfect a diagram or model that illustrates this line of thought, and I may never complete it; but I do feel that this line of thinking contributes to my studio practice as well as a certain awareness of being.

Along with the Mayan calendar, recent popular media and press has shown a poor understanding of what it is to be in an era.  Certainly, to humans, a year is not an era (if we take era as a word that refers to a long period of time), but if we think about different cultures having different belief systems of time, era, and cycle, I think we could have a better understanding of what each new year means.  Regardless of the time, I would propose that eras are larger cycles that are structurally similar to smaller cycles, such as a year.

In the studio, I am constantly seeing things resurface--even those things that I felt never had much weight for the future of my art making.  Ideas, symbols, methods, and practices are constantly coming up again to create these large, repetitive arcs within my studio practice.  Some simple and direct examples of this are abstraction and reductive compositions; ideas are those of folklore and Appalachian culture; and practices of painting on panel or making sculptures or drawings on paper.  Though these might seem like dichotomies, they really provide a structure for the cycle of my studio practices that all contribute to my studio output; some part of which the public sees.  Add into that research, reading, and various forms of writing and music, and one might start to get an idea of the complexity of a single cycle of my studio practice.

Soon I will stop apologizing for the incompleteness of these thoughts, it is still hard for me to get used to the format of blog writing--but I do apologize, there are some holes in this line of thinking that will be developed down the line.



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