tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82964421247071856452024-03-16T11:55:49.097-05:00MOUND<i>Art & Garden</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1969125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-60095916511553627712024-03-12T05:00:00.055-05:002024-03-12T05:00:00.342-05:00Ballad of 박은빈: Judge vs Judge<p>By the time I watched the 2017
series Judge vs Judge (aka Nothing to Lose), starring Park Eun Bin, I was a bit weary of her pure-hearted characters -strong-willed, tough when necessary, sensitive to others, things happen to
her, she doesn't hurt others, she is the noble poor, hard-working, has something to overcome, and so on.
For a young audience, maybe her
characters can be an impactful role model, but for mature audiences,
those of us who've lived long enough to have hurt others and feel
regret at least once, her characters become an impossible person.
These characters embody the self we wish we could be and with that, I
wonder, what do we do? Aren't these actors capable of greater complexity? I think so, but they are hamstrung by an industry that insists on modeling mores. <br /></p><p>But let's entertain the possibility that the lead character, the working class Judge Lee Jung-joo, wasn't prescribed the
task of exonerating her brother for the heinous crimes for
which he was framed? If only Lee Jung-joo, instead of displaying moral
character by immediately disowning her brother and later fighting against power to prove his innocence, had to find a way to
accept that her brother committed heinous acts. Could she not show
courage by navigating her colleagues at court while shouldering the
burden? Is there moral character in coming to terms with loving a family
member that made such a grave mistake? Can a show ask how we
live with those we love who've made terrible choices? The challenge
to the screenwriter is modeling forgiveness in a way that doesn't
diminish the severity of the crime, but also offers a path forward that
isn't as black and white as imprisoning the criminal and forgetting they
exist.</p><p>Toward the end of the series, as the real perpetrators are
exposed, we are confronted with the possibility that those who are close
to us are also capable of the greatest harm. The most difficult scene of the series was the confrontation of Park Eun Bin's Judge Lee Jung-joo with her mentor
Judge Yoo Myung Hee, who (<span style="color: #990000;"><i>spoiler</i></span>) was responsible for several crimes
including pinning them on Judge Lee Jung-joo's brother. Korean
dramas are good at rendering tearful emotion, but the contempt and disgust
Park Eun Bin had to muster to deliver this scene must've been
extraordinary and I found it the most memorable event of the series. </p><p>Despite my criticism of writing that only models pure good and evil, it is
difficult to imagine confronting such betrayal and finding within oneself any grace or
forgiveness. Although it is easy to think the string
of criminal acts presented is absurd, or that Judge Yoo Myung Hee's motives were not convincing,
one can also imagine one self-serving misstep catapulting towards another,
and yet
another, until one has gone too far to see a path toward extricating the good person from
the crimes they've committed. As Judge Yoo Myung Hee reveals in that scene -she was not
herself and yet she was
-the cognitive dissonance of being a good human being and criminal simply too great. I applaud the writers for attempting to relay this internal conflict. I also continue to ponder Judge Lee Jung-joo's struggle with her inability to think her brother was anything but guilty of the crimes he was framed for. We never get an answer to that -it's a question possibly intended to hang in the air.<br /></p><p>In several scenes we see a blurred Christmas tree at the end of a courthouse hallway, a reminder that Christianity has a significant presence in South Korean culture. Not to make too much of the display, but notable that Christianity made space for contrition and grace,
two ideas that are virtually meaningless in contemporary criminal statutes. Grace is getting what you don’t deserve (forgiveness, release) and not<i> </i>getting what you do deserve (incarceration or worse) and contrition is honest remorse and the deepest sorrow (with god as their witness) for hurting others. Neither of these come into play in Judge vs Judge, although I could argue that it shows in the acts of the son, Do Han Joon, of convicted Judge Yoo Myung Hee. Feeling shame, we find him dutifully helping the family of one of the people wronged by his mother. </p><div style="text-align: left;">Do Han Joon, played by the actor Dong Ha, is probably the most compelling character in the series. You are not sure what to make of him, at first. He is cocky and aggressive toward Park Eun Bin's Judge Lee Jung-joo, but eventually you feel pity for him as you learn he had little to nothing to do with the crimes of his parents. Korean dramas typically translate the shame of parents to the children, and the reverse is also true, and it is no different in Judge vs Judge. </div><div style="text-align: center;"><p style="text-align: center;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugN8p5c2NohV4UG-GceHijoFI3EB7PJDZzw_P84McZ_Td7xiLoSikAFhdcZOBcOkBNI-JVejdfog-TDFhxiitstLef-vSMKyKMU42Mpc06ll4Vn68PYkcI9QKCSMUpPZziVZo83l6ZnsdD-r-M-e_5focXRb3rBlNoQB25UtZmcg9N2JLTpeH1fVnGc6X/s640/Screenshot%202024-03-11%20at%2010.41.08%E2%80%AFAM.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="640" height="432" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgugN8p5c2NohV4UG-GceHijoFI3EB7PJDZzw_P84McZ_Td7xiLoSikAFhdcZOBcOkBNI-JVejdfog-TDFhxiitstLef-vSMKyKMU42Mpc06ll4Vn68PYkcI9QKCSMUpPZziVZo83l6ZnsdD-r-M-e_5focXRb3rBlNoQB25UtZmcg9N2JLTpeH1fVnGc6X/w640-h432/Screenshot%202024-03-11%20at%2010.41.08%E2%80%AFAM.png" title="Judge Lee Jung-joo and Judge" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Judge Lee Jung-joo and Judge Sa Eui Hyun<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;">Of course, he is also one leg of a love triangle, but never really had a chance, certainly not after it is revealed what his mother did to his love interest Judge Lee Jung-joo. The other leg is provided by the rather dull, but cocky Judge Sa Eui Hyun, played by actor Yeon Woo Jin. Fortunately, the love story takes a back seat to the behind the bench court proceedings and crimes. There is little fire between the two and Judge Sa Eui Hyun is awfully paternalistic. I can only imagine his ego has been constructed by his legal pedigree -his father, a lawyer and grandfather, a judge. Yet, he does deliver one romantic line in one of the final episodes while walking, at night, with Judge Lee Jung-joo. I won't share it -you'll have to watch.</p></div><div style="text-align: left;">Should you choose to watch -note that this series really begins like a slapstick comedy, even as it aims to deal with serious issues. Most of this is to model the change in the Park Eun Bin's Judge Lee Jung-joo from vulgar working class youth to mature and distinguished in her role as a judge. Issues of class play a role in almost every Kdrama, so it would be no different, if not heightened, in a court drama. </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Previous: <a href="https://nycgarden.blogspot.com/2024/02/ballad-of-father-i-will-take-care-of-you.html" target="">Ballad of 박은빈: Father I Will Take Care of You</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">Next: Ballad of 박은빈: Hello My Twenties<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-66002587229102475612024-03-10T17:25:00.004-05:002024-03-11T00:08:57.830-05:00A Few Thoughts On Past Lives<div style="text-align: center;"> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjraD2cDIL_4ILpEHCRI7fL7KzvVEiLKQcr6qo3hhJCmkBpO2MooMgWazhV23N2GeVuQPOx_2R_v3w9l2Pv7_0tWOyWQB5z23iGMj-C_oK-f6HNB-HPCBOy_lWAFPJZRJfCGFi6tAM8lS9qAnDqWEkWELw9nhW-tfYY1S-6kOYTlOW8Yl9ojf42WvJsmDV8/s640/Screenshot%202024-03-10%20at%204.47.04%E2%80%AFPM.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="554" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjraD2cDIL_4ILpEHCRI7fL7KzvVEiLKQcr6qo3hhJCmkBpO2MooMgWazhV23N2GeVuQPOx_2R_v3w9l2Pv7_0tWOyWQB5z23iGMj-C_oK-f6HNB-HPCBOy_lWAFPJZRJfCGFi6tAM8lS9qAnDqWEkWELw9nhW-tfYY1S-6kOYTlOW8Yl9ojf42WvJsmDV8/w554-h640/Screenshot%202024-03-10%20at%204.47.04%E2%80%AFPM.jpg" width="554" /></a></div><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">As we approach tonight's Oscar ceremony, we should congratulate the writer director <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine_Song" target="_blank">Celine Song</a> for the success of her film <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Lives_(film)" target="_blank">Past Lives</a>.
You can stream it if you want to see it via Prime and probably others. I have not been following the
Academy Awards and don't know more than a couple of films in contention, but we know it's
competitive, and Song may not be the winner. I decided to write out a few thoughts of Past Lives in the context of the many Kdrama series I've watched over the last nine months. If
you've watched Korean drama, you'll recognize the themes of fate and romance, the love triangle, and formative childhood experience. This felt rather familiar, and I began to wonder how those who have not watched Korean TV programs would see this film versus those who have.<br /></div><p>I became aware of this film via a public radio interview
with Celine Song, heard while driving, and decided to stream the rental. With anticipation built up by that interviewer, who described a scene with such great emotion -he was choking up as he described it.
Wow. So I waited for the scene where Hae Sung, played by Teo Yoo, first meets Arthur, Nora's American husband, played by John Magaro. But, the scene came, and went and I could not ascertain what it was in Arthur's expression that caused the interviewer to experience such emotion. I paused it, rewound, played again, paused on Arthur's look, but for me, nothing. </p><p>To heighten the tension, we are told, the actors playing the male leads had not ever met before acting that scene. I think Teo Yoo's Hae showed more discomfort, more visibly anxious, than Magaro's Arthur. Surely it would be an awkward moment and thankfully it wasn't charged with testosterone. Haven't we all met a former love of a partner at some point in our lives? Inevitably it leaves a question about what it is they still hold onto. I think a more difficult scene was where Nora and Arthur lay in bed and he expresses that question, why she married him, and whether she would rather be with her old school friend, Hae. She answers to the effect of "<i>This is where I ended up</i>." Not exactly a love poem to her husband, but on some level, entirely understandable to think of it this way. </p><p>The film is largely quiet, with times of little dialogue, and so there is room to breathe. But that room also seems to come from the distance between Nora in her new world, and the old world represented by Hae (He is very Korean, she says). She is free of that old world and as much as it wants to pull her back, there isn't the strength to do it. At first I was disappointed in the lack of overt emotion -after all, this is something Kdrama does so well, but now that I think about it, the director may have been working to push away from the emotive strain so common to Korean TV.<br /></p><p>Hae, the former boyfriend, is a rather melancholic figure I couldn't help but compare him to stoic male lead counterparts in Kdrama. Is he this way because he cannot bring the past he desires into the present or is it because there is a blues about the old Korea he represents? Probably both. Nora seems empowered by her escape, even if it's at the expense of feeling detached from her Korean identity. In a globalized society, especially among the people in the arts, the rewards of living and working outside of one's cultural heritage are a mixed blessing. </p><p>Celine Song addresses this in her movie, but also in the interview when she states this film is the first non-white, fully Korean script she has written/directed. Always wondering what themes and moments in Kdrama are truly representative of Korean culture, I have inched a little closer to an answer with Song's words.<br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-20889515175883846522024-03-01T21:55:00.002-06:002024-03-10T15:00:05.557-05:00An Interview With Artist Frank James Meuschke<div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">This interview was published during the pandemic year of 2020. <br /></div><div> <br />Artist and Landscape Architect Rebecca Krinke speaks with fellow <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Rosalux</a> artist Frank Meuschke about his relationship to the outdoors, shifting between photography and painting, and the path to making onsite landscape sculpture projects. <br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9qU-A60zF2kZQDxTP0Eht8vQCYLbmoNNvmvbrrmxQhksznXiBVULbsqd5bQ91PZPDIcxpv7JvmRIcryGezDrzxuh75R1-5Ha56XHhZ0-OdZStCkFDWPgE18MKufYyTdUOXQSy7LNPaF25/s1169/Screenshot_2021-01-25+Quarantine+Confidential+Frank+Meuschke.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9qU-A60zF2kZQDxTP0Eht8vQCYLbmoNNvmvbrrmxQhksznXiBVULbsqd5bQ91PZPDIcxpv7JvmRIcryGezDrzxuh75R1-5Ha56XHhZ0-OdZStCkFDWPgE18MKufYyTdUOXQSy7LNPaF25/w480-h640/Screenshot_2021-01-25+Quarantine+Confidential+Frank+Meuschke.jpg" /></a><br /></div><div><br /><i>How have you been doing? How has COVID, the struggle for racial justice, the election, and all of 2020, and now into 2021, been affecting your life and your studio practice?</i><br /><br />I’m going to add these events to my list of cortisol-raising experiences like watching the towers fall on Sept 11, the 2008-09 economic collapse, and post Hurricane Sandy in New York. Of course, Covid has lopped off my in-person teaching like most of us, but also social contact from most everyone but the occasional delivery person or my neighbor dropping off some eggs. I had some photography travel plans, but those were nixed. That’s all okay -there’s plenty to do in the time wrenched open and I am privileged to be out in the woods through it all. At the beginning of the pandemic I had a hard time concentrating, so that would have been back in March and April. I don’t think I made much work then, although I remember heading out to a park to photograph and it was so busy that I avoided that over the following months and concentrated on the space outside my house. <br /><br />Every time another soul is taken by law enforcement (or by anyone), wholly unnecessarily, I am taken back to <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Amadou Diallo</a>, shot at 41 times, and pierced by 19 bullets, by four New York City “plain clothes” officers and then again, Sean Bell and his friends, 51 bullets, and of course, Eric Garner, whose last words carried forward to George Floyd’s dying words. It’s heartbreaking. I am worried about where things will go after the trial and verdicts. You could see this trial as a trial of all police killings of the last decade, not just here, but all over the country. </div><div><br />As for the election? Well, let’s just say that New Year’s day came a little late this year, January 20, to be exact. For more of my thoughts on Nov 3 to Jan 6, read <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">here</a> and <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">here</a>.<br /><br /><i>Who were the artists that inspired you as a young person? </i><br /><br />My high school art teacher would take interested students to NYC to go to the Met or SoHo, back in the middle 80s. The art world was raging with Wall Street money. Impressionists were being snapped up by <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Japanese collectors for millions</a> -so I saw a lot of that. At fifteen, we had a field trip to see the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Van Gogh at Arles</a> exhibit at the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Met</a>. In SoHo, we’d loiter inside the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Think Big</a> store -we knew it wasn’t art, but you know, teenagers. We’d go to <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Pearl Paint</a>. There was a lot of paint on canvases in the 80s and I loved the smell of oil paint. If you stopped at Leo Castelli, you’d smell the oxidizing oil paint in those unventilated lofts. <br /><br />I really got into <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Keith Haring</a> as a teenager. He was on the walls, on the streets. I thought, yeah, I could do this! He was one of the reasons I wanted to go to SVA. Of course, we didn’t have the internet, or any art books or magazines around, so my introduction to SoHo was really important to seeing anything newer than Picasso. Even if I had no idea what I was looking at, I got to see things outside of poster prints, cartoons, and encyclopedias. I was pretty sure I could draw that turtle, too, so I knew there had to be more to it.<br /><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSU-p6jrC5_3fNfib_Ck4BP265cHTFCLgmN7tpwCHwCtxXlBj0FxIgkWX1GTWufHm4gXXBKqeWO86WLyMzHFIQnao-JhmmNq3H84MF61lZ9RULA_Gh-ryExU7p9NKeN-h5PR8jwI5f1ER3/s799/vincent-van-gogh.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSU-p6jrC5_3fNfib_Ck4BP265cHTFCLgmN7tpwCHwCtxXlBj0FxIgkWX1GTWufHm4gXXBKqeWO86WLyMzHFIQnao-JhmmNq3H84MF61lZ9RULA_Gh-ryExU7p9NKeN-h5PR8jwI5f1ER3/w640-h454/vincent-van-gogh.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Vincent Van Gogh, Pollard birches, 1884, Pencil, pen in brown (once black) ink, on wove paper </span></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><i>Was being an artist something that your family supported or understood? </i><br /><br />No, not at the outset. We didn’t know any, so artists were the “starving” caricature, and that wasn’t seen as a good path. My uncle married a musician, and she was supportive, although her parents essentially disowned her for that decision. It wasn’t that bad for me. They just didn’t have much experience with it. You could say I brought art to their lives.<br /><br /><i>Did you go to art school? Were there individuals who had an impact on your point of view as an artist during your education that you still think about, apply lessons from? </i><br /><br />My first year of art education was at <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">School of Visual Arts</a>. I was lucky to do well on their scholarship tests, and got a finalist round interview with <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Silas Rhodes</a>, the school’s founder. I dragged my giant portfolio onto the train to Penn Station. I could hear the conversation going on with another finalist and I knew I wasn’t prepared. I was firing on luck and ambition, not how well-read I was or my list of extracurricular accomplishments. So I ended up taking out loans and working at an electrical distributor to cover costs. <br /><br />Our painting instructor, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Peter Heinemann</a>, was not too wordy, so there isn’t much to remember, but he once said that he wasn’t an artist, he was a painter. That there could be a difference stuck with me. He sent us, weekly, to shows around town, which we had to write about and make sketches. I remember being blown away by an <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Anselm Kiefer exhibit, at MoMA</a>. Dark, architectural, giant paintings, the smell of paint, I had no idea what they were about, walking in, but it made an impression. <br /><br /><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzS-heQnmJ3G6siYtbFHLJ4IpDNRjRjT1I-Gpc85xfZaGCRnYy-ityNpOD53l0MuapxsLMg7CR0pvHBnUEi7m1W-yJbTEEttheqitRWFtE5p3mX-v4UIfj6_LXffoMcFKTlMFLcp89S1iJ/s512/PH+Painting.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzS-heQnmJ3G6siYtbFHLJ4IpDNRjRjT1I-Gpc85xfZaGCRnYy-ityNpOD53l0MuapxsLMg7CR0pvHBnUEi7m1W-yJbTEEttheqitRWFtE5p3mX-v4UIfj6_LXffoMcFKTlMFLcp89S1iJ/s16000/PH+Painting.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Peter Heinemann, Self-Portrait, circa 1980, oil on canvas </span></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>I ended up leaving SVA just after starting my second year, primarily because I got sick and for financial reasons. I transferred to the New York State University system which had a whole different paradigm -the liberal arts. I spent a semester at SUNY Stony Brook, and then transferred into sophomore year at <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">SUNY New Paltz</a>, in the Hudson Valley. My painting professor, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Hank Raleigh</a>, told us that a painter can do anything. He meant that this doesn’t work in both directions, so learn to paint, and then practice another discipline if need be. I guess I took that at face value, although I can’t defend the notion; it’s not easy to shift among media. Raleigh had the most influence on my thinking, and not all good; as the link above references, he was a complicated man. He advised me against two things: whatever you do, don’t paint landscape and never let green dominate a painting. I made sure to do both! <br /><br /><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEOaDnzBp4-ynfShg4DgatqDfDXEtlgsYn_c31E7YftoXtdZ9OXI5d13pWxPnXwqDqA8oOQtcgZzq8fDwy26J93QUCXHJv2Fhg2j4TAShyphenhyphenqQOKkeU1nddiMHYs7xqTt4AcTN1K4Zhqch4h/s1000/Horizon+1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEOaDnzBp4-ynfShg4DgatqDfDXEtlgsYn_c31E7YftoXtdZ9OXI5d13pWxPnXwqDqA8oOQtcgZzq8fDwy26J93QUCXHJv2Fhg2j4TAShyphenhyphenqQOKkeU1nddiMHYs7xqTt4AcTN1K4Zhqch4h/w640-h147/Horizon+1.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Horizon I, 1993, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 18 x 90 inches</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /><i>Did you establish a studio practice right off the bat, go to grad school; what were the early days of your career all about?</i><br /><br />I graduated with my B.F.A., had a summer art teaching gig at a place called <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">USDAN Center for the Arts</a>, saved a little money, and eventually rented an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where some friends from school had moved. You could live alone, then, so I converted the bedroom to a studio. I applied to a bunch of art-related jobs, but none panned out, so had to accept working well-removed from my education. I joined the union, as required, to work for an electrical distributor on W18th St. I chose the lighting department because that was as close as I could get to anything to do with my knowledge. <br /><br />To connect to my field, I applied for an internship (aka, no pay) at <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Foster-Peet Gallery</a> on Crosby Street in SoHo. I worked weekends and openings. Kim Foster’s background was in banking, which funded the gallery. Peet came off as a grifter. The interns did all the low-level work, which you may be surprised to hear included looking at all the slide sheets that came into the gallery and deciding which should be placed on Kim’s desk. We also wrote and rewrote gallery artists’ statements for their upcoming exhibitions. <br /><br />Meanwhile, I painted at night, and on weekends, went to museum shows, hung out at friends -they all had studio rooms in their apartments. We were 23, had no connections, so we painted for ourselves and our friends, worked in odd jobs like night watchman, warehouse workers, gardeners, cooks. The art market tanked after <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">the stock crash</a>, and the economy went on a white collar job shedding spree for five years. So there wasn’t a lot of opportunity, but we made all kinds of things. I was drawing directly on my plaster walls, making furniture, light sculptures, and also painting canvases.</div><div><br /></div><div><div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-9rj4h" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBrINNDQPBYBkZ0jIMDWuPzXlaPAf5C9i-lqIk2FUR1SAd_wYMG7QbBVd0X8WdZ4M0pkUpOxn0Y9crR8SXDu65btEREgDlfq1GDeG3pefOj0qk7uj0TD9d_Bcbub1MHxA4crqyMPfo0a2P/s1000/Table.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Hand-crafted, Stained Table (Detail), 1995, birch, douglas fir, charcoal, oil, urethane, dimensions variable" border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1000" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBrINNDQPBYBkZ0jIMDWuPzXlaPAf5C9i-lqIk2FUR1SAd_wYMG7QbBVd0X8WdZ4M0pkUpOxn0Y9crR8SXDu65btEREgDlfq1GDeG3pefOj0qk7uj0TD9d_Bcbub1MHxA4crqyMPfo0a2P/w640-h480/Table.jpg" title="Hand-crafted, Stained Table (Detail), 1995, birch, douglas fir, charcoal, oil, urethane, dimensions variable" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Hand-made, stained coffee table (Detail), 1994, birch, douglas fir, charcoal, oil, urethane, dimensions variable</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div>An ex-girlfriend saw an ad for a gardener at a NYC garden design company and I applied. The owner, Bill Wheeler, interviewed me at his Upper West Side apartment. He opened a case of 12v outdoor lights and said he had problems with these not shining bright. Ah, well I could tell him something about that, so I got the job. We gardened for the actor <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Mary Stuart Masterson</a>, pornographer <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Al Goldstein</a> (Screw magazine), a “penthouse” brothel in Chelsea, screenwriter <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">William Goldman</a> (Butch Cassidy, Princess Bride) and a lot of anonymous wealthy. Maybe the best view into New Yorker City’s rich and famous was through the garden.</div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0"><br />One day I was watching <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">True Romance</a> at my friends and got this terrible urge to get out of New York. I was depressed, honestly, but I had no words for that back then. After that garden season, in January, I got on a train to San Francisco to visit my college friend, Erin, a poet. After staying with her for two weeks, she sold me her Ford Escort for a hundred bucks and I drove it north, along the coastal highway, sleeping in the car, until I got to Portland, Oregon. I lived there for 8 months or so, painting, gardening, traveling around the state, seeing things, got a job with a landscaper when the money ran out. <br /><br />My girlfriend, in Portland, wanted to return to the East Coast, so we headed back. After a side journey to Joshua Tree and the Grand Canyon, we drove through New Mexico and I told her I would like to live there someday. After 18 months back in Brooklyn, more lousy economics, and a failing relationship, I applied to grad school in a number of places. It is no surprise that I chose New Mexico, where I earned an MFA in painting and minor in horticultural studies.<div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-d6486" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-dem9p" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-cdo3t" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: center;" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6kmkSRwkZK7TLrDBeAv_P_k3HrVFd9h-y7tLbGrm-xXMjeX7pqhlB_8QhmPR8ys5Qu4-pB5THB8IgQ1n1bL1uc2RmBH2gPHJ9VAZfN6oFISPtm-pw2QKb5E1udSwkwRaV672Cr6JJnzhv/s1000/newmexico19.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Mountain View, 2000, oil on panel, 9 x 13 inches" border="0" data-original-height="649" data-original-width="1000" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6kmkSRwkZK7TLrDBeAv_P_k3HrVFd9h-y7tLbGrm-xXMjeX7pqhlB_8QhmPR8ys5Qu4-pB5THB8IgQ1n1bL1uc2RmBH2gPHJ9VAZfN6oFISPtm-pw2QKb5E1udSwkwRaV672Cr6JJnzhv/w640-h416/newmexico19.jpg" title="Mountain View, 2000, oil on panel, 9 x 13 inches" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Mountain View, 2000, oil on panel, 9 x 13 inches</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0"><i> </i></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0"><i>Tell us more about your photography practice. When and how did it start? And how has it evolved over time? You have done paintings as well --tell me more about that and its relationship to photography.<br /></i></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><br /></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0">I think my photography is mixed up with painting in a way that makes it hard to delineate an evolutionary line. That’s not just with me, it’s a terribly entwined history. Photography took up the genre of landscape around the turn of the 20th century, not too long after landscape painting crested and was in decline. So, if you want to engage with landscape in the 20th century, you will largely be looking at photography. You have the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Pictorialist</a> photographer's contending with painting, early on, and much later you have <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">painters dealing with photography</a> in a hyper-realist manner. The dialogue has been constant since the inception of photography, and earlier if you consider the place of the lens in painting. <br /><br />I recall a studio visit with the painter <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Tom Nozkowski</a> at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in the summer of 2000. I didn’t have much new painting available, so he looked at my slides. He asked me, “Are these photographs?” I understood then, although I was painting, I had a kind of photographic eye and sense of composition. Drawing for me had always been a search for compositions, and photography could operate the same way. <br /><br />One summer, maybe 2003, I had a studio visit with <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Carrie Mae Weems</a>. She could see I was struggling with painting and suggested I consider taking photographs instead, or at a minimum, work from photos. Later on that day she told a table of folks that she would like to see a painter making photos -whatever she meant by that, I took it at face value, she was speaking to me -not the photographers at the table. I had to consider changing something, but I had little interest in the quality of photographic prints at that time and hated the process of painting from projected slides. </div></div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-fv7bi" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-dgnl6" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhVyu9NxWp58k-3zlQYoMiWDHkK-qg3bLPNw-xq45xrZx1mnBykWZVBmy8K4g1N5Qvo7mXbMvxtdoIBlpEZ4aFssTZp1PQ5j4cR1o4RuCyhKYhvKpPeOZ3ZyqlGHjuKhD4DMoPODSYZpyi/s1000/Treesa%2528maine_first%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Maine Farm, 2006, oil on panel, 12 x 24 inches" border="0" data-original-height="507" data-original-width="1000" height="324" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhVyu9NxWp58k-3zlQYoMiWDHkK-qg3bLPNw-xq45xrZx1mnBykWZVBmy8K4g1N5Qvo7mXbMvxtdoIBlpEZ4aFssTZp1PQ5j4cR1o4RuCyhKYhvKpPeOZ3ZyqlGHjuKhD4DMoPODSYZpyi/w640-h324/Treesa%2528maine_first%2529.jpg" title="Maine Farm, 2006, oil on panel, 12 x 24 inches" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Maine Farm, 2006, oil on panel, 12 x 24 inches</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;">Not long after, I began taking photos with a four megapixel Canon Sureshot and making prints on my home printer to use for paintings. They were terrible! But I used that terrible color in the paintings. Honestly, I thought about it as if I was still working en plein air. Instead of an environment before me, it was a print pieced together from several 8.5 x 11 sheets, fixed above my painting panel. The head motion -look up, paint, look up, paint, look up, was exactly the same as the plein air experience, but with a flat picture, low-fi color, and less flies. This way of working began around 2006 and lasted until 2016.<br /><br />Eventually I gained access to a large scale inkjet at the college where I was teaching. I began to make larger prints from these small megapixel files so that I could scale up the paintings. Occasionally, I would find myself taken by a pixel “stretched” print I intended for a painting. A photograph I enjoyed, that kept my interest, didn’t need to become a painting. So I'd say that first image that didn’t become a painting was the beginning of my transition to photography. I remember it too: gray, largely sky, and also the bridge to the Rockaways, as seen from Floyd Bennet Field, Brooklyn.<br /><br />In August 2007, I decided to start up a blog about my gardening, landscape, and nature in New York City. Initially I thought of it as a multimedia garden journal and way to connect with other NYC gardeners. Photos were often the instigation for posts and the drive to keep posting kept the camera with me. This led me to new places with the camera, new images, and new posts. I've written over 2000 entries since 2007. If anything, the success of blogging has been growth in my writing and editing skills and I still write, just not quite as often as the previous decade, under the new heading, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">MOUND</a>.</div></div></div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-6jun9" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-efh25" style="text-align: center;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66" style="width: 613px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: 40px; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg76CmpseCXWuXRYx2JoCLrJWBiUIQnrGeqCRqPyB03vFzZaalurp9f6f04vxyuQKILdNVOdFx0colWBpQ1zMsbQGg4n2vd_eeRSKTZhHrTqotIFb7WzDV07iEEoY3aDI5zz2exmA_0ZLs-/s800/Prairie.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Prairie-Savanna Garden, planted near our studio, 2017" border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg76CmpseCXWuXRYx2JoCLrJWBiUIQnrGeqCRqPyB03vFzZaalurp9f6f04vxyuQKILdNVOdFx0colWBpQ1zMsbQGg4n2vd_eeRSKTZhHrTqotIFb7WzDV07iEEoY3aDI5zz2exmA_0ZLs-/w480-h640/Prairie.JPG" title="Prairie-Savanna Garden, planted near our studio, 2017" width="480" /></a></div></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Prairie-Savanna Garden, planted near our studio, 2017</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><i>I have seen your work at Rosalux and online -all the photographs I’ve seen from you are made outdoors, some at night, some intriguing blurry. Can you tell us more about your relationship to the outdoors?<br /></i><br />The wilderness experience, alone on a mountain, sometimes extreme activities in extreme environments -that isn’t my outdoors, I stay close to the road. I was raised in what amounts to suburbia, and its unpopulated, wild places were the beach, waste spaces between housing tracts, underused parks, empty baseball fields, weed patches between misaligned fences. Landscape, for me, is always a peopled place, whether bodies are physically present, or by the artifacts of our presence, and sometimes by the abstract landscape idea, itself (i.e. even wilderness requires our participation). <br /><br />Working outdoors, or with the outdoors, is my natural state of being. I sometimes joke that I was raised by the yard. We were those early “latchkey” kids. We didn’t have a word for it, we just had a lot of time without parents around and I preferred the yard. It was full of weeds; my mother had no interest in it and my father was not very skillful with it. It was a bit of a paradise of bugs, lambsquarters and pokeweed. I made spears from dried poke stalks, collected caterpillars, made cities for ant colonies, built a swimming pool with a shovel and clear sheet plastic. My parents never knew what I was up to [laughs]. <br /><br />Nature time with my parents generally meant time at the beach, either Long Island Sound or out near Montauk, on the ocean. I miss that now, the smell of salt marsh muck, the harbor. Those spaces, the elevated bluff overlooking the flat horizon, salt haze, those were peaceful spaces where, when driving age, I would go to center myself. Those spaces had a big influence on my earlier painting.<br /> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">Had I not stretched myself, had I not gone to college, not imagined being an artist, or not had a supportive high school art teacher; and had I rejected my parent’s notion of what I ought to be (an electrician), I may have become a landscaper. That was in the realm of possibility within my familial and cultural milieu, at that time, in that place. Maybe not mowing lawns and throwing mulch, but in some form because, outside of art making, my other interests were plants, gardening, landscape, and weather. I never thought of horticulture or landscape architecture, nor were these professions placed on the table, although I was gardening in high school and messing around with plants and dirt and bricks since I was quite young.</div></div></div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-3vec" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-83rvt" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4nqXcWLVWWCTttfkyaCdrknI_uVPyKewfj6hG4h4EWm48vkk7LlLAeDU34KGz4T-vIwSMLseTJrZ6GAC_jFD5QTCajzWK5rRNkAHoZUN2rh_dxYCsao3qVTcUOrblU_dTwO-NgKz7svK3/s1023/Prospect%2528nethermeadesnow%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1023" height="470" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4nqXcWLVWWCTttfkyaCdrknI_uVPyKewfj6hG4h4EWm48vkk7LlLAeDU34KGz4T-vIwSMLseTJrZ6GAC_jFD5QTCajzWK5rRNkAHoZUN2rh_dxYCsao3qVTcUOrblU_dTwO-NgKz7svK3/w640-h470/Prospect%2528nethermeadesnow%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Grove, Prospect Park, 2015, oil on muslin mounted on panel, 18 x 27 inches</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div aria-label="Prospect Park, 2015, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 18 x 27 inches Frank Meuschke Landscape painting" class="_3lvoN" role="img" style="text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div><div aria-label="Prospect Park, 2015, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 18 x 27 inches Frank Meuschke Landscape painting" class="_3lvoN" role="img" style="text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr">In
my early twenties I gobbled up nature writing and garden books, had
subscriptions to Garden Design and Landscape Architecture magazines,
grew tomatoes on the tar roof. At that time, these were an escape from Brooklyn concrete, and they also dealt with
contemporary problems around our relationship to nature that I wasn’t
getting from NY arts scene at that time. Except for that guy riding around Williamsburg with the grass suit. What was his name?<br /></span></div></div></div></div><p class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-36cfo" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><i>Tell me more about your photography practice. How has working outdoors through a camera affected you?</i></span></p>In comparison with painting outdoors, photography frees me to roam. When I am painting on site, I can roam for a bit to find what it is I will set about painting, but the changing light, building the surface, in a sense, that is how I roam while painting. Photography allows me a different temporal and spatial engagement with the world. I first became aware of this while artist in residence at <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Weir Farm National Historical Park</a>. I spent each day exploring the preserve, making a lot of pictures with my little Canon, which led to playing with making a photo for each step I took, which slowed things down, but created a record, however incomplete, of my attention.<br /> <br />Whatever draws me out to use the camera, the visual stimulation that says -grab the camera and get outside, is usually not the thing that works through the camera. I’ve learned to look through the viewfinder to see the photograph. Things that are visually compelling often become less so through the camera, and I have to move on. In that way, the original stimulus is like a clue to further investigation, and that may lead to compelling photographs, which are often revealed later on, in the studio. I also think that the idea of a series is more important to my photography than in my painting. An individual painting might stand on its own, but I think my photographs need the contextualization of the series.<div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-dpsca" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-esiv6" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_6qj0Q_GfqFd60RkY9z3shVlLL4ssEcVhP2Y_9YCHw88-xTI59Eqi7sHPIa-BUTjysuZYCFMnZiO_fUGbtzdAIZproJCrO0sLp9Xrmxt-2zAM4sTksuizpG6zqMaaBlRopAJRzipD2NRS/s1000/Bish+Bash+Yoko+small.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1000" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_6qj0Q_GfqFd60RkY9z3shVlLL4ssEcVhP2Y_9YCHw88-xTI59Eqi7sHPIa-BUTjysuZYCFMnZiO_fUGbtzdAIZproJCrO0sLp9Xrmxt-2zAM4sTksuizpG6zqMaaBlRopAJRzipD2NRS/w640-h480/Bish+Bash+Yoko+small.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Yoko, Bish Bash, 2009, Digital Photograph</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div aria-label="Bish Bash, 2009, Digital Photograph Frank Meuschke Photography" class="_3lvoN" role="img" style="text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div><div aria-label="Bish Bash, 2009, Digital Photograph Frank Meuschke Photography" class="_3lvoN" role="img" style="text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr">A
camera can be distancing, which can be useful or a barrier to
experience. I always think of September 11th, the terrorist attack, when
I think of this problem. We had a direct view of the towers. My friend
Mark, myself, and two neighbors were standing on the tar roof, aghast,
and occasionally talking through it. But one of the neighbors, Tony,
grabbed his camera and through the entirety of the experience, he
continued to photograph. I don’t think he ever looked up from behind the camera through roll after roll of film. </span></div></div></div></div><br />Isn’t this a way not to deal with something, a way to distance oneself -to become an observer as opposed to a participant? I’m not immune to that, I’ve practiced that in certain large social settings. In general, however, I don’t think that my practice of photography feels like an avoidant act; if anything I am looking to create an experience via the photo. If I were to be photographing people, which I have, I think that sense of distancing has become apparent. The confrontation, the discomfort with something or someone, that can be an idea to work with, one which I think I’ve approached in my Prospect Park paintings and may do so again.<br /><br /><i>Are you always taking photos with your phone? </i><br /><br />I do take a lot of photos with my phone. These tend to many different visual needs ranging from memory to visual stimulation. So I might have a bunch of photos of plants I want to ID, insects in flight, night shots, or someone’s work I saw at a gallery. It’s truly never ending. I consider it a tool for everyday, functional and intended for screen viewing, although I think I approach my artwork when I push the phone's limits by photographing at night.<div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-v4ta" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-cra41" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUb1IBhZwIl7RRKZvRJhhuvVnaCxog6Y9-QMEqLYPj37s6nTN9xhfs3cdnijWOjg55ECc75iH47iBMqEIqK48pAGhpsOPhZmUP2pMEw-Dlxq47yHnJxxo4UnFWT5QzdheJ1YpPRmPCDtAS/s1000/nightArb.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1000" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUb1IBhZwIl7RRKZvRJhhuvVnaCxog6Y9-QMEqLYPj37s6nTN9xhfs3cdnijWOjg55ECc75iH47iBMqEIqK48pAGhpsOPhZmUP2pMEw-Dlxq47yHnJxxo4UnFWT5QzdheJ1YpPRmPCDtAS/w640-h480/nightArb.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Arboretum Light, Night, 2019, iPhone Photograph</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><i> </i></span></div><i>Have you ever been a darkroom photographer? What is the term - you know - not digital. </i><br /><br />Wet photography? Sure. In my first year in art school, I took a basic photography course, and I did learn the darkroom. For my final project, I made a series of black and white photographs looking at people looking at paintings in museums. The following summer I was hired on as the night manager of SUNY Stony Brook’s student union darkroom. No one ever showed up, so I had the space to myself and I printed nightly. And I never got much better at it. At the time I was reading Anselm Adams <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">book of letters</a>. You could say that Adams was more a master of printing than photography (see some failures in the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">government archives</a>). I think it may have been there that I picked up the idea that one needed to be a printer to be a photographer, that one could not exist without the other. <br /><br /><i>You have a section of your website dedicated to “Landscape Projects,” in which you are making site based works in and with the land. Tell me more about this body of work. </i><br /><br />As someone interested in landscape, not to mention gardens and landscape architecture, I had spent a lot of time looking at earth art, land art -that sort of thing. Whether it was <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Agnes Denes</a>’ <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Wheat Field</a>, Smithson -who I’ve always admired, or smaller bits like <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Time landscape</a> by Alan Sonfist -an artwork I passed so frequently, it had such invisibility, it became just a park one couldn’t access, which leads me to a well-known local work -<a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Revival Field</a>. I think these earthworks capture much of the discourse we are still having regarding land use and ethics.</div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-eakbu" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-e2qrq" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNXfcCpdyPg-rrEdYGdRg3YoCvabs7cQeMZSxEStSlpFYDhaawh_ajShL_IsvwfmZKaagapGzX5NJY2L9cRQbpcs3wS6bmli9ElM06PFY53mUKwcbChKsXABlWZMWPNZEh-ayutOU_gEfC/s1000/agnes-dean-wheat.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="767" data-original-width="1000" height="490" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNXfcCpdyPg-rrEdYGdRg3YoCvabs7cQeMZSxEStSlpFYDhaawh_ajShL_IsvwfmZKaagapGzX5NJY2L9cRQbpcs3wS6bmli9ElM06PFY53mUKwcbChKsXABlWZMWPNZEh-ayutOU_gEfC/w640-h490/agnes-dean-wheat.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Agnes Denes, Wheatfield, 1982, Image Credit: John McGrail, courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="_3lvoN" role="img"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div><div class="_3lvoN" role="img"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr">In undergraduate school I worked with the artist <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _2xVcV" href="https://www.stevensiegel.net/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><u class="sDZYg">Steven Siegel</u></span></a>.
