The Art of Curtis

I have decided to write an independent statement for each major medium I work in. This is a fragment of my first draft for ceramics:

I work with clay for the simple joy of working with clay. My work is very much related to a balance or harmony between characteristics. Working on the wheel allows me to begin each piece from center, a common starting place, and a place where anything is possible. Clay is a very flexible medium, I can make it be tight and confined, such as with my vases and bottles, or I can make it wide and revealing as with my many bowls. Each piece has a different meaning to me. Everything I create has some purpose as a vessel. These vessels hold things, and give things a place to exist. My bottles, with their small openings, are places of great security, on the brink of confinement, but not quite. My bowls are the opposite, they are open and inviting, seeking to form a relationship with a person. My bowls are never identical, most are not even similar, these are bowls to belong to someone. To me, bowls are involved in a possessive relationship. My bowls do not belong in dinnerware sets, they belong to a person.

 

Looking back on the last two weeks I feel more like a ceramic artist now than I have in a while. I like everything I have made and have been proud to send it through the kiln. I have also made more work and spent more time working on ceramics than I think I have in this period of time before. A lot of my throwing in the past, outside of an academic environment, has been very random and almost spastic. I have been making whatever came off the wheel, but in the last few weeks I have been declaring things that I was going to do, or at least attempt. I dared to try a rolled lip, it worked out. I tested the limits of "squared" bowls (bowls with a harsh angle and not a curve) and they fought back, but I still got some good examples from it. I held my breath and put my weakest bottle on its head to trim, they were resilient. I have had more kiln loads running in the last few weeks than I used to do in a month. Doing all of this makes me feel good, it makes me feel like a ceramic artist, or at the very least, a potter.

Picking a new clay body (Standard 563) was very important to this happening, it has made me feel like I am starting again with things, and taking off in a more positive direction. I am also working with a stoneware body again, not falling back to earthenware, so it is like I am growing up ceramically.

I feel like I am getting a lot done lately, but I look over at my bisque shelves and see lots of very white pieces that really need to be glazed. I really hate glazing, I must be a potter.

What is in an Artist statement? Its my statement, its about my work... right? So why is it so hard? I have tried many times to just sit down and write this statement. I know what I do, and I know what I like, but how do I put it into words? I am generally good at writing, but when it comes to writing about my work, I am absolutely stuck! How do artists do it? Where do you find the inspiration to write about your own work and find the guidance to know what to say? I need the answers to those questions to move forward with what I want to do.

Perhaps I should just collect all of the parts of statements I have started writing and see if there is anything there... until then, I guess I will just use a placeholder for my statement. Time to drag out the Latin generator (I bet someone I know will try to translate it).

As much as I enjoy blogging about my art here, it doesn't seem to happen very often, so I feel as though I should once again make a change to things. I feel like a more suitable alternative would be a true gallery style configuration for this site, or a separate site set up in a configuration like that. What does this mean exactly? Well, it doesn't mean use a lame photo gallery software to set up a site, that's for certain. I want to set up a site that is me, artistically, and just that, nothing else. I think I want to open with my artist's statement (I should probably write one) and then have users step through the site like they are going through an actual gallery. Images of each work will be displayed with their technical details and a few words from the artist (me) about each one. I think I want to give the user the ability to "step" into any "room" of my gallery they like (most likely by medium) and but the only other navigation is back/forward between pieces... like in a real gallery. The entire idea needs to be let out for some air before I start any actual development on such a site, but I think it would be really cool.

For the purpose of my academic pursuit of digital photography my assignments will be posted here throughout the semester: http://aux.livecurt.net/ART390.

There has been much speculation about my academic involvement in art. In the beginning I took a wheel ceramics course to satisfy my desire to acquire the skill to perform such a simple thing as throwing a bowl. In my second wheel course I was encouraged to expand and do things more interesting. This lead to my movement to sculptural ceramics. Sometime later, I had the acknowledgment of the fact that you don't have to know how to draw to take a course in drawing. Now... I don't know. I am in my second drawing course, have completed 3 ceramics courses and will be venturing into photography in the summer, oh, and not to leave out the liberal studies (western history and culture) course that I took in the field of Art History.

