Living Life with Art

Rumination: The act or process of chewing cud.

Experiencing art as a digital blip on a small screen is anachronism to me. I'm skeptical about using fast technologies to share slow processes and thoughts. Even with the sound off (and it seldom is), the digital world is a noisy, frantic place; my sensibilities have more in common with a grazing cow than a computer screen. But here I am - off we go!

Art asks questions, inspires long thoughts, remembers things, tells stories, observes. It engages with beauty and mystery, humor and delight, with anger and pain and grace. Artworks come to us always as bearers of an idea with a particular point of view, but the insights that they carry and the lens that they offer aren't always obvious at a glance. Sometimes the only way to receive them is to live with them for awhile, to use them, move them around, find their edges and soft spots. To let them climb into your head and crawl around under your skin. Nuance, inflection, intuition – these things take time. It takes time to make a piece of art and it takes time to encounter it too.

The daily repetition of engaging with artwork in the real world around you provides that kind of time, and it changes you, it wakes you up. Mixing bread dough in a bowl that was turned on a potter's wheel by a friend, stirring soup with a smooth wooden spoon carved by my son, climbing into bed under a quilt that I made by hand, laughing with friends over a new painting in the studio - that's how living life with art works for us. It's a way to pay attention as we move through the real world.

In the instant it takes to click through to the next screen, a person is only able to register a quick impression of what they see – like it, pin it, pass it by. That's not how we do things here. I'm hopeful that what you see and read here at the Farmhouse will encourage you to pause, look around, and take in the things around you that are beautiful and hopeful, things that engage your senses and and make your fingers itch to do something real with your hands. We want to make you chuckle or take a walk or listen deeply to a story being told. Rumination leads down unexpected paths – green pastures, still waters, restoration of the weary, overstimulated soul.

Comments

Making Fun

Funny : 1. intended to arouse laughter or amusement 2. suspiciously odd or curious I’ve made pictures since early childhood, and from the very beginning I delighted in making fun of everything. Premature exposure to Monty Python and the Holy Grail certainly nurtured the impulse. I tried so hard to be serious, but nature would out. In art school I did my best to be brooding and dark. Art history taught me that mankind’s greatest painting pretty much boiled down to two things: 1. Earnest religious scenes 2. Modern existential randomness. Painting was supposed to be deadly serious. Especially modern art - so VERY serious - but who wants to look at it, really? Of course there are geniuses that stand out and whose work I love, but as a whole, ugh. It’s cathartic (or profitable) for the artist, but man, so grim. When I graduated, my angst-y paintings had kind of run their course. There were only so many naked, monolithic, tortured, monoch...

Tintin and the Adventures of the Influenced Artist

Thundering Typhoons : an exclamation of dismay. When I was a child one of my favorite things was Hergé’s Tintin series; I read these graphic novels over and over again till the books were falling apart. Tintin is a young reporter who has swashbuckling adventures, visits mysterious tombs and secret places, outwits bad guys, and ends up in chase scenes through exotic city markets all over the world. The first one I read was called Tintin in Tibet. By the time I was twelve I had read almost all of them . When I went off to art school and then became an artist, I forgot about Tintin , but ten years later I had kids of my own and I pulled them out again. The boys never got tired of hearing me read Tintin in funny accents and voices and it wasn’t unusual to hear one of them holler “Thundering typhoons” as they raced around outside on adventures. Now I’m thinking about Tintin not as great reading, but as great art...

Stop Motion

Animation : To fill with life. It is abundantly clear in my stop motion work that I have no formal training in animation. I come to stop motion by way of live puppetry, years and years of physically moving handmade figures of various sizes and kinds through actual (usually cramped) physical space. I can't physically handle the big puppets anymore but stop motion has become a happy alternative. In the late 70's when I began, puppetry was a very small niche on the sidelines of live theater and early television; I've enjoyed watching as the form has shifted and changed, becoming part of the visual vocabulary of the culture. I admire and appreciate the work of artists like Nick Park, Wes Anderson, and Tim Burton, and I look forward to each new film as it appears after years of painstaking work on the part of hundreds of amazing, artists, editors, and animators. The films they create, with their flawless natural movement and perfect miniature worlds, is astonishin...

Living Life With Art

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