Plasticene Choreography

Continuing to make steady progress in my one-day-a-week marathon.

I think this is some of the hardest modeling I have ever done. It's not that the forms are particularly hard (although the grape leaves are no picnic), as much as the composition is so complex, and working with plasticine is so slow. Changes can't be made quickly, which means I need to visualize a lot of moving parts that I can't actually see, which always makes me nervous. I have come to be very suspicious of what I think will work vs. what I can see is working. The closest analogy I can draw in my own experience is my limited experience with choreography - trying to compose multiple movements on dancers in space as they overlap in time turned out to be one of the hardest creative exercises I have ever encountered. Particularly because, at the time I refused to use video recording. In those days, I was still more willing to trust what I thought than what I could see.

 

As I get close to the bottom, I'm having to figure out what that space is like. Does it remain a constant tangle all the way to the bottom, or does the addition of the fisher cat and the chicken require a more rational, dimensional, space? Questions like that keep me up at night.

New Business Model

For the time being, I have decided to limit the scope of this blog to the (more or less) present. I've been feeling a little anxious about the amount of information I'm leaving in my wake, and have decided to  make my digital life a bit more like my actual life; things happen, and then they go.

State Of The Arts

Watch Jed Morfit, artist on PBS. See more from State of the Arts.

Produced by the excellent Susan Wallner. Thank you Susan!

Nice Review Of The Abington Show

Just found out that the show at Abington was reviewed by Victoria Donohoe for the Inquirer.

Here's the link to the article in Philly.com, and the review follows.

Adventurous work from four soloists at Abington Art Center

May 27, 2011|By Victoria Donohoe, For The Inquirer

The increasing authority its curated "Solo Series" exhibitions of regional art have won for the Abington Art Center is reflected in their progressively more adventurous character.

Abington's current show by four soloists is an excellent example. It doesn't genuflect before tradition, yet in several instances takes as much notice of life as of art. And like its predecessors, it has a good long run of 2 1/2 months, a rarity for contemporary work in our region.

Front and center is Jedediah Morfit, who impresses because he possesses a genuine vision. He shrewdly downplays art as a vehicle for artistic self-expression, preferring to develop, in thought-provoking ways, panoramic scenes of fragmentation - of human figures, animals, and objects - portrayed in white sculptured ceramic reliefs, with achingly exact technique. Mundane aspects of everyday life mix with humor, fantasy, and the surreal. Shopping carts at the supermarket are pushed by an old woman, a gorilla, and a pig, amid mayhem.

In a less vociferous sculpture, Morfit more broadly patterns the image in a direct way, without losing the mood to decorative detail.

Significantly, in addressing directly some of the effects of our shopping-mall culture, Morfit manages to render the topical into the timeless, something very few socially aware artists are doing today. Somehow formats like his remind me of Dante's passage from Purgatory into Paradise, even though it's our 21st-century world that's being portrayed.

Another soloist, Thomas Vance, reanimates abstraction with his richly colorful, geometrically abstract paintings. Their inclusion of wood grain, tree forms, and architect's blueprints suggests a balance between nature and the built environment in paintings nuanced and easy on the eyes.

EJ Herczyk pulls out all the stops with two sets of multi-paneled works combining pixel-based and hand-painted imagery - "landscapes of data" that have a commanding presence. Viewing these glistening wall-size works - one 15-piece set dark and the other less so - we gradually realize that their true subject is the rigorous yet informal balance Herczyk creates with his big, broad paintbrush, even as it meets a certain amount of initial resistance from the pixels.

Eva Mantell, perturbed that people continue to be reckless about what they discard, presents a kind of modest tribute to used paper coffee cups. She associates each cup with the individual who held it, then put it to his or her lips. Individuality is stressed, as Mantell imaginatively recycled a trove of such cups to make her point. Take a look.