2008 – Page 5 – Deidre Adams

Kwang-Young Chun, Aggregations

Aggregation 04-ma023, ©Kwang Young Chun

This summer I’m taking a class called Hand Papermaking for Artists. It’s being taught by one of my favorite teachers at MSCD, Bonnie Ferrill Roman, who is also a fabulous artist. She uses handmade paper, branches, and other objects from nature in her sculpture work.

The class has been a lot of fun and very informative so far. In addition to hands-on experimentation with different ways of making and using paper (who knew there were so many!), the class also requires doing research on papermaking and artists who work in this media. I had to do a short research paper on an artist of my choice, and I chose Kwang-Young Chun. For several months, I have had a page with a large image of one his works torn from an issue of Artforum pinned up on my design wall. I’ve been looking at it for a long time because I find it fascinating, but now this research paper has provided a good impetus to find out more about his work and process.

Chun is a Korean artist who makes his work by wrapping small styrofoam triangles in mulberry paper taken from old books that he buys in large quantities and stores in an air-conditioned warehouse. After wrapping, each piece is tied with more paper that has been twisted into a narrow rope. Hundreds or thousands of these units are then combined into larger constructions, which might take the form of huge free-standing sculptures or low-relief wall pieces. See more of his work here, and a fabulous close-up detail here.

The areas that look like craters are created with trompe l’oeil effects rendered by varying the size and shading of the units in different areas of the piece. This is the kind of work that I find immensely satisfying. I love to imagine the endless hours and hours of patient, meditative process, wrapping and tying, and meticulous fitting of the thousands of pieces into a coherent, cohesive whole. The idea that someone would choose to spend his time in this way instead of sitting in front of a television or in a shopping mall gives me a great sense of hope and well being.

July 6th, 2008|Inspiration, School|3 Comments

Back in the studio

Untitled, ©2008 Deidre Adams

After a bit of a hiatus, I’m so happy to finally get some time to go back into the studio, as of yesterday. This is a shot of a piece I started a long time ago but haven’t had time to work on. Yesterday I finally sat down and finished the quilting, about a full 8 hours’ worth or more. I don’t do the entire 8 hours in one sitting; that would be a bit excessive. The time is broken up by meals, trips downstairs to do laundry or let the can in/out, and once, to see the latest present she brought us (more about that later).

This is how a piece looks after quilting but before blocking, full of lumps and bumps and wonderful (at least to me) texture. The next step is to throw it in the washer to equalize the stitching, then I’ll pin it up to the design wall to dry and thus flatten it out. I almost wish I could leave it bumpy, but I haven’t become that independent in my art making just yet. I still worry too much about what others think.

I know I’m not the only artist who is conflicted by the dilemma of how best to balance the drive to make art and the drive to avoid being broke. This is partly why I haven’t written a post in a while. I’ve been in a sort of paralyzed, deer-in-the-headlights state trying to figure out what I should do with my life. This is how the inner conversation goes:

Self 1: “You’re an artist. What are you doing wasting time at this job doing stuff that doesn’t really have anything to do with who you are in life when you could be in the studio developing your work? Who knows how many good years you’ve got left?”

Self 2: “That’s just crazy talk. How can you even think of quitting when the future is so uncertain? The economy is tanking — what if you end up homeless? Even in the best of circumstances, you’ll have no money to travel or do anything fun. Besides, it’s really a fantastic job — the people are great to work with, the pay is good, and you have security.”

Self 1: “Well ya know, you’re not getting any younger. If you don’t do something soon, before you know it, you’ll just end up being a tired old lady sitting in a cube, staring at a computer screen, wondering where your life went.”

Self 2: “But we have a 15-year-old who’s going to college in 2 years. It’s become glaringly apparent that he’s not likely to be getting a full-ride scholarship anywhere, so how will we pay for that if you’re unemployed?”

And so on and so forth, round and round. But this past week, Self 1 finally won out. I finally got the courage to tell my supervisor I’m leaving. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted it. Besides giving up a great job, my supervisor is one of my best friends, and I’ll miss talking with her on an almost-daily basis. But the future is wide open now, so it’s sink or swim!

June 29th, 2008|Work in progress|11 Comments

The self-portrait: Part II

As mentioned in an earlier post, the self-portrait is a very common assignment for art school studio classes. This is one that I did in Painting II last fall. The direction called for making a “psychological” self-portrait. Despite my tendency to agonize over these things and want to read in more than is really there, I do think this came out pretty good and so I use it as a kind of signature image here on the blog and in other places when needed.

If you’re not super-comfortable with your appearance, it can be rather disconcerting to have to stare at your own face for long periods of time. It does help to do it from a photo rather than a mirror, because after awhile it just becomes shapes and values that you are trying to reproduce in a painting, and you can stop obsessing about the strangeness of it. I was working from a printed version of the image below, which I created by montaging a photo I took with a self-timer together with a photo of the side of a train car & a pencil drawing of a quilting pattern from my sketchbook.

You can see that I didn’t get the eyes & eyebrows quite right, but I was very absorbed in thinking about the colors and having fun with the brushwork, and I was not too concerned with making a perfect copy.

This self-portrait shows a big improvement over the one I did in Painting I, which I’m only showing here (left) very tiny because it is so Lame (yes, with a capital “L”).

May 30th, 2008|Painting, School|1 Comment