JcSparks.com

Part of the curriculum at the New York Academy of Art requires students to do a bit of writing. I thought I’d take the opportunity to give myself a bit of context on the contemporary art world from a historical perspective. Art really is in a denegrated and marginalized position at the moment. Eric Fischl talks about how this is leading to a sort of visual illiteracy in the general public. Anyhow, while not terribly uplifing reading, I feel it’s pretty fair accounting of how art was viewed 700 years ago and how that view has changed over time. If anyone out there actually does bother to read it, I’d love to hear what you think (even if you disagree).

The Exile of High Art and the Effect on the Picture Plane (PDF).

– Jeremy

I’m feeling a little burned out. I think I leave for Porland next week… but there is still work to be done here in NYC. Here’s a few images for you…

This one is from the Painting III class with Steven Assael. It’s a full chromatic palette, direct painting. I think this was the third week we had to work on this painting.

I think it’s interesting to compare that last image with this one. From Alyssa Monks’ Painting the Flesh class. This is a multi-week indirect painting done with a dead palette.

Arguing the merits of direct versus indirect painting is left as an exercise for the reader. Although in truth most of the painting in Alyssa’s class was also done in a direct manner, I just added a couch (thin glaze into which opaque colors are added, wet-into-wet) at the end to unify things and push some of the highlights.

This last image is from the open form exercise in Martha Erlebacher’s History of Painting Techniques class. This was a particularly difficult exercise for me and Martha still claims that my finished painting was too volumetric. Which sounds so odd to my ears, particularly coming from Martha. But if you don’t know Martha or haven’t been to the New York Academy of Art I guess you wouldn’t know what I mean. Trust me when I say the program here is all about modeling form.

That’s really about it for the semester. I’ve got a couple of make up classes next week (Ecorche mostly) and a big group critique this weekend. Then it’s home for a month of decompression and preparation for the final semster. Oh, and I’ve got a bit of computer work lined up for the break too…

– Jeremy

As I sit here preparing to go sing at the Lessons and Carols convo for the third year running, I looked back in the blog to recall whether or not I wrote about the experience last year. Sure enough, I did. What surprised me, though, was how similar my life was last year at this time to what I am doing now.

A year ago, the night before Lessons and Carols, I went to choir practice, ran over to yoga, and got started on holiday baking. The next day, I wrote up a little blog post and baked pumpkin and eggnog breads to take to the holiday party at work.

This year, the only difference is that I’m making Bill Granger’s coconut bread instead of eggnog bread, and don’t plan to start baking cookies until this weekend.

Oh, and the most important difference of all: Last year Lessons and Carols took place 9 days before Jeremy came home for Christmas, but this year he’ll be here in a week! If only I could make the time pass more quickly—this waiting thing is killing me…

I haven’t posted a picture of my ecorche in a while. Here I’ve added the muscles of the lower leg and cleaned up a few of the thigh muscles a bit. I’ve also added the latissimus dorsi. Work on this has been an interesting experience. It really is quite useful to have a tactile memory of the major muscles of the body. It is an extremely rewarding exercise and I am really looking forward to doing a larger and more elaborate ecorche in the future.

As I mentioned previously, we’ve been working on an open-form painting for the final assignment in Martha’s History of Painting Techniques class. I really was having difficulty in losing the contour of the form. By the end of the class I really just felt like I was assaulting the canvas. It has an interesting quality and I was really starting to build up some beautiful impasto. I believe we’ll have one more week to work on these paintings; it will be interesting to see if I can work out the balance between a mark-making vernacular and still have an aesthetic representation.

– Jeremy