He says it's garbage! They both look up at me on my ladder and grin hugely.

I hear his voice before I see him. I'm surprised.

They come over to me and with a little prompting he says hello, placing a cool small hand on mine and looking into my eyes as he tells me his name. He asks me directly why I'm doing this.

I don't think it's a question an adult would ask. They'll ask what it's for but not why. The candor I guess seems rude. A child doesn't consider rudeness, he just wants to know.

I feel the candor and it feels good. I don't think, just tell him sometimes you have an idea and you just have to go for it. Then I say I'm highlighting the building so people will notice it in a new way.

He looks at me with big eyes behind black framed glasses, his lime green t-shirt picking up on the soda machine behind.

Art is everywhere. Art is a point of view. Art is for everyone.

These are the thoughts underlying Heighten, my installation at the historic University Heights Center that treats the interior of this beloved, 110-year old former school building as a canvas for a vast, site-specific collage painting.

Rather than hanging paintings on the walls I treat all elements of the interior from the wood wainscoting and plaster walls to water fountains, signs, bulletin boards, light switches and vending machines as integral parts of the painting, "heightened" to call attention to them in a new way. My adult painting students were invited to join me in the painting and installing phases so that the work is collaborative and inclusive.

FARMER'S MARKET VISITING HOURS
Saturday, February 3
11-2

OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, February 17
6-8

CLOSING RECEPTION
Friday, March 16
6-8

LOCATION
University Heights Center
5031 University Way NE
Seattle, WA 98105

Heighten is being documented on film by Rodrigo Valenzuela

All are welcome!

I am up a ladder on the landing of the southwest stairs what are you doing the woman in purple asks passing by this is an installation I say oh you mean you're installing something she says yes I say will it be pretty she asks well I say indicating the walls with a sweeping gesture this is what it looks like, it's going to grow. Oh she says slightly incredulously you mean it grows at night? I say over the next weeks it's going to grow so keep checking back oh she says you mean like an art project she says yes I say you mean you're an artist yes I say ohhhhhhhh she says as if at last understanding has been reached and walks away smiling down the stairs.
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More Heighten updates here

Ellsworth Kelly, CurveXXI, Birchwood, 75 x 170 x 3/4", San Francisco Museum of Art / Anonymous Private Collection

I was also surprised to learn that he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, the same school most of my professors and the founder of the program I attended at Boston University got their rigorous training.
I admire how Mr. Kelly has stuck to himself (and his guns) all these years.

"To a great extent Jasper [Johns] is a literary artist," says Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, in today's New York Times article by Carol Vogel. "His work is coded with secret messages. Ellsworth is purely a visual artist. With Ellsworth there is no message, just an experience."

I marvel at the word "just" in this sentence. "Just" an experience? That's a mouthful. It's precisely the indescribable series of thoughts and sensations one gets standing in front of something rich and resonant to the eye that lies at the essence of visual art. Someone has to champion the purity of the visual as a language in and of itself, free of exposition, and Ellsworth Kelly follows this visual line with unwavering surety.

The way I see it his elegance is a byproduct of his clarity of thinking. Each idea is somehow necessary. Scanning his work on Google, that blue canvas had to happen, bent at 80°, as did those joined panels of red and green tapered to appear to be receding in perspective, or that tall piece of dark wood, apparently straight yet leading the eye ever so slightly windward at the top...these ideas existed and needed to be found and made visible.

To me they are humorous and sensual, too. While seemingly solemn in their formality and classical in their simplicity, his sculptural paintings embody the essence of sensuality and fun in their exuberant curiosity.

Again and again he finds, reduces, stops short of over-reduction, each solution containing what must be countless revisions and decisions to land it just right. As in any art that is well done, when the piece is finally real you accept its existence as somehow inevitable. The traces of hours and years and machinations and maneuvring that went into it are no longer visible and what remains is a beautiful visual fact.

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Ellsworth Kelly | Wood Sculptures
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
 
September 18, 2011 - March 4, 2012

True to His Abstraction
NYT article by Carol Vogel

Gradually I emerge from the grip of a nasty virus that found its way into my lungs. Not how I had hoped to start the year or spend the precious days off until I begin teaching again, but as always being sick has its lessons.

Such as...respect the virus. The virus is temporarily in charge, and when I try to override it by pretending it's not really there it lets me know about it in a way that is very humbling. Like massive coughing attacks and losing my voice, watery eyes and feeling generally like crawling into a ball. We've all been there.

Yesterday I decided to get serious and treat getting well as a job instead of a nuisance. That meant rounds of steaming with a towel over my head (and crushed herbs from the apartment garden that I had stuck in the freezer as an experiment, I don't know what they are but they smell good), hydrotherapy (dipping my feet alternately into hot and cold water to stimulate the immune system sure I'll try it), ginger root tea with squeezed lemon and raw honey (antimicrobial and antiviral, as are coconut oil and coconut water, I consume those too), glass after glass of water, and my new secret weapon: RAW GARLIC.