I am still unsure whether I will pursue the full BFA degree, but at the least, I wish to work on an AFA degree to evaluate my interest in going the full length for the higher degree. I could potentially find it within myself to complete an MFA degree, but in what field? I have an interest in ceramics, drawing, photography, painting and culinary arts. I have never truely focused myself, but I feel that after a few more studio courses I will be able to find my field in art.

I feel that getting away from art at UNCC for a little while will be healthy, as most instuctors in the department all act the same way and think the same way. I need difference, I need exploration.

I have decided to become more active in one of my lesser focused arts, photography. I will begin a digital photography class this summer at UNC-Chapel Hill.

From when I was a little kid I have always played with cameras. I used to have three 110mm cameras at a time, with different levels of film and in a variety of places, so I always had a camera around me that I could use. I took many rolls of film, most being developed, some not. I almost never used flash, and hell, why would I? All of the images I wanted to capture were outdoors.

Later on, for a short time I began working with some simple point and shoot 35mm cameras. I didn't like loading the film very much and I had a hard time adjusting to all of the winding, rewinding and all of the other bullshit. I have very few 35mm images that I have saved. I hated my 35mm cameras (only 2 of them). They were bulky, annoying and just not fun to play with.

Finally in my film camera adventure I was a pioneer in making the switch to the APS (Advanced Photo System) film type. APS provided me with flexibility in selecting the format I wished for my images to be in, and it also recorded a lot of information about the images. Best of all, there was no pesky film to keep track of, the negatives get rolled back into their original tube. Unfortunately, APS would become just a sad film-based precursor to digital. APS gave me a lot to think about with the options for photography as an artistic medium, but it's advancements lead me to want to make the switch to digital as soon as possible.

In January 2002, I made the switch from film to digital. I soon missed the prints, but then adapted to the other ways I could share images, including through the internet. My original HP PhotoSmart 3.1 MP camera wasn't a great camera, but it got me started. I soon learned of getting my prints made online and having access to the same resources as I did with film. During my time with my HP camera, I became less enthusiastic about photography and my life began to change a little. I still don't really understand what happened with me, but photography dropped away as one of my mediums, and with it, my connections to art. A few years later, I discovered how far digital photography had grown and I discovered my present "casual" camera, the Nikon Coolpix N7900. Around the same time, I started spending more time with my friend Chris and we started sharing the N7900. That didn't go very well. Later that year, he received his own N7900. Both he and I take a lot of pictures, although, him much more than me.

Now, I have enrolled in a digital photography class at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the summer semester. It is an online art studio course covering the basics of photography, as well as the use of manual controls on digital cameras to have artistic control over the outcome of images. For the course I have purchased a Fujifilm FinePix S5200 digital camera. I am hoping to take the summer to get back into photography and start keeping cameras around me like I used to, back when I would go through several rolls of film per week, except this time, there is no film.

I have been told that my drawing style most resembles that of Van Gogh. I am unsure how to take this comparison. It seems as though the similarities between us extend only to the use of short, repetitive strokes to establish a variety of shades as well as to create texture. For the past few weeks when drawing in class, my instructor has tried throwing me at every Van Gogh resource she can find, and one of my friends in the class has caught on and is now bringing me Van Gogh materials. I don't feel that I have much in common with Van Gogh at all, and I'm hoping this phase just blows over.

On the plus side of things, my instructor feels that I am developing my personal style well and that it is becoming very strong, whatever that means.

It is possible you could be reading this from one of two places, you could be reading this blog from a link received from the original site at http://www.ClayMentality.net/Blog, or you could be coming from the new location at http://art.livecurt.net. Either way, you have reached my new centralized art blog.

This new blog has all of the entries from the old ceramic blog, but will also begin having entries about other forms of art which I participate in. In my attempts to become a  more well rounded person, this blog will  serve as a public  journal of my adventures in art. This blog will probably remain as calm as it always has been, but at least now it will be all together. This is by no means a truly active blog, but it has its purpose.

One of the primary objectives of this blog will be for me to resolve some internal conflicts with myself and discover some of the meaning behind some of the symbols I use in my art. I have never really had a real reason for pursuing art, it has just called to me, which makes establishing reasons for some of the things that my sub-conscious mind pulls forward a bit of a challenge.

Welcome to the Art Blog at http://art.livecurt.net.