One of the hard things, when you're painting, is, "what?"
Gary Hume, artist
You don't owe anything to the work you've done previously.
Chris Sperandio, artist
Nature is a mirror onto which we project our own ideas and values, but it is also a material reality that sets limits . . . the nonhuman world is real and autonomous . . . but the paradox of our human lives is that we can never know that world at first hand.
William Cronon, environmental historian
Don't wait to do your "good" ideas. Act on every idea; you'll inevitably make bad art. Don't strive to get it right on the first try. Strive to make art each time you have an idea. Don't strike ideas down, because you achieve by doing, not thinking.
paraphrased from Deborah Aschheim, artist
Plato suggests . . . that memory is like an aviary inside your head, with all these birds flying around, such that you might reach in for a ringdove and accidentally pull out a turtle dove instead.
David Wilson, director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, as quoted by author Lawrence Weschler
The ivory tower of science is in a ruin. Science is not a pure realm of truth beyond the taints of ideology and business, but a field of ideas enmeshed in a power struggle. Increasingly industry and economics dictate the direction and priorities of research. Whilst informed by science, we are ever vigilant against claims of scientific neutrality, and ever skeptical of the "official story" of natural history presented by scientific institutions.
Mark Dion, extracted from a manifesto for artists working with or about the living world
We are the species in control, and it is up to us.
Donald Johanson, anthropologist and discoverer of Austalopithecus afarensis fossil "Lucy"
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
so, an update
It's one month later. How has my "make art every day" mantra been going?
Well, I'm reminded of the five-year plan I was encouraged to make as an undergrad in my senior thesis class. On Saturday I'll be participating in a school-to-professional forum at Carnegie Mellon University this weekend, so I dug up my senior packet and five-year plan to take a look at what I thought I had in store for myself back in 2005:
spring 2006: graduate from CMU
summer 2006: work part-time and find a job in one of the following cities: Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago
fall 2006: relocate to new city and begin working part or full time at a nonprofit institution
end of 2006: apply to grad school for the fall of 2007
2007: start grad school
Had I followed this, I'd probably have an MFA by now, and I'd almost certainly be living somewhere else. For those of you following along at home, I've managed to stay in Pittsburgh, work 3 years in retail, get married, buy a house, and ... not go to grad school. On the other hand, I've had over ten shows in the last few years, made enormous strides in my art, had an awesome residency and later job in Chautauqua, and, well, hey, I'm married and I own a house. And finally, after a few years of retail and unemployment I did score a job at an awesome nonprofit. Not so bad.
While I was poking around on my hard drive I also uncovered a lot of old cover letters for job opportunities long past (unsurprisingly, a few were for the Mattress Factory). The letters and my plans were a window into my 21-year-old self, who, at the time, was ready to hit the diving board running and plunge headfirst into a mix of prestigious jobs and higher education.
Let it suffice to say that life rarely unfolds the way in which you intend. I snagged the first steady job I could find out of college and intended for it to be a temporary stop on my way to career greatness. I found myself in the same place two years later treading water in a job I wasn't super thrilled about, plagued by doubt about my situation, my education, even why I was making art and how to deal with it existing solely in the echo chamber of my own judgment. But, after a residency, a year of unemployment, then returning to my old job, and finally moving on to the Mattress Factory, I do feel like I've gone somewhere.
Let it also suffice to say that as a young person ready to flee the college scene I really underestimated Pittsburgh. I confess I thought the city had nothing to offer beyond a few larger museums, but I've found a lot of small galleries, local talent, and a supportive and genuine atmosphere that has been a good place to develop as an artist. I do think we are a city poised on the brink of a greater role in arts, technology, and re-invention than we've had before.
Okay, so, what I am really taking up all this space to say is, it's hard to predict in what direction life will take you. Best laid plans of mice and men yadda yadda. Lesson learned, although sometimes I get pretty down when I think about how much I should have accomplished five years out of school.
Long story short, I broke my promise to myself in early January and, feeling creatively uninspired by nature fast asleep in the dead of winter, haven't made much of anything. Tonight I'm about to sit down and try my hardest to re-start.
