Praeterita

  DUTCH SHOES, 27 inches high. Clay, wood, objects, charcoal, graphite Melissa Stern is a New York-based artist and writer who is exhibiting work at Firecat Projects in Chicago, in a solo show titled Does She or Doesn't She? The art consists of paintings, drawings, ceramic sculptures and found object assemblages, in all of which we see a common feature: hair. Specifically, a female face or head or form with the hair styled in every imaginable fashion (and probably some beyond imagining). The theme is both playful and serious. Serious, because the idea underpinning the subject matter is the way in which a woman's hair has, since time immemorial, been one of the key ways in which female identity is determined. The title of the show derives from an old advert for hair products, and the unsubtle message that when a woman "fixes" her hair, her personality is completed, which comes with the opposite corollary that "unfixed" hair leads to a socially incomplete wom...

It's actually eleven years and one day since I published my first post on this blog: that doesn't sound as bookendish as "decade", which clearly I forgot to celebrate a year ago. This is the text of what I published on December 21st, 2009: Praeterita was the title of the great English writer John Ruskin's reflections on his life. In a sense we are always looking backwards at things that are now past as soon as we try to describe our experience. Ruskin's choice of the Latin word, with its archaic and somewhat grandiose feeling, was well-suited to his manner of thought and his writing. I have chosen to echo it not just from philosophical principle, but because my work involves reflections on personal narrative - mostly a childhood growing up in an English mining town in the 1960s and 1970s. Ruskin also said that he would write "frankly, garrulously, and at ease; speaking of what it gives me joy to remember at any length I like ... and passing in total silen...

 I'm now entering my sixth month of teaching online classes from home. It's all been an enjoyable experience so far, with the exception of the reason for why we're all doing this, of course. And sometimes the participants in my classes send me photos, such as this great one of Tula the cat giving her owner the "why aren't you petting/feeding me?" look over the top of the laptop: Then here are the books created by someone in my Beginning Bookbinding class: And more by another person: Clockwise, from the bottom right: a 5-hole Japanese stab binding: a 9-hole Japanese stab binding; a mini-accordion fold book; a soft cover pamphlet stitch; and a hardcover book with a chain link stitch binding on the spine. As I've said in earlier posts, everyone is patient with the circumstances of this kind of teaching, both with the technology, and with each other (because everyone works at a slightly different pace). I also get the sense that I will continue to do online te...

Between 2011 and 2018 I was the Chicago correspondent for Hyperallergic , the New York-based art blog read throughout the global art world. This post is part of a series on my blog devoted to writing about artists in Chicago. Eden Unluata-Foley is a multi-discplinary artist based in Chicago. He is currently (summer 2020) taking part in a city-wide exhibition of public art called Art in Place , for which artists exhibit work outside their homes as a way to continue connecting their practice with the community during the extraordinary circumstances of a pandemic-induced social lockdown.  Unluata-Foley's work is a sculpture titled Staffs of Memories and Knowledge . All kinds of common and unusual objects (household items such as buckets, old cameras, a model car, a Moorish-style lamp, gourds, cans) are glued together in seemingly random chains around lengths of wood. The ensemble is then painted a uniform yellow that serves to harmonise the mix of items and render some of them difficu...

I've been working on painting lately that is in the same vein as the others I've posted (crows, hands, memories from childhood) but this stays more closely to the colour scheme of the original oil sketch, part of which is visible in the right hand side of the above photo. It also ends up being more representational and less abstract. Here too is a quick video compilation of the most recent session spent working on it:

I've returned to my studio a couple of times in the last few weeks (masked and wearing latex gloves whenever I am in the corridor of the studio building, or moving between building and car.) I took advantage of the new equipment I bought to setup my online classes to record a timelapse of me painting. The piece is a 5 feet x 4 feet canvas, brushing a texture layer of Prussian Blue over a ground of Naples Yellow. The video is a 60 second condensing of several hours of work. What interests me when I watch it is that I notice things that I'm only semi-conscious of during the painting process, such as how I vary the direction of the brush all the time, and the pressure, and the kinds of marks (linear vs. brushing), to create a lively surface.

I've started teaching some of my Printmaking and Book Arts classes online, an arrangement that I can see lasting at least into autumn, possibly beyond. The photo shows my setup: materials arranged on the cutting mat, laptop to my left on which I host the Zoom session for ten people, a ring light on a tripod for illumination, and my phone (mounted in the centre of the ring light) relaying a live feed of the table into the Zoom session, so the participants can see my hands as I demonstrate the different bookbinding techniques. In terms of equipment, the laptop and smartphone were things I already had, of course. I experimented with all kinds of software for connecting smartphone-live-feed to laptop, but in the end the simplest thing was just to get my phone to join the Zoom meeting as an extra participant, and then to highlight that 'box' on the Zoom screen. The ring light is the main new investment. I decided to fork over the extra money ($130) to buy the sixteen inch diamet...