I helped him build what he’d probably term an environmental sculpture
with recycled newspapers and soil on our college campus. That was
probably my first involvement with that kind of art making. <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _2xVcV" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smithson" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><u class="sDZYg">Smithson</u></span></a>
takes on entropy in this abstract way where Siegel can be somewhat didactic, but I remember an excitement about digging as art. Being in
the Hudson Valley, then, I was also tipped off to Storm King by a
professor. I spent a good amount of time there and it is still one of my
favorite places. I remember bumping into <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _2xVcV" href="https://ursulavonrydingsvard.net/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><u class="sDZYg">Ursula von Rydingsvard</u></span></a>
and her crew of chainsaw wielding men while she was installing. That
was pretty exciting, big art, outdoors, wow. I was also lucky to meet <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _2xVcV" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Acconci" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><u class="sDZYg"><span style="color: #4a5aef;">Vito Acconci</span></u></a> by posing as a sculpture student when he visited our school. </span></div></div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-2270d" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-5hf22" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizkFTGguWu10EJxTv9qW3Hwumy4pFIkjE2kZ8ZpY9S4e2DGi8M8NNOscWEGMBhLwSSztJhUsnb64vxcxAq1IjO9MoxcEd1sKsl8y20A3PWqkw-b7uB09QPWrHjgX1KKoyzjGQmh3DsCuE8/s800/800px-Partially_Buried_Woodshed_Remains.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizkFTGguWu10EJxTv9qW3Hwumy4pFIkjE2kZ8ZpY9S4e2DGi8M8NNOscWEGMBhLwSSztJhUsnb64vxcxAq1IjO9MoxcEd1sKsl8y20A3PWqkw-b7uB09QPWrHjgX1KKoyzjGQmh3DsCuE8/w640-h480/800px-Partially_Buried_Woodshed_Remains.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr">In grad school, I used to drive around on <a class="_2qJYG blog-link-hashtag-color _2xVcV" href="https://www.blm.gov/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><u class="sDZYg"><span style="color: #4a5aef;">BLM</span></u></a>
land, through Chihuahua Desert canyons and across the mesa, looking for
painting spots. One time, it got quite late, and I ended up taking an
arroyo downhill that I had never been through before. Well, it got kind
of rough and it was dark, I slammed the rear end of my truck down on a
rock ledge. I was lucky not to get hung up on it, and continued on. I
was run down by the border patrol and they searched the vehicle because I
came out of the hills adjacent to their control point. I realized then that I had
lost my spare tire, which had been mounted underneath the rear of the
truck. </span></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr">The following day I thought I should make my way back up the
caldera, go as far as I could go with the truck, stop, and walk until I
found my spare. I found it, well down the arroyo, and had to roll it
back uphill. While I was rolling this giant tire, just like you would
imagine, kicking it with the heel of my palm, steadying it so it didn’t
flop, in the heat of a desert day, I thought to myself -<i>what the hell am I doing</i>!
This is like an art project, rolling a giant tire uphill through a
sandy arroyo, over stones; man and his petroleum tire. Sometimes life
feels that way, like you’ve unwittingly burdened yourself and still you make great
efforts to keep the burden going. So maybe that was my first
performative land artwork. I’m laughing, but seriously, maybe it was. I
wish someone was there, out of sight, filming it.</span></div></div></div><br />When I was at <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Skowhegan</a>, I was there as a painter -notably, a landscape painter. I was still working out of doors, on site, and several of the other artists found that novel and kind of intriguing. I was being exposed daily to radically different methods of artmaking. This happened through my peers, faculty like <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Kim Jones</a>, and weekly visiting artists presentations, and I had a sense that this was an opportunity to stretch myself. I just didn’t have a project, or know where to start. <br /><br />I was reading a book, Thoreau’s <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">The Maine Woods</a>, given to me by one of my housemates there, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Matt Northridge</a>. Thoreau says that the Maine woods growth fills in, right behind him, as he cuts his trail. Clearly hyperbole, still, it kept in mind. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Janine Antoni</a> was on campus that summer and it is safe to say that my work was perceived as rather opposite of her work -couldn’t be more different. I remember watching her slide presentation and I got stuck on one sculpture, “<a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">And</a>,” she had made there, at Skowhegan, a few years before. I understood this work was about a relationship; one of brutal grinding until finally, each wore the other into mated parts. <div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-79cqb" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-8et66" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlTqxUSMXWEG4gXYzBvrRlLrHrUJ2e3TN2Mod2zLG4VC1Z_O4UcShTrPux7_vcL7xbi31pdgqyg7PZgPxBMsm4BV6UxcIKzpFTOeV_pTlbuDevbRXlS4HKx4ttpasDHUQAxP3JYHUuN1Nx/s1000/TracingAnd3.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="729" data-original-width="1000" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlTqxUSMXWEG4gXYzBvrRlLrHrUJ2e3TN2Mod2zLG4VC1Z_O4UcShTrPux7_vcL7xbi31pdgqyg7PZgPxBMsm4BV6UxcIKzpFTOeV_pTlbuDevbRXlS4HKx4ttpasDHUQAxP3JYHUuN1Nx/w640-h466/TracingAnd3.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Tracing And, 2000, performance, 20 foot diameter circle</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr">Kind of dark, really. In spite of what Antoni considered to be the artwork, I
became intrigued by the other, cast-off relationship -between her body and the earth. This mating of body and earth manifested into a circular path worn into
the sod of the old cow field. Thinking of Thoreau's words, I wondered -could that
circle still be there? Or did Maine grow right up behind her feet like
Thoreau suggested? So I went sleuthing up in that field and
in the library. I found a book with the same imagery from Antoni’s slide presentation,
and used its images to triangulate a possible location. Narrowed down, I
was able to locate a divot in the field where timbers held the sculpture's stone in place. Once I had honed in on the precise location, still I wondered "now what?" <br /></span></div></div></div></div><p class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-bc548" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></p>What came to mind was the story where Rauschenberg repeatedly asks DeKooning for a drawing. Dekooning begrudgingly complies and once in Rauschenburg's hands, he sets about erasing the drawing. Why is the art world so antagonistic?! I thought, I'd like to consider the opposite of that; what about bringing back what has been disregarded or discarded? So I set about analyzing the Antoni's documentary images, making assumptions about her shoulder width, lever length, and common timber lengths so that I could recreate the dimensions of the worn circular path. With the aid of a center stake and string tied to my waist, I walked for one hour, daily, until I had re-drawn the circle. It took about an three weeks. It is not as easy as it sounds to walk in a circle for an hour, and it put me in a trance-like state. </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0"> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0">People were really unsure about what I was up to, some thought I was making fun. Seriously -a bit too much effort to be funny. The truth is the work came out of a rather stream of consciousness process and I needed to trust it. Ultimately, it was one of the most interesting things that happened that summer.<br /></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0"> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0">This nugget began a process of me making work out on the land each summer I was at Skowhegan because I found that I rarely felt compelled to paint while there -for once I had access to all this space, land, and that was what intrigued me. Back in NYC, I had little space to work with, but I created project proposals, applied to opportunities with them, but rarely, if ever, did they come to fruition outside of my summer Maine projects, with one exception at <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Socrates Sculpture Park</a>. <div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-elu0m" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-2falc" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIcFCRahMOfeKFw4C1lrUdBqgGlglJhldIUwBekdwlLCvtOCRRJTAnC70TFLcY1sRuaUhGKGaKM6NDP4vJ2228Z2xJgLJnwB461hM8CeRUqRFYSSq8puhS89IO16JcPsgLBxeqDS5Crk6j/s1182/Screen+Shot+2021-01-25+at+1.05.14+PM.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="749" data-original-width="1182" height="406" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIcFCRahMOfeKFw4C1lrUdBqgGlglJhldIUwBekdwlLCvtOCRRJTAnC70TFLcY1sRuaUhGKGaKM6NDP4vJ2228Z2xJgLJnwB461hM8CeRUqRFYSSq8puhS89IO16JcPsgLBxeqDS5Crk6j/w640-h406/Screen+Shot+2021-01-25+at+1.05.14+PM.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Husbandry, 2001-02, plants and various materials, 12 x 8 x 10 feet</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><i> </i></span></div><i>How might you describe your aesthetic? </i><br /><br />I don’t know that I have an aesthetic, or have a way to describe it clearly. For many years I have been telling people that my medium is landscape, more so than painting, photography, sculpture or writing. I try to speak through landscape, and this framing allows me to shift across media. I've never wanted to stay in my lane.<br /><br />My latest work, its “sfumato,” (from the Italian fumo -smoke) is the result of the process of making the photograph with custom filters; it's not from an editing process or the lens being out of focus. This diffuse quality ties my photography to painting, which I hadn’t thought about until someone said the new photographs look like paintings. I am enjoying the dialogue between my painting and my photography, although nothing new -the conversation has been going on for 175 years. </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0">I really like color, more specifically -individual colors. I’ve never had an internal color sensibility, or even the impulse to rigorously apply color theory. It was only when I started painting from life, directly, that I had a purpose for choosing colors. That changed my relationship to color in a way that felt really good and I think this easily shifted over to photography, which is defined by the intersection of technology and local color.</div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0">You know there’s an idea that, say a farmer or any laborer, doesn’t look up and see a beautiful moment, the sunset, say, while working -he sees the end of a hard day, a termination of toil or tomorrow’s hard work tearing up the sod or what have you. Somehow, the appreciation of beauty, or any aesthetic concept, is the product of only an urbane existence. I have a hard time with that -I don’t believe it. I know we learn aesthetic concepts, we pick them up as children, and we learn them through training and cultural reinforcement. Yet, I am struck by the far off sound of a softball clinking off an aluminum bat on a humid day or the moment the dewpoint shifts, cool air seems to descend upon my skin, and the odor of soil and plants becomes potent. I'm sure the farmer experiences these things, he just doesn't usually have the time, energy, or will to communicate them. </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"> </div></div></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-cqrf1" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYKLEKA_-tSLq1qB-iNvGziIRzvo15e63kfte6SQW2orgvssbRF1sgv59ltK7cASQt-ed1EhwmN-GZEq9LZQ1GOlxv2DlKG9E2yIUtXeWJ0P_4kLff4ZUMvCrAkPPifbH51JspS4knEA1a/s1000/Submergedtrailerhome_Saltonea_1985Desert+Cantos.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="798" data-original-width="1000" height="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYKLEKA_-tSLq1qB-iNvGziIRzvo15e63kfte6SQW2orgvssbRF1sgv59ltK7cASQt-ed1EhwmN-GZEq9LZQ1GOlxv2DlKG9E2yIUtXeWJ0P_4kLff4ZUMvCrAkPPifbH51JspS4knEA1a/w640-h510/Submergedtrailerhome_Saltonea_1985Desert+Cantos.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Richard Misrach, Submerged Trailer-Home, Salton Sea, 1985, pigment print, dimensions variable</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><i> </i></span></div><i>Who inspires you in photography and what are they doing that attracts you?</i><br /><br />I’m attracted to art that is idiosyncratic; work that is personal and complicates common narratives. Immediately who comes to mind is artist <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Wendy Redstar</a>, who works across media in a way that is true to herself and upends preconceptions and projections. I’ve been following the painter <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Joe Noderer</a> for a few years now, for similar reasons, but manifested differently.<br /><br />I’ve liked Richard Misrach for some time. I admire his <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">On the Beach series</a>, but <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Desert Cantos</a> in the way that it considers without judgement or didactics; the work creates beauty out of the most human-altered environments, despite what ails; despite what is fraught in the relationship. </div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-un4t" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-3ca99" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF45cAK8onE5pOt_ioIo2NF2vENfw_WJI5W5OE40rzW0ccH18pJWKetM5o28Vv5s5-oJezdAfuusyc5pKTDeidxqPUmP5cCElKzyAryt5icGiZwcC-wE-CV3RWaFfEDFnyHHKE8co_c4fC/s1823/Bladerunner.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1823" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF45cAK8onE5pOt_ioIo2NF2vENfw_WJI5W5OE40rzW0ccH18pJWKetM5o28Vv5s5-oJezdAfuusyc5pKTDeidxqPUmP5cCElKzyAryt5icGiZwcC-wE-CV3RWaFfEDFnyHHKE8co_c4fC/w640-h264/Bladerunner.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Film Still, Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, director, 1982</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div><div style="text-align: left;">Another example is Ridley Scott’s <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Bladerunner</a>. This world is probably not one you’d want to be a part of, but still we are confronted by the most stunning urban-industrial visages. It’s almost romantic and I get hooked on this complication. <br /><br /><i>What do you hope viewers will feel or think when experiencing your work?</i><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div>In my Prospect Park series of paintings, viewers could experience the park landscape as a place of uneasy repose. I had in mind that this artificial nature is our nature, that there could be romance in that and also discomfiture. It was the first work where I painted space explicitly peopled, which made sense given it <i>is</i> a park. There are two kinds of distance painted there: the painted space and looking at others from afar. It was probably the work that represented most clearly my internal, psychological space.</div></div></div></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-av0fl" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: left;" tabindex="0"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvUQtVxGcmsAFube8fibJAh9Olb6CxXVgSFVveWEZok_fND9k074FjyGqmryrnoSMJtzclmIFAN0C-VSFTDlH449kGdYAW_MV3Y90OkqqflJr0LdiF61y5YvXiZ98m3MRwn5O6rZpujOwr/s1000/Prospect%2528fingerwag%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="711" data-original-width="1000" height="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvUQtVxGcmsAFube8fibJAh9Olb6CxXVgSFVveWEZok_fND9k074FjyGqmryrnoSMJtzclmIFAN0C-VSFTDlH449kGdYAW_MV3Y90OkqqflJr0LdiF61y5YvXiZ98m3MRwn5O6rZpujOwr/w640-h456/Prospect%2528fingerwag%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Prospect Park (Dogwalkers), 2011, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 12 x 17 inches</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0">My last exhibit, "Invisible Present," showed work made during my residency at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. I wanted to have people wonder what they are looking at, despite its components being recognizable. In a way, that is an experience of ecology -we know what we are looking at, its parts are clear, but we do not understand how it all comes together. So a sense of mystery, and although I began to filter my experience through the idea of haunting, I didn’t intend the work to be a display of the haunted. It's not scary, there are no monsters or ghosts -it's not that kind of haunting. <br /></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0">I wanted to approach our hauntedness in our experience of the land or the natural world. So I pointed toward the occult appearance of the artifacts of scientific activity. Those objects, their purpose concealed, suggest something less concrete than we expect of science. Science abhors the supernatural, so this was a challenging way for me to approach Cedar Creek. As the notion crept up on me, I questioned it too, but the more time I spent walking the lonely sand roads of Cedar Creek, it became too hard to resist. In the evening I found myself reading up on folk horror, hauntology, and enjoying MR James ghost stories -especially <a href="https://youtu.be/DRGfEk0cnL4?si=hDkXFutoPhUWJDwv" target="_blank">Whistle and I'll Come To You</a> from the BBC. Ultimately, this led to my current work.<br /></div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-8nv52" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-884ai" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9KmU4YnnOaZ05LXoPeCEiZcU1ZODQFUeH-W76c6A3wMYiZluNA6xbFI3u9FMILYEux-sWijyLB6FSK0ykNJWqCHW2_2wQ0ja4kJqwSeXQezU5U_r_SOj5B2KWnciLEHgdJL2lC5Ox5y5e/s1000/22.5x30+Forest+Apparatus+2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1000" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9KmU4YnnOaZ05LXoPeCEiZcU1ZODQFUeH-W76c6A3wMYiZluNA6xbFI3u9FMILYEux-sWijyLB6FSK0ykNJWqCHW2_2wQ0ja4kJqwSeXQezU5U_r_SOj5B2KWnciLEHgdJL2lC5Ox5y5e/w640-h480/22.5x30+Forest+Apparatus+2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Unidentified Forest Apparatus, 2019, archival inkjet print, 22.5 x 30 inches</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><i> </i></span></div><i>Do you work in bodies of work? Color photos only? What size prints? How do you like to show them? </i><br /><br />I work in series, although there are specific projects I set about doing and then there are other subjects that I work with, sporadically, over many years. I tend to group these bodies around a place, or, if not a place, an idea. For example, I have a group of photos I take of artists in the landscape, another of empty sports fields, and these have been ongoing as the opportunity to photograph them reveals itself. Other projects are more concentrated, like my Cedar Creek work or Prospect Park paintings. My first series of photographs was taken, in black and white, of Brooklyn’s “<a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">only remaining forest</a>.” I was still painting at the time, and I never intended to show them, but when I was asked to be in an exhibit of artist zines, I put the group together for a zine, in black and white.<br /><br />My history as a painter has informed my ideas about size. People would look at my image presentations and imagine that the paintings were big, even though they were quite small. I felt that a big painting of a vast space was a kind of mockery, or at least, silly. So I made small paintings, you had to get close, to experience the vastness. It made sense practically, but also conceptually. With photography, it makes sense to me that one would print the size that manifests the ideas you are working with. In my last exhibit, at Rosalux, that meant 22x30 inches -big enough to see the details I wanted you to see, but not aggrandizing<span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr">.</span></div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-cil5k" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-2cd99" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66" style="width: 556px;"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_vnxkl6XW4IzKMKzA_em5g2-7uVQO463QxDsEPdeeBRtBhHHtYUfuP4gwiD5ZIxGUdYuKeUYQlNt5Qt5EV0SMx8ZPRTWjwpq0IQ1l3UXjvjHDyOAioZZ-RQ5ahchna8zZQetC54XhKOV-/s1000/Screen+Shot+2021-01-25+at+1.06.03+PM.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="751" data-original-width="1000" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_vnxkl6XW4IzKMKzA_em5g2-7uVQO463QxDsEPdeeBRtBhHHtYUfuP4gwiD5ZIxGUdYuKeUYQlNt5Qt5EV0SMx8ZPRTWjwpq0IQ1l3UXjvjHDyOAioZZ-RQ5ahchna8zZQetC54XhKOV-/w640-h480/Screen+Shot+2021-01-25+at+1.06.03+PM.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Brief History of the Woods, (Zine Detail), 2014, digital photograph</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div aria-label="Brief History of the Woods, (Zine Detail), 2014, Digital Photograph Meuschke Frank Landscape Photography" class="_3lvoN" role="img"><br /></div></div></div></div>That said, I don’t think I have found the best photography display “fit” yet. Modes of display are a perennial concern, as are issues of commerce. So, it’s a good question that is hard to answer for a broad spectrum of work.<br /><br />When I teach color theory, I introduce the idea that color in photography marks time, much like film or fashion can. Even if you should eliminate all the visual cues to time, like a style of clothing or hair in a photograph, the color print will dictate its time period. Black and white does this earlier on, but by mid-century it had stabilized, so that -again, styling aside, a black and white wet print, today, could be confused with one from 30 years ago. You can’t say the same for color, as it has been progressing. It is only now beginning to stabilize with inkjet printing -but for how long? <div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-a3m4k" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><div aria-label="Lindeman Hall, Cedar Creek ESR, Winter Night, 2019, Archival Pigment Print, 30 x 40 inches Meuschke Landscape Photography" class="_3lvoN" role="img" style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEJAFgCE_IrvQ5FOz356mc2OgSiQcIErGGxpF401lxzFwhVIQ2p839E4zLODbG1YbMxKq-prdmhyTRjngHwfaxXtVVOGwJA0j557GZN2MeHJfCnBq-N-3gtEgBWrmR8RDPvSHFPH5iztAx/s1100/Sodium+Red+and+Metal+Halide+Green+Promotional.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="825" data-original-width="1100" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEJAFgCE_IrvQ5FOz356mc2OgSiQcIErGGxpF401lxzFwhVIQ2p839E4zLODbG1YbMxKq-prdmhyTRjngHwfaxXtVVOGwJA0j557GZN2MeHJfCnBq-N-3gtEgBWrmR8RDPvSHFPH5iztAx/w640-h480/Sodium+Red+and+Metal+Halide+Green+Promotional.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Lindeman Hall, Cedar Creek ESR, Winter Night, 2019, archival pigment print, 30 x 40 inches </span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><i> </i></span></div><i>When photographing outdoors, have you thought about how we as white settlers are on land taken from indigenous peoples? Does that or could it affect your practice? </i><br /><br />My work doesn’t come from that point of view, although that is not to say that it couldn’t. It’s not too far a stretch to see photography, particularly of land or people, as a kind of stealing. The language, itself, refers to taking, capturing, grabbing a shot, and then, if there’s commerce involved, profiting off that taking is there as well. I’m conscious of using the words “making a photograph,” although that doesn’t absolve me of responsibility. <br /><br />Living where I do now, in the woods of Minnesota, I don’t think there is a day that I don’t think about being on and caring for land that isn’t mine. Coming from New York City, despite the butchered indigenous names everywhere, that awareness of being on native land isn’t present like it is in Minnesota. If you're sensitive to it, you know there is blood on every stone, and you cannot walk the woods without the presence of that history. There could be something spiritual in that experience; certainly there is grief, but also haunting. In this way the Hudson Valley haunts its residents, past and present. And aren't we too, in Minnesota? So, in this way, my current exploration of hauntedness, as we look at the land, ties to environmental and colonial crimes. Can these be separated? I don't think so.<br /></div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-fup1g" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-c6q8v" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP6DtA7GHnSDT7IS0ll1_94LATbijFjX1S_mFHmFZ-N6bAPrdTU00Cq-QcP7cAWEGLXRXOOxoG4l3qfIlC0LMG6KVORd6DUFvtqZSWiK2pewOocRskachY3gVWUK0Xh89Qm5zPAHCWWCpF/s1000/4_Big+Bio+Exclusion+Tarps.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1000" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP6DtA7GHnSDT7IS0ll1_94LATbijFjX1S_mFHmFZ-N6bAPrdTU00Cq-QcP7cAWEGLXRXOOxoG4l3qfIlC0LMG6KVORd6DUFvtqZSWiK2pewOocRskachY3gVWUK0Xh89Qm5zPAHCWWCpF/w640-h480/4_Big+Bio+Exclusion+Tarps.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Water Manipulation, Biodiversity and Climate Experiment, 2019, archival pigment print, 22.5 x 30 inches </span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div><i>If you were given a large grant with no strings attached (like a MacArthur grant) - what would you do with it?</i><br /><br />Make a film and have a show at Storm King. Storm King would get me out on the land to make physical spaces and objects, likely with plants and other landscape construction materials. Maybe I would make a horror movie at night at Storm King -that would include a lot of things I would enjoy playing with!<br /></div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-44ct5" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-a4cgi" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigO4GrqxHxlRcryyvaF8vaKJE33BSdZ6EJNaKbtQt0IV8n6yH3K1u1QgZ_zacBNcgAnideY2g5h_HAP9ogxFN-IMWJ-EOPU45VH8AeyW8nOJOfhWYWvT13JpAWnnxFamrJq7KKVP4xsUkk/s800/PolyShadow.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="649" data-original-width="800" height="520" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigO4GrqxHxlRcryyvaF8vaKJE33BSdZ6EJNaKbtQt0IV8n6yH3K1u1QgZ_zacBNcgAnideY2g5h_HAP9ogxFN-IMWJ-EOPU45VH8AeyW8nOJOfhWYWvT13JpAWnnxFamrJq7KKVP4xsUkk/w640-h520/PolyShadow.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Shadows on Plastic Sheet, Basement, 2019, iPhone capture</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><i> </i></span></div><i>What are you working on right now? Where is your work headed? Any plans to show?</i><br /><br />In summer of 2019, I replaced a rotten window in our basement and I had polyethylene sheeting hung to keep the dust contained. It was still up in November, and you know how low the sun is here, at that time. Trees cast shadows onto this clear plastic sheet and it surprised me, so I photographed it with my phone and posted it to Instagram. Eventually, that led to new photographs where I place polyethylene and other plastics between the subject and the lens. The subject is in focus, but the plastics diffuse the image. So I've been expanding on this process. </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><br />As for upcoming exhibits, right now it’s pretty quiet other than online showing. I really want to develop this new body of work, so having the time to do that is important. I think I’ll be ready to show these before my next exhibit at Rosalux. At the cusp of the pandemic, I was supposed to have a show of my last series of paintings in Brooklyn, so that may come back around, if we can whip this thing. </div></div></div><div class="XzvDs _208Ie ljrnk blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color _2QAo- _25MYV _1Fao9 ljrnk public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr" id="viewer-eufb2" style="line-height: 1.38; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-align: left;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"><br /></span></div><div class="q2uC4 _3kAGd" id="viewer-6v6io" style="text-align: left;"><div class="c-Mgr _2Mq66 _2Mq66 _7gPc2"><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHQcwjs2H6TNfvMIp4ZKUrZvzz8RG1w_rBzk1D9CItsxvAmOnYzeRyAkGZt9IXV6yXzQpWFhFtdQnJ7R1AuRPhzkApDYIAfbT4B2lyNnN_vKi4r26bSF_LnSRRCeEPPXh7fYu0ZrZyZ5qi/s900/Polyethylene_no3_1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="674" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHQcwjs2H6TNfvMIp4ZKUrZvzz8RG1w_rBzk1D9CItsxvAmOnYzeRyAkGZt9IXV6yXzQpWFhFtdQnJ7R1AuRPhzkApDYIAfbT4B2lyNnN_vKi4r26bSF_LnSRRCeEPPXh7fYu0ZrZyZ5qi/w480-h640/Polyethylene_no3_1.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="_1cwDk image-caption" dir="auto" style="font-size: x-small;">Polyethylene no. 3, 2020, digital photograph</span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="vkIF2 public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr"> </span></div></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"><br /></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" style="text-align: center;" tabindex="0"> _________________________________________________</div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0">Frank was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Artist Initiative Grant</a> for 2019 for his photography work made at <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve</a>. You can see more of his artwork by visiting his website, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Frankmeuschke.com</a>. Read his landscape and garden writing, see thousands of garden, insect, and landscape iPhone pics, and find other links at his blog, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">MOUND</a>. You can follow him on Instagram <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">@frankmeuschke</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/shelterwood_gardens/" target="_blank">@Shelterwood_gardens</a><br /></div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"> </div><div class="_2o-_D image-container LPH2h" data-hook="imageViewer" role="button" tabindex="0"> </div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-51392377607192212312024-02-21T21:40:00.005-06:002024-03-11T20:20:54.098-05:00Ballad of 박은빈: Father I Will Take Care of You<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLHkuxFt3hQr0d64dZzkAMrx-A3156_dA1Z7_Xr_tMqJsE-pVWXBQPhMRkDh8BfIrpF28N3rs0_Voq8L7bFBeY-wPhrZHJIngLszuLYS65R-tIXBcS-wwuAR4urFK1M2riYywAcQqHFDWzNcH38uCOOdeJ8oC6ywUYg-7TkAyVDzoVHvdjTh3ut8XRCO9F/s640/fatherItakecare.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLHkuxFt3hQr0d64dZzkAMrx-A3156_dA1Z7_Xr_tMqJsE-pVWXBQPhMRkDh8BfIrpF28N3rs0_Voq8L7bFBeY-wPhrZHJIngLszuLYS65R-tIXBcS-wwuAR4urFK1M2riYywAcQqHFDWzNcH38uCOOdeJ8oC6ywUYg-7TkAyVDzoVHvdjTh3ut8XRCO9F/w640-h480/fatherItakecare.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><a href="https://asianwiki.com/Father,_I%27ll_Take_Care_of_You" target="_blank">Father, I Will Take Care of You</a> is a sitcom that attempts to deal with serious issues alongside common
soap contrivances. For a glimpse of suds, watch (with the sound off) <a href="https://youtu.be/lFYMzGWVx90?si=hzRIgxQDeShm5oLj" target="_blank">a short clip on Youtube</a>
to see the soapy up-close facial expressions, pauses, and love triangle
melodrama. If that turns you on, great -otherwise this is a very long
series I doubt anyone would choose as an entry point into the world of
Korean drama. </p><p>The narrative hangs on so many things unsaid and the many misunderstandings it creates. Too often the dialogue is
what we'd rather not hear: complaining, wailing, arguing or the whiny
stammering of the character Sun Sik. Why won't these characters <i>just say
what is on their mind</i> (except for Sun Sik)? Because each protracted pause, each missed
opportunity to explain, carries one episode to the next. </p><div style="text-align: left;">This silence is
an agony of past mistakes -of which little can now be done. As everything
comes to a head, forgiveness can be sought, but may not be given. The show works
as a warning, or reminder, that one never fully escapes past actions, however well-meaning, and to
be mindful before acting or speaking. This theme is consistent across
several series I've watched. It's a compelling hook because who among us
hasn't acted inappropriately, or sinned, or hurt another? All to often our actions have consequences that, had
we understood them before acting, we likely would have made another choice. <br /></div><p>As the title
suggests, this is a soap opera exploring parenting -are dads (Oppa!) and moms
(Eumma!) required to be biological, can children choose their parents, what of
surrogate caregivers, what responsibility do children have to their
parents (or grandparents) and to what can parenting failures lead? What responsibility do we have as children to our parents'
reputation? A line of dialogue from one episode shares that children
are rarely better than their parents -a warning to parents; one that
counters our western, individualist point of view (which, in one U.S. mass-shooting case, is about to be tested). </p><p>Entwined into this long series is a long act of revenge taken by the character Lee Hyun-Woo. His revenge was instigated by a
wrong suffered by his father and brother at the hands of the community years prior.
