What excites you most about your most recent work?
I am excited about my summer project because it’s collaboration with two remarkable poets, Charlene Spearen and Julia Koets, as well as Carolina undergraduate student Natalie Askew. She is only twenty and initiated the project this past spring. The project has been a true collaboration from the start to the finish. The work doesn’t look like my work or her work. It is our work.
Natalie has a very unique artistic voice. She brought me her sketchbook to review this past spring. After reviewing it, I realized that there weren’t any undergraduate art classes that could in tandem address her particular artistic and academic interests with the amount of depth I could see she was yearning to. So when she came to me with the idea for the Fire and Transformation project, and asked that I be her mentor, I saw an opportunity to foster a research project that would address her needs. Each of us has worked on the project for 400 plus hours. It has been a unique opportunity to see the tremendous artistic growth that she has experienced this past summer while working on a comprehensive project. Her dedication has been inspiring, and I feel moved when I see the positive impact that it is having on her life.
What do you find most appealing about the arts community at Carolina?
I like that there are a lot of organized grass root projects.
How do you see your work relating to other arts disciplines besides your own?
My work is very figurative and theatrical, and I am interested in storytelling with the images I create. All of the design, format, artistic, and media decisions that I make are always in service to the story, so I would have to say theater and creative writing.
What artist in your field, living or dead, do you admire most, and why?
Vincent Van Gogh. I truly love all of the post-impressionists, but he is my favorite. I am amazed by the amount of work that he created in such a short lifetime. In particular, I am very interested in his drawings, because of the unique mark making plus the sense of pattern & abstraction. In all of his work he is continually merging the perceptual world with a sophisticated symbolic visual language.
I believe that the basic shape relationships within the pictorial design of a painting creates an underlying abstract space from which ideas are communicated, perceived spontaneously and intuitively by the viewer. The content of this preconscious reaction defines the overall perceptual experience symbolically. Vincent Van Gogh frequently employs the use of a perpendicular triangle shape composed half way up from the bottom of a canvas to indicate the ground in several landscape paintings. A half circle indicating the tree line encompasses this shape, and the direction of the curve at the edges of the canvas implies that it continues. Above the half circle is a horizontal rectangle indicating the sky. These shapes have symbolic implications separately and within their relationship to each other. A triangle denotes a sense of purpose and when pointed upwards, transcendence. A circle denotes the eternal and wholeness, and a horizontal rectangle denotes stability, peace, and rest. With this in mind, Van Gogh’s landscapes possess a selection and organization of shapes that psychologically makes viewers feel good. With the simplistic content of the shapes it is implied that the viewer is part of a secure, purposeful, and hopeful cosmos.
If you had a million dollars to give away, what would you do with it?
I would donate it to a community in need of an art center so that one could be constructed in order to offer after school programming in the arts for children & youth.
What kind of place do you think art has - or should have - in the larger global community?
Art is everywhere. It is in everyone’s lives - clothing, architecture, dinnerware, movies, video games, jewelry, etc. Artists are very important to all cultures throughout history. And how does what you do in the classroom connect to the larger world? I introduce students to art & design from diverse cultures, both contemporary and historical. The very essence of art & design is visual communication, and great art & design can create markets or uphold societal mores. It is my hope that students begin to understand art & design as a form of visual language and learn to view visual culture objectively in order to discern artistic intentions.
What's the last book you read, and what did you think of it?
We were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates. I love the accessibility and directness of her writing.
Tell us about your work in progress - what can we expect from you next?
Hum…. |
