Happy New Year! I’ve been hard at work painting a painted turtle; it was a beast to draw and quite demanding to paint as well because of all of the pattern and detail.
I met this baby painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) while biking the Adams Homestead and Nature Preserve - I felt very lucky to have spotted its dollar-coin-sized stature along the trail!
This is Velocity, acrylic on basswood panel, 14x14x1.5”, 2021.
In my last ceramics blog post, I shared a range of planters I’ve created. (When I use the term “planter” for my own ceramic work, I am specifying that I have crafted them with drainage holes. I haven’t done so yet, but if I were to create a piece without drainage holes to house a plant, I’d call it a “cache pot.”)
I am most interested in making planters because of my extensive plant collection, so I’d say that for every non-planter piece I make, I make four planters. But I have made other pieces, including vases and bowls! Here are a few examples. The three vases all make use of my experimental embedding of iron oxide chunks, so they’re glazed in a “clear” that appears as a transparent tan.
Well, we submitted final grades last week and we’re officially moving on to preparations for next semester! I will be teaching Painting I/II, Graphic Design I, Graphic Design Internship, and Senior Art Seminar for Spring 2021.
Back in January, I began to try to learn about the discipline of ceramics for professional development as an administrator and artist (and maybe even further down the line it’ll be a course I feel capable of teaching, too)! Of course, the pandemic descended right after we had begun to kiln fire and we went remote mid-spring so then there was no more firing for a time which was a barrier to progress.
You may remember my blog post titled Pandemic Productivity which I wrote toward the end of March discussing this topic, and over the spring and summer I generated a number of pinch pot raw ware from home - and an end-of-summer bisque firing was done, so all of those pieces were ready for glazing in early August.
(If you’re unfamiliar with how to make ceramics, you take clay and shape it which when ready is called raw ware. That raw ware is then bisque fired in a kiln. Once bisqued, you typically glaze your pieces and fire them again at a higher temperature. The pieces that come out of that second firing are usually finished, though you can do additional treatments beyond that as well.)
My very limited previous ceramics glazing (I believe one finished cycle only?) had been with Cone 9 glazes, which our gas kiln is theoretically capable of… but the first set of pieces that came out were not only experimental in terms of learning how to glaze but also very underfired due to the gas kiln needing repairs. The underfiring negatively affected their watertightness and texture. We have since fixed the gas kiln, and I do have some pieces from January through March that had been prepared with Cone 9 glazes for my second glazing attempt and are presently still waiting for whenever we next fire the gas kiln.
This fall we reopened Morningside College in person, and our ceramics course began again. It takes several weeks of creation before class bisque firing begins, and then once a decent stockpile of bisque pieces build up students begin glazing. Midway through this fall, I was able to rejoin the cycle by beginning to glaze my pandemic pinchware! The instructor teaching now prefers to fire at Cone 6 with our electric kilns. This meant any color mixing knowledge I had about our existing Cone 9 glazes - minimal anyway - was out the window, and I was starting from square one with the new Cone 6 glazes, many of which didn’t even have sample swatches yet. Again, there was a lot of experimentation and not a lot of control - but in only a few cycles I’m starting to develop some preferences! It’s also nice that these finished pieces have reached the proper temperature and their surfaces are, in contrast to the underfired pieces I’d done before, behaving as intended.
So, here are the first of my finished ceramics after almost a full year of work! All of these are planters with drainage holes, as the last three photos demonstrate. A couple are wheel thrown, and the rest are pinchware. They vary in size but most are relatively small - they’re all approximately 2-5” in diameter. Bigger pots are more time- and material-consuming to make and take up more room in the kiln so I’ve been sticking with smaller ones for now. I’ve made a few bowls (with no drainage holes) and vases, too, which I’ll share in a later post!
As you might imagine, making planters brings my interest in art and plants together nicely in that I can start to house my plants in my own pots! Transplanting during winter isn’t optimal so I’ve only done so where necessary, but here you can see a young Chlorophytum comosum - colloquially referred to as a spider plant - who desperately needed more space and has therefore been upgraded into a Shelby Prindaville planter with a top dressing to complement!
I’ve had two pieces - Balancing Act and Camelflage - selected for exhibition at the Cultural Center for Cape Cod in Massachusetts’ international show Wild Things which opens November 20, 2020. Only 87 of 707 entries (the most they’ve ever received!) made the cut, so I’m pleased that 2 of mine are included in that number!
You can already view the online gallery here!
I have been juried by photographer and arts administrator Alison Erazmus into Webster Arts’ Relationships national exhibition! Of 586 submissions, 64 works were selected and my mixed media painting Littoral Layers is one of those 64.
