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Process Study: Land of the Above

6/30/2015

This process study focuses on another cornerstone piece of my BFA portfolio, Perpetual Pursuit: Painting the Unattainable, Land of the Above. The piece is for sale for $700; see the full product detail here.

Land of the Above began with a suggestion from critique. Professors and peers were pushing me to jump more wholeheartedly into the realm of 3D. In short, if you're going to do it, do it right. They said that some of my other pieces felt tentative, and it would be nice to have something more deliberately and obviously in the realm of the third dimension. Here is the process that ensued...

1. Make a Model

When I made this design in Sketchup, a 3D modeling software, I barely knew how to use the program. I had taken an architecture class in high school I admittedly payed little attention to, and my Sketchup skills were limited to my shoddy performance over 3 years prior. But I was dead-set on using it, as drawing the form wouldn't really allow me to change my mind and re-evaluate the composition the way I wanted. Sketchup would be much easier... that is, if you know how to use it. Making this admittedly basic form (compared to what Sketchup can do) took hours of frustration and mumbling foul language at the computer. After I finished what you see here, I used proportions to attach numbers to each plane, which ended up being down to fractions of an inch.

2. Realize the Form

This is what the form looked like, gessoed but unpainted. It barely fit in my studio, and I had to hang it specially. In order to paint the overhead shadowbox, I had to stand on a chair and turn my head awkwardly skyward, Michelangelo-style.

3. Begin the Painting Process

I distinctly remember this painting process being a difficult one. Part it could have been that it was crunch time in the semester, but it was more than just that: this was the first "painting" I'd done that, even its its blank-panel stage, already had a composition-- a 3 dimensional one. Even thought the panel didn't have any paint on it, it wasn't really blank. With largely 2 dimensional works, the painting part can speak for itself. After all, that is the main element. But with this piece, I had a hard time not overdoing the painting. I had a hard time stopping. My studio mate and sanity-keeper Louise Thompson begged to me leave the graphite sketches of a curtain-like form you can see to the right of the staircase untreated. I wasn't convinced, but I ended up leaving the painting be. For weeks. Maybe even a month, which I basically never do. But I was stuck.

And to make matters worse, I had another, more complicated problem: lighting. The shadowbox, "cutout" form in the upper right hand of the panel looks green, right? Only I had painted it blue. It needed to be blue, as this color is essential to my concept. I wanted the viewer to WANT to access this unreachable (both literally and figuratively) bluespace. Which, frankly, doesn't work if it's green. And it's hard to make something appear to be bright when it's quite literally in shadow. And how are you going to light that plane in the gallery?, everyone asked. I had no idea.

4. Problem Solving

5. Display

Two crucial things happened in this phase:

I had to deal with the overhead shadowbox situation. Many ideas were suggested, most of which freaked me out. The scariest involved cutting out the overhead shadowbox altogether (it's made of wood, so this would involve some pretty powerful and precise power tools I did not feel comfortable operating) and replacing it with a sheet of vellum, behind which I could shine a light. Instead, I went with a brilliant suggestion from a classmate, Jen O'Connell. Jen said, "why don't you just paint the shadowbox to look bright?" In other words, overcompensate for the cast shadow by painting the area so bright it ended up looking the way I wanted it to. This is what I ended up doing. If you looked at my palette at the very color I used to paint the overhead shadowbox, it actually looked very different than what you see in the painting. Optical illusions, man.
As you can see on the leftmost photograph, I added a deep cerulean blue to emphasize the left edge of the staircase and diversify the color palette.

Finally, in the gallery, I hung the piece way above eye level, so the viewer had to look up and into the bluespace. This decision spoke to the work's conceptual ties with ascension, one of the few constants that remained unchanged in the execution of the piece.

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Process Study: Staircase in Blue

6/24/2015

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I've been wanting to do a "process study" series for awhile now: that is, to create a visual narrative to demonstrate how decisions are made in the studio. For this entry, I'll focus on "Staircase in Blue," one of my first 3-dimensional staircases. While it is displayed on a pedestal, earning it the official title of a sculpture, the piece is essentially comprised of five thick, stacked panels. So you could almost think of it as five miniature paintings, arranged to take on the form of a staircase. Like many of my works in the Perpetual Pursuit series, this element allowed the object to walk the line between painting and sculpture.

Here is a step-by-step process of how this piece came to fruition (at least as much as we can reduce the whole fine art endeavor to linear steps):

1. Make a Drawing

2. Create the Form

3. Realize

First, I'll make a drawing. Which unfortunately does involve math. I plotted out how I wanted the forms to look, and then used a scale to attach numbers to the forms. I like to make the shapes first so I have an idea of how I want things to look proportionally before I dive into numbers land. For this piece, I initially thought I would make three blocks, or "steps," though I later later this approach didn't look visually enough like a staircase. The evolution of this decision making can be seen in the sketch on the right.

This is what the form looked like when it was actually made. Constructed out of plywood, I was able to arrange the stacked rectangles to give each "step" the appearance of twisting, like a winding staircase. The texture on the surface consists of repurposed studio materials, or what I like to call "artistic waste." This material in particular falls under the category of palette scrapings, which is what I call recycled paint that has been scraped from a painter's palette and reattached to another surface. In the studio, I save used paint and categorize them by color and texture. Similar hues of blue are grouped together on each step to create a gradient. Finally, I like to concentrate the majority of the texture on the side that appears to be rotating, drawing the viewer's attention to this edge. When the form is painted later, I will further emphasize this area.

4. Reassess

After painting the form on the left, I still wasn't quite happy with it. It appeared stumpy--almost squat--and after asking a few classmates' opinions, we agreed it needed a couple more steps. I thought this adjustment would 1) make the piece more aesthetically pleasing and 2) create a form that looks more like a staircase. After figuring out the dimensions of two more blocks, I attached them to the form to create the image on the right. The white texture faintly evident on the horizontal plane is molding paste, which I often use to create texture in my work. In the next step, you will see this element with more contrast, as I ultimately draw over the medium with graphite pencils. This takes hours, and can be quite meditative (I usually break out the This American Life podcasts for this step).

5. Finalizing & Display

From left to right, this is what the final piece looks like in the round (i.e. walking around the piece in the gallery).

Several things happened to get to this stage:

I finished painting the form. The ochre (orange-looking) color alongside the artistic waste was chosen to emphasize that edge, as orange is blue's complementary color.
I had a pedestal custom made to suit the piece. I wanted it to not only be the right height (so the object would be eye-level with most viewers), but also the right width as to appear to be the next "step" should the staircase continue downward.
Continue the artistic waste onto the pedestal: the main reason I wanted to have my own pedestal (as opposed to borrowing one from UNC Asheville's art department) was so I could have the artistic waste/ palette scraping texture drip down from the piece. I wanted this to be part of the sculpture's display, and galleries don't tend to like it if you mess with their pedestals. I think the idea stemmed from critique, and I loved the prospect of drawing more attention to the artistic waste element. To match the color perfectly, I ended up "manufacturing" artistic waste; in other words, I mixed up the exact color in oil paint, let it dry (this takes a few days), then scraped it up and reapplied it to the pedestal. Ultimately, I think this visual decision really adds to the piece.

6. Recognition

Staircase in Blue ended up placing first in Art Front's 48th Annual Juried Exhibition! The work is for sale for $350 (pedestal included). See the full product detail here.