Putting Ads in their place.

Roger and I headed out in the rain to the reception at the Dump last Friday night. The show was very interesting as always but I want to talk about one artist in particular. Donna Anderson Kam produced a series of pastel and or crayon drawings that were interesting in themselves and is her usual work and style- abstract realism with a very strong social content. Her process for these pastel drawings was interesting , she takes a series of photographs of young actors re-enacting a recent news event (she stages these “re-telling’s”), she then collages the photographs along with other street photographs, edits /deletes and creates what she calls a narrative puzzle. The resulting collage becomes the inspiration or study for her drawing in pastel or crayon. BUT what I found most interesting was her use of advertising material, for example, a Budweiser beer vinyl banner. The banner she abstracted by cutting out organic shapes, like fingers or decay reaching into the banner, abstracting the imagery. She used this abstracted banner as a runner along the bottom of her drawing – 1/3 covered. She cut out enough of the banner to abstract the ad but allow the viewer to put together the beer can … very very cool because she managed to defeat the advertising! I have often tried to defeat the ad on cracker boxes by placing bag imagery on top of them using the box ad imagery as a back ground to collage on to. I thought to abstract the advertising by covering up the imagery. However, the advertising imagery – the ad- often took over and I could not escape it/ignore/ or make the back ground effectively talk to the foreground because the back ground (advertising) screamed at me so successfully that the resulting collages often did not work. But an overlay, an abstraction of the advertising imagery itself … brilliant… perhaps the ad will not yell quite as loud due to the abstraction by reduction. Very very cool and a brilliant idea!!!
http://sunsetscavenger.com/AIR/nextshow.htm

thought keys

ART

Instinct- the bags told me or tell me what to do, I see an image and see something else in the image and run with that.

Intent- I decide what to create and use the bags and bag images to do so.

Focus- Along with instinct and intent I also study other paper artists for example, Matisse’s paper cutouts, and other paper art techniques such as papal picado, to create art that tells stories.

Instinct, Focus, and Intent are the keys to life, art, meditation and magic!!!