The show will open with a Facebook Live event on November 17, 2020, at 7 pm CST. Additionally, all exhibition pieces will be available on their website http://webster-arts.org under the Exhibits tab.
I was invited to serve as a judge for the Sioux City Camera Club’s print competition in mid-October, and it was a really fun experience! The competition was split into two parts: color, and black and white. I along with two other judges rated each entry on technical skill, composition, and interest. I was quite impressed with the quality of the submissions - we have some really talented photographers in our community! Category winners will go on to compete further on a regional level, so I’ll be interested to hear how those photos fare in upcoming competitions.
Judging-wise, I have a lot of experience in assessing artwork in terms of value, color, composition, and so on. I am also expert at Adobe Photoshop, so digital manipulation is totally in my wheelhouse. I am skilled at digital photography, but there’s more there that I’d like to learn, and in film photography I know the basics but haven’t immersed myself in that discipline since undergrad. It was interesting to see how my deep knowledge areas complemented those of the other judges and vice versa.
Recently, I was invited by my mentor and former professor Kelli Kelley to guest lecture via Zoom in Louisiana State University’s ART 4889 Advanced Drawing Workshop! It was fun to get a chance to catch up with Kelli and to virtually meet LSU art upperclassmen and graduate students.
I’ve been taking advantage of the beautiful fall weather we’ve had - I’m still biking the Adams Homestead & Nature Preserve twice a week, and recently I went apple and pumpkin picking with some friends in Mondamin, IA. I didn’t realize it until I arrived, but Mondamin is nestled right up to the Loess Hills, a beautiful landscape that features some nice hiking trails and overlooks, and which is host to a number of interesting species - including a native yucca plant! After enjoying Small’s Fruit Farm, I stopped by one of the scenic overlooks and took some photos as well as harvested a ripe seed pod from one of the Yucca glauca on site - more on that to (hopefully!) come. A section of the overlook land had recently undergone a controlled burn, which added another element to the already interesting view. As I was leaving to head back to Sioux City, I also passed this house with very eclectic and aesthetic brickwork.
I give propagations of plants out to students as gifts, and sometimes as prizes for answering art questions correctly (if more than one student is interested in adopting the plant). So far, students this semester have received Cyanotis kewensis, Zamioculcas zamiifolia, Tripogandra serrulata, Kalanchoe daigremontiana, and Kalanchoe beauverdii. Then this showed up in my inbox a few weeks ago:
If you’re wondering, I said yes.
Anosmia happens to be a relatively common symptom of COVID-19, so more people are talking about it of late. I was born with anosmia, which is the term for no sense of smell. (I mostly get by just fine in the world, and in fact I appear to have better color vision as a result, and perhaps my super-powered high-pitch hearing abilities are also related. I do have more exposure risk to toxic fumes, gas leaks, fires, and such, and spoiled food can also be more difficult to discern. My long-term memory is also negatively impacted. So it’s not something I necessarily recommend, but anosmia is and always has been a part of my life.)
One of the more frustrating things about not being able to smell, though, is that people who can smell conflate smell with taste ALL THE TIME. They are not the same sense. Words have meaning. For example, many “flavored” items in the market are in fact scented, which is very frustrating if you don’t in fact experience both because you waste time and money on discovering this inaccurate marketing language. Jolly Rancher candies, Starbursts, Skittles - their various colors and types (strawberry, cherry, orange, lemon, grape, etc.) all taste pretty much the same, and any differences in taste are typically not identifiable as actual fruit differences but rather slight differences in citric acid to sugar ratios. Meanwhile, I can absolutely differentiate a real strawberry from a cherry by taste, and so on. All those “flavored” sparkling waters on the market like La Croix Mango vs. Coconut are all merely scented waters. They are indistinguishable to me. The only truly flavored sparkling waters I’ve found so far are from Spindrift, and they also are 10-15 calories apiece because they do actually incorporate a touch of juice.
This recent op-ed in The New York Times is therefore infuriating. Krista Diamond did not lose her sense of taste. She lost her sense of smell. Ageusia is its own disorder. Words have meaning. WORDS HAVE MEANING.
When I was a kid, I really liked reading survival fiction. Hatchet, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, My Side of the Mountain… I was down to be a self-sufficient machine. Nowadays, if you are interested, there are people surviving (or as some like to put it, “sur-thriving”) in the wild for weeks to months with very few supplies on various television survival shows like Alone and Naked & Afraid and YouTube channels dedicated to living a fully self-sufficient lifestyle.