Well, I'm reminded of the five-year plan I was encouraged to make as an undergrad in my senior thesis class. On Saturday I'll be participating in a school-to-professional forum at Carnegie Mellon University this weekend, so I dug up my senior packet and five-year plan to take a look at what I thought I had in store for myself back in 2005:
spring 2006: graduate from CMU
summer 2006: work part-time and find a job in one of the following cities: Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago
fall 2006: relocate to new city and begin working part or full time at a nonprofit institution
end of 2006: apply to grad school for the fall of 2007
2007: start grad school
Had I followed this, I'd probably have an MFA by now, and I'd almost certainly be living somewhere else. For those of you following along at home, I've managed to stay in Pittsburgh, work 3 years in retail, get married, buy a house, and ... not go to grad school. On the other hand, I've had over ten shows in the last few years, made enormous strides in my art, had an awesome residency and later job in Chautauqua, and, well, hey, I'm married and I own a house. And finally, after a few years of retail and unemployment I did score a job at an awesome nonprofit. Not so bad.
While I was poking around on my hard drive I also uncovered a lot of old cover letters for job opportunities long past (unsurprisingly, a few were for the Mattress Factory). The letters and my plans were a window into my 21-year-old self, who, at the time, was ready to hit the diving board running and plunge headfirst into a mix of prestigious jobs and higher education.
Let it suffice to say that life rarely unfolds the way in which you intend. I snagged the first steady job I could find out of college and intended for it to be a temporary stop on my way to career greatness. I found myself in the same place two years later treading water in a job I wasn't super thrilled about, plagued by doubt about my situation, my education, even why I was making art and how to deal with it existing solely in the echo chamber of my own judgment. But, after a residency, a year of unemployment, then returning to my old job, and finally moving on to the Mattress Factory, I do feel like I've gone somewhere.
Let it also suffice to say that as a young person ready to flee the college scene I really underestimated Pittsburgh. I confess I thought the city had nothing to offer beyond a few larger museums, but I've found a lot of small galleries, local talent, and a supportive and genuine atmosphere that has been a good place to develop as an artist. I do think we are a city poised on the brink of a greater role in arts, technology, and re-invention than we've had before.
Okay, so, what I am really taking up all this space to say is, it's hard to predict in what direction life will take you. Best laid plans of mice and men yadda yadda. Lesson learned, although sometimes I get pretty down when I think about how much I should have accomplished five years out of school.
Long story short, I broke my promise to myself in early January and, feeling creatively uninspired by nature fast asleep in the dead of winter, haven't made much of anything. Tonight I'm about to sit down and try my hardest to re-start.
Monday, January 3, 2011
2010: my year in review. Plus, uh, the future.
This was a fortunate and exciting year for me that involved:
• showing in four exhibitions
• participating in the Three Rivers Arts Fest as an Emerging Artist, and winning Best in Show
• moving on to a new job as Volunteer Coordinator/Visitor Services Assistant at the Mattress Factory
• way more bicycling
• buying a house
• finally going on a honeymoon with my husband
• ending the year with a great collaboration between me and Deanna
• my first official press coverage in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
2010 was chaotic and somewhat stressful, but full of amazing opportunities. I'm looking forward to the coming year, and I've decided to take some time off of exhibiting to create new bodies of work. I need to carve out more time in my life to create and explore, and I felt like a lot of my "art" time this past year was spent prepping work I had already done. Some goals for the coming year:
• make art every day
• draw more
• get back into (clarinet) playing shape
• draw inspiration from the work of others without feeling intimidated or defeated (constant battle. suggestions from those fighting it?)
I've got a big year ahead. Happy 2011!
• showing in four exhibitions
• participating in the Three Rivers Arts Fest as an Emerging Artist, and winning Best in Show
• moving on to a new job as Volunteer Coordinator/Visitor Services Assistant at the Mattress Factory
• way more bicycling
• buying a house
• finally going on a honeymoon with my husband
• ending the year with a great collaboration between me and Deanna
• my first official press coverage in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
2010 was chaotic and somewhat stressful, but full of amazing opportunities. I'm looking forward to the coming year, and I've decided to take some time off of exhibiting to create new bodies of work. I need to carve out more time in my life to create and explore, and I felt like a lot of my "art" time this past year was spent prepping work I had already done. Some goals for the coming year:
• make art every day
• draw more
• get back into (clarinet) playing shape
• draw inspiration from the work of others without feeling intimidated or defeated (constant battle. suggestions from those fighting it?)
I've got a big year ahead. Happy 2011!
Friday, December 17, 2010
You must read this
I'm a big fan of WNYC's public radio show Radiolab, wherein "Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow" in a manner most interestingly. Topics range from linguistics to animal behavior to mathematical theory to what happens when you sleep, and it always manages to be fascinating, if sometimes a little conceptually scattered. Robert Krulwich, one of the show's two hosts, maintains an occasional blog on NPR's website that follows a similar exploratory arc, and the latest entry was a great one (read it here).