Unfortunately, little time is given to exploring the people who've
chosen to lie in order to protect themselves and their loved ones at the expense of the innocent.</p><div style="text-align: left;">I have to remind myself that I am watching TV, a genre where there is always an appeal to a lowest common denominator. In Korean dramas, this is often romance, or always romance, along with a current of moral didactics. In Father I Will Take Care of You, as we watch elderly and middle-aged married couples, we chart the course of two young romances. It is almost too complicated to describe...let's see...okay -one young woman (actor Park Eun Bin) who aspires to be a soap opera writer who falls for the producer (actor Lee Tae Hwan, in above photo, center) of such shows, who also happens to be related to her by marriage. Or did he fall for her? Does that even matter? </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">What matters is there is a love triangle and, ever so familiar, it pits the innocent-hearted, creative, and something else I cannot spoil against the snotty, privileged, entitled woman (actor Lee Seul Bi, in above photo on left) who also is said producer's employer. The second romance is between the man (actor Kim Jae Won) who aims to take revenge and a woman (actor Lee Soo Kyung) who is the niece of the family he aims to destroy. Oh -is that complicated? And yet, there's so many more plot twists that I wouldn't think of getting into it -after all each episode is an hour long with 50 episodes. It takes conviction to see it through.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinCz5cjP9vTf7hdgES6GLqjaBdSBeZhhBDbHPFWe9i9oM4ALS5Agip_kqvgQ04x8WeoZ3-JnVLGzI6oMU8Orl2xvf581jxnWjvJ_2dtTacVaShbPh33UK7Y_A9KTMCFPrpr1ws8IUBJ3Sumn3IPcWl0hm-awPkSFavybhhsbgbpwcbZI6ndK5K2mOcPVVu/s640/fatherItakecare2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="640" height="412" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinCz5cjP9vTf7hdgES6GLqjaBdSBeZhhBDbHPFWe9i9oM4ALS5Agip_kqvgQ04x8WeoZ3-JnVLGzI6oMU8Orl2xvf581jxnWjvJ_2dtTacVaShbPh33UK7Y_A9KTMCFPrpr1ws8IUBJ3Sumn3IPcWl0hm-awPkSFavybhhsbgbpwcbZI6ndK5K2mOcPVVu/w640-h412/fatherItakecare2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">To watch Kdrama is to get comfortable with the wrist grab<br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">A
few other thoughts: This was the first program I watched that had
hair-pulling fights among the women characters -I've seen it since, but
was taken aback by it this first time. If you are new to Korean dramas,
be forewarned -you might be disturbed by the slapping, pushing,
wrist-grabbing, and aforementioned hair pulling. </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Although handsome, the leading character Han Sung Joon (actor <a href="https://mydramalist.com/people/6853-lee-tae-hwan" target="_blank">Lee Tae Hwan</a>)
was quite tall, with a neck so long and beefy that he was hard to look
at for the first few episodes. He didn't say much either, in fact had
very little personality whatsoever. I mentioned this problem with male
leads in another post. His character also had a mild aggressiveness
toward his love interest that came off a little strange. Spoiler...There
was a moment, deep into the series, where a teen, played by actor Son
Bo Seung, is shown to have quite the lungs for song and it was one of
the few positive moments for this family. Although one might expect Park
Eun Bin's leading character to deliver, whether it was the directing or
writing or both, she comes across rather flat. It was the other
romantic lead actor <a href="https://mydramalist.com/people/6853-lee-tae-hwan" target="_blank">Lee Soo Kyung</a>'s character who showed greater complexity and an arc of change across nearly 50 episodes. Actor <a href="https://mydramalist.com/people/4358-shin-dong-mi" target="_blank">Shin Dong Mi's</a>
Kang See Hook was over the top, teetering between comedy and melodrama
as she caricatured a mom obsessed with her child's success at school. </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">What
else can I say about a show jam-packed with plot, grief, mishap,
misunderstanding, conflict, and more. I will say this -it doesn't end
the way it appears it would, delivering the emotive scene K-drama is
known for, but only after too long of a commitment.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Previous: <a href="https://nycgarden.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-ballad-of-kings-affection.html">The Ballad of 박은빈: The King's Affection</a><br />Next: </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-2820119457038049192023-12-05T10:00:00.181-06:002024-03-11T20:15:14.414-05:00The Ballad of 박은빈: The King's Affection<div><p><span style="color: #660000;">*spoilers abound... </span><br /></p><p>The heart of most Korean drama is a love
story. To those trained on Hollywood or European cinema love, Korean romance will seem light -friendship, conversation, helping, hands touching, plucking an eyelash off a cheek, and <i>catch on a fall</i> does some heavy lifting. Too often there's a love triangle, among
lead and supporting characters, sometimes driving the narrative tension and, other times, only background noise. </p><p>A parallel story line is
spiraled around this love story, like a rope that leads, as expected, to
a knot. This parallel story may tackle contemporary social issues,
engage fantasy or historical <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseon" target="_blank">Joseon-period</a>
narratives. As with all shows, the writing, acting, and production
value are the weak or strong fibers entwined in the making of this rope,
but it is the love story that pulls us along (I know fellas, it's the
sword fights). </p><p>Yet, I am surprised how often the male leads lack personality. Cool, stoic, yes, and occasionally even tearful, but rarely interesting, rarely lively. I have watched Park Eun Bin as the love interest of a ghost, twice a coworker, a pianist, a faux-cousin/supervisor, a royal tutor, and now, in Castaway Diva, a reporter or TV producer (still in ♥ ▵). Although these male lead roles trend toward stiff, personality-less characters, they do support the lead woman's ambitions and remain "by her side." As in our own culture, overcoming generations of patriarchy and gender roles is represented and, one may reasonably guess, valued by the presumed demographic for these shows.<br /></p><p>Fortunately for <span title="Korean-language text"><span lang="ko-Hang"><i>연모</i>, </span></span>aka<span title="Korean-language text"><span lang="ko-Hang"> </span></span><i>Yeonmo</i> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Romanization_of_Korean" target="_blank">Revised Romanization</a>) or, as on Netflix - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King's_Affection" target="_blank"><i>The King's Affection</i></a>, the male lead, Ji-un, was animated, smiled frequently, showed confusion, solemnity, doubt. <span class="expandableItem">Given the restrained portrayal of a woman concealed as the male Crown Prince</span>, the romantic narrative would have suffered without<span class="expandableItem"> </span><span class="expandableItem"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowoon" target="_blank">Rowoon's</a>, aka </span><span class="expandableItem">Kim Seok-woo, </span><span class="expandableItem">lively royal tutor. </span><span class="expandableItem">This reversal carries the show through several mid-series episodes, until, at last, the Crown Prince is revealed to Ji-un as the woman she is. Unwavering, the two navigate the challenges of concealing her identity and Ji-un's love for the Crown Prince. </span></p><p><span class="expandableItem">That she is also Ji-un's childhood first love -the princess cum maid-servant Da-mi, becomes largely irrelevant, and is passed off with a shrug in a later episode. I presume this plot line is necessary primarily because fate is always present among lead lovers in Korean dramas. <i>The King's Affection</i> appears to use fated love to drive the narrative -how else to explain such circumstances? But then, how can a woman Crown Prince sire off-spring with the unknowing Crown Princess? Fate, here, appears to lead toward tragedy, as in the scene below, where they cannot be together, or worse -that one, or both, will be executed for the treason of concealing the true identity of the Crown Prince.<br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs6kSQoZyxwfI05WL63Sp8zFKWRB3eJlDPfoGdh0xFtAw7ANnlVOKD1Is5V2JqnVtyCfm5RNDVV3h2XhyphenhyphenGazYYMGVKY1TJIImh6o-BuDGitaFM7ZGozi9FxNIh_D9GR8ZPdfGkJGKvXYi47Fy0QtHC1KFzUkmSQhiVvQtJJHDCR8hydDpHzAyeAgBiMK5B/s640/kingsaffection3.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="640" height="342" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs6kSQoZyxwfI05WL63Sp8zFKWRB3eJlDPfoGdh0xFtAw7ANnlVOKD1Is5V2JqnVtyCfm5RNDVV3h2XhyphenhyphenGazYYMGVKY1TJIImh6o-BuDGitaFM7ZGozi9FxNIh_D9GR8ZPdfGkJGKvXYi47Fy0QtHC1KFzUkmSQhiVvQtJJHDCR8hydDpHzAyeAgBiMK5B/w640-h342/kingsaffection3.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p>The Crown Prince Lee Hwi and Royal Tutor Jung Ji-Un approach each other. He bows. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #4c1130;">Prince
Lee Hwi: "I was wondering why you did not come by today. You did not
deliver the royal reports. Do you have any idea how worried I was? </span><br /></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEityqY992eQNdwNb4eZA_1cKtEkILoTBv7GWyBJxSUJ_hGuYRyNQsWHCg5XF4LfGhGkGCaKXnagSF5UPVlp1LaZ-Vx84ht4MQQ1cKm12HsP0H6u1XnRv52qfMBoOB5pOd6sqzCO1VI4Itdd9QRjuT4_271laAi26RmGtQWbEnX2GVJKqxrhcqePcM-2nZUR/s640/kingsaffection4.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="291" data-original-width="640" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEityqY992eQNdwNb4eZA_1cKtEkILoTBv7GWyBJxSUJ_hGuYRyNQsWHCg5XF4LfGhGkGCaKXnagSF5UPVlp1LaZ-Vx84ht4MQQ1cKm12HsP0H6u1XnRv52qfMBoOB5pOd6sqzCO1VI4Itdd9QRjuT4_271laAi26RmGtQWbEnX2GVJKqxrhcqePcM-2nZUR/w640-h292/kingsaffection4.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="color: #073763;">Tutor Jung Ji-Un:" I have something I have to tell you, Your Majesty. </span><span style="color: #444444;">[pause]</span><span style="color: #073763;"> I am going to get married."</span></p><p><span style="color: #4c1130;">"Why,
though? If it's because of the rumors going around; don't go through
with it. We knew this was going to be difficult and ‒"</span></p><p><span style="color: #073763;">"This is the choice I have made."</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidabNLgtbVnQQhFZgmV61myDZKfZ-r6UTCqfiYXczI-aSMBY1r4m1wUf2XMcW_SGloah2asLXL9Eifa9LqYWmjfzpmD21AbiR-RRekzEnpBqG8y8enbQ8tcYaTiJvhHkGGPTVxnEfM9jmDfl_KtCEdCDPXxJLf0ykoBEnRcsGPE2uxHttRMVbqeG1CD9VZ/s640/kingsaffection5.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="294" data-original-width="640" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidabNLgtbVnQQhFZgmV61myDZKfZ-r6UTCqfiYXczI-aSMBY1r4m1wUf2XMcW_SGloah2asLXL9Eifa9LqYWmjfzpmD21AbiR-RRekzEnpBqG8y8enbQ8tcYaTiJvhHkGGPTVxnEfM9jmDfl_KtCEdCDPXxJLf0ykoBEnRcsGPE2uxHttRMVbqeG1CD9VZ/w640-h294/kingsaffection5.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #4c1130;">"Then..if that's what you really want, how can you just lie to me like that? Why
on earth are you going through with this? Please just tell me, why all
of a sudden you have a complete change of heart? We've been able to stay
strong through so much until right now. </span><span style="color: #444444;">[pause]</span><span style="color: #4c1130;"> So, why? Is there a reason, then, why you cannot just tell me?"</span></div><p><span style="color: #073763;">"I do not want to lose you, Your Majesty. And this is the only way I can make sure that happens."</span></p><p><span style="color: #4c1130;">"So what are you saying, then? If you don't wish to lose me, why ‒"</span></p><p><span style="color: #073763;">"This is... </span><span style="color: #444444;">[pause]</span><span style="color: #073763;"> I think this is where I should say goodbye, Majesty.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0cKSSBnjJ57FhV3Pt6jphlYzi7y8skn007SPeP3vfEFXA90i-yBrCJ04aY4Xl-vTtZwnaX0Ykcl5GqxcRiRS3np47pYZLqoMjEt8RBu6dnKMqv-TZPx27104o5gULQmHQ_b8d_yrm81XE6oCVvlRw-qiNVmhVAf4-D-2jUaomD5XmCK94Lu6G__wnN_Hv/s640/kingsaffection2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="314" data-original-width="640" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0cKSSBnjJ57FhV3Pt6jphlYzi7y8skn007SPeP3vfEFXA90i-yBrCJ04aY4Xl-vTtZwnaX0Ykcl5GqxcRiRS3np47pYZLqoMjEt8RBu6dnKMqv-TZPx27104o5gULQmHQ_b8d_yrm81XE6oCVvlRw-qiNVmhVAf4-D-2jUaomD5XmCK94Lu6G__wnN_Hv/w640-h314/kingsaffection2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;">He bows and begins to walk away. <br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #4c1130;">"Stop! Don't you dare leave!"</span></p><p>He stops. </p><p> <span style="color: #4c1130;">"I did not say... </span><span style="color: #444444;">[pause] </span><span style="color: #4c1130;">that we were finished here. You can't leave." </span><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhvdaQtNfA443TcTrGI8usjBJvmWkkYhRNOzLnRklpOZUsvR5oHbs0i4dCnDo3-tFkzxjlU0Ycz3y6A0sljVhLKeew12iyOQZEHWl0fHSToV4iY8rAwAxOlr2f-ib_RoXNODqsXrLJ5LsVANm8RMgVgu1MBXOrYa1xR0z1lb52Ov-wjgtZ5P15vSLZk8h0/s640/kingsaffection6.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="321" data-original-width="640" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhvdaQtNfA443TcTrGI8usjBJvmWkkYhRNOzLnRklpOZUsvR5oHbs0i4dCnDo3-tFkzxjlU0Ycz3y6A0sljVhLKeew12iyOQZEHWl0fHSToV4iY8rAwAxOlr2f-ib_RoXNODqsXrLJ5LsVANm8RMgVgu1MBXOrYa1xR0z1lb52Ov-wjgtZ5P15vSLZk8h0/w640-h322/kingsaffection6.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">Clenching his fist, he begins to walk away.<br /></p><p><span style="color: #4c1130;">"Stop, <i>now!</i>"</span><span style="color: #444444;"> </span>Music begins to play.<span style="color: #444444;"> </span><span style="color: #4c1130;">"I order you!"</span></p><p>Holding back his emotions, <span style="color: #073763;">"Forgive me... </span><span style="color: #444444;">[pause]</span><span style="color: #073763;"> Your Majesty" </span><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh1C096IHj4AHp_0aG80ycEh9Ut6eovuvA1oHMg0OjAL1UREYDS6G9Ym_nWIkv6dn7a2yDI4WNlpY-t4O99D0yGUfG3nGT8goEAybgot_ItefpLZLjY21HXIeOiFi6_e_nRj7Qm6wUmKB1TlNHsu6ESW8sxCHFG0KzLzPixBBrHo6ybTpe7T2Nw7EKKur5/s640/kingsaffection1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="305" data-original-width="640" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh1C096IHj4AHp_0aG80ycEh9Ut6eovuvA1oHMg0OjAL1UREYDS6G9Ym_nWIkv6dn7a2yDI4WNlpY-t4O99D0yGUfG3nGT8goEAybgot_ItefpLZLjY21HXIeOiFi6_e_nRj7Qm6wUmKB1TlNHsu6ESW8sxCHFG0KzLzPixBBrHo6ybTpe7T2Nw7EKKur5/w640-h306/kingsaffection1.jpg" title="Park Eun Bin in King's Affection" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The scene ends with the Crown Prince, isolated, alone -as in the beginning.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>If
her use of Royal authority in a pitiful attempt to command him to stay
by her side does not tug at you -perhaps you've no heart. Of course Prince
Hwi isn't aware that Ji-un <i>is</i> loyal, acting only to save her life. Despite this well-worn, soap contrivance, the low-key lighting punctuated by cyan and orange, deliquescent eyes, and shallow depth of field beautifully package this culmination of twenty hours of
nearly-suspended disbelief in two characters who have walked
together and now cannot. Fate, it seems, is coming to its own conclusion.<br /></p><p>Although the show is framed, largely, by royal palace courtyards and royal quarters, and sometimes landscapes or
villages, it never feels suffocated by them. The cinematic wide-screen format, variety of compositional devices from perspective
lines to boxing in, and closeups punctuated by catch lights and shallow depth of field provide room to breath; separating the feeling of <i>The King's Affection</i> from a swath of overly sharp, 4K productions. The wide screen format also offers an abundance of space to be filled with period details -stone walls, flowering trees, architecture, and
even sharply differentiated topography. Color is grounded in muted tones
punctuated by intense cyans, magentas, reds or white. The dark of night is produced with an eye for limited sight under low
light instead of artificially brightened scenes (see above photos). <br /></p><p>This
visual appeal is met by Park Eun Bin's effort to inhabit
the character as wholly as she did Woo Young Woo.
Few of the actor's expressive mannerisms, often visible in her other work,
including <i>Extraordinary Attorney Woo</i>, were seen in <i>The King's Affection</i>. In portraying a girl surviving as a boy, she chose restraint rather than masquerade, and as the episodes progress, stoicism becomes displaced by an un-constructed, un-gendered entity. As their relationship grows more comfortable, the repartee between the Crown Prince and tutor Ji-un is smile inducing. One episode is memorable for a scene in which the petite
Crown Prince Hwi physically assaults a visiting, and intolerable,
eunuch. One can hardly believe that Da-mi is playing the role, self-consciously, of a young man, but is motivated by something beyond gender -a rage fired up by unjust circumstances. </p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSKwo5yUchF2f58IMe2QD2pxb9QvQtk1jhISeUl-vj7OuW6y1HBensCGG4WfNTMAN81EvJcgssFtlqk5ybV3uLVAfLtekF9A-eIJOKHdY5LXGD_3s9QsHNrxtMrJIXr6uhkeycSOoiXGdt4n4IJJ2OImt1HmD1i7mERlOUsieLjZnqJNm6dWWlmkgzaCPv/s640/kingaffectionhauloff.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Park Eun Bin as Crown Prince punching visiting eunuch" border="0" data-original-height="277" data-original-width="640" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSKwo5yUchF2f58IMe2QD2pxb9QvQtk1jhISeUl-vj7OuW6y1HBensCGG4WfNTMAN81EvJcgssFtlqk5ybV3uLVAfLtekF9A-eIJOKHdY5LXGD_3s9QsHNrxtMrJIXr6uhkeycSOoiXGdt4n4IJJ2OImt1HmD1i7mERlOUsieLjZnqJNm6dWWlmkgzaCPv/w640-h278/kingaffectionhauloff.png" title="Park Eun Bin as Crown Prince punching visiting eunuch" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><div style="text-align: left;">Moments like these run interference against the kit of scenes all too
commonly drawn upon in Korean drama: romantic leads bantering about jealousy, fall and
catch scenes, or unexpected rainfall met by a kind umbrella. It also adds a touch of humanity to the character, Da-mi, whose complexity is generated only by the concealment of her identity, not by any flaws such a life may have realized. When Da-mi/Crown Prince Hwi makes a poor choice, she knows it, owns it, and is
forgiven by an audience that already understands that she is not truly
at fault. Such writing caricatures good and bad behavior to a point beyond question. This becomes an oppressive construct that, in its modelling of ideal
behavior, is rather conservative. Of course, none of this is restricted to Korean dramas, but is noticeably absent in several contemporary U.S.