That stuff is powerful - I alternate bites with an apple and while it smells and kinda stings, it thins out mucous and I swear I can feel it launching a counterrattack on the enemy which shrivels and retreats, aaaaaaaahhh! Take that, nasty parasitic secret ruler of the planet.

Ahead of me: The first round of teaching drawing and painting at Julia's Studio, my teaching practice. Avid and talented students await and I'm looking forward to getting back into the thick of it with them. As I've written before, I get a lot out of the delving into the depths of process and technique that to me are integral to teaching and it feeds my studio practice in surprising ways. That said, it's always a challenge for me to balance studio time with teaching time, but I'm working on it.

In the studio, my major focus is on Heighten, my installation project at the University Heights Center in Seattle opening in February. My student crew and I had an excellent second day of painting...you can see and read more about it in the new page I've created specially for the project, which includes text and a lot of pictures I'll be updating as the piece develops.

Other projects in the works range from smaller to ambitious, including more collaborations and some that veer from the purely visual realm. Actually it's all ambitious. Because what's it all about if not to trust your most out-there ideas and work like a crazy person to realize what's in your head? Nobody's going to make you do it, notice if you don't do it, or do it for you. So you might as well go for it, or just hand over the keys to the virus.

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Heighten Journal

I step in to the iconic lobby and there, dangling like a sweater from a hand is a horse, dead and stuffed and majestically sad. The way it hangs is so undignified, both ends drooping as if it died that way (how would it have died that way?), the juxtaposition with the balletic spiral of the curving white walls so incongruous it almost inspires a laugh. Almost.

It's my last of five nights in New York City and I am sitting on the bed in the guest room after a last dinner with my hosts, musing over the Cattelan show I saw today - the layers of it, the outrageous imagery (the Pope laid low by an asteroid, Hitler kneeling as if in prayer but cross-armed and cartoonish, a grumpy bobblehead professor; the ship's prow/store mannequin bust of a woman, portrait-specific and staring while fondling her own bust), all adding up - to what? I had asked myself almost right away.

Because the second I see an artist hanging random stuff in a space a switch flips in my mind...stand by to determine if this eclectic collection amounts to anything meaningful or if it's a molehill of cleverness for the sake of its own shocking, random oddness.

Shocking random oddness doesn't interest me.

It has to add up to something.

I kept walking, very slowly, looking up as I turned the first spiral, taking in a giant newspaper, a black man kneeling, head covered, a white boy hanging by the neck, a fake tree on its own cubic planet of carpeted dirt, glimpses of toys and more animals and signs and photographs peripherally, without knowing what they meant, yet somehow inhaling an overall sense of their quality and their meaning, as if they pulsated electric waves of intent.

Next to the elephant covered in a sheet like a kid playing ghost, in front of the open casket, a handsome docent smiled then sweetly informed me that the elephant's sheet did not, as many thought, refer to the Klan, that the man in the coffin was JFK with his feet bare so that despite having died with his boots on (as "they used to say in old times") he might go to heaven, and that the young woman strapped arms overhead and face away in her box was an artist friend who had killed herself.

As soon as I politely could I excused myself. He was trying to be helpful but I didn't want to hear, I didn't want to know, especially in case it was misinformation (in the catalogue, which I glanced at later, I saw no reference to a suicide), I didn't want my raw experience influenced; I wanted to see for myself. To me the measure of a piece is often in how well it reads with no support, how much comes across without verbal assistance.

I enjoyed how many things I could see for myself and interpret with no explication. Individual pieces impressed me in the fullness of their conceptual realization as I stared and slowly made sense of them. A couple made me literally gasp, such as the granite monument engraved with the names not of soldiers but of European soccer scores; this alone was worth the admission. I could only imagine its power in the original context.

In fact, it's precisely the raw first visual impression from the lobby that stays with me even now as I sit here in my room in my host's beautiful loft, typing this with one finger on my iPhone.

Something happened as I gazed up from ground level, ignorant of any information about the artist, at the eclectic collection of elements cavalcading above my head. Almost immediately, I was struck by a distinct sense of the Italianness of it all - the crusts of history, the world view from the Boot, from the entrenched depth of ages, of colossal sculptures (here, cathartically snapped off fingers flip the bird in Carrara marble), of appliances cobbled into ancient dwellings (the menopausal woman in the fridge), the weight of Romans to Renaissance, the hypocrisy of absolute religion and most of all, the embarrassment and lingering pain of WWII, couched in so shallow a grave as to haunt the living still.

It's a dark and melancholy show, deeply funny, political and personal and therefore universal, yet despite what resonates on this broader level, inescapably, specifically Italian.

On a round cushioned pouffe I sat and charged my phone and admired the delicate bones of Mr. Wright's design. It stands, as always, curiously removed from whatever you mount inside it, its odd tri-corners and elegant bands interested really only in themselves. Yet Mr. Cattelan has his way with the famous space, boldly and with wit, and the pair of them together held me there, engrossed, for hours.

This was not shocking random oddness hanging from the ceiling. It was the greatest hits encapsulation of a fearless, funny commentator, each part springing with meaning. They collude in a sly play on the idea of a retrospective that interacts with the unique space and swirls into a whole, new and resonant and full-blooded.