He covers the work of two people: Vi Hart's funny, inventive videos about "doodling" and mathematics, and a lengthly essay by Paul Lockhart about the (many) problems with mathematics education. I really, really recommend watching the video and reading the essay in full.
Lockhart's essay is damning, interesting, and a great read. There are some problems - for one, he lacks a sophisticated understanding of what visual art is when he compares it to music and mathematics, but to be fair he hasn't had the post-post-modern conceptual perspective (or indoctrination) that most of us contemporary artists have. Now that art can exist solely in the realm of "ideas," it can be a concept, an action, a performance. (I know this isn't really new to anyone familiar with, say, Jackson Pollock, but every so often I'm amazed by how revolutionary and far-seeing these ideas were in the 50s and 60s. We take it for granted now that we aren't all stuck painting placid landscapes trying to get into the Paris Conservatory.) Art, like pure mathematics, need not be confined to the physical world. The best art never has been. Like Lockhart points out, Michelangelo had other things on his mind than decorating when he envisioned the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
His critique of math educators and the "institution" of learning is absolutely scathing. I'm not sure how I would feel if I were a math teacher and read this. (Or any teacher. He's pretty harsh on the idea of pedagogy overall.) All the same, I think he has some great points to make about the need to approach mathematics with the same creativity, playfulness, and inventive problem-solving we use to explore music, art, poetry, and the other arts.
While I read, I realized that many of my own artistic and intellectual heroes - Leonardo da Vinci, Leon Battista Alberti, James Audubon, Archimedes - approached mathematical or logistical problems with a creativity we reserve now for artmaking. Having a teacher take this tack with me might have avoided the complete mathematical paralysis I have as an adult. I can hardly approach math beyond simple arithmetic, although I don't really care about that (you don't think I use trig when I'm engraving, do you?). Instead, I wish that I had been encouraged to think about mathematical problems the way he describes, by formulating my own proofs through creative thinking, trial and error, rebuttal, discussion.
There is sort of a tie-in here, finally. Working with Deanna over the past year and doing a lot of free-form, responsive, automatic drawing (or "doodling," a word we both hate) has really put my educational background in perspective. Sometimes I feel really conflicted about what having a BFA means, particularly from an established school with a great reputation, like, ahem, Carnegie Mellon. In the end, I feel like I learned what I was supposed to from art school - how to see, how to think, how to create. Your pencil, and what comes out of it, is not really as important as what's happening between your ears and behind your eyes. Yet, getting an education in art is always sort of walking a tightrope over a sea of institutionalized technique, and some schools fall into it, even the best ones. For years, that technique was what I thought I wanted - that I couldn't be a real artist until I learned perspective, or anatomy, or how to use oil paint properly. CMU is a rarity in art schools in that it really stresses a conceptual vocabulary in its art students, to the admitted sacrifice of technical facility in some traditional areas.
Frankly, at this point I couldn't care less about whether I can draw a proper vanishing point to create perfect bricks in two-point perspective. I still hate oil paint. I'm pretty good at anatomy. But in the end, those are tools. They're not your vision. It's harder to be original and creative and exploratory, to make mistakes and search in the dark, but that's what real art - and math - is. As a person and artist who's always craved structure, rules, and predictability, it is a particular challenge to remind myself that the people goofing off in class with their own amazing projects are sometimes the visionaries on the way to greatness. It's a challenge to maintain spontaneity and creativity and free thinking. I try, though.
He covers the work of two people: Vi Hart's funny, inventive videos about "doodling" and mathematics, and a lengthly essay by Paul Lockhart about the (many) problems with mathematics education. I really, really recommend watching the video and reading the essay in full.
Lockhart's essay is damning, interesting, and a great read. There are some problems - for one, he lacks a sophisticated understanding of what visual art is when he compares it to music and mathematics, but to be fair he hasn't had the post-post-modern conceptual perspective (or indoctrination) that most of us contemporary artists have. Now that art can exist solely in the realm of "ideas," it can be a concept, an action, a performance. (I know this isn't really new to anyone familiar with, say, Jackson Pollock, but every so often I'm amazed by how revolutionary and far-seeing these ideas were in the 50s and 60s. We take it for granted now that we aren't all stuck painting placid landscapes trying to get into the Paris Conservatory.) Art, like pure mathematics, need not be confined to the physical world. The best art never has been. Like Lockhart points out, Michelangelo had other things on his mind than decorating when he envisioned the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
His critique of math educators and the "institution" of learning is absolutely scathing. I'm not sure how I would feel if I were a math teacher and read this. (Or any teacher. He's pretty harsh on the idea of pedagogy overall.) All the same, I think he has some great points to make about the need to approach mathematics with the same creativity, playfulness, and inventive problem-solving we use to explore music, art, poetry, and the other arts.