productions like <i>You</i>, <i>Breaking Bad</i>, <i>Ozark</i>, <i>The Sopranos</i>
and more. </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The peasant or noble-born peasant with a heart of gold is a narrative trope common to Park Eun Bin's characters, whether in <i>The King's Affection</i>,
<i>Father I Will Take Care of You</i>,<i> Ghost Detective, Judge Vs Judge</i>, and now,<i> Castaway Diva</i>. To be fair, <i>The King's Affection</i> manages to succeed despite this limitation
-the Crown Prince, after all, was born a princess to be killed at birth, and
purportedly so, but for the grief of a mother that whisked her
unnamed daughter away in defiance of the King. Where the humble orphan meets her royal origin, there is nothing so kingly as kindness and truth. Where kindness and truth face ambition, we find sacrifice and tragedy.<br /></div><p style="text-align: center;"></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1spbo60y4QfmQQ-Ahz01sXSy8xwY5-dQOtOhup2hwEjfOiFjQ9wVV37Sfp3ed0uI_9eRRJu3I_sPDroXM67Uz_t8wGXBMLJ-LOlR90gB4MEU2UJ0ohfhx3LLynSLJSf8m29LshCOUFt9Kf4ACypt48pOPe2wkSKeQvH-0zrbxiMvXsOyy-l9KoFgKDkpR/s640/BloodyEndAffection.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1spbo60y4QfmQQ-Ahz01sXSy8xwY5-dQOtOhup2hwEjfOiFjQ9wVV37Sfp3ed0uI_9eRRJu3I_sPDroXM67Uz_t8wGXBMLJ-LOlR90gB4MEU2UJ0ohfhx3LLynSLJSf8m29LshCOUFt9Kf4ACypt48pOPe2wkSKeQvH-0zrbxiMvXsOyy-l9KoFgKDkpR/w640-h275/BloodyEndAffection.JPG" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The tearful, desperate end. </td></tr></tbody></table>For a show which, from the very beginning, moves toward tragedy, I thought it would have finished more memorably if it had only followed its tragic logic to the end. Wouldn't a fitting, trope-bucking conclusion sacrifice the twin sister of the real, but dead, Crown Prince Hwi to save the kingdom by perishing alongside her familial adversary? Although the situation was desperate, it may have been hard to accept
Crown Prince Hwi ingesting poisoned tea, if only to ensure that her
grandfather also drank it. Early on, we were primed for the deadliness of this poison as the Crown Prince's father, the King, was also poisoned this way by her maternal grandfather, who she now sat before, tea cup in hand. We did not know her plan, yet we understood the stakes, the risk, and were in a position to accept her self-sacrifice.</div><div> </div><div><div style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="#" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih6pyJSpsLqVj0onGQlGn00EarXsBkTmmCwYbpcz-egLs7VFCpKKMOXHmY5_G5bZZGNh_7Bdi0nwJH4DlW1RzuoczG9Y0KWN8ryYhTBN60xZDi_Tvia2RPMzEbQ1cGjg9YWIAlYRmYHLKy0Rh0w99CHfUwRtyQZRVXJYAs6__LDhm4aA5o4_4r-Mnj6GZw/w640-h328/BloodyEndAffection2.JPG" /></a></td></tr><tr align="center"><td class="tr-caption">After ingesting the poison<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>If the narrative had her die alongside her ruthless grandfather, all outcomes would have remained the same with one exception -this tragic love story would
have remained a tragedy. The viewers may not have forgiven the writers and the writers may have struggled with modeling the hero's path toward sacrifice, but instead, they chose to take the audience to that precipice, dangle us, and then pull us, improbably, back to safety. Inevitably, we find that model characters require model endings and we are left untouched by the significance of tragedy.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Previous: <a href="https://nycgarden.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-ballad-of.html">The Ballad of 박은빈</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">Next: <a href="https://nycgarden.blogspot.com/2024/02/ballad-of-father-i-will-take-care-of-you.html" target="_blank">Ballad of 박은빈: Father I Will Take Care of You </a></div><p><br /><br /></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-36305652201675199502023-11-21T04:30:00.002-06:002024-03-11T20:15:42.984-05:00The Ballad of 박은빈 <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyfxXeNTw_YJDndLsHT-qQXOeJAuIvLdcQfgavG2MtQ0ETYDOZkK3De-lnF-rrSSkaA7owUHgpW3-gRkkPVx2ZbPZrjWjlxhfXL1YHLX8xoHx23ikbuB6CTjj6GGyAHkjrSHdifdtJewoG_Fba6YRK2wh9mVO4f7goqvIXKSEC9JUgc8c1fWzc1KQkDbcT/s1366/ParkEunBinForeshadowing.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Park Eun Bin sitting on a chair at a bus station with dolphins overhead" border="0" data-original-height="879" data-original-width="1366" height="412" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyfxXeNTw_YJDndLsHT-qQXOeJAuIvLdcQfgavG2MtQ0ETYDOZkK3De-lnF-rrSSkaA7owUHgpW3-gRkkPVx2ZbPZrjWjlxhfXL1YHLX8xoHx23ikbuB6CTjj6GGyAHkjrSHdifdtJewoG_Fba6YRK2wh9mVO4f7goqvIXKSEC9JUgc8c1fWzc1KQkDbcT/w640-h412/ParkEunBinForeshadowing.JPG" title="Park Eun Bin 박은빈" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Character Dong Hui (Hee), in a bus station, foreshadowing Young Woo's obsession with whales<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>As June approached, under the long days of a northern solstice, nursery work kept me going until 8pm, sometimes later. At last light, I crashed, exhausted, in front of the TV -the first half-hour lost to a continuous scroll through endless Prime or Netflix possibilities. I had just re-watched <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Berlin" target="_blank">Babylon Berlin</a>, a show I savored, in preparation for the possibly never-airing 4th season. I watched the auto-trailers of top-left suggestions like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suits_(American_TV_series)" target="_blank">Suits</a>; I then scrolled across and decided to give <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_(TV_series)" target="_blank">You</a> a go. I lasted two or three episodes before quitting. It's possible Netflix algorithms calculated that, based on watching a trailer for a lawyer program plus a foreign-language series plus turning off a serial killer romantic not-comedy, I might watch a Korean program
about an autistic lawyer. I had seen a few Korean films over the years -The Host, Snowpiercer, Parasite, and most recently Train to Busan -all dark films, most dealing with class and moral attitudes, but I enjoyed Snowpiercer and Parasite, and Busan was a zombie flick, so it was okay, too. </p><p>But Extraordinary Attorney Woo? It's auto-trailer presented like a comedy, a fish out of water story. Was it difficult for me to separate my experience of a brother-in-law's Asperger's from my imagination of this portrayal? Was this actor, herself, on the spectrum? If not, was this okay? The program's intentions could only be sussed with an investment -each episode over an hour long. So I watched that first episode and what I recalled the next day was a supporting character asking Attorney Woo "are you an idiot, are you stupid?" On the other hand, there were other characters in Young Woo's orbit that were endearingly supportive. So I gave it another shot the following evening. And then again.<br /></p><p>Part of the what kept my attention is the freshness of a culture's new-to-me media. Also new was the program's emotivity. In my forty-five plus years of watching television, how many shows, or movies for that matter, have brought on tears? I do not recall many, with the notable exception of Dancer in the Dark, Lars von Trier's film starring Bjork about an impossible murder conviction and death row sentence that brought an entire theater audience to tears thanks to the humanity of the corrections officer who escorts the prisoner to her execution. I think of the film Wit by Mike Nichols, with Emma Thompson -dreadfully sad, yes, but no tears. Ted Lasso had scripted emotive moments like those in Attorney Woo, and after watching several Korean dramas, I see how much Lasso borrowed. </p><p>But Attorney Woo pushed it to a new level. Once or twice per episode, tears streaming? A time or two, having watched the night before, I woke ready to sob. This <i>can't</i> be right. Is it that I <i>am</i> <i>not okay</i>? Is it this show or was it my life in that moment? Had I lacked access to my feelings, or suppressed them, and this program's earnest expressions became a channel for processing emotions for which my daily life was providing little opportunity? Had I been spending too much time alone? Possibly. My wife had recently landed a new job in another state and in a very short time I found myself suddenly alone. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglbBWs8Kg-9lxt7VdgeE0NA007CaCYV8QL8aeuBbrjx3YQ6-LhZotyh1h2QN2xIzwJpBHg5M6Ql2H36m_BQLbtnMgoe_TnhWXIFwuYrA4Se6k5gPEeeFDjJTDrDmUYym2F-0I16opDpb5x794JN0Q4wpXK-2av24xIALihpvC95A0bnT2j37o8fsDvx1C4/s640/Woo2.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="416" data-original-width="640" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglbBWs8Kg-9lxt7VdgeE0NA007CaCYV8QL8aeuBbrjx3YQ6-LhZotyh1h2QN2xIzwJpBHg5M6Ql2H36m_BQLbtnMgoe_TnhWXIFwuYrA4Se6k5gPEeeFDjJTDrDmUYym2F-0I16opDpb5x794JN0Q4wpXK-2av24xIALihpvC95A0bnT2j37o8fsDvx1C4/w640-h416/Woo2.JPG" title="Attorney Woo Park Eun Bin" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Woo Young Woo introducing herself to her new colleagues.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;">So, I watched Attorney Woo and then, sure that I had missed things, re-watched it. Charmed by the lead, Park Eun Bin, I decided to seek other shows on which she was cast. I also did a little research -I had known about the K-pop phenomena, but I was ignorant of two decades of addictive episodic programming coming out of Korean entertainment industry. I am not the intended demographic for this industry, but I suspect it captures some who consider it a guilty, maybe secret, pleasure. While visiting my wife, I spoke with a Korean woman who watches. She said her husband does not watch, but sitting beside her, she often looks over, only to find him tearing up. Does he not watch? </p><p style="text-align: left;">Over the warm months this past summer, I've seen several series -sometimes multiple times (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_You_Like_Brahms%3F" target="_blank">Do You Like Brahms</a>) and one where I struggled to push through its 50 episodes (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father,_I%27ll_Take_Care_of_You" target="_blank">Father, I Will Take Care of You</a>). Another (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Detective" target="_blank">The Ghost Detective</a>) I watched with a fair amount of indifference after what I imagined was an interesting premise became a pedestrian script. I was sure there would be nothing for me with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello,_My_Twenties!" target="_blank">Hello, My Twenties</a> (aka Age of Youth) -a show about four women in their 20s who share an apt and grow, together. This program quickly revealed itself to be outside the common bounds of Korean drama (or anything in the young friends genre) and an inflection point for Park Eun Bin's career. </p><p style="text-align: left;">As Netflix drops new episodes of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castaway_Diva" target="_blank">Castaway Diva</a>, starring, of course, Park Eun Bin, this November, I am watching. There's talk of a season 2 for Attorney Woo, but I don't think a second season is necessary or a good idea, as the first ended perfectly and second seasons often suffer under high expectations and low resolve. Meanwhile, at the risk of taking these dramas too seriously, I am sharing my thoughts about them -as a way to understand my investment and as a way to distance myself from them. Beware: spoilers lurk in each post, yet, if you would like to jump into Korean dramas, but are unsure where to begin, these posts may be useful anchors for your choice.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Next: <a href="https://nycgarden.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-ballad-of-kings-affection.html">The Ballad of 박은빈: The King's Affection</a></p><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-34691958452684256582023-01-05T07:49:00.003-06:002023-01-05T10:38:04.508-06:00Rime on the Ancient Juniperus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-tsCblP-zW6Qp1mDIuwH2nPL4rfsKXahKE1cs6zhh5jH68059jUVbkigsArgVZsIicNTYX_t52lYrlK2804J8uyl0WZ_jzE3qxqsK1FnnJ6xCqydZrMR12L7Kaht3kEaLRf7zKszSMe3CvloZwjYiJbhi__ZatDTSvi0DfQQ9mDawix1AWN7-I7UYgg/s1366/73034641-5517-449E-9E30-F36FFC8846C7.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1366" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-tsCblP-zW6Qp1mDIuwH2nPL4rfsKXahKE1cs6zhh5jH68059jUVbkigsArgVZsIicNTYX_t52lYrlK2804J8uyl0WZ_jzE3qxqsK1FnnJ6xCqydZrMR12L7Kaht3kEaLRf7zKszSMe3CvloZwjYiJbhi__ZatDTSvi0DfQQ9mDawix1AWN7-I7UYgg/w640-h640/73034641-5517-449E-9E30-F36FFC8846C7.jpeg" width="640" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Yesterday’s tree ice was spectacular across the neighborhood. As relatively warm, moist air advected over cold snow, advection fog formed for an extended period. The air temperature had been in the low teens to mid twenties for some time and the trees, very cold branches. The aerosol moisture, in essence a cloud, in contact with those cold branches freezes to become rime ice. In this case, the finer distinction of soft rime which occurs more frequently when there is little wind -just that advecting or moving air. </div><p>The iPhone, as good as it is, has trouble capturing the subtleties of color on one of my favorite winter trees: the often disregarded (due to <a href="https://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/tree/eastern-red-cedar" target="_blank">its ability to colonize prairie</a> and other disturbed sites) Eastern Deciduous Forest native <i>Juniperus virginiana</i>, Eastern Red Cedar. Highly drought tolerant, these evergreen (well, ever-bronze) do well in a home landscape, particularly where soils are well draining sand or gravel. In the right setting, they can live quite a long time -up to four hundred years. I love them in winter, when the greens turn to lavender-bronze and glow red-orange under lengthy sun sets. These, like many around Shelterwood and elsewhere, have grown in old farm fields, making for a low growing, homogeneous forest. Not ideal, but what is? </p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEignNiIgEiVwgH8zUi3pW92jfhxKj-I7nBy0n6KSbCxP_qD4bh3DMEw7v21PitVVP2YcVo5W8aUZT0wHw-C0Sr-9MWrrQI_m0sle6F_0W8HePLLUqQnwdr7zMIHrnGpQYn5sVB9df8ZFZe7AJ4tM4PWx9eSIX53KGR7WYI9VUCBgxryBN3GWv1jDRb6mg/s1366/B6839258-C989-4C36-A890-1E6BABB89FE4.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1366" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEignNiIgEiVwgH8zUi3pW92jfhxKj-I7nBy0n6KSbCxP_qD4bh3DMEw7v21PitVVP2YcVo5W8aUZT0wHw-C0Sr-9MWrrQI_m0sle6F_0W8HePLLUqQnwdr7zMIHrnGpQYn5sVB9df8ZFZe7AJ4tM4PWx9eSIX53KGR7WYI9VUCBgxryBN3GWv1jDRb6mg/w640-h640/B6839258-C989-4C36-A890-1E6BABB89FE4.jpeg" width="640" /></a> <br /></p><p>I have a soft spot for this species -probably because one, just the one, grew alongside our fence line, in the sandiest of sand soils, providing shade for us kids under hot summer sun. A laundry effluent drywell installed 25 feet away seemed to boost growth, bringing the tree from 25 to 40 feet or so in a matter of a few years. The bigger picture is to survey one’s own attitudes about plants. Often our desire to plant a species is due to our youthful experience with the same or similar species. Sometimes this drive is okay, sometimes it leads to poor decisions. </p><p>When we desire a plant, strongly, it's helpful to think about why and whether or not it is a good choice for one’s yard conditions or the ecology it belongs to. Occasionally I see a seedling Juniper trying to get a foothold in the woods, on a trail, under any opening in the canopy that allows enough sunlight. Under those conditions, a spindly one may make it, but won't be able to rise above the canopy of deciduous trees. Others I find, occasionally, around the woods edges that border the human "yard." I pot those up or move them as needed. I get to see these on the roads around Shelterwood and that is good enough. </p><p> </p><p> <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-23637615443463868802022-12-26T09:53:00.009-06:002023-01-05T10:39:10.437-06:00Sonoran Winter<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiuJynT8FLG2dGz-cL4A46HopnEJpYVXcIfy3gExoJ8U6tpuAQn51YIgjsre_Bwcsu6gaTdOP3JpYkuPB6BCnhNMvnH2kf7bm9Wkn2lJZjvjd_rJ5htRVhXdseujsDBsftdOZF7zqYhpChHBR5qLgpbPY_7zP16sb46anLZWGhP0Bl_Ygtdb4YNHYzHQ/s1366/03E1C67C-E408-4DB6-9CF6-1B1736CDA619.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1366" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiuJynT8FLG2dGz-cL4A46HopnEJpYVXcIfy3gExoJ8U6tpuAQn51YIgjsre_Bwcsu6gaTdOP3JpYkuPB6BCnhNMvnH2kf7bm9Wkn2lJZjvjd_rJ5htRVhXdseujsDBsftdOZF7zqYhpChHBR5qLgpbPY_7zP16sb46anLZWGhP0Bl_Ygtdb4YNHYzHQ/w640-h640/03E1C67C-E408-4DB6-9CF6-1B1736CDA619.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div>Not much available for the hungry in the Sonoran Desert in December: but a bunch of likely Soldier butterflies, <i>Danaus eresimus</i>, a Monarch cousin lookalike, feed on what looks to be Mistflower in Tucson’s <a href="https://tohonochul.org/" target="_blank">Tohono Chul</a> garden. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZWou6G_dSB429wE00mA73bUmUlXtR4UpD34-Q_qWPy-gx8LddNp9LHJ8m03hYtBsuHLDzXnUcRLVcJu7CrJhv0fbId-uoSvBQ6SAEBRBt2R5-9geWUR0jCpLMJt4aQCDetiEHHTo19JA3KeCRnVgQqT-uV7YVvupiP93Ph4vUgK1CTCm6Tp8oidS8zw/s1366/AE57C514-D35B-499C-9D78-8A01FD582A6B.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1366" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZWou6G_dSB429wE00mA73bUmUlXtR4UpD34-Q_qWPy-gx8LddNp9LHJ8m03hYtBsuHLDzXnUcRLVcJu7CrJhv0fbId-uoSvBQ6SAEBRBt2R5-9geWUR0jCpLMJt4aQCDetiEHHTo19JA3KeCRnVgQqT-uV7YVvupiP93Ph4vUgK1CTCm6Tp8oidS8zw/w640-h640/AE57C514-D35B-499C-9D78-8A01FD582A6B.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><div style="text-align: center;">A sweat bee on, possibly, <i>Tetraneuris scaposa</i>, Four nerve daisy. </div></span></span></div></div><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><div> </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMTwSJkdaLOlJjBVOWMse2YcQwMOq6B2hUMkZpTsE9xwxyf2ULzfywl-OUmEQVue1dNu3guamFG0pdef9QKLA53cxTfHtLAN0QJrR-Zh7l8w-INrfWSAzVvbwP_Tla0YYbH1U2CaDskRfwwQU7i35t2APtGMsqvt78HkL7tmytGavjdcNDzImgTAwF0g/s1366/171709AF-ED12-4580-A26C-1588DDB0ABC1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1366" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMTwSJkdaLOlJjBVOWMse2YcQwMOq6B2hUMkZpTsE9xwxyf2ULzfywl-OUmEQVue1dNu3guamFG0pdef9QKLA53cxTfHtLAN0QJrR-Zh7l8w-INrfWSAzVvbwP_Tla0YYbH1U2CaDskRfwwQU7i35t2APtGMsqvt78HkL7tmytGavjdcNDzImgTAwF0g/w640-h640/171709AF-ED12-4580-A26C-1588DDB0ABC1.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div>Amazing how many milkweeds are adapted to different biomes. Here we have Pineleaf Milkweed, <i>Asclepias linaria</i>. </div><div> </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXfVm-1YtRu747GdnkNKS9VbIAmT71H5AYB4BVe1dB6kgo2-y2vmJrcxZT0WCQumTS24XnIZKU6JQ0Sak41x49MKna4JQMwT7BKgXzeD7Y7hMUqrvEHOT4eCF7UXN4j-Ldz4LKhXYGA1cf6gnwUrnZ9dPbade5nTX_tpwwgSVxOumyVJi7tWmOwZABOA/s1366/69463CCB-92EF-4771-A21F-5F9C051B72AF.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1366" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXfVm-1YtRu747GdnkNKS9VbIAmT71H5AYB4BVe1dB6kgo2-y2vmJrcxZT0WCQumTS24XnIZKU6JQ0Sak41x49MKna4JQMwT7BKgXzeD7Y7hMUqrvEHOT4eCF7UXN4j-Ldz4LKhXYGA1cf6gnwUrnZ9dPbade5nTX_tpwwgSVxOumyVJi7tWmOwZABOA/w640-h640/69463CCB-92EF-4771-A21F-5F9C051B72AF.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div>An unknown (to me) caterpillar, possibly a Tussock Moth caterpillar, -one of many on a roadside wall at 5000 ft. </div><div> </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgCVNZ122xr1VklMnCTrjPsQD1bHYEowzp-FAnfZy1knP454UkXsf6WkfmfoukuPpdU6voCvA3-P3r9eXKOBFvuBuolBk2rw__XckhZT2Uh8nyLPdta8KKry2JCtsaRQ3dDSTQ5WNkHEzaCjhRjXx4oELLH7tZJBv5UIVstcmINJtusRvl06ii-_fgHg/s1366/161D7AC0-DFF6-4380-BDC6-C0A2A039209D.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1366" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgCVNZ122xr1VklMnCTrjPsQD1bHYEowzp-FAnfZy1knP454UkXsf6WkfmfoukuPpdU6voCvA3-P3r9eXKOBFvuBuolBk2rw__XckhZT2Uh8nyLPdta8KKry2JCtsaRQ3dDSTQ5WNkHEzaCjhRjXx4oELLH7tZJBv5UIVstcmINJtusRvl06ii-_fgHg/w640-h640/161D7AC0-DFF6-4380-BDC6-C0A2A039209D.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">At a higher elevation, maybe 6000 feet -cactus, moss, and snow. </div><div><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifd3GTrWitxYBjm5xEsLAMEPWwOXWIkwbG6R_jr6JGLldCZtKE6iyWWrnGW9wpdcwadu0BSybtcB6tbGrJE9OrxQNC7UxcYKe84fj4_ZAjd2faI1PT_oij0izpe0OTEth2i1bYII78YCUy8eixJG8BqqLLYdNO44cHgKzwTDZaIR1U_J88zNIxcTMILg/s1366/6FAB840C-F0BB-41F4-BE44-27CEB4EA88F8.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1366" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifd3GTrWitxYBjm5xEsLAMEPWwOXWIkwbG6R_jr6JGLldCZtKE6iyWWrnGW9wpdcwadu0BSybtcB6tbGrJE9OrxQNC7UxcYKe84fj4_ZAjd2faI1PT_oij0izpe0OTEth2i1bYII78YCUy8eixJG8BqqLLYdNO44cHgKzwTDZaIR1U_J88zNIxcTMILg/w640-h640/6FAB840C-F0BB-41F4-BE44-27CEB4EA88F8.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">You can identify this Monarch lookalike by its white spots on the tops of wings.<br /></div><p> </p></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0Tohono Chul | Gardens, Galleries, and Bistro, 7366 N Paseo Del Norte, Tucson, AZ 85704, USA32.3394668 -110.98172664.0292329638211513 -146.1379766 60.649700636178842 -75.8254766tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-35628671464669403732022-11-05T10:49:00.005-05:002023-01-05T08:39:32.312-06:00Don't Go Into The Light<p><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;">It's been a very busy year, and the last three or four months didn't disappoint. After wrapping up a fairly busy nursery season at <a href="http://www.shelterwoodgardens.com" target="_blank">Shelterwood</a>, managing or teaching 35 <a href="https://arb.umn.edu/learn/classes/adults/photography-classes" target="_blank">photography classes</a> at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, teaching landscape painting for three weeks at <a href="https://art.chq.org/" target="_blank">Chautauqua Institute,</a> photographing at several sites in far northern and southwestern Minnesota, yesterday I opened my exhibit, "<i>Don't go Into the Light</i>," at my Minneapolis gallery <a href="https://www.rosaluxgallery.com/post/don-t-go-into-the-light-new-photography-by-frank-james-meuschke-at-rosalux-this-november" target="_blank">Rosalux</a>. </span><br /></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwkpEvhZ1c5FfJVW5J_7Ze07h2hOezURemwiccJATZ5Yy_46XIRRyI9slImuc_H3m87Hg5SwZDNFYu5ZPBGRIEyhpN7z6PWf3JYRYsGeIBBj7bXtMool3p2ly3Ha8zerUS81esruPy1Cag-782A9JtsfRh9lVlroXEGuAB92wamD42lN1_dFcSCBW9OQ/s640/reception%20reflection.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="519" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwkpEvhZ1c5FfJVW5J_7Ze07h2hOezURemwiccJATZ5Yy_46XIRRyI9slImuc_H3m87Hg5SwZDNFYu5ZPBGRIEyhpN7z6PWf3JYRYsGeIBBj7bXtMool3p2ly3Ha8zerUS81esruPy1Cag-782A9JtsfRh9lVlroXEGuAB92wamD42lN1_dFcSCBW9OQ/w520-h640/reception%20reflection.JPG" width="520" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Avenir Book"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;">Reflection of artwork in the plate glass window.</span><br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">The gallery is open 12-4pm Saturdays and Sundays through November and I will be on site for Sunday hours. We are also hosting a couple of special events on climate change and native plants:</span></span></span></p><p>
</p><div class="WordSection1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;">
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><a href="https://www.frankmeuschke.com/upcoming-classes-events/2022/10/12/climate-habitat-what-you-can-do" target="_blank"><i><span style="color: #d0000a; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Radical
Resilience: Climate Change, Habitat & You</span></i></a></span></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><span style="color: #d0000a; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Saturday,
November 19<sup>th</sup>, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM</span></span></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><span style="color: #d0000a; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">&</span></span></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><a href="https://www.frankmeuschke.com/upcoming-classes-events/2022/11/20/native-plant-clinic" target="_blank"><i><span style="color: #d0000a; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Native Plant Clinic</span></i></a></span></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><span style="color: #d0000a; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sunday,
November 20<sup>th</sup>, 12:30 PM – 4:30 PM</span></span></span></p>
</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
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</span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Has news of a changing
climate left you feeling anxious? Has the current drought changed the way you
feel about your home landscape? If you want to irrigate less, help pollinators,
feed birds, and see thriving life, this free program was designed for you. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Rosalux Gallery and the artist
and owner of Shelterwood Gardens, Frank Meuschke is hosting an event on
Minnesota-specific climate changes and what you can do to build resilience into
your home environment. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Radical Resilience: Event Schedule</span></b></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Seats are limited. To help
with a headcount, <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">please register using <a href="https://forms.gle/2SCf66M2LDFMPm369" target="_blank">this link</a>.</span></i></span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></b></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">1:00pm</span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">: Frank
James Meuschke introduces the event, gallery, and artwork</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">1:15pm</span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">: Past,
Present, & Future Climate in Minnesota -climate scientist Sam Potter, PHD </span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">2:00pm</span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">: Q&A
with Sam </span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">15
minute break</span></b></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">2:30pm</span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">: Bird
& Bat Habitat (in Your Yard) -Hennepin County wildlife biologist Nicole
Witzel </span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">3:15pm</span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">: Q&A
with Nicole</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">3:30pm</span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">: Planting
for a Changing Climate -Shelterwood Gardens’ Frank Meuschke</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">End
of Program</span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">: Free Bird & Bat House Raffle!</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"><span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">To
limit spread of the Omicron Covid in our community, we encourage masking at
this group event and please stay home if you do not feel your best. Thank you.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Avenir Book"; font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXT8SvSaMTqWbxDuJPVBQw5YwrJQam6Y_kbbBhKfJIREDST2m21mPrxv8VBkmSKPnRxS2eafoHICqKcmFb81kkSRNACqZKnXQ0Ph8gEBuKtCKVZ1QQLSHzu8X5R7QPnpxycTDdtuffXM0N6SZc9PxD4MYxP79mXuT1gZQ9ljCZx0W40Fo0GHvISB-Hgw/s1335/Polyethylene_Whitewater%20River_51x51_sRGB.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1335" data-original-width="1335" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXT8SvSaMTqWbxDuJPVBQw5YwrJQam6Y_kbbBhKfJIREDST2m21mPrxv8VBkmSKPnRxS2eafoHICqKcmFb81kkSRNACqZKnXQ0Ph8gEBuKtCKVZ1QQLSHzu8X5R7QPnpxycTDdtuffXM0N6SZc9PxD4MYxP79mXuT1gZQ9ljCZx0W40Fo0GHvISB-Hgw/w640-h640/Polyethylene_Whitewater%20River_51x51_sRGB.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: Josefin Slab;"></span></span></p>
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-67993773627067089262022-04-05T14:59:00.004-05:002022-04-05T15:04:26.075-05:00EBlast From The Past<p>A post by Marie on <a href="https://66squarefeet.blogspot.com/2022/03/18thstreetpollinators-nothing-to-see.html" target="_blank">her blog</a> sent me to Google street view and I was close, so I went to look at what had changed in my old neighborhood. The school, a block away is open, big, and then closed for Covid, but open again. It was still under construction when we left. J&L nursery is still there -almost surprising! The corner has a bump out, a traffic control measure that may have been finished before the school -I do not remember, it has been 7 years (what?!).</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzPtfIvMBjoxOBTK5pt0uyZBT-8frZRpDwmC7mKtgo36oyHuChtCcjUtzpHcOaUYhsqQA3ybpym_s-tZd_2xtJSTe-eYs6fFEdjWG9TN54MA4VSW5srVl8Zhxvz881Cn3eJbvsCaZDzdcdl2GxYc7fieZyV2yd5f-USSMcZxyAtwHARD-CDZnTYpUeWg/s1373/Screen%20Shot%202022-04-05%20at%2010.46.28%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1373" height="421" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzPtfIvMBjoxOBTK5pt0uyZBT-8frZRpDwmC7mKtgo36oyHuChtCcjUtzpHcOaUYhsqQA3ybpym_s-tZd_2xtJSTe-eYs6fFEdjWG9TN54MA4VSW5srVl8Zhxvz881Cn3eJbvsCaZDzdcdl2GxYc7fieZyV2yd5f-USSMcZxyAtwHARD-CDZnTYpUeWg/w640-h421/Screen%20Shot%202022-04-05%20at%2010.46.28%20AM.png" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><div style="text-align: left;">The first thing I noticed is how the Russian (why is that loaded now?) Zelkova trees have come to completely change the street feel. The former gardens would have been completely shaded and changed to shade loving plants, had those plants remained. They do not. All is gone, bare soil probably steeped in feline urine and poo, among other nasties. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUo26OYd5GloWZwv5QSjSvH_-o1mHiqvo4rS87NrrAE5nGf70xa8D_jzmKvuQ2a0Txgt_2f42OzDh2oQMBNsQEMb3iveSogzvH2XKCq-6OZLKnww7LH2YKsKwAymWLmbqEE9kVYvPMrSdspKLfsecJrrgB1wVnRaF0nsGzulUFt3h9FFu85K86f2NbGw/s1122/Screen%20Shot%202022-04-05%20at%2010.48.04%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="968" data-original-width="1122" height="552" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUo26OYd5GloWZwv5QSjSvH_-o1mHiqvo4rS87NrrAE5nGf70xa8D_jzmKvuQ2a0Txgt_2f42OzDh2oQMBNsQEMb3iveSogzvH2XKCq-6OZLKnww7LH2YKsKwAymWLmbqEE9kVYvPMrSdspKLfsecJrrgB1wVnRaF0nsGzulUFt3h9FFu85K86f2NbGw/w640-h552/Screen%20Shot%202022-04-05%20at%2010.48.04%20AM.png" width="640" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;">A closer look indicates that my slate "patio" still stands. I mean they have not been moved <i>at all</i> -even the individual slates nearer the sidewalk. If it weren't for someone's outdoor accessories resting against the wall I'd say few, if any, have stepped over that ramshackle iron fence. That fence supported a never flowering, but lovely climbing hydrangea; it held my camera that walked away one morning as I clipped. I wonder if the Mayapples, removed from
the trash heap of trail clearing, up in Van Cortlandt Park, still thrive
under the last corner Yew. Likely not, but fun to think
