Altered Border States

Altered Border States, 2009. 16"x5.25" watercolor

You may recognize the hill on the right from Ms. Moments of Clarity's post. She's very prolific, so it was a long time ago that she put it up.

This continues my series on marks and signs found in my environment. In this case, an ominous [literal] sign—courtesy of the Parks Department— completely transformed my sense of the landscape in front of me that day. The innocent landscape was instantly a place of unease. And yet, the sign was also intrinsically ridiculous.

In preparing for the painting, I was stitching images in Photoshop, and realized that each layer I added obscured something below in the previous. So, my obscured images might include armies of "illegals," and you would never know. Just as I couldn't know, as I stood there painting plein air, if there was a band of drug smugglers camped on the back side of that hill in front of me. And I realized that the stitched image had become a metaphor for my experience of the altered landscape: it became disjointed, a landscape reframed as something else, something alien.

It is a part of this series that I reproduce something in the landscape that is already a man-made mark. These marks are art in its most basic form: artifice, for the purpose of expressing communication. So, the series is about making a mark about an encounter with another mark. But, the medium (pretty traditional watercolor) is used to signify the traditions of fine art and the art industry: my expressions of other's signs, images and scribbles found in passing through the world, becomes—not without irony—art "for the gallery."

Blog in a bog

A work in progress

What's been going on? Too much to mention.

But I had what I think is an insight the other day, as I was talking to Ms. Moments of Clarity. We were talking about two artists we were both familiar with. One is a well-known name in southwest art, the other, an up and coming contemporary of ours. In a magazine Melinda was thumbing, we saw a work of the latter's in an ad on one page, and one of the former's on another page.

The contemporary's work was an image from imagination, which was (we surmised) intended to whimsically convey child-like joy, a young person ready to take on the world. The well-known's was a social comment, delivered as nearly a characature, complete with a word balloon.

But we were both struck by how 'off key' the contemporary's piece felt: the figure was distorted, with a neck too long, and the rendering lacked depth. A painting from the mind's eye. The well-known's was unselfconsciously whimsical, ironic and captivating. A painting from emotion.

It reminded me of an article I read at Huffingtonpost.com by an acting coach on why Gov. Bobby Jindal's response speech to President Obama's was such a failure:

"In life we have thoughts and feelings and then we find the words to express those thoughts and feelings. It is a straight line. In acting as in public speaking, we start with the words. What should the great actor and the great orator do? They should find the thoughts feelings [sic] that make them need to say these words...

"What Jindal did is focus on How he wanted to come across. In acting I call this a General Attitudinal Choice. He thought of the effect he wanted to have on the audience. He wanted to come across as likable and friendly. He wanted the audience to think that he is a good guy, so he adopted a general demeanor of kind and empathetic. This is why he came off as condescending. No matter what he talked about the the pose was the same. He was trying to project his idea of a warm and friendly guy. Therefore he came off as patronizing."

It struck me that these two statements about "trying to come across as something" versus "trying to get across an idea" are the differences we saw in the paintings: and this is what everyone seems to be talking about when they say "art needs to be authentic."

A distinction I will struggle with, in completing the painting above.