As an adult, I have to share that I really like living in a specialized society. (Also, as a vegetarian for ethical reasons, I dislike the emphasis on killing animals that seems to invariably accompany these solo survival experiences.) I grow a lot of plants, but currently am only growing one food-producing plant (my tomato plant), and that was a gift from a neighbor. I know a lot about art, plants, animals, and ecology, and a fair amount about a range of other topics. Nevertheless, I rely on other people for a lot! I buy most of my food from a supermarket, and am fortunate enough to be gifted pretty much else in my diet (aside from my homegrown tomatoes, though I was gifted the plant itself) from gardening friends. My job - college department chair and professor - exists as a product of living in a society. I rent my house, and pay for water, electricity, and trash/recycling removal services. I make use of modern medicine, and have interests and hobbies that depend upon the participation of others for maximum enjoyment. This very blog is a product of the internet, a social network.
We’re living through a pandemic that wouldn’t be a problem if we were all self-sufficient machines that could permanently isolate (as well as one that wouldn’t be a problem if we were all vegetarian…). It sucks. We should do our best to stop COVID-19 spread through wearing masks, pausing on travel and large gatherings, and in general following recommendations from scientific and medical professionals because having a social conscience is important when living with others. But I love the life that I have - which has not only benefited greatly from but is founded on being a specialized member of a society - and while I understand that there are certain negatives that come along with living this way, I nevertheless embrace it as my desired lifestyle. Viva society.
I was recently introduced to the concept of “cryptic species” - a term for when there are two or more species being accidentally harbored under one scientific name due to having very similar characteristics. So for instance we humans are all Homo sapiens, but if there did happen to be a mistake and two different species are currently being labelled as Homo sapiens, the non-Homo-sapiens one that got lumped in would be a cryptic species. Furthermore, sometimes there are several species that are so similar-yet-variable that they end up getting tossed all together into a relatively intentional “species complex,” meaning that we’ve understood multiple species exist but also acknowledged we’re not going to be able to reliably distinguish between each individual species in a species complex other than through advanced techniques like lab-based genetic differentiation.
My Aloe bowiea beginning to grow a flower spike.
How did this come up, you might ask? I have been charmed by my grass aloe, Aloe bowiea, of late and decided to read up a bit on it and in fact its whole category of grass aloes (and every time I say, think, or type “grass aloes” I am reminded of grass-type Pokémon, which is perhaps part of their appeal to me).
Grass aloes are aptly named aloes that are small, thin-leaved, and easily mistaken for grass in habitat - particularly when not in flower. They are not showy plants; they are in fact often considered too plain and small to merit growing as a houseplant. This means that they are rare, but the kind of rare that comes from being overlooked rather than in demand or particularly difficult to grow. And this quality of being overlooked, small, and plain brings me back around to cryptic species, because apparently there are grass aloes that had been cryptic and potentially more still to discover. There’s not a ton of information about grass aloes online presumably at least in part due to their lack of popularity, but I have put in an inter-library loan request for the book Grass Aloes in the South African Veld which I imagine will more than satisfy any remaining curiosity once it arrives!
I am teaching ART 103 Design and ART 210 Graphic Design I in addition to overseeing ART 401 Advanced Studies: Design this semester, and today is the first day of classes here at Morningside College! Given the pandemic, I’ve been working hard all summer at adapting Design and Graphic Design I to accommodate a hybrid and/or remote learning model if necessary. I have really enjoyed using the software VidGrid to record video lectures for asynchronous content delivery!
I’m opening up the school year with a solo faculty exhibition, Contact, at Morningside College’s Eppley Art Gallery! If you’re in Sioux City and can safely visit, check out my poster below for all the pertinent details. I’ll show some gallery images later on for those of you who are further afield or unable to attend.
This summer has been so crazy that I haven’t been as on top of sharing my press coverage, but here’s a still fairly recent article from the LSU Reveille which gives my collaboration with Dr. John Pojman on 3P Quick Cure Clay a mention, “LSU professor creates QuickCure Clay, combining science, art, aiding wide range of artists.”
My relief Outreach will be on exhibit in The Vacant Museum’s two-part online exhibition Heat & Relief which will open on August 28, 2020. I’ll get a link out once it goes live!
I’m exhibiting my newest painting, Emerging, in the Art Museum of South Texas Chapman Gallery’s exhibition Creative Distancing: An Exhibition of Community Creativity. The show is being held online and awards will be selected by jurors and voted upon by the public at the close of the exhibition, so keep your fingers crossed for me! (I’m a little unclear as to how the voting will happen, but if I am notified I’ll share the news so that if you’d like to vote for my painting, you can.)
I entered artwork into the jury pool for the 2020 issue of the Kiosk, which is published at my own institution of Morningside College in Sioux City, IA. Two of my pieces, Balancing Act and Camelflage, were selected and the magazine’s print edition will be distributed in a few weeks! If you’d like to see the digital version, you can browse it here. The 2020 issue is Volume 82, which is a testament to the longstanding tenure of this publication - the first issue was released in 1938.