so.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjbYsiKPOHVo74l9LJHGWZoxQmNzUExVkZ0q_6Z00ESpjAUGjep-3Fxc4BjqwJDlPrxZZBQ_jZBRaI5E9rVMgSoBnuTJM7bQ-39XdINYzLUbEq0KDyerX19hN4QwkVSSaS4lthmA42TEVgD5BGhUQOm7ZrtjnrboCePsIw8F8CWX2U6poBIFJNO94FHg/s1221/Screen%20Shot%202022-04-05%20at%2010.48.26%20AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="938" data-original-width="1221" height="492" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjbYsiKPOHVo74l9LJHGWZoxQmNzUExVkZ0q_6Z00ESpjAUGjep-3Fxc4BjqwJDlPrxZZBQ_jZBRaI5E9rVMgSoBnuTJM7bQ-39XdINYzLUbEq0KDyerX19hN4QwkVSSaS4lthmA42TEVgD5BGhUQOm7ZrtjnrboCePsIw8F8CWX2U6poBIFJNO94FHg/w640-h492/Screen%20Shot%202022-04-05%20at%2010.48.26%20AM.png" width="640" /></a></p><p>It is nice to see the block hasn't changed all that much despite the restaurants and bars popping up. Neighborhoods have a way of holding when owners are your neighbors. Thank you Google Tours, Google Memories, Google Nostalgia for a touch of the old world witnessed from the farthest reaches of the eastern deciduous forest.</p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-67788954924556699622022-01-14T17:58:00.002-06:002022-01-14T17:58:25.427-06:00Perpetuity<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg3_3lvhjvSRAPXSEzWvb_BC8kUnp6FNiYmfUjxMDxlsJ2OXlBA0v2zXbAhnfyIT9UEsTH3z5VeXBtlvk10KYeT4HomywwG2g_NCUeYIVoptRoR4qPK7gIFqc-6B10EQRcGMiChPW7Hx7V2Hl5w6UyWjOVVw4qKRjo5Qq-UTbJKrS-DqXJDRoQIHrI34Q=s1000" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg3_3lvhjvSRAPXSEzWvb_BC8kUnp6FNiYmfUjxMDxlsJ2OXlBA0v2zXbAhnfyIT9UEsTH3z5VeXBtlvk10KYeT4HomywwG2g_NCUeYIVoptRoR4qPK7gIFqc-6B10EQRcGMiChPW7Hx7V2Hl5w6UyWjOVVw4qKRjo5Qq-UTbJKrS-DqXJDRoQIHrI34Q=w480-h640" width="480" /></a></div>I received a pandemic-related artist grant from the state early this year. One of the components of the grant proposal was to update my website (not this blog) to contain all aspects of my creativity in one place. This is proving to be more difficult than I imagined. My website is "owned" by the company Squarespace. Squarespace allows blog import, a feature they tout, but you cannot import individual posts. Pictures are not sized, formatted or placed properly. Captions will be gone. One must go into each post (I have over 2000) to correct every format problem. Images do not populate as thumbnails, so that only new posts written and populated with images on Squarespace show as thumbnails on the third challenge -the index. <p></p><p>Blogger allows for simple indexing on the left column -you can see it here by scrolling down. By date, by tag, whatever. Squarespace only allows an index-type page called a summary block (on a separate page) that can be populated with only 30 posts. It is on that page that the nifty thumbnails of each post do not show unless I repopulate each post with an image from my computer. Because the summary block only allows 30 posts, I have to create a batch tag for each group of 30 posts, input the tag into each post, and do this roughly 60 times to create the index for the blog imported to Squarespace.</p><p>So then I think -what happens when Squarespace goes bankrupt, sells, or otherwise says they're not offering this service any longer? Well- I have to start from scratch. You cannot export the content: all images, text, captions, titles, blog posts or anything from Squarespace. </p><p>It seems to me that what I have created in my time on this planet will only live on in this virtual space -at least as long as there is electricity and money to keep the website live. But how do we keep our existence in virtual space around far into the future? Is it worth it? Are there better ways to be spending one's time? </p><p>Probably.<br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-80242139145029612492021-06-04T08:30:00.001-05:002021-06-04T08:30:00.227-05:00What, Now <p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWb614p6FNMv1-UGc5BZPGS82OvMHagltcWZL5tXQhoJ9hT17U2KE6BeAHshg1s_9eC-MNQAHtsTnwYwa1neVTEdULcV2e04FaACa4uCJgNNmu2mBzdw5wRFSD3kvc5CJHT0i1UbWy3Bf9/s640/01760FAA-0A72-4654-A022-999691588BAA.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWb614p6FNMv1-UGc5BZPGS82OvMHagltcWZL5tXQhoJ9hT17U2KE6BeAHshg1s_9eC-MNQAHtsTnwYwa1neVTEdULcV2e04FaACa4uCJgNNmu2mBzdw5wRFSD3kvc5CJHT0i1UbWy3Bf9/w640-h640/01760FAA-0A72-4654-A022-999691588BAA.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p>I'm selling plants, mostly plants native, or nearly so, to our eastern deciduous forest region of the Upper Midwest. Many I am growing by seed, some are transplanted from the trails and gardens, others are grown by a greenhouse about two hours away. Was focusing on ephemerals, but it became difficult not to grow the shade plants, and then the part shade plants, and then the sun plants. </p><p>I built a deer pen for the shade plants, still need one for the sun plants (and a place to put that). After two months of non-stop work, I've come to realize growing plants in year one is really setting the stage for year two. Ultimately I would like to take customers at our place, not be at the market, but it is a way to get people to know the nursery exists, and our place isn't as ready for display and sales as I would prefer. </p><p>The idea is to funnel future profitability into our artist-in-residence studio build, ultimately creating a more complex human and environmental ecology in our woods. There is a lot of work to be done -we could really use some volunteers! </p><p>Along with this, there are classes I am preparing to teach at MCAD, art-funding grants to spend and apply for, a couple of sculptural installations to plan for at regional art parks, photography trips to make, and more. Busy busy. <br /> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-68488588552442018442021-04-03T10:30:00.087-05:002024-01-30T14:51:55.972-06:00An Interview with the Painter Joe Noderer<div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I first met the painter Joe Noderer on Instagram -then, after a couple of years, on a Google Meets for this interview. Social media creates an environment where finding interesting artists is easier yet also may have you wading through a massive amount of less interesting art. Joe is one of the most interesting landscape painters of our day. An idiosyncratic painterly language, links to artists working long before him, and work untrammeled by judgement or environmental despair are key to this distinguished painter. Read on to find out how Joe came to practice painting near Pittsburgh, PA, how he forged his career early on, learn about his influences and what concerns him today.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><img alt="Joe Noderer in his Pittsburgh studio" height="480" src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/ad211b_c964c24486dc4cc5bdc7188d7cf77585~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_740,h_555,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/ad211b_c964c24486dc4cc5bdc7188d7cf77585~mv2.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Joe Noderer in his Pittsburgh studio" width="640" /></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Joe Noderer in his Pittsburgh studio</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><i>How would you describe your work to someone who has never seen it?</i><br /><br />I usually say expressive landscape paintings; that is the easiest way to cover a lot of bases in my work.<br /><br /><i>Tell us something about where you live? </i><br /><br />We’re part of the city [of Pittsburgh], it’s called Brookline. It’s just a few miles to Pittsburgh, although we are within the city limits. I am south of the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monongahela_River"> Monongahela</a> or<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegheny_River"> Allegheny</a> River, I can’t remember. They come together to make the Ohio River, which then goes down, west, through Kentucky to the Mississippi. We’re south of that and it’s pretty green. Brookline has a lot of houses that are eight or nine feet apart. Older houses that are a hundred years old. There’s a lot of green, a lot of tangly stuff popping out all over the place. It’s very hilly. Looking out my studio window, across the street, I can see the telephone poles and houses that are at the top of the next hill. It’s an urban neighborhood, family oriented, folks that have been here for awhile; Pittsburgh locals.<br /><br /> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Lonesome Sue 'Pon Turd Hill (For Big Sue), Oil on Canvas, 36 in x 36 in, 2017 noderer" height="627" src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/ad211b_00e613aa6a344526b54765a7a4015649~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_740,h_726,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/ad211b_00e613aa6a344526b54765a7a4015649~mv2.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Lonesome Sue 'Pon Turd Hill (For Big Sue), Oil on Canvas, 36 in x 36 in, 2017" width="640" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Lonesome Sue 'Pon Turd Hill (For Big Sue), Oil on Canvas, 36 in x 36 in, 2017</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><i>It sounds like an early 20th century, working class, single family home neighborhood.</i><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;">Yeah. Pittsburgh used to be a pretty big manufacturer of steel but there are also a lot of coal mines in the area. Pittsburgh is one of those places where there’s the north and there’s the south, not in terms of their…<br /><br /><i>Not the Civil War.</i><br /><br />Yeah. People in the south don’t like to cross the river and vice versa. So I grew up in the south and my experience with the north is only since I have moved back. The further south you get, the closer to West Virginia you get; there’s more and more coal, more mines in this area, and there’s more mills in the north.<br /><i><br />Did you grow up south of Pittsburgh?</i><br /><br />Yeah, even further south. I live in Brookline, now, but I grew up a little bit further south in a suburb called Bethel Park. Those houses were built in the sixties and seventies, housing development kind of thing. At the time we had a pretty big wooded area behind our house that kind of stretched parallel to our street and at the top of our hill, which was a dead end street, a big patch of woods that I could easily walk through to get to my friends. <br /><br /><i>So you grew up in that in-between space, between total urbanity and the hills of southwestern PA.<br /></i><br />Yeah, it wouldn’t be too much further south to be where you would consider it truly rural. As a family we would go on walks or bike rides on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montour_Trail">Montour Trail</a>. As a teenager we’d go creeping around the woods, trying to smoke weed, and hide from the cops. You can easily have that experience of being out in the woods, but then come home to sleep in a nice house in the suburbs. Or just go to the city; Carnegie Mellon is here, three or four different schools, and especially <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/">CMU</a>, bringing in lots of interesting people around the city [which] was truly a good place to get interesting, alternative thought. <br /><br />I think people still don’t think of Pittsburgh as a place of thought so much as it will always have this working class association, which it still hangs on to very, very much. Not hangs on to, but is. I mean it is a very working class city, for sure. But there are also some really smart people here, and really creative and really interesting people too, and they just coexist somehow; it’s great.<br /><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="400" src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/ad211b_fe7002350c0049828d37c30f0e5ef326~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_671,h_895,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/ad211b_fe7002350c0049828d37c30f0e5ef326~mv2.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Screenshot, Noderer IG Post, 2020" width="300" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Screenshot, Noderer IG Post, 2020</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><i>Before the pandemic, what was the nature of the art community in Pittsburgh?<br /></i><br />There are a few galleries. Historically, they have had a hard time staying open. There are a lot of people here who are intelligent and sophisticated and appreciate shows, but there are only a few people here who buy [art]. <br /><br /><i>How is the community of artists? Do people support each other?</i><br /><br />Yeah, I think so. People are serious about making work and seeing work. A gallery recently opened up that is concerned with showing local artists. That helps a lot. There are a lot of really talented people here and Pittsburgh needs to showcase that talent. <a href="http://zynkagallery.com/">Zynka Gallery</a> is doing that, which is cool. There’s a first Friday. The city does support a lot of arts organizations -there’s the <a href="https://www.aapgh.org/">Associated Artists of Pittsburgh</a> and things like that. I can see it moving, incrementally, toward getting richer. <br /><br />You do have to make an effort to meet people and maintain those friendships. My friend, Pete, who is a painter as well, we met when I was renting a studio space from an organization called <a href="https://www.radianthall.org/">Radiant Hall</a>. They own three buildings converted into studio spaces and they are really affordable and in the city. They have open studios and a number of people came through. <br /><br />You might go to openings and see a few people that you know, go out and have drinks and talk. That was the experience in New York and Chicago -we’d go to openings, accumulate people, and you’d end up in a bar, somewhere, talking about art. That doesn’t happen as much, here, but I am okay with that. [Laughs]<br /><br /><i>Have platforms like Instagram substituted for a local, in-person art community? </i><br /><br />To some extent you can get around the exhibition experience, but that social aspect? You find out that a big part of it is the social aspect - and the work is a part of that. Talking to people, meeting new people and all the ways that kind of thing can turn into new relationships and foundations to be built. <br /><br />But this [pandemic] is happening, It seems like people, in art, are saying we’ll do an online exhibition instead. That’s good, but I would hate for that to replace things, though, because it is so much easier to be able to be on your phone, to be able to hold onto an exhibition. Plus the format is so different, it being so small really changes [the experience]. It’s the equivalent of walking across the street and then turning around to look at your painting on the other side. A lot of times it looks really great when they’re two inches by two inches. Or different, at least. I feel like we still have a lot of visual stuff we can get out of having an online interaction and we can be somewhat sociable on it too.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Lois Johnson Memorial Daycare Center, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2020" height="468" src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/ad211b_1146f8e97bb6421899742e0890dff562~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_740,h_541,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/ad211b_1146f8e97bb6421899742e0890dff562~mv2.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="noderer Lois Johnson Memorial Daycare Center, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2020" width="640" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Lois Johnson Memorial Daycare Center, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2020</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><i>I like artist interviews because I feel like I can better understand what artists are thinking. I think a lot of artists are interested in that, maybe because it gives some insight into something that is largely private.<br /></i><br />Yeah for sure. In <a href="https://nycgarden.blogspot.com/2020/10/an-interview-with-artist-jim-hittenger.html">the interview</a> you pointed me to, with <a href="https://www.jimhittinger.com/gallery">Jim Hittenger</a>, it was neat to read about things that I consider influential for me also influencing him and see how he visually dealt with those things. You can have a similar influential experience, say film, and we’ll both put out different things maybe based on our age or how our environment was filtered through seeing these films when we were younger. Sometimes it makes you feel a little bit better about what your influences are, if you are embarrassed by somethings here and there, when you find out that everyone has got geeky things they like.<br /><br /><i>You have to come to terms with the things you were raised with.</i><br /><br />My parents had mostly family photos around the house and they still have this artist hanging up, the artist<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bev_Doolittle"> Bev Doolittle</a>. She makes nature based, believable looking stuff. They are all prints at home, not originals, but they’re of some Native American, frontier stuff, a lot of natural stuff. What she does is kind of gimmicky; she’ll hide things in the underbrush...<br /><br /><i>Oh, yeah, I know her work.</i><br /><br />Yeah, like a wolf! It’s funny because I liked them when I was a kid. Bev Doolittle paintings are rugged, frontiersy, but with this hidden element that is only revealed the longer you get lost in staring at the image. Saying this out loud, it is absurd to me that I never realized that until right now [laughs]! So yeah, those Bev Doolittle things were more influential to me than any art I saw at the Carnegie as a kid.<br /><br /><i>Because you lived with it -it was there, in your vision, everyday.</i><br /><br />Yeah, it was similar to looking out the window. Like the Bev Doolittle painting, the longer you look, the different kind of animals you can see in the tree branches -you can kind of do the same thing just looking out the window of the kitchen.<br /><i><br />A way of bringing in the idea of the painting as a window.</i><br /><br /></p></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtIMxgEa4L4E5F0a6eMgMbztXIQ2weNgDTLp1N511viJFLa1I1d9LbajCLp20lv-hQal1lCIhGrnEc2L9ILnrg61NHPPzXET9VBTGzAjL6i9GlwFtiV4Lzmpvojb9_KkKRkliUVWaELy6z/s919/oilpanel_2016-24x30_Night+of+the+Horsefire.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Night of the Horse Fire, Oil on Panel, 24 in x 30 in, 2016" border="0" data-original-height="919" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtIMxgEa4L4E5F0a6eMgMbztXIQ2weNgDTLp1N511viJFLa1I1d9LbajCLp20lv-hQal1lCIhGrnEc2L9ILnrg61NHPPzXET9VBTGzAjL6i9GlwFtiV4Lzmpvojb9_KkKRkliUVWaELy6z/w522-h640/oilpanel_2016-24x30_Night+of+the+Horsefire.jpg" title="Night of the Horse Fire, Oil on Panel, 24 in x 30 in, 2016" width="522" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Night of the Horse Fire, Oil on Panel, 24 in x 30 in, 2016</span></td></tr></tbody></table><i></i><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Would you share something of your formative experience of the land that has so strongly influenced your work?</i><br /><br />I had a positive experience with being outside, in Bethel Park. As a kid, playing outside, we had a large patch of woods, behind the house. I spent a lot of time outside with friends or by myself having experiences with what seemed like “real nature” at the time. Not just a tree in the yard, but the woods with the creek, where I happened upon a dead deer and that kind of thing. It’s a visually striking place. It’s pretty dramatic. <br /><br />There’s hills, sometimes very steep hills. The weather is temperamental; I always think of it as kind of moody. I think this nature lends itself to painting because there is a lot of texture here, a lot of movement, it’s very dynamic. It’s an older place; there’s still quite a bit of old buildings and some of them are occupied and falling apart. I’ve been a visual daydreamer ever since I was a kid. It was easy to get lost in staring out the window, in elementary school, at the trees because there were so many trees right there. The sky and the leaves on the ground -it’s easy to get lost in all those things. I started doing that when I was a kid and haven’t stopped. <br /><br /><i>Would you say that the window is more important than an actual engagement with the outdoors?<br /></i><br />Now, for sure. When I was a kid it was probably equally split. I played outside a lot. Now the balance is little off. You had more time to do that when you were a kid. You can just play.<br /><br /><i>Without a sense of time.</i><br /><br />Yeah. It’s harder to do that as an adult.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgCM_lM4pYLKwey_PYh_9THPYBO-bdxjA3cGHo7299kT85-tKpRnMt-kobcKFmk_YNKsgu3_0ndaJyo6O48yb10MMlhG6r_iKGboPlnRs8YES4TdQBMiQtK8vT7ZKjD6wUUItp7BG5MvNK/s1000/houseplants.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Housplant Display with Painting, Noderer Home" border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgCM_lM4pYLKwey_PYh_9THPYBO-bdxjA3cGHo7299kT85-tKpRnMt-kobcKFmk_YNKsgu3_0ndaJyo6O48yb10MMlhG6r_iKGboPlnRs8YES4TdQBMiQtK8vT7ZKjD6wUUItp7BG5MvNK/w480-h640/houseplants.jpg" title="Housplant Display with Painting, Noderer Home" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Housplant Display with Painting, Noderer Home</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i>The work isn’t necessarily informed by your day to day, now, but is informed by early experience?</i><br /><br />In a lot of ways, yeah. If I think literally about my day to day, seeing it through my car windows, through the work windows -I’ve wondered about that. How can I make my work more about my day to day experience? But then, all I can think about is making paintings essentially of work, which I do not want to do. <br /><br />When I moved up here, my dog and I would walk multiple times a day throughout the seasons. That, up until about two or three years ago, was the extent of my daily experience with nature. Now that primarily comes through plants. My girlfriend and I have a lot of houseplants. It’s a big part of our interior worlds. We have these beautifully composed areas of lots of different types of plants that she has cared for amazingly.<br /><br /><i>I think the suburbs has conventionally gotten a bad rap when we talk about nature, or even when we talk about the city. I’m thinking that the suburbs is sort of a window upon the world outside the city. It exists as this place between the internal city space and the external, raw nature experience. </i><br /><br />Right.<br /><i><br />It has a lot more to offer than we have ever allowed it in terms of our experience of nature. It's counter to the narrative of wilderness, where there isn’t a human in sight, and its opposite, the urban experience and it being nature-less, which we also know is not true. The suburb is a unique vantage point and if you open up to it, it allows you to see that narrative differently.</i><br /><br />I can see it from other perspectives as well. Folks out in the country can look at the suburbs as a window into what’s happening in the city in a way that maybe they can relate to more than just looking directly at the city. It’s a window; it’s a middle ground. Yeah. That’s interesting. Paintings as windows is definitely a thing.<i><br /><br />It’s not even something I care to walk away from or challenge, strictly.</i><br /><br />Yeah, I’m pretty much fully invested in that idea.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj42_y1AWf-xzccLXoP2f88AWic2Qe_wpPWPU9mXffMLbRNBMUdGZC3Wj5a2U9_nCI3j7tNPiGE1cK9XCa0Dk_TKujRgHg5-KV2H14FefOYt8ijy4FspqeBUN1HchXXu7QIKfeooc092WyB/s950/oilonlinen_2020-11x14+Joseph+Noderer+-+Shortcut+to+Wabash.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Shortcut To Wabash, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2020" border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj42_y1AWf-xzccLXoP2f88AWic2Qe_wpPWPU9mXffMLbRNBMUdGZC3Wj5a2U9_nCI3j7tNPiGE1cK9XCa0Dk_TKujRgHg5-KV2H14FefOYt8ijy4FspqeBUN1HchXXu7QIKfeooc092WyB/w506-h640/oilonlinen_2020-11x14+Joseph+Noderer+-+Shortcut+to+Wabash.jpg" title="Shortcut To Wabash, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2020" width="506" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Shortcut To Wabash, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2020</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i>How do you go about creating a sense of place, or more on point -the feeling of place, in your artwork, if you even feel you are doing so?</i><br /><br />I want to. I find this area very beautiful. Formative experiences, in terms of interacting with the world, those were all had here. It’s important to me, but since I’ve been back, I have trusted that the character of this place would come out if I work intuitively because I’ve had so much time, even when I wasn’t here, being saturated by this place, or wanting this place back.<br /><br />My goal is to capture how I feel about this place and I just assume that it comes across to people looking at my work. Whether or not they know, by looking at a painting of mine, that I live just outside of Pittsburgh? They can see it, maybe even the group of paintings, as a region because of the consistency there, in terms of subject matter, color, composition, specificity. I want there to be specificity in my work and of course, an amount of ambiguity.<br /><br /><i>I looked at your work and I’m not sure I knew you were in Pennsylvania, but it suggested it. I don’t know if it matters to viewers of your work that they pick up that regional sensibility or not, but to me it is specifically there, I see it based on my experience [of Pennsylvania].</i><br /><br />I’m glad to hear that. Because to some extent it confirms that it’s not me subjectively thinking that I am capturing the place, but being way off-base, objectively, for someone else. I am really just painting what I see here. I know that it is not representational in the conventional sense, but I think it’s reflective of my influences, they’re right out this window. What I do with those influences, I don’t put them all back together so they look like the view out the window, because I need more than that. I think some people don’t realize that I am painting what’s around me. I haven’t constructed some sort of world, or if I have, it’s based on the world that I live in.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs7EJGOkAtmpkfhtZ0WNwZt2SgtXNVoodc4FermIMFuhryoCcrbLvW0glwk_PkDVimf0cVKzdggOWffsjc3Gf0oxT9IUbpK6ZAXl_W29GVda3ecKNx24aAAT3FcsYomRR6v6AeZdZa4KNj/s1000/oillinen_2019_16x20+Joseph+Noderer+-+Monongahela.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Monongahela, Oil on Linen, 16 in x 20 in, 2019" border="0" data-original-height="791" data-original-width="1000" height="506" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs7EJGOkAtmpkfhtZ0WNwZt2SgtXNVoodc4FermIMFuhryoCcrbLvW0glwk_PkDVimf0cVKzdggOWffsjc3Gf0oxT9IUbpK6ZAXl_W29GVda3ecKNx24aAAT3FcsYomRR6v6AeZdZa4KNj/w640-h506/oillinen_2019_16x20+Joseph+Noderer+-+Monongahela.jpg" title="Monongahela, Oil on Linen, 16 in x 20 in, 2019" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Monongahela, Oil on Linen, 16 in x 20 in, 2019</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i>There is a sense of decay in your work that, to me, speaks of the region as well.</i><br /><br />Yeah, it’s here. There’s a lot of old stuff here and a lot of it is not repurposed. Some of it is plowed over and something is built on top of it. But there’s plenty of stuff that is left alone to fall apart. At the same time, it doesn’t exist in an economically depressed area, it’s not an indication of a ghost town. You can appreciate it that way and not look at it as an indicator of some really dark thing that is happening.<br /><br /><i>I’m reminded of<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich"> Caspar David Friedrich</a> -his interest in painting the gothic ruin. I don’t look at that ruin as a matter of fact, but that he is creating an entire ethos or mood around an environment that looks partially rendered, accurately, and partially made up. I feel like your work has an American...I was almost going to say gothic!</i><br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbRjFP4Wm9D2pMTbsxUk_3ooV1_ouIQEhBNM_4D63u9pOvbiaFRKx2mSF4v8rPeFEtCPSMOipFbhG6Gf0NpzyQKkKHIPerTtIUbMbtXl7Vbo4xd26i1-2Y6uY26VW7jzwBPVxcINU3Tl5m/s1000/1920px-Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Abtei_im_Eichwald_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1810" border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="1000" height="410" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbRjFP4Wm9D2pMTbsxUk_3ooV1_ouIQEhBNM_4D63u9pOvbiaFRKx2mSF4v8rPeFEtCPSMOipFbhG6Gf0NpzyQKkKHIPerTtIUbMbtXl7Vbo4xd26i1-2Y6uY26VW7jzwBPVxcINU3Tl5m/w640-h410/1920px-Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Abtei_im_Eichwald_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" title="Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1810" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1810</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;">I know you’re not talking about this [gothic] literally, but, it’s funny, as a teenager, I was very<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goth_subculture"> goth</a>, liked al the goth music, but also gothic fiction, films, and some artwork -I didn’t see a whole lot of that in high school. You know, I am a seventeen year-old with black hair and nail polish and my teachers weren’t like, “Oh, you should check out Friedrich!” No, they were like, “Do you need help?” [laughs]<br /><br />That sensibility, that awareness of mortality, with Friedrich, is something that has always been built in with me. I don’t know if that has to do with the region, or what. With Friedrich, his work is reflective of mortality, of spiritual wealth versus earthly gain. Those things aren’t explicit, in my mind, but I am aware of loss, the transitional nature of things.<br /><br /><i>How much of that speaks to being in a rust-belt city that has seen a significant end to a certain kind of life or work life?</i><br /><br />It could be the collapse of the steel industry or it could also be genes. I’ve just been drawn to that stuff for so long. When I lived in Austin, Texas, that’s a very different city than Pittsburgh. I think that how Austin’s culture deals with progress is a lot different than here. So I feel like, if I had grown up there, I might not be as affected by the things that I am here. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6sN4p4IDcugxn1GlhBPcFtKh6ISt4Xj2zGMG63MpvNIctOuJs-ZKBOflvH5bBfXdg2eoyNwGwEiBXfV8qMNogg_HxAPD36BF7s5_CtBhEZHCI093hWsrt-dxzHrGU0S5x88pibuvH_hpk/s944/2014oilcanvas24x30+Horse+Hill+Burner.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Horse Hill Burner, Oil on Canvas, 24 in x 30 in, 2014" border="0" data-original-height="944" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6sN4p4IDcugxn1GlhBPcFtKh6ISt4Xj2zGMG63MpvNIctOuJs-ZKBOflvH5bBfXdg2eoyNwGwEiBXfV8qMNogg_HxAPD36BF7s5_CtBhEZHCI093hWsrt-dxzHrGU0S5x88pibuvH_hpk/w508-h640/2014oilcanvas24x30+Horse+Hill+Burner.jpg" title="Horse Hill Burner, Oil on Canvas, 24 in x 30 in, 2014" width="508" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Horse Hill Burner, Oil on Canvas, 24 in x 30 in, 2014</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Was there a particular exhibition that had a profound impact on you as a young artist?</i><br /><br />Earlier on I mentioned going to the Carnegie. There’s the <a href="https://carnegiemnh.org/">Museum of Natural History</a> and then the <a href="https://cmoa.org/">Museum of Art</a>; they’re connected but also distinct. As a kid, I don’t remember going to the fine arts aspect, but I remember going to the natural history part quite a bit. Because, like any kid, I liked dinosaurs. Anything else there -the hall of minerals, the geologic stuff, the dioramas there, are out of sight. They are from the golden age of dioramas. Those contained worlds were very influential to me and that makes a lot of sense [when] looking at my work and that idea of a window. <br /><br />When I was in undergrad, I really liked figurative painting. I really liked <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_Freud">Lucien Freud</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Saville">Jenny Seville</a>. Who I loved the most was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Nerdrum">Odd Nerdrum</a>. I remember going to New York and seeing a show of his work at Forum Gallery. I was just beside myself with wonder -it was great, but I have a different opinion, now<i>.<br /><br />He was popular then [nineteen nineties].</i><br /><br />Oh yeah, sure. He was writing all that stuff on kitsch. He’s a goofball, but he could definitely make a handsome painting. Seeing them in person was important because he was essentially doing Rembrandt-type stuff. It was like, wow, these paintings have all this depth, on top of the content. At the time I was being a little reactionary; I was into academic figurative painting and almost everybody else was into more avant-garde stuff that I didn’t feel comfortable doing myself because I didn’t know enough.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQbuYYcVfileBHdKAX6IPJpAA0KffC6fILWiJjWGJMTNhtaWGH1Ykm7jtqC8mrweN2EGkLB8jHfOjAUGyrHSmmKsH9Ff9sGR1ZaTYYwADNLXlYkA-7M5865CoZC-eq6ekXYFoGbfyANudM/s750/screenshotCarnegieDia.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Screenshot, IG Post, Joe Noderer, Carnegie Museum of Natural History Diorama (Detail), 2020" border="0" data-original-height="561" data-original-width="750" height="478" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQbuYYcVfileBHdKAX6IPJpAA0KffC6fILWiJjWGJMTNhtaWGH1Ykm7jtqC8mrweN2EGkLB8jHfOjAUGyrHSmmKsH9Ff9sGR1ZaTYYwADNLXlYkA-7M5865CoZC-eq6ekXYFoGbfyANudM/w640-h478/screenshotCarnegieDia.jpg" title="Screenshot, IG Post, Joe Noderer, Carnegie Museum of Natural History Diorama (Detail), 2020" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Screenshot, IG Post, Joe Noderer, Carnegie Museum of Natural History Diorama (Detail), 2020</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;">That <a href="https://whitney.org/exhibitions/charles-burchfield">Burchfield show, at The Whitney</a>, about ten years ago. I love Burchfield. He’s so Midwestern. There’s an undercurrent of darkness to his work that I think exists in regions like this.<br /><br /><i>He was in Western New York. Gloomy -lot of clouds from the Lakes. </i><br /><br />Yeah, and he lived in Ohio for a long time before that. Seeing that show in person was great. I don’t think, prior to that, I had seen any Burchfield in person because they are famously sensitive to light and they stay put. So that was just mind-blowing for me. I also saw a pretty great Lucien Freud show in Ft. Worth -that was pretty eye opening too. <br /><br /><i>Do you think about this work when you are making your own work?</i><br /><br />Burchfield I do. I have plenty of his books around. The <a href="https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/">Burchfield Penny Museum</a> is only about three hours away, in Buffalo. I think about Burchfield in terms of I don’t what to be derivative of, more so than anything else. I think my paintings are pretty different from Burchfield. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMQ-oo0KSElrbudpfo_-rBNYLT8EubPAR80HVgZzZ_jFAAcu1adSoKXBo_aIh5LRy5RMfXh862wEFukyGDLqm2neW8Kjul-Q2wP17lbBm1DNKnjEgCxKSpv6FWq7CwIlcbxZm1Tbekvnd2/s908/Oilonpanel2018_18x24_Hell%2527s+Hollow.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Hell's Hollow, Oil on Panel, 18 in x 24 in, 2018" border="0" data-original-height="908" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMQ-oo0KSElrbudpfo_-rBNYLT8EubPAR80HVgZzZ_jFAAcu1adSoKXBo_aIh5LRy5RMfXh862wEFukyGDLqm2neW8Kjul-Q2wP17lbBm1DNKnjEgCxKSpv6FWq7CwIlcbxZm1Tbekvnd2/w528-h640/Oilonpanel2018_18x24_Hell%2527s+Hollow.jpg" title="Hell's Hollow, Oil on Panel, 18 in x 24 in, 2018" width="528" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Hell's Hollow, Oil on Panel, 18 in x 24 in, 2018</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;">Freud I don’t think of, consciously. One of the things I was blown away by, at that show, was how the closer you got to those paintings, they completely fall apart into material but you do not have to get to far away from them and they feel as real as you. I still have a hard time understanding how that’s possible, to be honest. I don’t really like Freud as much, anymore. Once you find out about people, you’re like, “These people aren’t that great.” [laughs] But that was one of the first times I had that experience. <br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Vuillard">Viullard</a> -there’s a few of his paintings at the museum in Chicago where I would go pretty frequently. That’s a similar thing, but his stuff is way weirder than Burchfield or Freud. <br /><br /><i>What contemporary artists are you looking at now?</i><br /><br /><a href="https://www.alessandrokeegan.com/">Alessandro Keegan</a> is an awesome believer in painting. He’s into the occult and spirituality. He’s up front about it and makes really great work that is connected to that. It’s not corny, cheesy, sensational or anything like that and I think that’s pretty impressive. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzsU-tebEmu74pk-4DJkj3MOTyHm7G_AHRLphnI0sSgrfZBhDqzpw1ar7xole1bkZ3i1rvXB9aq5Gvixn78i0TFjGgphCbJKn6M99zwgc_Q27ebOMj1ZoYNKR0sRFzS-dnTN5Mc7MtxS2z/s932/Inky+Bloater_2017-24x18_oilover+walnutinkwood_Alessandro+Keegan%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="932" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzsU-tebEmu74pk-4DJkj3MOTyHm7G_AHRLphnI0sSgrfZBhDqzpw1ar7xole1bkZ3i1rvXB9aq5Gvixn78i0TFjGgphCbJKn6M99zwgc_Q27ebOMj1ZoYNKR0sRFzS-dnTN5Mc7MtxS2z/w516-h640/Inky+Bloater_2017-24x18_oilover+walnutinkwood_Alessandro+Keegan%25281%2529.jpg" width="516" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Alessandro Keegan, Inky Bloater, Oil Over Walnut Ink on Wood, 24 in x 18 in, 2017</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Where did you study art, if you did at all?</i><br /><br />Undergrad school was in Pennsylvania. I went to the <a href="https://tyler.temple.edu/">Tyler School of Art</a>.<i><br /></i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>In Philly?</i><br /><br />Yeah, near Philly. <br /><br /><i>Did you go to grad school?</i><br /><br />Yeah, in Chicago. Although, before I went to <a href="https://www.saic.edu/">SAIC</a>, I lived in New York very briefly. <br /><br /><i>What year was that?</i><br /><br />It was February, 2002, and I probably left in 2003 [Laughs]. It was one of those...a really rude awakening. I really did not like it there.<br /><br /><i>Why did you go to NYC?</i><br /><br />Before I graduated from Tyler, I did the <a href="https://www.art.yale.edu/about/study-areas/summer-programs/norfolk">Yale Norfolk Residency</a> and met a lot of people there that lived in New York and we got along really well. I decided I was going to save up some money and move to New York. Went to Philadelphia, got my stuff, and then moved back to Pittsburgh. I lived with my folks, worked and saved money. I saved about two thousand dollars and then I moved to New York in February.