While I read, I realized that many of my own artistic and intellectual heroes - Leonardo da Vinci, Leon Battista Alberti, James Audubon, Archimedes - approached mathematical or logistical problems with a creativity we reserve now for artmaking. Having a teacher take this tack with me might have avoided the complete mathematical paralysis I have as an adult. I can hardly approach math beyond simple arithmetic, although I don't really care about that (you don't think I use trig when I'm engraving, do you?). Instead, I wish that I had been encouraged to think about mathematical problems the way he describes, by formulating my own proofs through creative thinking, trial and error, rebuttal, discussion.
There is sort of a tie-in here, finally. Working with Deanna over the past year and doing a lot of free-form, responsive, automatic drawing (or "doodling," a word we both hate) has really put my educational background in perspective. Sometimes I feel really conflicted about what having a BFA means, particularly from an established school with a great reputation, like, ahem, Carnegie Mellon. In the end, I feel like I learned what I was supposed to from art school - how to see, how to think, how to create. Your pencil, and what comes out of it, is not really as important as what's happening between your ears and behind your eyes. Yet, getting an education in art is always sort of walking a tightrope over a sea of institutionalized technique, and some schools fall into it, even the best ones. For years, that technique was what I thought I wanted - that I couldn't be a real artist until I learned perspective, or anatomy, or how to use oil paint properly. CMU is a rarity in art schools in that it really stresses a conceptual vocabulary in its art students, to the admitted sacrifice of technical facility in some traditional areas.
Frankly, at this point I couldn't care less about whether I can draw a proper vanishing point to create perfect bricks in two-point perspective. I still hate oil paint. I'm pretty good at anatomy. But in the end, those are tools. They're not your vision. It's harder to be original and creative and exploratory, to make mistakes and search in the dark, but that's what real art - and math - is. As a person and artist who's always craved structure, rules, and predictability, it is a particular challenge to remind myself that the people goofing off in class with their own amazing projects are sometimes the visionaries on the way to greatness. It's a challenge to maintain spontaneity and creativity and free thinking. I try, though.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The Forest Through the Trees in Trib-Review
Deanna Mance's and my show gets reviewed in the Trib!
2 artists work on the big picture, details, in 'The Forest Through the Trees'
2 artists work on the big picture, details, in 'The Forest Through the Trees'
Monday, November 1, 2010
countdown begins
November was here before I even realized it, and my opening's right around the corner! Here are the details.
My and Deanna Mance's show opens this Friday. Come see the fruits of our collaboration, new installations, and new drawings! An image of our postcard for the show is attached.
THE FOREST THROUGH THE TREES
Deanna Mance and Maria Mangano
The two Best in Show winners of the 2010 Three Rivers Arts Festival collaborate to explore themes of chaos and order, systems and searching, nature and humanity.
opening at 709 Penn Gallery on Friday, November 5th, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
show continues through January 2, 2011
709 Penn Avenue, in the heart of the Cultural District in downtown Pittsburgh
hope to see you there!
Thursday, October 14, 2010
sneak peek!
A few pictures of my and Deanna's collaborative drawings, and a detail shot of a watercolor I finished last night.
We've been working on these drawings by sitting down together with two at a time, and switching drawings every two minutes. Although I've had exercises in drawing class where people briefly trade drawings, this is the first time I've tried to create entire pieces this way. I think they're turning out really well, and I'm sure that's helped by the fact that we have a similar aesthetic vision and had no trouble agreeing on the use of fine-line marker. It would be much harder to do this with someone who had a really different style or wanted to use oil pastels or paint.
As we've done these, I've tried hard to notice what Deanna is doing to the paper during her two minutes, and then incorporate and be inspired by her aesthetic and her markmaking, rather than just try to wedge my own marks in between hers.
We've been working on these drawings by sitting down together with two at a time, and switching drawings every two minutes. Although I've had exercises in drawing class where people briefly trade drawings, this is the first time I've tried to create entire pieces this way. I think they're turning out really well, and I'm sure that's helped by the fact that we have a similar aesthetic vision and had no trouble agreeing on the use of fine-line marker. It would be much harder to do this with someone who had a really different style or wanted to use oil pastels or paint.
As we've done these, I've tried hard to notice what Deanna is doing to the paper during her two minutes, and then incorporate and be inspired by her aesthetic and her markmaking, rather than just try to wedge my own marks in between hers.
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