Artifact Narrative

First in a series of new images: "Artifact Narrative".

Spiral Construction

A Spiral Construction in three stages made from found objects on our property. Approximately 72 inches high x 36 inches wide x 36 inches deep.

Robert Morris University Faculty Show

I started teaching a course at Robert Morris University several weeks ago. The course is Portfolio, a class for Senior Graphic & Web Design students. As you might imagine, the objective of the course is to prepare the "Final Portfolio" which will be used to get a job or to get into Graduate School.

RMU is having a Faculty Show on September 25, and I've been working on preparing my entries for the show. I settled on submitting a collection of work that will include both Fine Art  as well as Design related work. In the Fine Art category I'm submitting a photograph, a mixed media piece, and the drawing shown above. The drawing titled "Heroes" depicts three of my favorite people: John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Ayn Rand. Keynes the famous British Economist advocated among other things that markets and the private sector operate best without state intervention, this fits my independent political views. Schumpeter is the Austrian economist, former Harvard Professor who borrowed the phrase "creative destruction" from Karl Marx and gave it a capitalist twist. By Schumpeter's definition, "creative destruction" is a process in which old ways of doing things are destroyed and replaced by new ways—the Silicon Valley set are famous for using this phrase. This idea forms the basis of entrepeneurial capitalism—again, something dear to my heart. And then there is Ayn Rand. Well, I loved "Fountainhead" and in particular, the fictional character Howard Roark, the architect who choses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic ideals. I can't say that I've ever actually done that, but I do admire the thought.

This piece is actually an archival digital print, 24 x 18 inches, and is a composite made from three separate drawings in sketchbooks. I scanned the drawings, did a "live trace" in Adobe Illustrator--converting them to "vector art" so that I could manipulate the paths and line weights. I then opened an EPS of the Illustrator file in Photoshop, created a Quadtone image, primarily so that I could create a super-rich black. The print has tremendous depth of tone— a very dark brown/black. This is being framed now along with the other work which I'll post later.

Max Bill Quote by James Moran

Time Trials

OK, so speed isn't necessarily the most important thing in art, but this is an example of a painting done in under two minutes on a moving bus.

In the late 80's I was on a bus tour of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales with Margaret, Evan and my parents.  I constantly found myself observing beautiful landscapes through the window of the moving bus. So I set up my little sketch book, a 4 x 5 inch mini, and my watercolors, and after looking at a landscape as we passed it, tried to memorize the details of a scene. In this case, a lovely rural landscape on the road from Edinburgh to Leith. This little exercise of taking "mind photographs", then putting them onto paper became a favorite pastime of mine on the trip and sharpened my observational skills. Try it. It's a fun exercise, but you've only got two minutes!