<br /><br />It was the winter after September 11th. It was probably the worst time to move to New York for lots of reasons -that being the primary one. It was a complicated time. I moved from Pittsburgh, from a relatively ideal setting, to New York. It was a lot of anxiety, really stressful, on top of the fact that there was a miasma of total terror and fear and anxiety -all those things left over, just still hanging. Not even left over, just hanging in the air from nine eleven. <br /><br />I visited some friends in Philadelphia while I was living in New York and they were living, to my eyes, just the best life and I didn’t see them as making any kind of huge sacrifice, artistically, by living a more comfortable life. I realized that part of the reason I moved to New York was that I thought, you know, that this is the place -the center of the art universe in America. And you know, I really don’t like my day to day life, I feel terrible all the time, but it’s worth it because I am in New York and it’s going to lead to something. So that trip to Philly made me see that I didn’t have to live in New York if I didn’t want to.<br /><br /> </p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyqyzyGbU9qcdNuQGOrM5sTlN8SgChFTezMOD-Mh-v0I0s7tAveGNb-d0anJIQWX3QcwEVUPbpTKHXXgo6hQRtcro87pDfadmwtbS4uwB7Tx3kChrQ8D2xWymVk72PooeKvNO2ap9IBWoW/s837/acryliconpanel24x30_Nightof+the+Demon_Friend+to+Beast+and+Bird.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Night of the Demon; Friend to Beast and Bird, Acrylic on Panel, 24 in x 30 in, 2004-05" border="0" data-original-height="837" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyqyzyGbU9qcdNuQGOrM5sTlN8SgChFTezMOD-Mh-v0I0s7tAveGNb-d0anJIQWX3QcwEVUPbpTKHXXgo6hQRtcro87pDfadmwtbS4uwB7Tx3kChrQ8D2xWymVk72PooeKvNO2ap9IBWoW/w574-h640/acryliconpanel24x30_Nightof+the+Demon_Friend+to+Beast+and+Bird.jpg" title="Night of the Demon; Friend to Beast and Bird, Acrylic on Panel, 24 in x 30 in, 2004-05" width="574" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Night of the Demon; Friend to Beast and Bird, Acrylic on Panel, 24 in x 30 in, 2004-05</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">Part of my reason for moving to New York is that I wanted to get into grad school and I thought it would be a great place to be making work to then apply to grad school. I assumed that I would get into at least one of the grad schools that I applied to. Didn’t get into any grad schools because the work wasn’t true to my nature. I was making stuff that I thought would fit into Yale or even SAIC or...<br /><br /><i>The “important” schools [laughs].</i><br /><br />Yeah! Exactly, the important schools.<br /><br /><i>Everybody applies to Yale, whether they want to go there or not [laughs].</i><br /><br />Yeah [laughs]. That’s the truth.<br /><br />So I got all the rejection letters and that was tough, but what happened was that I kept making work; I kept painting. But then I started making these paintings that I really, really felt connected to and that was a pretty formative experience. When I am making a painting I am trying to be relatively intuitive; I’m trying not to think too much about what it might mean or what I am trying to say with this painting. I’m trustingthat I’m making it and I’m influenced by what’s going on and that influence will come out and will show in a way that is more saturated than if I were to set out with the idea of this or that. That practice of just sitting down, painting, listening to music, getting lost in a painting -that’s where that started, actually. <br /><br />I wasn’t painting for an application or for anybody, since I didn’t have any kind of prospects lined up for showing, really just painting, in large part, for myself. Although I lived with two other people who were artists and I had a lot of artist friends -they saw what I was doing. It wasn’t like no one knows I paint. The experience was just about me and the painting. I can’t imagine how awful things would have been if I had gotten into grad school with that work I was making, initially, for grad school.<br /><br /><i>How old were you at that point?</i><br /><br />In my twenties, twenty-three or so.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyppjxRTvp5DadXe-QerdHByDznPzDr5nQyVXPSPyEWTjPgf63PvviRuffHJUmkCdoBBI3YMEWbZxinNXO0qA23ZwSao4PhLRBHhEy152PzBoji2TwPOI0ZAivmOlMpOlDgiK6nbxAiynS/s640/acryliconwood200432x30+Jogger.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Jogger, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 32 in x 30 in, 2004" border="0" data-original-height="628" data-original-width="640" height="393" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyppjxRTvp5DadXe-QerdHByDznPzDr5nQyVXPSPyEWTjPgf63PvviRuffHJUmkCdoBBI3YMEWbZxinNXO0qA23ZwSao4PhLRBHhEy152PzBoji2TwPOI0ZAivmOlMpOlDgiK6nbxAiynS/w400-h393/acryliconwood200432x30+Jogger.jpg" title="Jogger, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 32 in x 30 in, 2004" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jogger, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 32 in x 30 in, 2004</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i>There was a lot of struggle when I was twenty three. Questions like, “what am I doing; what worth does it have, who am I in my work and how do I choose a direction?” Do you have a memory for what you worried about, artistically, back then?</i><br /><br />All my friends who were making art there were painters, but they definitely were kind of conceptual. They had gone to <a href="https://cooper.edu/art">Cooper</a> or <a href="https://www.pratt.edu/">Pratt</a>. I didn’t know anyone from the <a href="https://nyss.org/">New York Studio School</a>, which maybe would have been an easier fit. When I think too much about being intelligent or defending something I’ve done in a painting, I get suffocated. I mean it’s intellectual to some extent, but for me it’s about connecting to my experience and just connecting to my environment. Again, not that thought has no place in that, but it’s not the primary reason for making the painting to begin with or there is no end goal, proving some sort of point, necessarily, about painting. So knowing that about myself, but trying to be a “smart person” in my paintings -that was very stressful. <i> </i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>That time in your life, whatever you do, but certainly as artists, your mind is way more open to influence, even influences that don’t fit, and it pulls you into a kind a void. And if you’re lucky, or whatever, maybe luck has nothing to do with it, if you survive all that you get to come out on the other side, which I say is over 35, whatever, maybe over 40, I don’t know what age it is, it’s different for everybody, where who you are remains in tact, despite all that. </i><br /><br />Yeah.<br /><i><br />To me, that’s an arc of an art education. So what brought you to Chicago, SAIC? </i><br /><br />I had been to Chicago as a kid and thought it was a pretty cool place. I had been told, when I was in undergrad, by one of my professors, <a href="https://www.pafa.org/museum/collection/item/waverly">Richard Cramer</a>, who <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/obituaries/coronavirus-obituary-richard-cramer-tyler-school-of-art-professor-painting-20200417.html">unfortunately has passed away</a> of complications due to Covid-19, that Chicago would be a good place for me to check out; check out the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Imagists#The_Hairy_Who">Hairy Who</a>. At that time I was making work that was a little more graphic, in terms of being kind of flat, and really composed, but it was also inspired to some extent by cartoons and comics. So I can see why he would say that now. At the time, I was just a kid, and I thought more about what was happening in New York as important versus what was happening in Chicago. So I just didn’t know much about Chicago. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7gX15jaqGOV9Y4mErwUVY1b5s97aikAt7EqiRe7RVEmXtD2C89PePayceKNzhL_oegd-neHa-4JJNRluIsfvZpsJEbDqfQ9Ijy32P4eZUxzqpQnyMSG7cGp02m2nHkDfgfSYtQXvKvdHl/s1000/KurtWirsumYoudue1966.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="767" data-original-width="1000" height="490" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7gX15jaqGOV9Y4mErwUVY1b5s97aikAt7EqiRe7RVEmXtD2C89PePayceKNzhL_oegd-neHa-4JJNRluIsfvZpsJEbDqfQ9Ijy32P4eZUxzqpQnyMSG7cGp02m2nHkDfgfSYtQXvKvdHl/w640-h490/KurtWirsumYoudue1966.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Kurt Wirsum, Youdue, c. 1966</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;">Even though the way I approach my paintings has changed, that current stayed intact. A lot of color, relatively stylized figures, but also not a presumptive attitude about art, which is what those folks [Hairy Who] were known for. They were smart; really intelligent people reacting to the high brow stuff in New York and on the West Coast. <br /><br />So, the second time I applied for grad schools, I got an interview at SAIC. I went and got along with <a href="http://dandevening.com/">Dan Devening</a> and <a href="https://www.judithgeichman.com/">Judith Geichman</a>, the folks that interviewed me, and they were interested in where I was coming from. <br /><br />I also applied to Yale and got an interview there too, but when I went it was like, “You don’t belong here, Joe.” When I was at the interview, they asked me who I was looking at and I mentioned <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kippenberger">Martin Kippenberger</a>. Based on what I had to say about Kippenberger, which was mostly all formal, not conceptual at all, which is an enormous part of the approach, if not the entire thing, Kurt Kauper, who was one of the interviewers, said flat out, “I don’t think you understand Kippenberger.” It was pretty intense, he was right, but no one had ever been that blunt with me or it had been awhile. That was a pretty intense environment to be in anyway; I was interviewing at Yale and I was sweating bullets.<br /><br /><i>Yeah, it’s that kind of environment. </i><br /><br />So when he said that, he was right. It made my stomach sink, and I also knew I wasn’t getting into Yale, but that made the interview at Chicago, which came after that, just feel more right, more natural. We got along. I was making these paintings on acrylic panels that I put together from wood at Home Depot -they were really poorly made. I wasn’t thinking about that conceptually, I was just making something to paint on. Dan said something about how the supports look like shit, and that’s got to be on purpose. It wasn’t on purpose, but I understood what he was saying. </p><p style="text-align: left;">So it just seemed like a good fit. Chicago, in a lot of ways, reminds me of Pittsburgh -a big, blue collar city. After getting to know <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Nutt">Jim Nutt</a> and <a href="https://www.artic.edu/artists/37327/karl-wirsum">Karl Wirsum</a>, and other folks that work at the school, it seemed like the right attitude. They were serious, but not too serious, fun but not too much fun.<br /><br /><i>So, why did you move to Texas?<br /></i><br />I was living in Chicago. I was teaching and working in a woodshop. Chicago was stressing me out. My parents had recently moved from Pittsburgh to El Paso, Texas, and then to Austin to be with my sister because of the grandkids. Work was drying up in Chicago and me wanting to be there was drying up. I initially wanted to move back to Pittsburgh, but part of that was to be closer to my family. Since they had all just moved to Texas I thought maybe I should consider moving to Texas. I found a job, there, teaching at the art institute. I have to admit I was definitely into the idea of moving to “the West.” Not the west coast, but the frontier west.<br /><br /><i>A romantic notion, maybe? </i><br /> <br />Yeah, for sure. Lot’s of people in Chicago were like, “If that’s the only reason you are going there, you shouldn’t go. Don’t move to Texas for that reason. ” But I did. So I moved there for a change. I liked that Austin was small, like Pittsburgh, but also that it seemed healthier than Pittsburgh -it is healthier than Pittsburgh. Coming from Pittsburgh, New York or Chicago, that seemed refreshing, although talk to anybody I knew down there and they’d say all I complained about was that it wasn’t old enough or decrepit enough [laughs]. <br /><br />So I started working from pictures that were of Pittsburgh or South Carolina, which reminded me a lot of the Pittsburgh area with the tangly growth.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSMncK1GG3e4Ne0Jwitbxy6pDQKHzXrnw-SzqWBRc6HOHqN0RCrqoZYy7-MxQjgwr5m_eFpEF5s2TC8IHs0rceZ41R_cylGXzLOpFqrLPXtInsd7hCWpRGnFX4QLHSUFFcGgSMMOo05TXb/s750/acrylicwoodpanel_2011-12x12-+Untitled.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Untitled, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 12 in x 12 in, 2011" border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="733" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSMncK1GG3e4Ne0Jwitbxy6pDQKHzXrnw-SzqWBRc6HOHqN0RCrqoZYy7-MxQjgwr5m_eFpEF5s2TC8IHs0rceZ41R_cylGXzLOpFqrLPXtInsd7hCWpRGnFX4QLHSUFFcGgSMMOo05TXb/w626-h640/acrylicwoodpanel_2011-12x12-+Untitled.jpg" title="Untitled, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 12 in x 12 in, 2011 Noderer" width="626" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Untitled, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 12 in x 12 in, 2011</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i> When was this?</i><br /><br />That was 2009 through 2014.<br /><br /><i>So you went somewhere new, but you were thinking about where you were from and you were looking for notes of that in things that were in Austin. You then made a decision to go back home to Pittsburgh. I read in an interview that it was a bit of a challenge for you to go back home, even though you had wanted to. I don’t think your work is nostalgic, but I think, to some degree, you have dealt with nostalgia.</i><br /><br />Yeah, a lot. <br /><br /><i>Can you talk about nostalgia, going back home, the pain it involved, and how that manifested in your work?</i><br /><br />Towards the end of grad school, I was feeling a strong desire to move back to Pennsylvania, to Pittsburgh; wasn’t able to, and I moved to Texas. I was looking at things that reminded me of the Pittsburgh area, to work from, and that were also related to family. So, when I worked on paintings from photos of South Carolina, those were all family vacations that were impactful on me, visually, and made its way into my art. I realized I missed family or that feeling of belonging that I feel here [Pittsburgh], because I grew up here and had a lot of experience with people who have lived their whole lives here. <br /><br />My uncle passed away in 2012 and we came up here for that. That was obviously, emotionally, a very heavy time. He was my mom’s only sibling and she was pretty upset and I missed my uncle. We came up in June or July, a beautiful time to be up here, but also very emotionally intense. While I was up here I began taking some pictures of things that I’d like to paint when I got back to Texas. After I got back to Texas, the more I was making these paintings based on stuff from Pennsylvania, the more I thought, “Why don’t I move back to Pittsburgh -why am I doing this -it’s weird.” My parents moved back up about a year before I did, so there were all these things pointing me in the direction of going back which was something I wanted to do for at least a decade.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhs3-SSvqirJDrhKXAJXOPt43Nfuxz2DWjmmVJEYo_ubYTvmda8lasBq0vHGQuCyEc9QrIQh42N841lUVe7n_TsEYPBhANwqxe31326iHKVf356nBra8As1Y0spnNXS1Pvnv72YL0QxIYT/s1000/oilcanvas2013_48x56_Big+Mingo+Gap.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Big Mingo Gap, Oil on Canvas, 48 in x 56 in, 2013" border="0" data-original-height="856" data-original-width="1000" height="548" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhs3-SSvqirJDrhKXAJXOPt43Nfuxz2DWjmmVJEYo_ubYTvmda8lasBq0vHGQuCyEc9QrIQh42N841lUVe7n_TsEYPBhANwqxe31326iHKVf356nBra8As1Y0spnNXS1Pvnv72YL0QxIYT/w640-h548/oilcanvas2013_48x56_Big+Mingo+Gap.jpg" title="Noderer Big Mingo Gap, Oil on Canvas, 48 in x 56 in, 2013" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Big Mingo Gap, Oil on Canvas, 48 in x 56 in, 2013</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">When I got here [Pittsburgh], it was April or so. It was early spring, which here is dark, not warm, it’s wet, there’s barely any green although you know it’s on its way. That had a pretty profound effect on me emotionally, just like it did growing up. On top of the fact that I had suffered some losses; leaving people behind in Texas; not sure I was doing the right thing by moving [in] with my parents and not knowing what I was going to do. Found a job at a grocery store, no teaching had popped up, even though I made inquiries. I had to ask myself a lot of questions, had to change my perception of myself, I had to adapt.<br /><i><br />What did that mean to you -to change your perception of yourself?</i><br /><br />In Austin I thought of myself as an artist and a teacher that had come from Chicago. I was showing at a gallery in Chicago, regularly, every two years or so. My view of myself in Chicago was all art-based, painting-based. When I moved to Texas, that’s how I presented myself and that was the world I fit into. When I came up here [Pittsburgh] I just had a show and I had one more coming up, but beyond that, it was almost like a secret. I was working at Trader Joes and nobody here knew or cared about my experiences in Chicago or Texas. To some extent I had to be okay with painting or art-making as somewhat secondary to being a son. My mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer and I painted along with that. That put things into perspective quite a bit when there was the very real possibility of her death. I took myself out of a bubble; popped that bubble pretty hard. <br /> <br />But the thing is that once I got over that shock, it’s more in line with my nature, anyways, to exist in that middle ground. It was ultimately a good, but difficult, thing for me to have done. It was good because it helped me be a little bit more objective about home in a way that has improved my relationship with it, as well as changed the atmosphere of my work so that it might be less nostalgic. I’ve always, inadvertently, skirted nostalgia in my work, but now that I am here, I am painting what’s here. It feels like it is almost impossible for there to be nostalgia in my work, which is good because I was never comfortable with that. <br /><br /><i>I don’t think your work or landscape, itself, is a nostalgic enterprise, absolutely. It really depends on what you are going about.</i><br /><br />Prior to that [the move home], I was being nostalgic. I was missing Pittsburgh or Bethel Park and seeking out things that reminded me of it. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHPYCOsUEcfQ-lad9shOjPI0AzXqEEqYSAHqZFFzypNQLo2474YQAqnhYnOHrxMVawqinUcAat6eA36VQGN5vkn8PEVKG4tvPvPhWU-1m2suwjlXmw8oBL5v9YVPsW5IZoCWu4rHGxCFui/s750/AcrylicOilWoodPanel12x12_2010+Pink+Motel.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Pink Motel, Oil and Acrylic on Wood Panel, 12 in x 12 in, 2010" border="0" data-original-height="737" data-original-width="750" height="628" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHPYCOsUEcfQ-lad9shOjPI0AzXqEEqYSAHqZFFzypNQLo2474YQAqnhYnOHrxMVawqinUcAat6eA36VQGN5vkn8PEVKG4tvPvPhWU-1m2suwjlXmw8oBL5v9YVPsW5IZoCWu4rHGxCFui/w640-h628/AcrylicOilWoodPanel12x12_2010+Pink+Motel.jpg" title="noderer Pink Motel, Oil and Acrylic on Wood Panel, 12 in x 12 in, 2010" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Pink Motel, Oil and Acrylic on Wood Panel, 12 in x 12 in, 2010</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>In the <a href="https://mwcapacity.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/tenses-of-landscape-pt-4/">online catalog</a> for the 2012 exhibit “Tenses of Landscape,” which included some of the Austin work, you stated that “Reacting against... sameness has become essential to my work. I find the unique things (older buildings, trees, alleys/garbage) much more valuable than things that seem to be increasingly built to replace them.” You go on to say that these unique, old things remind you of painting.</i><br /><br /><i>So the question is what painting things is, or could be, in relation to your statement? The other thing I wondered, in the sense of reacting against the sameness of contemporary architecture, is whether you are reacting against a certain kind of art at that time. It’s kind of a tricky discourse because nobody wants to be reactionary, right? And yet, I know that people see [often incorrectly] that an artist making landscape is working against a contemporary art culture. </i><br /><br /><i>Can we have a dialogue about that -is there something to say about that?</i><br /><br />Austin being a newer place, I was definitely talking about that sameness. I really didn’t like the architecture there. It was right for people who didn’t have a problem with putting this thing up or that thing up. It’s flat so there is no issue with expanding. Having been in older cities, prior to that, I saw Austin’s architecture as a visible byproduct of “new” culture, throwaway culture.<br /><br />By looking at other things, I was definitely choosing those. By painting those things and putting them in shows in Chicago and Austin; I felt that by valuing them, by taking the time to paint them, I was giving people an alternative to what was happening.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBEyhCdU24yvQiK66Qc21tmu3gCJnJb6GM0NIlGP9yhnXwagFtW9GH-5bHd0NHWAo56tpQEtPRRCynKiUajyPbMJPhihfFtajNDlcYS2kFaG41yHlOuY1oulZQ6oa9Rg2TEYv5wIfeD3jS/s750/acrylicwoodpanel_2010-24x24-+Store+II.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Store II, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2010" border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBEyhCdU24yvQiK66Qc21tmu3gCJnJb6GM0NIlGP9yhnXwagFtW9GH-5bHd0NHWAo56tpQEtPRRCynKiUajyPbMJPhihfFtajNDlcYS2kFaG41yHlOuY1oulZQ6oa9Rg2TEYv5wIfeD3jS/w640-h640/acrylicwoodpanel_2010-24x24-+Store+II.jpg" title="noderer Store II, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2010" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Store II, Acrylic on Wood Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2010</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;">In general, I don’t know what’s going on [in contemporary art]. What I could say is, as you mentioned, I'm being pretty blunt about wanting the paintings to have an expressive quality. Maybe that is something that people don’t say even if it is something that they want; they don’t throw it out there. <br /><br />I think at the time, because I saw myself as an artist-teacher, I was thinking more about reacting to, or having a dialogue with, contemporary art, but now I don’t see it the same way. Because my role has changed, which is good. It’s made my work better because it is more direct. I think less about how it is going to fit into what’s going on, as if I know what’s going on.<br /><br /><i>I think the idea of expressiveness is a challenge because the academic life, and to some degree the commercial life that may come after it, tries to work that out of us. There are a lot of artists that work from that place, but hesitate to talk about it because [talking about it] it has been trained out of them.<br /></i><br />That was definitely part of my experience in grad school. I had a group of friends in school who were not so much making expressive paintings, but they believed in the act of painting. The thing that united all of us was the tradition of painting and trusting, even though it was hard, that something of relevance was going to come through because we’re making paintings now, in the world. Whereas other folks in the [grad] program, or the advisors, weren’t into expressiveness, in the literal way you think of it, like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Auerbach">Frank Auerbach</a> painting, unless you had a conceptual reason for doing it. <br /><br /><i>Do you think that was a function of their disability to entertain what I think is conceptual...a way of thinking about what painting is or could be -that’s conceptual, right? How you conceive of painting and what it can do. </i><br /><br />Sometimes I am not sure if expressiveness is the right word. I think of them as expressive paintings, but maybe more in terms of being emotive, having a mood, an atmosphere. There’s a certain amount of texture to them, not a lot of flat, plain painting. That kind of texture, or implied texture, is something I consistently like across the board, whether its music, actual landscape, or other people’s work. There’s the evidence of my hand, there, because I use my fingers to move things around. There are fingerprints, so they are literally hands-on. <br /><br />I can’t help but to think of Frank Auerbach, or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Ludwig_Kirchner">Kirchener</a>, when I think of expressive. But who I really think of as an expressive painter, who has been a big influence on me, is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix">Delacroix</a>. Historically speaking, his work is not expressive -it’s Romantic. He’s bold, his stuff has a lot of color, his compositions are very active. It’s an experience to look at one of his paintings; you look all around, you get really close, you get really far. That’s the kind of quality that I like to have in my work. Formally speaking, you could call my paintings expressive; there’s a lot of movement in them that is generated by me making expressive marks to begin a painting and then building on them from there.<br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJURSLxJOaRq_pXu4zyzRzCdV9BKS-DgsthG02IJQCUyY4Sm68386oMyi0nrxtmD7a6jAiBDlj8RYsabE_AQCmTveiCnlOSElFDTOCeRXiXzmVpHBR2YI-TkukouFn1C17jCxuw0m1CHze/s1000/Eugene_Delacroix_-_Horse_Frightened_by_Lightning_watercolour1824.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="738" data-original-width="1000" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJURSLxJOaRq_pXu4zyzRzCdV9BKS-DgsthG02IJQCUyY4Sm68386oMyi0nrxtmD7a6jAiBDlj8RYsabE_AQCmTveiCnlOSElFDTOCeRXiXzmVpHBR2YI-TkukouFn1C17jCxuw0m1CHze/w640-h472/Eugene_Delacroix_-_Horse_Frightened_by_Lightning_watercolour1824.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Eugene Delacroix, Horse Frightened by Lightening, Watercolor, 1824</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Do you think it’s the sense of the natural world, the architecture, whatever it is, having a quality of languid animation -I say languid because your work isn’t wildly frantic. It’s sort of a dripping animation; even the inorganic feels organic.</i><br /><br />Yeah, that’s how I see things when I look around. That’s what’s here. Even power-lines, hills, and houses -there’s a lot of, visually speaking, movement here. If I were living in Chicago, in Logan Square, I wouldn’t really get much -there would be a lot of horizontal and vertical. We get a lot of different visual stimulation here. On top of that, we have a lot of nature, pretty intense seasonal changes, all those things come together. Maybe expressive of emotion, or of feeling, maybe that is a better way to frame things when we are talking about painting because that [expressive] is such a loaded term. That’s why people don’t say, “I wanna make expressive paintings.” [Laughs] If somebody told me that, like one of my students, I’d be a little wary until I saw what they wanted to make and then that wariness might change. <br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH7wRsumEBvdwntYCildFaLob0b_IPlNhpi8AB8CnO2eQ4VFv4f0Qgj4Rq90v9UlM6qwTjYcD3yp9nPdXL611U4Nrv_6hP5IQpomGOCf3KqgUFSR0F52twzCXXIuo-WNOecpAbAmeVAHD4/s972/2019+Oil+on+Linen11x14Acanthus+Island+on+the+Mon.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Acanthus Island on the Mon, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2019" border="0" data-original-height="972" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH7wRsumEBvdwntYCildFaLob0b_IPlNhpi8AB8CnO2eQ4VFv4f0Qgj4Rq90v9UlM6qwTjYcD3yp9nPdXL611U4Nrv_6hP5IQpomGOCf3KqgUFSR0F52twzCXXIuo-WNOecpAbAmeVAHD4/w494-h640/2019+Oil+on+Linen11x14Acanthus+Island+on+the+Mon.jpg" title="noderer Acanthus Island on the Mon, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2019" width="494" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Acanthus Island on the Mon, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2019</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>I find <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism_(arts)">Symbolist</a> impulses entwined with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regionalism_(art)#American_Scene_Painting">American Regionalism</a>, <a href="https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/view:billboard/browse:permanent-collection/type:painting/artist:charles-e-burchfield/">Burchfield</a>’s manic mysticism hybridizing with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odilon_Redon">Redon</a>’s macabre irrationalism in your work. There is also a current of later <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Romanticism">German Romanticism</a> and, in some paintings, a compositional resemblance to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico">deChirico</a>’s Archaeologists. What do you think of these combinations I put together?</i><br /><br />I think they’re good.<br /><br /><i>There was a specific image that you made and I thought, “why does this painting remind me of deChirico?” A lot of your paintings have an internal aspect; they mind the boundary of the canvas edge. “The Archaeologists,” he had a series of them, are like that, where they look like a still-life. Your painting is like that -it’s portraiture, it’s landscape, it’s still-life -all at the same time. </i><br /><br />I had to look that picture up because I know deChirico, but I was always really turned off by Surrealism, although he is kind of a proto-surrealist. I am still wary of it, but I think there were some really good things that came out of it. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlwmRnUe7BbWomnLvmc6VsKU5_9FJWex4i1to09PN3QDqnZXTsadgXKocQ2WIfthRQsCOB8zEhW9ev7NAkC9BVYEYAJdX0BqfBFLtN4-cNt62v4guAZl5VDifhkV3tNIA1MhAKrz78SIsQ/s1032/The+Archaeologists%252C+1927+-+Giorgio+de+Chirico.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1032" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlwmRnUe7BbWomnLvmc6VsKU5_9FJWex4i1to09PN3QDqnZXTsadgXKocQ2WIfthRQsCOB8zEhW9ev7NAkC9BVYEYAJdX0BqfBFLtN4-cNt62v4guAZl5VDifhkV3tNIA1MhAKrz78SIsQ/w466-h640/The+Archaeologists%252C+1927+-+Giorgio+de+Chirico.jpg" width="466" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Giorgio deChirico, The Archaeologists, 1927</span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;">With “The Archaeologists,” once you brought that up, I instantly saw the subject matter and its relationship to the edges. I’ve become increasingly aware of the edge; how what I am making interacts with that. I’m looking at this one right here [on the studio wall], it definitely has that kind of still-life aspect where it looks as if it’s an object existing in a space. It’s a painting of a possum chewing on someone’s hand and arm. The possum and the arm have become like one thing. The exterior is just color. <br /><br />The idea is that I don’t always want what I am making to look as if it’s a snapshot, or a window is a better way of putting it, out onto a larger reality. It’s like a way to make the experience of a physical thing rather than a picture of the environment in which you or I would feel a certain way. I’m taking that idea and trying to get at making a new thing out of those parts. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I think of them sculpturally, not all the paintings, but the ones you’re referring to. I look at it and think, “Why is there all this empty space?” To get the idea across of this thing being three dimensional, like an impossible still-life. Why not just try to make an impossible still-life? It would almost make more sense if they were sculptures. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Gjp8h6HSIyO8ZDkabHyv2Cmql3gV0yCTF0SuNO07oEAR-xgDOjHkMKwkfoiqGuKl2V_TxgTbBzBTpc2MKsh-fKgt0SJDSTKrCgiB-NJs7tOpBXXhGSRRP7rTg8iLHBzhuCDASeLnqk9a/s1011/2018+Oil+on+Panel+24x24Bingham%2527s+Vision.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Bingham's Vision, Oil on Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2018" border="0" data-original-height="1011" data-original-width="1000" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Gjp8h6HSIyO8ZDkabHyv2Cmql3gV0yCTF0SuNO07oEAR-xgDOjHkMKwkfoiqGuKl2V_TxgTbBzBTpc2MKsh-fKgt0SJDSTKrCgiB-NJs7tOpBXXhGSRRP7rTg8iLHBzhuCDASeLnqk9a/w634-h640/2018+Oil+on+Panel+24x24Bingham%2527s+Vision.jpg" title="noderer Bingham's Vision, Oil on Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2018" width="634" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Bingham's Vision, Oil on Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2018</span></span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"> <i>In</i> <i>your later, shall I say "bearded portraits,” I draw visual connections ranging from Ole Peter Hansen Balling's John Brown to Goya’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son">Saturn Devouring his Son</a>. What do you think about all that?</i><br /><br />You’re not reaching too far with “Saturn Devouring his Son.” That’s definitely an image I saw when I was a teenager. When we see that painting, now, there’s an element of goofiness to it. But there’s also a blunt, downplayed, but in that way believable, violence to it with the mutilated corpse he’s holding. I’ve always been drawn to that kind of grizzliness. <br /><br />That figure doesn’t look too threatening to me. If that figure wasn’t holding, and implied to be eating, another human being, I would certainly think it was strange, but wouldn’t be afraid of it. It reminds me of watching horror movies, when I was a kid, with my dad. You know this is fake, going into it, but there are gross things that happen. Like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_of_the_Dead_(1978_film)">Dawn of the Dead</a>, everything’s garish, the zombies are blue, the paint -there you go, the <i>blood</i> is bright red as paint. Yet there’s still a visceral, disgusting fear and terror to those things and I think that I saw that in that Goya painting. Then you can get into the irrational -that being something that just isn’t as aggressively off-putting as something that is bloody. He’s going for something like that. And the same for those <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Sabbath_(Goya,_1798)">paintings of witches</a>, all that irrational belief in superstition or the occult. That has stuck with me for a time. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwlpEy6oHKxi1euaQGxUH5ACM32hGAP1EiNP3OVonZ5UYGh8paEmgaEb60rxg8c_wUV_KDRMxVUogiFn94ehuu71ybD0BWephfvLFOr35r3nPZsapx5dutO9aiR6GADawscjhIQYX5ZUwU/s1200/GoyaBalling.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Left: Ole P.H. Balling, John Brown (Detail), 1872 Right: Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819-23" border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1200" height="534" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwlpEy6oHKxi1euaQGxUH5ACM32hGAP1EiNP3OVonZ5UYGh8paEmgaEb60rxg8c_wUV_KDRMxVUogiFn94ehuu71ybD0BWephfvLFOr35r3nPZsapx5dutO9aiR6GADawscjhIQYX5ZUwU/w640-h534/GoyaBalling.jpg" title="Left: Ole P.H. Balling, John Brown (Detail), 1872 Right: Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819-23" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr align="center"><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: small;">L: Ole P.H. Balling, John Brown (Detail), 1872 R: Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819-23</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)">John Brown</a>, he’s an interesting person. He’s a person, an era, I’ve been drawn to for awhile. There’s that connection to the hillbilly, you mentioned, just formally. Painting facial hair or hair that is unkempt is way more satisfying as a painter of primarily natural things than is someone who has a nice haircut and no facial hair whatsoever. I live pretty close to rural areas, here, and folks that remind me of... [laughs] the stereotype of the hillbilly, visually speaking. It's more that I see the bearded people as symbolically representative of my home and the land, here.<br /><i><br />It is, technically, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia">Appalachia</a>.</i><br /><br />Yeah. There’s a love-hate relationship with that. I have this critical remove from my education. I think, on the one hand, I like that, I need that -the everyday, which in this area, often kind of looks like that [my portraits]. I mean, I exaggerate it a bit, of course. But I also need that kind of criticality; one can be both. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhanJdGOS_CKwhK6mUX8YxpmKmgvU41JW8VAqxMMkK2RpgiOGltzvB6flSvZfmeAYN6Vf57Toz8903bcwRIHOVPWfU3BkaIO4ZbbcPpE0hPgzPTw4qd7R9TUFpgIK60mr4mb5w9C3rSopln/s1000/oilcanvas_2014-24x30-+Some+Fair+Spring+Morn.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Some Fair Spring Morn, Oil on Canvas, 24 in x 30 in, 2014" border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="784" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhanJdGOS_CKwhK6mUX8YxpmKmgvU41JW8VAqxMMkK2RpgiOGltzvB6flSvZfmeAYN6Vf57Toz8903bcwRIHOVPWfU3BkaIO4ZbbcPpE0hPgzPTw4qd7R9TUFpgIK60mr4mb5w9C3rSopln/w502-h640/oilcanvas_2014-24x30-+Some+Fair+Spring+Morn.jpg" title="noderer Some Fair Spring Morn, Oil on Canvas, 24 in x 30 in, 2014" width="502" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Some Fair Spring Morn, Oil on Canvas, 24 in x 30 in, 2014</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"> <i>Is</i> <i>there a sense of self-portraiture in it?</i></p><p style="text-align: left;">Yeah, definitely. That’s part of the reason why I struggle with portraits. I don’t have a problem making myself look unusual or deformed or whatever in a painting. I can be pretty objective about it. I wouldn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings if they had an expectation of a portrait being painted of them.<br /><i><br />Would someone ask you for a portrait? [laughs] Has that happened?</i><br /><br />No, not really. I would like to do that and I’ve painted a few portraits of people, but it never feels good to do it. I never feel like I’m letting loose and doing what I want to do. Whenever someone who maybe hasn’t asked, but might want a portrait, that is what they want. They know they’re not going to get a photographic portrait of themselves. <br /><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQmUsptjE71jO5FiOFGzeCwpJMzSggIwxdYZZyPy3wOF9iwhRLH0wOOX98yzp-NtEwX80r_O0N9Ar6iEhrMnIKfuodpr48lqKxpe-tfnY_tx57AXJTQwPzCvmfZ4uIpcotVIebC9N9QoNV/s1009/oiloncanvasoverpanel_2016-24x24+Horse+Hill+Waugh.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Horse Hill Waugh, Oil on Canvas over Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2016" border="0" data-original-height="1009" data-original-width="1000" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQmUsptjE71jO5FiOFGzeCwpJMzSggIwxdYZZyPy3wOF9iwhRLH0wOOX98yzp-NtEwX80r_O0N9Ar6iEhrMnIKfuodpr48lqKxpe-tfnY_tx57AXJTQwPzCvmfZ4uIpcotVIebC9N9QoNV/w634-h640/oiloncanvasoverpanel_2016-24x24+Horse+Hill+Waugh.jpg" title="Horse Hill Waugh, Oil on Canvas over Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2016 noderer" width="634" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Horse Hill Waugh, Oil on Canvas over Panel, 24 in x 24 in, 2016</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i>From Thoreau to Ted Kaczynski, the retreat to nature has been a consistent counter-cultural impulse in the U.S. What do you think of the “lone man in the wilderness” concept? I’m not really catching much from you about the wilderness man; I’m not sure that that is relevant. Does this idea interest you?<br /></i><br />It used to. I was very interested in mountain men for while. At the time, when I was getting into that stuff, I was swept away by the romance. I didn’t think at all about how it was connected to the destruction of the environment, expansion of corporations, all that stuff. I was just looking at what I saw was a harmonious balance between man and nature, but specifically for Americans. Now I think it is synonymous with the destruction of nature, consuming things, the displacement of peoples. But with mountain men, that happened here or there, folks were just heading out west to be alone and commune [with nature]. I realize now that my view of that was very romanticized, very inaccurate, and certainly something I wouldn’t want to put out in terms of an image of “better days.” <br /><i><br />That’s not where you’re coming from.</i><br /><br />No, but I was drawn to those things just [from] growing up here. <br /><i><br />The influence of that mythology.</i><br /><br />Yeah, for sure. There’s a connection to nature, there. I was influenced by those things, but now, when I tap into that, it has less to do with mountain men or the frontier. Those were a way for me to get back into this. All that stuff, like the film <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Johnson_(film)">Jeremiah Johnson</a>, the big resurgence of that stuff around the time of the bicentennial. I was born a few years later, but I grew up with people who were very influenced by that time period. There’s a lot of visual evidence of that here. By way of that stuff, I found my way back to images of home. I guess I had to go through it, conceptually.<br /><br /> </p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKpye1zXQvf93WkhlGoX1WWqU2pJIiCP92nTnancke_mh5VxDgwGLIiPm3aeXmivT4Wdx6dAGuHbum8CqpMbDE8LSqlVznlAPh5yGEMXrvfMQeP4r-M92qEoxsvJL-KTYFZygRIUfr4ylW/s1000/2019+Oil+on+Linen+1x14Older+Boggy+Lite.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Older Boggy Lite, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2019" border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="774" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKpye1zXQvf93WkhlGoX1WWqU2pJIiCP92nTnancke_mh5VxDgwGLIiPm3aeXmivT4Wdx6dAGuHbum8CqpMbDE8LSqlVznlAPh5yGEMXrvfMQeP4r-M92qEoxsvJL-KTYFZygRIUfr4ylW/w496-h640/2019+Oil+on+Linen+1x14Older+Boggy+Lite.jpg" title="noderer Older Boggy Lite, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2019" width="496" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Older Boggy Lite, Oil on Linen, 11 in x 14 in, 2019</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i>I had the same impulse -I got to get across this country, I got to see it and participate in it. There’s some suspicion or skepticism about that and I think that’s reasonable. These ideas come full circle to the original displacement [of native peoples] and nation building, when I think about the people I associate with those [western mountain] places, now, which can be white supremacists on compounds, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski">Ted Kacynski</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge">Ruby Ridge</a> -to me, that’s the mountain men now.</i><br /><br />We just went up north for a couple of days and it was like Trump this, Trump that. Just sign after sign -big, hand-made signs saying “Love America, Vote for Trump.” This is really unfortunate because we’re in this beautiful environment. This is a place that you should expect more harmony. I’m sure there are pockets of that, but it seemed like the impression one would get from the folks living out in nature is that they are a bunch of angry conservatives. I know that’s not true, but it does seem like you have to contend with that now.<br /><br /><i>It’s complicated since we are all dealing with a set of stereotypes and mythologies. Our conception of nature is formed in cities where ideas are different and social or cultural norms are different. Out there, in the country, ideas they form about cities are just as wrong. <br /></i><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtPnNdpcXGRG4O5xMTKcG4NqzpmVbDlY0TsWyC_K14Z6TmiL0qEm3a3IX0eDQLWAkzveBSvU3T6kjAfz-yaj2SFKafsVB-jllgeGqjHPRxPHdpJKC1kmOHbmPG7QHGWZ9G-V6ZLcnpmxSp/s951/oilcanvas_2017-16x20-+Horse+Hill%252C+We+Hardly+Knew+Ye.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Horse Hill, We Hardly Knew Ye, Oil on Canvas, 16 in x 20 in, 2017" border="0" data-original-height="951" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtPnNdpcXGRG4O5xMTKcG4NqzpmVbDlY0TsWyC_K14Z6TmiL0qEm3a3IX0eDQLWAkzveBSvU3T6kjAfz-yaj2SFKafsVB-jllgeGqjHPRxPHdpJKC1kmOHbmPG7QHGWZ9G-V6ZLcnpmxSp/w504-h640/oilcanvas_2017-16x20-+Horse+Hill%252C+We+Hardly+Knew+Ye.jpg" title="noderer Horse Hill, We Hardly Knew Ye, Oil on Canvas, 16 in x 20 in, 2017" width="504" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Horse Hill, We Hardly Knew Ye, Oil on Canvas, 16 in x 20 in, 2017</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><i>But it</i> <i>does play into the artwork, to some degree. I do not look at your work and think this is representative of that. It does seem a bit of a critique, the portraits. Maybe that’s putting it too academically.</i><p style="text-align: left;">I know what you mean. I think that is part of why I am drawn to them; it is because they do make me uncomfortable. They tap into different feelings than I usually tap into when I’m making my work, which are usually harmonious, good feelings. A lot of the portraits started out, honestly, to be critical of people here. People who are backwards. But I don’t think that it is fair or right to project that onto people. That’s why they are often filtered through self-portraits because, really, that’s what it is anyway.<br /><i><br />You are a part of it, in maybe not an obvious way, but you are born of the same place. </i><br /><br />I can love it, its backwardness, or I can be really irritated by it and think I should have stayed in Chicago where there is more of an arts culture.<br /><br /><i>By making it your image, you are implicating yourself in being the thing that you are criticizing. <br /></i><br />Yeah, it’s good to hear that may come across. I’m still working on that with the portraits. Because the complexity needs to come across, not just be out-rightly critical. <br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG4IYIVlJi_aOrUW7u5C0Hkljn7qQy0fBuWqYpwHIH8dMFGX7_VnY8wWVGBIg10uAw7eC3GSZ6N1is7jQemnpQ4rFD3X0LP1DJj1lwqMNDZtnkTAwK8f96Hm1JTahMHsEBLHBwrumkx7kH/s903/2015Oil+on+Canvas+over+Panel+10x12-+Old+Jonah.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Old Jonah, Oil on Canvas over Panel, 10 in x 12 in, 2015" border="0" data-original-height="903" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG4IYIVlJi_aOrUW7u5C0Hkljn7qQy0fBuWqYpwHIH8dMFGX7_VnY8wWVGBIg10uAw7eC3GSZ6N1is7jQemnpQ4rFD3X0LP1DJj1lwqMNDZtnkTAwK8f96Hm1JTahMHsEBLHBwrumkx7kH/w532-h640/2015Oil+on+Canvas+over+Panel+10x12-+Old+Jonah.jpg" title="noderer Old Jonah, Oil on Canvas over Panel, 10 in x 12 in, 2015" width="532" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Old Jonah, Oil on Canvas over Panel, 10 in x 12 in, 2015</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div style="text-align: left;"><i>What happens to your work after you finish it? Do you have an outlet for them?</i><br /></div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">Not currently. I was showing at <a href="https://lindawarrenprojects.com/">Linda Warren Projects</a>, in Chicago, but she closed her doors awhile ago. It’s the place that I consistently showed. I was lucky, right out of grad school, I got a show in her back room, the start-up place. That went well and she said “How would you like to have a show in the main gallery next year?”<br /><br /><i>Yeah, I would. [Laughs]</i><br /><br />Yeah, exactly. Right out of school like that? There’s no way I’m gonna say no. That’s an interesting thing, too, because my experience was different than a lot of people. I started showing right out of grad school. I also had to work, I wasn’t selling and making all my ends meet, but I didn’t have to hoof it.<br /><br /><i>You weren’t applying to shows?</i><br /><br />No, not really. Honestly, Instagram, visually at least, is my primary outlet just as far as getting things out there [now]. <br /><br /><i>Do you sell work that way? </i><br /><br />I’ve sold a few things, here and there, with it. If someone wants to buy something they are free to ask. I think my Instagram does say they’re for sale, but I don’t put a price on them. I don’t even wonder about it, unless somebody asks. <br /><br />Linda had a sense of what she could get for something at her gallery. She had a clientele and had been in business for awhile. I was really lucky to connect with Linda because she is such a strong supporter of her artists. Without that person, without that guidance, I don’t know. Plus, that was in Chicago, this is Pittsburgh. I sold a painting to someone a couple of years ago, in Brooklyn, NY, and I’m sure they are used to seeing, if not paying, high prices. There’s so many different contexts that it’s hard to come up with one...it’s almost a case by case, I imagine.<br /><br /><i>Should a painting be the same price in Pittsburgh as it is in New York City? If you don’t have a facility in New York, say.</i><br /><br />Why not? Assigning a monetary value is just that. I don’t believe that things that cost a lot are more worthwhile than things that don’t. In fact, I probably think the opposite. It’s a struggle because I kind of cut my teeth selling things through a gallery and I could get a couple thousand bucks for a painting.<br /><br /><i>Is that after her take?</i><br /><br />Yeah, and that’s nice; I am not going to lie. But at the same time, maybe because of my upbringing, I don’t always attribute value to money. I think of it more as, if someone is interested in my work, if they’re getting something out of it, if it moves them, as corny as that sounds, that’s more important to me than making a buck off of it. Because I am fine, I am making money. I actually don’t think I would like to just make money through my paintings and just paint all the time, just be an artist all the time. <br /><br />I sold a few paintings through Instagram; intentionally putting them up for sale and pricing them to help support <a href="https://blacklivesmatter.com/">BLM</a>. I felt that was the best way to do it, because the money was going almost entirely to an organization that I think is doing good. The people that bought them wanted to support that organization and they wanted my work, so they were supporting me. It just felt great; it was a significant amount to give to an organization, wasn’t a loss on my part, and a person is getting a piece of mine. Why not let that be how I sell things? That’s possibly good enough.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4MicNBXBQv6aIutvm2xeIhO9X5-Oms2eoUauSybdqPdEitY_trQ65_IjHopZ5na82yCQDyV89Zg_zCC4DNH6wq4fe3WS7Z4pV_wwsFTJRtY8uwM2SvZNW76jYkRw-keYUQUg2swqOZ-Vu/s990/graphitepaper_2018-22x30-+Sherman+Maggie%2527s+Dream+of+the+Jays.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Sherman Maggie's Dream of the Jays, Graphite on Paper, 22 in x 30 in, 2018" border="0" data-original-height="990" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4MicNBXBQv6aIutvm2xeIhO9X5-Oms2eoUauSybdqPdEitY_trQ65_IjHopZ5na82yCQDyV89Zg_zCC4DNH6wq4fe3WS7Z4pV_wwsFTJRtY8uwM2SvZNW76jYkRw-keYUQUg2swqOZ-Vu/w484-h640/graphitepaper_2018-22x30-+Sherman+Maggie%2527s+Dream+of+the+Jays.jpg" title="noderer Sherman Maggie's Dream of the Jays, Graphite on Paper, 22 in x 30 in, 2018" width="484" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Sherman Maggie's Dream of the Jays, Graphite on Paper, 22 in x 30 in, 2018</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p>After moving back up here, I had to take a look at how I define myself. I feel more like myself, in terms of how I approach thoughts like that, than when I lived in Chicago. There’s a reality to being here that I didn’t have there. I don’t want to work at Trader Joes for the rest of my life, but there is something, I get a lot out of work that isn’t artwork. I need that to a certain extent. <br /><br /><i>When <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg">Justice Ginsburg</a> died, her quotes started coming out and one of them was about how she needed to be a mother to create the the space for her law work. That one demanded the other and made the other one possible; it made the enjoyment of the other one possible.</i> <br /><br />Yeah, I think that’s true. On days off, I can’t wait to get in here and paint. I’ll paint sometimes after work. It definitely helps me appreciate it more that I don’t work as much in that field. When I teach, that’s the closest I get to feeling as if there is a seamless connection. I was teaching two nights a week at <a href="https://pghartsmedia.org/">PCA</a>, prior to the pandemic, so that has changed a little bit. I have been doing that less; just started doing that once a week, yesterday. That’s good enough for me, that little bit. I still get to share insight with people and get that genuine connection and help people at PCA. That’s enjoyable to me, as enjoyable as painting. For me I need to have both, not just one of those things. <br /><i><br />What’s the future look like for you?</i><br /><br />I have as show in Chicago in spring of 2022, at the <a href="https://www.riversideartscenter.com/">Riverside Art Center</a>. <a href="https://judithmullen.com/">Judith Mullen</a> reached out a few months ago to ask if I’d be interested in a show there. Otherwise I don’t really know, especially now with everything going on. I’m waiting to see how we’re going to move forward. So I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing. <br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: center;">____________________________________________<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br />You can see more of Joe's work by visiting is website, <a href="https://josephaaronnoderer.com/home.html">josephaaronnoderer.com</a>, and keep up to date by following him on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/josephnoderer">@josephnoderer</a>. This interview was originally published at <a href="https://www.rosaluxgallery.com/post/city-2-city-with-painter-joseph-noderer" target="_blank">Rosalux Gallery</a>.<br /></p><br /><br /><div class="jwLWP _2hXa7 _30PMG blog-post-text-font blog-post-text-color public-DraftStyleDefault-block-depth0 public-DraftStyleDefault-text-ltr rich_content_line-height-1_38 rich_content_padding-top-0 rich_content_padding-bottom-0" data-block="true" data-editor="editor" data-offset-key="fnqsn-0-0" style="text-align: left;"><div class="public-DraftStyleDefault-block public-DraftStyleDefault-ltr" data-offset-key="fnqsn-0-0"><span data-offset-key="fnqsn-0-0"><br /></span></div></div><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-62242687344589706212021-03-14T11:01:00.001-05:002024-03-14T11:04:20.856-05:00Using Epoxy to Fix Porch Wood Railing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
In my previous post, How To Repair Porch Railings and Minimize Wood Rot, I showed you how you can cut new wooden spindles with a subtle angle to allow water to drain from the commonly used wood bottom rails of accents and porch railing systems. Read on to learn how to improve the odds of long term success by adding epoxy products to your toolkit.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsw4EKSUb0945RR3oZbih4EhIUjNz-qRTIZF-3w4cVYHHVvjTaOozBtW4gc56iNPT3wI2cGJGyBjse4SyKM2oubn2VgdptLCtEuZdpnXfliycvQkjOvIaKbskq12ktzIqi1ldzvMctNRDj/s1600/RepairSpindle.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rot fix epoxy sealer railing woodwork repair" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsw4EKSUb0945RR3oZbih4EhIUjNz-qRTIZF-3w4cVYHHVvjTaOozBtW4gc56iNPT3wI2cGJGyBjse4SyKM2oubn2VgdptLCtEuZdpnXfliycvQkjOvIaKbskq12ktzIqi1ldzvMctNRDj/s640/RepairSpindle.jpg" title="rot fix epoxy sealer railing woodwork repair" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">When applying epoxy, use a throwaway chip brush and container.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Since the accent rails (or hand rails) are disassembled, you may as well make a little extra effort before reassembly to protect the end grain that we know will wick moisture into the wood, causing rot. To do that, apply an easy to use two-part epoxy to seal the end grain. My preferred product is called <a href="https://www.systemthree.com/products/rotfix-epoxy-sealer" target="_blank">Rot Fix</a>, by System Three. </div>
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Rot Fix is low odor, has a simple 1:2 mix ratio of hardener to resin, and has some open time -meaning it will stay liquid for a few minutes or longer in cold temps. The only complexity of two-part epoxy is measuring ratios accurately. With throw away plastic containers, you can easily mark them up for proper measure. Just remember: one part hardener to every two parts resin. Easy.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRdlhpjL_CRyhWlED6z7Vk_OCni1gQ2RWPpFp7LGVcfpIICNCi8CRIl5RcNzcC0oznHHXFeNl6mVtRqZtchyHpUpyF3w-JzuZrlIVxf3j3F8wcs7liaNk598onOa3BM7L6JT94KbHRtWXf/s1600/Rail+ends.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Rot Fix System Three wood repair railing repair" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRdlhpjL_CRyhWlED6z7Vk_OCni1gQ2RWPpFp7LGVcfpIICNCi8CRIl5RcNzcC0oznHHXFeNl6mVtRqZtchyHpUpyF3w-JzuZrlIVxf3j3F8wcs7liaNk598onOa3BM7L6JT94KbHRtWXf/s400/Rail+ends.jpg" title="Rot Fix System Three wood repair railing repair" width="400" /></a></div><p>Why not seal the end grain of sanded (or new) bottom rails while you are mixing some epoxy? It's a good idea because any end grain can wick moisture. It's a little added protection against future rot.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvHcudcSjT9n8Nnhrh-7Evucu4Q9KTKkX-r7cnHww4gN17h0Z65iErAZ8EXh_bQ9-MFiJZmwNx5Xc9MiiccoNX6pC0SUI5fDfhigFIgift35I72VAipTtrT4jukM3Li4kFmv3u1pzFFHl3/s1600/Rotfix2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="System Three Rot Fix SculpWood Railing Porch repair" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvHcudcSjT9n8Nnhrh-7Evucu4Q9KTKkX-r7cnHww4gN17h0Z65iErAZ8EXh_bQ9-MFiJZmwNx5Xc9MiiccoNX6pC0SUI5fDfhigFIgift35I72VAipTtrT4jukM3Li4kFmv3u1pzFFHl3/s640/Rotfix2.jpg" title="System Three Rot Fix SculpWood Railing Porch repair" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">System Three SculpWood is a much better repair material than any box store wood fillers.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><p>It's possible that there will be some holes in the rail bottoms, either from nails or from rot. Make sure the railing pieces are dry to the touch, then scrape out any soft, crumbly wood. It is suggested that you coat all holes with liquid Rot Fix before
filling them with System Three's putty, <a href="https://www.systemthree.com/products/sculpwood-moldable-epoxy-putty" target="_blank">SculpWood</a>. You can add the putty
immediately after application of the liquid epoxy. SculpWood's mixture ratio is a simple <b>1:1</b>. Simply scoop the putty resin from one container and the same amount of hardener putty from the other, mix them well and use a flat tool to spread the mixture.<br />
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</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglFQ1fEy7LkP-bVS_Xw2y5sOhFKfd7dCFRy5rc8RoeLjx1c3DMh02423zOrWCn3FXifLPhETZ4ngmyA56oX3YzQ88hyphenhyphenwGjD3zkG0o5VczZqQa6PPXbzjjtmgBYIxxZ9GbSTnZDN31CcGFL/s1600/rotfix4.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglFQ1fEy7LkP-bVS_Xw2y5sOhFKfd7dCFRy5rc8RoeLjx1c3DMh02423zOrWCn3FXifLPhETZ4ngmyA56oX3YzQ88hyphenhyphenwGjD3zkG0o5VczZqQa6PPXbzjjtmgBYIxxZ9GbSTnZDN31CcGFL/s640/rotfix4.jpg" title="Rot Fix System Three wood repair railing repair" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rot Fix epoxy putty is easy to manipulate and even easier to mix.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br />This combination of epoxy liquid and putty,
after proper curing, is extremely tough, grips wood with tenacity, can be
sanded easily, and then be painted like any other wood. I couldn't repair my house in the woods without it! Use sandpaper sheets or bust out the Feintool and sanding pads to conquer this job quickly.</div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-4rckHyvwz_A7At26LuN2SpyZB9NM1REhX4_nBwjvQAEkNAEzsf8H-Zaa6MBwtAdetqUVSDaljOU9QANrJRtibE3mDFPd3ueA-XzLcmd6jEQA-UaTjVj1lXrQSvVS0EmCxSNsXYVTYogp/s1600/lineup.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-4rckHyvwz_A7At26LuN2SpyZB9NM1REhX4_nBwjvQAEkNAEzsf8H-Zaa6MBwtAdetqUVSDaljOU9QANrJRtibE3mDFPd3ueA-XzLcmd6jEQA-UaTjVj1lXrQSvVS0EmCxSNsXYVTYogp/s640/lineup.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Make sure to pair up the right bottom rails and top boards.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><p>If you have taken down several sections of railings, its a good idea to match lengths up to ensure the rebuild goes smoothly. Because putty work and even paint can conceal the original spindle placement, you can use the screw holes in the 2x4 top boards to space spindles. Otherwise, you can measure railing that is still mounted to the porch and take that as the basis for spindle spacing. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDgmBsIXW0LyyusvXpEZXvuwKnZvTWOLcMyD_-02uwdHhgJ9tf17_bNhGnHW3YGG635fs-C8enPRUl3Bvzju86ojm1k0FvQn4JExKAnb-O-RDQC8A0N7-7xlXxs2O1Jgn3W1Hhn2f-YUYL/s1600/connect.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="railing repair rot fix" border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDgmBsIXW0LyyusvXpEZXvuwKnZvTWOLcMyD_-02uwdHhgJ9tf17_bNhGnHW3YGG635fs-C8enPRUl3Bvzju86ojm1k0FvQn4JExKAnb-O-RDQC8A0N7-7xlXxs2O1Jgn3W1Hhn2f-YUYL/s640/connect.jpg" title="railing repair rot fix" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="center"><td class="tr-caption">When to paint is up to you -before or after assembly. After is probably best, although fussier.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">We are close to reassembly now that all our pieces are cut, epoxied, puttied, and sanded. As you can see, I have chosen to paint some pieces and not others. Because there was no fixing to be done on the 2x4 top pieces, those received primer and paint ahead of reassembly. The milled cedar pieces, or bottom rails (which are on top in this image), received epoxy on ends, holes were filled with putty, then sanded, primed, and all surfaces painted. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZVZKmHYQ65kCTR2FjBMz_hUsUcUgOM1Cdabr52jxuirrI-7rF1vM_oTL02kjn7JzNL-3SHa5MqEZXyo2990Vgi4t_XM8eWPY2kABqXWxaWmIdRvTheq4uNfsDmELyNesZpgj1cIZgOS3j/s1600/senco.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Senco compressor air tank nailgun brad nails railing repair rot fix" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZVZKmHYQ65kCTR2FjBMz_hUsUcUgOM1Cdabr52jxuirrI-7rF1vM_oTL02kjn7JzNL-3SHa5MqEZXyo2990Vgi4t_XM8eWPY2kABqXWxaWmIdRvTheq4uNfsDmELyNesZpgj1cIZgOS3j/s640/senco.jpg" title="Senco compressor air tank nailgun brad nails railing repair rot fix" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">There are many nail guns out there, but I prefer 18gauge pneumatic guns.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The bottom rail will be taking in brad nails to reattach it to the spindles. The brad holes, quite small, but visible, will get a bit of outdoor rated caulk and then paint. To accomplish this, I use a pneumatic nail gun with small compressor and tank. I've been using this <a href="https://www.senco.com/tools/details-page/finishpro25xp" target="_blank">Senco</a> for at least a decade now without any issues. It works well, but I do like the quietness of <a href="https://www.rolair.com/products/air-compressors/hand-carry/jc10plus" target="_blank">this Rolair</a> compressor, a model I purchased for my architectural model shop.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7lwAJOkKWjMG3hxktTNsPifaIw5bHzcGg3oz9p2pI2_LGHk1AaE2TSeTLhGaz9vpIZN5K7A9i6IbuSer-3-eYWtp8EETrYvskvAdXLLg1pvWgMil4FJgvm7KWLQZdZyAwDZDE4UkrGBSa/s1600/tank.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7lwAJOkKWjMG3hxktTNsPifaIw5bHzcGg3oz9p2pI2_LGHk1AaE2TSeTLhGaz9vpIZN5K7A9i6IbuSer-3-eYWtp8EETrYvskvAdXLLg1pvWgMil4FJgvm7KWLQZdZyAwDZDE4UkrGBSa/s400/tank.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The compressor and gallon tank came as a kit with the brad gun.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Carpenters know
that a nail is often just a clamp holding things together while the glue
dries. Glue holds a lot of things together really really well, but in
outdoor carpentry, this is not usually the case. We depend on
outdoor rated screws for much of our fastening, although there are instances when screws are not palatable or functional. At these times, we rely on galvanized brads. </div>
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<br />
For this project, I use one 2 inch galvanized (reduces corrosion) brad
to fasten the bottom rail to the spindles. This single brad is used to hold the spindles in place before sinking the more functional, angled brad. This second brad is driven from the side of the bottom rail, upwards into the spindle to give the piece a modicum of downward resistance. These accent
rails are not intended to hold much weight, although that hasn't stopped many
people from hanging plants or other objects from them!<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWKhCB4PJzAYc6knjNkyg_wwgMHmeNubyOztlYM4r2VGqSKSSfkx-n-BIuzKQzFdb5Y8DjUyQ0KIawEq2kpKu_0x5ZSfnU2gjuccEhjL7cE38LXW4dK3ESVvMspFhkx0-pCAqv_8muo4c/s1600/final.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Porch Railing rot repair assembly western red cedar" border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWKhCB4PJzAYc6knjNkyg_wwgMHmeNubyOztlYM4r2VGqSKSSfkx-n-BIuzKQzFdb5Y8DjUyQ0KIawEq2kpKu_0x5ZSfnU2gjuccEhjL7cE38LXW4dK3ESVvMspFhkx0-pCAqv_8muo4c/s640/final.jpg" title="" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That slight angle seen where the spindle meets the bottom rail (at top, its upside down!) will help keep railings dry.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
There are different routes to reassembly. The best, if fussier, solution is to assemble all three components -top rail, bottom rail, and spindles <i>before</i> priming and painting. Assembling first allows you to putty the brad holes, sand, then prime and paint the whole assembly. A little more time consuming, but possibly the longest lived solution because the brads used for assembly are concealed under the most paint and putty.</div>
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I haven't yet addressed how nails and screws can also lead to rot in porch railing systems. We often find some rot where brads pierce the bottom rails to attached spindles. As water accumulates on these rails where nails penetrate the the paint film, the water can travel the length of the nail, deep into the wood. Cold metal of nails or screws can also condense moisture out of the air, covering the metal with dew -inside the wood! <br />
<br />
My solution is to angle the spindles to create a slope that reduces the accumulation of water. I add epoxy sealer to limit wicking of moisture deep into the wood. Finally, I prime and paint with a high quality, gloss paint to protect the wood from the destructive action of the sun and moisture.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF3MgBFc3FuwZj_m55iRZp5-DGnsqXUPNm6pwupPkq-FfW4PQ-e4owXnddEZGw0W6XdaDoJOM6NZ_7vpAG-lq56Rwe1M6mcW0LuEj7yw7YgpvHqFLXC1pxZwj9zkY966jeUq5ifxwN_oNg/s1600/Paint.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Sherwin Williams porch repair paint emerald resilience" border="0" data-original-height="429" data-original-width="640" height="427" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF3MgBFc3FuwZj_m55iRZp5-DGnsqXUPNm6pwupPkq-FfW4PQ-e4owXnddEZGw0W6XdaDoJOM6NZ_7vpAG-lq56Rwe1M6mcW0LuEj7yw7YgpvHqFLXC1pxZwj9zkY966jeUq5ifxwN_oNg/s640/Paint.jpg" title="Sherwin Williams porch repair paint emerald resilience" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I have paint preferences, but whatever you do, do not buy the lowest cost paint.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">I've been using Sherwin Williams paint for the last four years. I'm a fan of their <a href="https://www.sherwin-williams.com/homeowners/products/resilience-exterior-acrylic-latex" target="_blank">Resilience</a> line in satin or gloss. It's lower cost than their top of the line <a href="https://www.sherwin-williams.com/homeowners/products/exterior-paint-coatings/exterior-paint/emerald-exterior-acrylic-latex-paint" target="_blank">Emerald</a> line and it has the same application temperatures down into the 40 degree range. What I truly like is Resilience's early wet time. The paint can collect dew after four hours of dry time. Here, in the woods of Minnesota, it gets moist at any given moment, rain seems to pop up out of nowhere, and Resilience hasn't failed me yet. </div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
Emerald is a good paint, but when using it on a railing project, several days of rain beginning a day after I painted, despite protection with plastic, led to a failed paint film. I will only use Emerald when I am convinced it will be warm and dry for several days or when painting exterior items removed into the shop, as with this accent rail project. </div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
I prefer gloss for porch railings -its tougher and I believe it is better at shedding water. Finally, if you are going to spend on Sherwin Williams Paint, do so during one of their <a href="https://www.sherwin-williams.com/homeowners/special-offers/sales-and-coupons" target="_blank">many 30-40% off sales</a> and you will save a considerable amount. Once you register with them at the store, you will begin getting postcards letting you know it is sale time.</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Addendum:</b></div>
<br />
Because I mentioned that it is possible to use the very same techniques on the handrail as the upper accent rail, it's useful to add a few more images of the the handrail as there are some minor differences.<br />
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<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju-DLU7QP55gYOWydOwauLEo6LjYuy88nfMXGsM4Znlt-nBmdr81NDMfUOZM-2nPeWIjiTHU8u6ZP1l8ekpHAMLqg0o5A3hCZY1dnw_zw3KJxKoENILrKjxBFDzeOdDvz73SZcmluYLDre/s1600/screw.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju-DLU7QP55gYOWydOwauLEo6LjYuy88nfMXGsM4Znlt-nBmdr81NDMfUOZM-2nPeWIjiTHU8u6ZP1l8ekpHAMLqg0o5A3hCZY1dnw_zw3KJxKoENILrKjxBFDzeOdDvz73SZcmluYLDre/s400/screw.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>As you can see here, there is a screw sticking up through the bottom rail of the handrail structure. This screw is used to fasten the spindles from below. This is the opposite of the top accent rail that was covered in the above article.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOvBcyTJBiAv7l6lduSHJ6WJ4vzlJY4Ngqzsug-Rz9xR9TxXO4FIhmsyaRtNEa7aqX-S27_5XH568TEiZ74eJLF2zvI5k0NZ-95EDBPXY4DQZ1LcrEaNfmIMXnAQyWc6H05oQzPOForEIj/s1600/bottomscrews.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOvBcyTJBiAv7l6lduSHJ6WJ4vzlJY4Ngqzsug-Rz9xR9TxXO4FIhmsyaRtNEa7aqX-S27_5XH568TEiZ74eJLF2zvI5k0NZ-95EDBPXY4DQZ1LcrEaNfmIMXnAQyWc6H05oQzPOForEIj/s640/bottomscrews.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p>The spindles on the handrail will be fastened with screws to the bottom rail -yes, the one that requires draining, Some of those screws can be seen in the above picture of the underside of the handrails bottom rail. The reason for this is twofold. The first is that brad nails would not be strong enough to resist downward pressure from things like someone's foot resting on that lower rail. The other reason is more subtle -the underside of the bottom rail is not visible so brads are not needed to conceal the fastening system.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDUbhkbGAVAYIs4FO7HeIT5l0BG5OBI5qkncP8zClL9eNQN3uHbOAhfF2GYUd7SVTVe_OtC3R0SG0hp0bvkb4QrX4xWMA2MkV5Sbx7q4_lPAT9c3BAgTEMVQSzfSvITS_5L2qweCOmF3g/s1600/bradhandrail.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Porch railing rot repair brad holes hand rail" border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDUbhkbGAVAYIs4FO7HeIT5l0BG5OBI5qkncP8zClL9eNQN3uHbOAhfF2GYUd7SVTVe_OtC3R0SG0hp0bvkb4QrX4xWMA2MkV5Sbx7q4_lPAT9c3BAgTEMVQSzfSvITS_5L2qweCOmF3g/s640/bradhandrail.jpg" title="" width="640" /></a></div>
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</div><p>The top of the handrail -the most expensive component, is not screwed into the spindles at all. It is brad nailed from above, diagonally into the spindles. The bottom of the upper handrail is milled as a channel. This channel accepts 2x2 spindles perfectly. It also provides outward and inward resistance to movement. Two brads are sunk as described to lock it in place -but that is about all they do. As you can see, screws are fasteners used where they are not visible, brads where visible. Brads are never used where strength is mandatory -that is unless the pieces will be glued, an unlikely practice in outdoor woodwork.<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;">*Please note that the tools and products used in this post are the one's I actually use. I do not receive any paid or product support for the links provided.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-27160911796504727892021-03-14T10:57:00.000-05:002024-03-14T20:28:48.354-05:00Repairing Outdoor Wood Railings<br />
In this first post, I cover repair techniques to allow water to drain from your porch railings. In part two, I cover epoxy coatings, reassembly, paint, and some additional notes. <br />
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Porch railing repair can get expensive fast. Add that cost to the other job that is likely, porch painting, and it may become downright prohibitive! Fortunately, with a few simple products, you can fix your rotten spindles, and even those expensive cedar top rails, without too much skill or effort.<br />
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Older porches are often made out of western red cedar -a naturally warp and rot resistant (never rot proof) wood grown in North America. This is a good choice of material, yet many porch railings are constructed by quick moving builders who do not take the extra time to make the little adjustments that will allow rain, snow melt, and dew to drain properly.<br />
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Water standing for any period of time on paint and wood will lead to the eventual decomposition of both materials. The railing repaired in this post is about twenty years old, just about the amount of time I would expect above ground, western red cedar to last when not draining properly.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO5rp2j9qmYNYMxW8NZAi7pBbffUSrDm6RxWJxAYbUJcMwmT18vtH49YA53ts-ihkCU1cPYO87Q_jxYZ2KtTW7zAXhsvOq0FLl8oTDwCtVovBthHSbkgJKcEz1Uouhj_ZcZY7zZ-GwAy-f/s1600/house.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="house porch railing repair rot fix" border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO5rp2j9qmYNYMxW8NZAi7pBbffUSrDm6RxWJxAYbUJcMwmT18vtH49YA53ts-ihkCU1cPYO87Q_jxYZ2KtTW7zAXhsvOq0FLl8oTDwCtVovBthHSbkgJKcEz1Uouhj_ZcZY7zZ-GwAy-f/s400/house.jpg" title="house porch railing repair rot fix" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The porch being repaired</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td></tr>
</tbody></table><p> This house has been <a href="http://nycgarden.blogspot.com/2015/09/job-one.html" target="_blank">undergoing many exterior repairs</a>, including new doors, sill rot repairs, window rot repairs, replacement decking, new stairways, and a new paint job. Some of these repairs were necessitated by the simple non-adherence to good sense carpentry, some are from manufacturer defects (windows), and others simple time and weather. Below I will go over techniques for repairing the top accent rail seen on this house. These same techniques can be used to address rotted top rails and even windows!<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2qKOxnCpx0DvzW5g0bwCNUIbuYts2E6d9Pwywcaj2u6G_jcgrF7ffxi2VHwdD9CsX5KouqxtQ2JuINXaic6qfObt0t7f-jofnqGZJmMjzRa3OWvOa63nT-99fOfYylEwKEp3u7kQvO8xU/s1600/Rotspindle2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2qKOxnCpx0DvzW5g0bwCNUIbuYts2E6d9Pwywcaj2u6G_jcgrF7ffxi2VHwdD9CsX5KouqxtQ2JuINXaic6qfObt0t7f-jofnqGZJmMjzRa3OWvOa63nT-99fOfYylEwKEp3u7kQvO8xU/s640/Rotspindle2.jpg" title="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The lower portion of a porch railing is where much of the decay can be found.</td></tr>
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</div><p>Wood placed against wood will hold moisture and eventually decay, even when painted. In fact, the rotting wood will undermine the surface coating leading you to notice the rot. Rotted wood is soft, sometimes crumbly, sometimes green with algae, and sometimes even releases moisture when pressed. This is quite likely to happen where the spindles meet the bottom rail, particularly at porch corners where they receive rain from two sides. A spindle's end grain will wick moisture up into the wood.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv-Bw0kcpNycJPaNI6xiCDuDSZBperx_yr_64vnm_X6a-hk2WCCQ3Vt3sUFCjQH3KIqfGdoUKnR8nLZFGXqRFA2Evun-KRRzts6D0QN6pz9IMDHNmCtHihop_HfcKgHWCVNuPqFT0wlhyphenhyphenv/s1600/RotSpindle.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv-Bw0kcpNycJPaNI6xiCDuDSZBperx_yr_64vnm_X6a-hk2WCCQ3Vt3sUFCjQH3KIqfGdoUKnR8nLZFGXqRFA2Evun-KRRzts6D0QN6pz9IMDHNmCtHihop_HfcKgHWCVNuPqFT0wlhyphenhyphenv/s640/RotSpindle.jpg" title="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">End of the porch bottom rail</td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Another prime spot for decay is the bottom rail, particularly at the porch corners. Water running down the porch corner posts and spindles attached to it collects at the bottom rail. The rail's end grain wicks moisture into the rail and the spindle also wicks moisture up into itself, holding it against the bottom rail. This double whammy of moisture will rot the bottom rail from the side and the top!</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUSBxefuH-mVSUT_mOx1spDyD4tDiLA0hPrZ8IAWpCW7rwhTHilY5MsuxcLn_FAZy4DRV2xMVT3RLhnDoGSl1_FUDoum-EYNg5hM3wVDAnsaVrqeeXUGLPwY63MK2JSTgEYgbu_irXPB1k/s1600/Accent.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="557" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUSBxefuH-mVSUT_mOx1spDyD4tDiLA0hPrZ8IAWpCW7rwhTHilY5MsuxcLn_FAZy4DRV2xMVT3RLhnDoGSl1_FUDoum-EYNg5hM3wVDAnsaVrqeeXUGLPwY63MK2JSTgEYgbu_irXPB1k/s400/Accent.jpg" title="how to fix the porch railing using the accent pieces" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Accent rails and spindles at the top of the porch</td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Accents at the top front of a porch tend to not rot -they don't see much rain, but side accents see sun and rain on the south side and on the north side, may never dry out for lack of sun. These two sets of conditions lead to rot! Although many are familiar with shady, damp north side of a house, some people are surprised to hear that a full day of sun can lead to decay as well.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNRnrRMEddeBtVYwSPhB45k0QagapGIJqHemnFRMcNfLXdHrkRmc_GnX5O4cJuhiLVtG-GkpW718EsxnEnm1ZL8B7RttzKCsmJnDULltvZvYmy4Qkq3vmMpbYHyFNa0dTDHgMSpVMXqaPY/s1600/Priming.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting fixing the porch" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNRnrRMEddeBtVYwSPhB45k0QagapGIJqHemnFRMcNfLXdHrkRmc_GnX5O4cJuhiLVtG-GkpW718EsxnEnm1ZL8B7RttzKCsmJnDULltvZvYmy4Qkq3vmMpbYHyFNa0dTDHgMSpVMXqaPY/s640/Priming.jpg" title="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting fixing the porch" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Accent rails that have been repaired, primed, and are awaiting their new spindles</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">For this tutorial I will show you how to fix the porch railing using the accent rails as an example. The process for fixing the lower railing is exactly the same, only with longer spindles.</div>
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The first step, of course, is to take your accent rails down. They are typically installed with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Phillips" target="_blank">phillips head</a> screws above and possibly finish nails or phillips screws into the porch posts. These should be fairly easy to remove. If nails are used, or screws spin but do not come out, you can use a pry bar -but this may do some damage. Its better to use a tool like the one shown below. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEtusbgj2REjBAekg9_wbGggqvT3rOdl3AmNlv6aHHqzVN8y1QihKHLQFTLzmdReuDj9cAkmCTvBtXUXfZwb90_rKpTOIIF3__kNzQW-MSzLjheR7uovKsb2f49Fz2nYXgDe613HVTZOhH/s1600/Feintool.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="porch railing repair rot fix fein tool" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEtusbgj2REjBAekg9_wbGggqvT3rOdl3AmNlv6aHHqzVN8y1QihKHLQFTLzmdReuDj9cAkmCTvBtXUXfZwb90_rKpTOIIF3__kNzQW-MSzLjheR7uovKsb2f49Fz2nYXgDe613HVTZOhH/s640/Feintool.jpg" title="porch railing repair rot fix fein tool" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Feintool Multimaster</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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The <a href="https://fein.com/en_us/multi-tools/tools/fein-multimaster/fein-multimaster-top-0342759/" target="_blank">Feintool Multimaster</a> is my home repair go to powertool. If you do any home repair, this tool is a must have. There are lower cost brands, of course, but I trust the Feintool. You can use the metal-cutting blade shown below to slice through soft nails and even hard screws. Be aware that the hard screws will wear your blades much faster than nails.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN05jWclKHollPql5wuwTrSuv7p4DVH0DhjkH12SoMXhSwd66NsNHCfkPCJYAUpN3O-GXkD8lm4WHHjDCoKBmUOwnlxlSV0QSBfRvtV5qIbG_K1uTNf6bpBk-cTakuDeXZyVxeLW8SZKgc/s1600/BiMetal.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="porch railing repair rot fix fein tool bimetal blade" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN05jWclKHollPql5wuwTrSuv7p4DVH0DhjkH12SoMXhSwd66NsNHCfkPCJYAUpN3O-GXkD8lm4WHHjDCoKBmUOwnlxlSV0QSBfRvtV5qIbG_K1uTNf6bpBk-cTakuDeXZyVxeLW8SZKgc/s400/BiMetal.jpg" title="porch railing repair rot fix fein tool bimetal blade" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">BiMetal Blade. You can use it on wood, but it is designed for metal cutting.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The only drawback to a Feintool Multimaster, or any oscillating tool, is the cost of blades. Buy them in bulk to save a few dollars, protect them in your kit, and use them wisely to save on wear and tear.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2qKOxnCpx0DvzW5g0bwCNUIbuYts2E6d9Pwywcaj2u6G_jcgrF7ffxi2VHwdD9CsX5KouqxtQ2JuINXaic6qfObt0t7f-jofnqGZJmMjzRa3OWvOa63nT-99fOfYylEwKEp3u7kQvO8xU/s1600/Rotspindle2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2qKOxnCpx0DvzW5g0bwCNUIbuYts2E6d9Pwywcaj2u6G_jcgrF7ffxi2VHwdD9CsX5KouqxtQ2JuINXaic6qfObt0t7f-jofnqGZJmMjzRa3OWvOa63nT-99fOfYylEwKEp3u7kQvO8xU/s640/Rotspindle2.jpg" title="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The lower portion of a porch railing is where much of the decay can be found.</td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Once you have the railings down you can take them apart. If they are really rotten, it will be easy to separate the spindles from the bottom rail -typically attached with 16-18 gauge brad nails applied with a pneumatic nail gun. These nails are soft and flexible. To protect the bottom rail, you can use the oscillating cutter to slice through these brads. </div>
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The top board, typically a 2x4, is usually connected to the spindles with phillips head screws. These should be easily removed with a cordless drill and phillips bit. I do not expect the top board to need to be replaced. The bottom rail, a more expensive milled piece of cedar should be saved if it is not too far gone. I'll show you how to fix it, below.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxjhtyGLSAcmLP3uiWlOM6QJxlWs_26Fv4cBh2Q5feKmInGEmDAf3piiLU2Tp7j5Ki10HckCg5-Ei2OptY0A-PrEryBp1rZLOGyEwxemKDXiFHbl8wZUf1NiQcZiikHo6hMg6ob3FrOGCa/s1600/SandingPad.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Feintool Sanding Pad Porch Railing repair rot fix" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxjhtyGLSAcmLP3uiWlOM6QJxlWs_26Fv4cBh2Q5feKmInGEmDAf3piiLU2Tp7j5Ki10HckCg5-Ei2OptY0A-PrEryBp1rZLOGyEwxemKDXiFHbl8wZUf1NiQcZiikHo6hMg6ob3FrOGCa/s640/SandingPad.jpg" title="Feintool Sanding Pad Porch Railing repair rot fix" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Feintool Multimaster oscillating tool with sanding pad attachment. </td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">I go to my Feintool Multimaster and sanding pad attachment to quickly
remove loose paint on any railing pieces I plan to re-use. The sanding pads come in boxes of 50 in all grits. I use 60, 80, or 120 grit to remove paint on these pieces. These Velcro attached pads are relatively long lived, but their most valuable feature is the ability to rotate the pad to help with difficult corners.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2PoQ8xu-YfAJIWw275-iaRZzwjnKJfRLOk3TRV0PQ1RLbsDfE_RaIe4FRJhKdlsSmVLCFcc_BCeUIzU1ppfdCgoZAbjzsM2VTkgu7CFYGhTFf7fqcajnyIQkiJ10WrR8v-HPR1ypYOfYi/s1600/spindles.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="spindles Menards western red cedar precut wood" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2PoQ8xu-YfAJIWw275-iaRZzwjnKJfRLOk3TRV0PQ1RLbsDfE_RaIe4FRJhKdlsSmVLCFcc_BCeUIzU1ppfdCgoZAbjzsM2VTkgu7CFYGhTFf7fqcajnyIQkiJ10WrR8v-HPR1ypYOfYi/s640/spindles.jpg" title="spindles Menards western red cedar precut wood" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Basic spindles are cut lengths of 2x2 cedar. Typically these are smooth and are 1.5x1.5 inches </td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">I aim to replace all of the spindles, rotten or not. Why? Because the spindle is the lowest cost piece of the railing and, at only 6.5 inches or so, they allow me to get several spindles out of one piece of 2x2 western red cedar. You can buy 8 foot lengths of 2x2 cedar at your local box store or lumber yard, but it may be even easier to find pre-cut western red cedar spindles of 36-42 inches in length. Lastly, the part of the repair that ensures a longer life railing requires another 1/4 of an inch in length. So, if your spindles are in good shape, and you do not mind shortening them, you can re-use as needed. Otherwise, I recommend purchasing a few new lengths of 2x2 western red cedar.</div>
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<b>A word about choice of wood</b>: you may be tempted to buy <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_preservation#Chemical_preservatives" target="_blank">treated lumber</a> for any or all aspects of your repair project. I firmly reject treated wood, typically pine, for porch railings. Why? It simply is not stable enough. Where I was asked to use it, it has twisted, pulled screws or nails, split, and has molded on the surface where not painted. Painting it is also a problem, often requiring an adequate drying time before a coating can be applied. In that time, the drying process has twisted or warped the wood. It's simply not good for this forward facing part of your home! </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXY16-m-r-DNf6UMKtT6eBp9GftZ5AeFZi7OSiwq3_wVusTaqnoo-xBjEgytOf7iBvZJDfXMVTqFB53bo40QBL3NHukdI_w2nl5qDVubYkWI5b7YT0QuPfExz81qRU7fFuhGAg5KJnTFwR/s1600/Chopsaw.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Dewalt Miter Single Bevel Chop Saw" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXY16-m-r-DNf6UMKtT6eBp9GftZ5AeFZi7OSiwq3_wVusTaqnoo-xBjEgytOf7iBvZJDfXMVTqFB53bo40QBL3NHukdI_w2nl5qDVubYkWI5b7YT0QuPfExz81qRU7fFuhGAg5KJnTFwR/s640/Chopsaw.jpg" title="Dewalt Miter Single Bevel Chop Saw" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A simple, useful tool -the miter saw. You will not need a fancy one for this job.</td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">You will need a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miter_saw" target="_blank">miter saw</a> for this repair. For spindle cutting, it does not need to be the costliest machine available. What I am using here is a <a href="https://www.dewalt.com/products/power-tools/saws/miter-saws/10-254mm-compound-miter-saw/dw713" target="_blank">10" Dewalt compound miter saw</a>, generally a solid cutting tool. You may also use the smaller 7.25-8.5 inch bladed models. This part of the repair can even be done with a hand-powered miter saw! After all, western red cedar is fairly soft and easy to cut. Your blade should be sharp and, if you cut slowly, a 40 tooth blade will work just fine.</div>
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The first task is to cut your spindles a wee bit longer than needed. If 6.5 inches is required, then cut each to 6.75 inches. This leaves room for your miter cut. This is important because it is this miter cut that will spare you the rot returning as quickly as it had the first time!</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmw9etyxR6xHXAURCv21EPtRINb0t0nlMphXWLEKDcBgfJ0QJjMyTyD7UIOckL0Dryj8Zv3HeCWA6BRyvofwFASFzy0ImNGT_1DvTGaBe_ph9vnWSdrgHVYWjE0M3wHFhD6CJZDhaoEA32/s1600/Fencestop.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmw9etyxR6xHXAURCv21EPtRINb0t0nlMphXWLEKDcBgfJ0QJjMyTyD7UIOckL0Dryj8Zv3HeCWA6BRyvofwFASFzy0ImNGT_1DvTGaBe_ph9vnWSdrgHVYWjE0M3wHFhD6CJZDhaoEA32/s640/Fencestop.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Make sure that your stop, a device that allows all cuts to be the same length, is square!</td></tr>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Now that you cut all your needed spindles to 6.75 inches it is time to make your final cuts. To ensure that all cuts are exactly the same length, we clamp what is called a stop to the back fence of the miter saw. This can be done on any type of power or hand miter saw. I've used a piece of 3/4 inch thick plywood that I checked for square (see picture above) and ensured that it is mounted flat to the miter saw fence and table. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhndVf-Nan_gEbmxlqLj0OSgjaB2EOymrLvA2PKoYVSAWzRJeGzyPh-fC8JiVOsRwszprbNiI0_Zag7qZ_T3H6sf8ptK927CgoMVxXoAV8yeziOVD0SpJtwGjluXwHX2BpXi4_iCQOors9t/s1600/measure.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhndVf-Nan_gEbmxlqLj0OSgjaB2EOymrLvA2PKoYVSAWzRJeGzyPh-fC8JiVOsRwszprbNiI0_Zag7qZ_T3H6sf8ptK927CgoMVxXoAV8yeziOVD0SpJtwGjluXwHX2BpXi4_iCQOors9t/s640/measure.jpg" title="chop saw miter saw measure dewalt rot railing fix" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Measuring accurately is important. -the blade tooth lands squarely on the 6.5 inch line.</td></tr>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Measure to ensure 6.5 inches from the stop to the right of the saw blade (or left, if you are working from the other side). After measuring, affix the stop with a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-clamp" target="_blank">C-clamp</a> to hold the stop firmly in place -then measure again to make sure it didn't move. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbTK9c78g_AXJvbUIBPLoe3YrJWOqWXXYu1jkKicYKAUftKh_zuo1WfuLAK2QO-mtLL4LhIK8Nnopa1qXtrwLeiZlNPgmPDOvKPs7cLosnsla0om9gHBkvCPQevpesFT5H-bUHMCQhcpaw/s1600/Mask.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbTK9c78g_AXJvbUIBPLoe3YrJWOqWXXYu1jkKicYKAUftKh_zuo1WfuLAK2QO-mtLL4LhIK8Nnopa1qXtrwLeiZlNPgmPDOvKPs7cLosnsla0om9gHBkvCPQevpesFT5H-bUHMCQhcpaw/s400/Mask.jpg" title="3M safety dust mask face shield" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A combination dust mask and face shield.</td></tr>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Before making your cut, be safe. Wear safety glasses and a dust mask, or what I prefer -a full face shield with lung protection. It offers better dust protection and full face projectile protection. The above is a <a href="https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/3M-Full-Facepiece-Reusable-Respirator-6800-Medium-4-EA-Case/?N=5002385+8709322+8711405+8720539+3294780256&preselect=8720550+8720784+8726633&rt=rud" target="_blank">3M model with exchangeable filters</a> for a variety of pollutants and a silicone seal that is remarkably comfortable given its level of protection. Honestly, I wish I bought one of these 20 years ago. Protect yourself!</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9_ZEmdRkXQ1cipUOIeJyJBeS1X5damToGlyGp90Pznn7NwzQZuzXHPad0OeemK4htvDuaR_m8meucqLWEjut5ZtltDQIBnLr-_SAxICmqbkg_TdlMCQ1EDUxCloTbNVwrFHpLqQzbuzVr/s1600/AngleMiter.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="chopsaw porch railing repair miter cut" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9_ZEmdRkXQ1cipUOIeJyJBeS1X5damToGlyGp90Pznn7NwzQZuzXHPad0OeemK4htvDuaR_m8meucqLWEjut5ZtltDQIBnLr-_SAxICmqbkg_TdlMCQ1EDUxCloTbNVwrFHpLqQzbuzVr/s640/AngleMiter.jpg" title="chopsaw porch railing repair miter cut rotfix" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Note the subtle angle, about 4 degrees from square. This little bit of work will spare your railings!</td></tr>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Now you are ready to move the miter position about <b>4</b> degrees <b>away</b> from the spindle (to the left in this example) and lock it in place (usually by turning the knob). Place a precut, 6.75 inch spindle between the stop and the blade, holding it firmly with hand closer to the stop than the blade. Get the blade up to speed and pass it slowly through the cedar spindle. Hold the saw down while it slows to a stop. This will protect the wood from tear outs and splinters while protecting you. When you raise the saw blade you will see a slight angle on your spindle. </div>
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This angle gives the spindle a length of 6.5 inches on one side and about 6.625 inches on the other. This little bit changes everything. An eighth of an inch over the spindles' 1.5 inch width is the same slope as a 1 inch drop over 12 inch length. It is the reason the bottom rail will now drain water instead of hold it!</div>
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So is that it? It could be, or you can take rot resistance to the next level. Read on in Part II, Epoxy Repair...</div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">*Please
note that the tools and products used in this post are the one's I
actually use. I do not receive any paid or product support for the links
provided.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #990000;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #990000;"> </span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-59799146655410494382021-01-16T05:00:00.002-06:002021-01-16T05:00:03.605-06:00Invisibility of Mechanisms and the Half-Percent Revolution<p>The events of January 6, at the U.S Capitol, point me back to the invisibility of mechanisms that play a role in popular superstition, conspiracy-thinking, and suspicion. That invisibility which manifests a sense of something much bigger, more diabolical, than its true extent, also provides the cover for power and influence of a small group of actors or a limited number of terrorizing acts, that can manipulate political outcomes against the greatest good. If perceived power is power, the magnification of the actions of a few by media outlets, including social media, and the obfuscations created by time, distance, mistrust, ignorance, and the representational vacuum created by globalized economics have come together to destabilize our system. </p><p>We have to ask who most benefits from this destabilization and follow that logic to its conclusions. </p><p>It is said that it takes anywhere from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erica_Chenoweth" target="_blank">3.5%</a> to <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-25-revolution-how-big-does-a-minority-have-to-be-to-reshape-society/" target="_blank">25%</a> of the population to flip majority rule to minority rule, to enact a social, cultural, or political revolution. I'm inclined to believe the smallest number of actual actors, along with a larger number of inactive support or disinterest, is all that is necessary. The majority may fear the changes afoot, or the actions they witness on TV, or even the ideas inherent to the changes, but most will sit in shock or horror, unsure of how to act without the strongest leadership to shape the majority's actions. </p><p> "<i>IT can manipulate people with weaker wills, making them indifferent
to the horrific events that unfold or serve as unknowing accomplices</i>." <span></span></p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBQBqDmEwuCwyCit0BfD5MY4mDiVfPn-ZwlMsRz6k3seAp2a1Fb8m3UIYi6N8R5GfBfZ2kx3VnSHfy2ypkMsmjVaujIMvtnA0wq_ccbkscAMF7aokrfzTOYkfWitESOWMYIeIGvFaJVrqq/s640/IMG_9078.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Donald Trump as Pennywise the Clown" border="0" data-original-height="501" data-original-width="640" height="501" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBQBqDmEwuCwyCit0BfD5MY4mDiVfPn-ZwlMsRz6k3seAp2a1Fb8m3UIYi6N8R5GfBfZ2kx3VnSHfy2ypkMsmjVaujIMvtnA0wq_ccbkscAMF7aokrfzTOYkfWitESOWMYIeIGvFaJVrqq/w640-h501/IMG_9078.PNG" title=""I'm every nightmare you've ever had. I'm your worst dream come true. I'm everything you ever were afraid of."" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span>"<i>I'm every nightmare you've ever had. I'm your worst dream come true. I'm everything you ever were afraid of.</i>"</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span></span></p><p><span>Unlike the mythical spirits of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistle_and_I%27ll_Come_to_You" target="_blank">ghost stories</a> of the Continent, that rise up from the land to defend against transgressions born of arrogance and rationality, this American spirit rises up from its sewers to manipulate and encourage the arrogance of ignorance. American ghost stories are powered by our greatest crimes and recurrent ills. <br /></span></p><p> <br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-82562896212557367292020-12-08T05:00:00.001-06:002020-12-08T05:00:10.006-06:00When Absurdity Gives You Squash, Make Cake<p><br /></p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnD3ZgKP_qez_hhOCSl3j42pmOsu-zR6LVnO9sWnp98fngXewoHJPKg0AF_c9gMTBUTKgbC6ENogC2Esm_2b9Q1taSZTIvCrj5sKOIMqHW98y3R6Z1qBAlX5Gu36NJ8xJTNKajoCW2K2Ky/s640/squash.JPG"><img alt="large butternut squash" border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnD3ZgKP_qez_hhOCSl3j42pmOsu-zR6LVnO9sWnp98fngXewoHJPKg0AF_c9gMTBUTKgbC6ENogC2Esm_2b9Q1taSZTIvCrj5sKOIMqHW98y3R6Z1qBAlX5Gu36NJ8xJTNKajoCW2K2Ky/w640-h640/squash.JPG" title="large butternut squash" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div> The local Arboretum, where I manage photography education, employs a
couple who've been growing an absurd variety of squash. In fall, it's
quite a spectacular display. Some of these end up for sale and I
happened to show up on two for one day, and that's how I ended up with
two ridiculously giant "butternut" squash. I cooked one in the oven to
eat as a side, but found it too fibrous and moist to enjoy the way we
might delicata or acorn, or even ordinary-sized butternut squash. What
to do?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> <br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmqg2GFaro6UxRl5I_I5azGAGvhipWZXHUZo4RuBzERsgXb9CmmrMZt5mqvKC7kSRQtKnrARDbUoQqdTL0rmPtO8pHYotTyUC6Q3nJUArNlUTZUYFcFopGAbkE6oFXAaSrYagEkK6sDubn/s640/bigsquash.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="large butternut squash" border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmqg2GFaro6UxRl5I_I5azGAGvhipWZXHUZo4RuBzERsgXb9CmmrMZt5mqvKC7kSRQtKnrARDbUoQqdTL0rmPtO8pHYotTyUC6Q3nJUArNlUTZUYFcFopGAbkE6oFXAaSrYagEkK6sDubn/w480-h640/bigsquash.JPG" title="large butternut squash" width="480" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Out of the oven, into the fridge until...<br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2GD1rFf5QxjBesjXQ3dE3z_jv0oNwNkPI-gnC-87hR6lme9up71eBdI_ZCAyQhiIfXhEWXCqPJf3BjO2i3RiXa0lNe92mGx1JKprlXDdO7WQddq9lHcEhGuRx2jip5L4kCiQoxqKxXWip/s640/squashcake2.JPG"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2GD1rFf5QxjBesjXQ3dE3z_jv0oNwNkPI-gnC-87hR6lme9up71eBdI_ZCAyQhiIfXhEWXCqPJf3BjO2i3RiXa0lNe92mGx1JKprlXDdO7WQddq9lHcEhGuRx2jip5L4kCiQoxqKxXWip/w640-h640/squashcake2.JPG" title="sugar free squash bread" width="640" /></a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">A cake was born. It had to be sugar-free, since that's the new way, here. Sweet is allowed, as long as it comes from fibrous sources like dates. If you google pumpkin bread, you'll get millions of hits. If you search for sugar-free pumpkin bread, you'll get a bunch of keto, vegan, gluten free, paleo wonk, but few, if any pages dedicated to the refined sugar-free. So, one must adapt, and adapt I did. Recipe follows:</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div></div><p style="text-align: center;"><u><span style="font-size: medium;">Refined Sugar Free Squash Bread (Cake)</span></u></p><p> </p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>1 cup of unbleached flour, all-purpose works</li><li>3/4 cup whole wheat flour, all the healthier -right?</li><li>1 tsp baking powder</li><li>1/2 tsp baking soda</li><li>1/2 tsp salt</li><li>1 tsp all-spice, what a catch all name</li><li>1 tsp cinnamon </li><li>1/2 tsp nutmeg, ground of course</li><li>Zest of an orange, although, when in a pandemic, I pass up going to the grocery for one orange</li><li>1-1/4 to 1-3/4 cups (more moist, less moist) of pureed (or vigorously stirred), cooked squash </li><li>1/3 cup oil (or 1 stick of softened butter in my case)</li><li>2 eggs, preferably from your neighbor's chickens</li><li>1/2 tsp vanilla (glad to get that jug of it from Costco, pandemic baking and all)</li><li>2 cups whole, dried dates (thanks again Costco), one chopped and the other soaked in warm water and then pureed. </li><li>Chopped walnuts, as much as you like, or none if you wish</li><li>Sugar-free Lily chocolate chips if you're into that (chocolate is one place the alcohol sugars hold up well) <br /></li></ul><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><u>On To It </u></span><br /></p><p>Preheat oven to 350 F</p><p>Butter up a loaf pan, average size, maybe 9x4x3 inches<br /></p><p>Warm 1 cup of water in the microwave or stove-top and place 1 cup of dates into it to soften. Once softened, mix manually or with a machine to puree (doesn't need to be perfect). In a medium-large bowl, combine both flours, baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices. In another bowl, place the pureed dates, oil or butter, squash puree, and orange zest (if you went to the store to get one orange) and mix well. Add the two eggs to this mixture, then the vanilla and mix it up. Add this bowl to the flour bowl and now you're cooking. </p><p>Fold the ingredients together into a smooth consistency (well, as smooth as it can get, don't go crazy). At this time you can add the chopped dates, the nuts, and chips (if those are part of your diet), and fold it all together. Get that mixture into the buttered baking pan and it into the oven for, hard to say, 45-55 minutes. Check on it. Do the toothpick into the center test. When done, take it out and let cool for twenty minutes before turning it upside down for removal. Then enjoy. You can freeze it or refrigerate it, or eat it all in one sitting. </p><p>Post Script: For a guy who teaches photography, those images up there are real orange, absurdly orange, like the times.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-40133413121530415742020-11-02T13:00:00.218-06:002020-11-06T12:28:56.635-06:00The Politics of Superstition<p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUPSx3S0U_AqLIg073O2ReIsaI7O1U0Cnj8aXohyphenhyphentSBYWJOw-LbXz6Ox1vWltqYBJtunNZnr5tE2ps1Xe2vd0XoUhsWmg-IljTq1rULh_52D5Gun1LhnYUIHHgVuMD0Hcn7Fqe5PsmPYdR/s640/trump.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="trump on stage" border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="640" height="520" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUPSx3S0U_AqLIg073O2ReIsaI7O1U0Cnj8aXohyphenhyphentSBYWJOw-LbXz6Ox1vWltqYBJtunNZnr5tE2ps1Xe2vd0XoUhsWmg-IljTq1rULh_52D5Gun1LhnYUIHHgVuMD0Hcn7Fqe5PsmPYdR/w640-h520/trump.jpg" title="political theater trump on stage suggesting fire in a crowded theater" width="640" /></a>I know a thing or two about Donald Trump. I grew up with him. </div><p>We were both born in the same borough and more precisely, in the same hospital. Over the 24 years between our births, the populations served by that hospital had changed. For me, that change became part of my identity and for him, a repudiation that could only be salvaged by slapping his name on it. </p><p></p><p>Throughout my childhood, our local media afforded Trump attention that out-sized his accomplishment. In those rough years, the seventies into the Reagan eighties, the media wanted something or someone to look at that wasn't the blighted hangover of the previous decade. Instead, we were served Trump's self-manufactured over-confidence, a salesman, as the nation turned away from its problems to fix on the shiny object Reagan had promised, but would never deliver. </p><p>In this past, Trump's vainglory, gold-plated hucksterism and bald-faced opportunism was self-serving. Apart from the misguided attention provided by a talk TV media industry always in search of content, his effect on most of us, then, was negligible.</p><p>Yet, here we are, today, in a confused haze, a political fog of war. On the precipice of this election, whose over-stimulation of the senses is experienced by the political spectrum, I cannot escape my supposition that our political body has a tickle of calamity in its throat. A deep, possibly unconscious, metastasization of threat and decline that may have begun with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or was it the election of 2000? Hard to say -it was all too easy to dismiss the subtle symptoms back then.<br /></p><p>Social, cultural, or political conservatism has roots in the fear underpinning the premise of stability. If I were to discard Trump's means, leaving only ends, I would say this opportunist has successfully re-established the minority's conservative vision of defunded government (so-called tax cuts), reduced environmental regulation, religious fundamentalism, "law and order," racially-stratified liberty, extraordinary defense spending, and more. These <i>ends</i> are not new, but Trump's simple arithmetic of means and ends cannot possibly calculate all the potential consequences his <i>means</i> can bloom.</p><p>What began as a circus of comedic take-downs of various GOP suitors has become a theater of tragedy. What makes a tragedy is simple: it wasn't inevitable; it didn't have to be. Maybe the western wildfires are an apt metaphor. This tinderbox, full as
it is with combustibles, shouldn't be governed by those apt to play
with fire. Yet this president revels in flicking lit matches. His support is easily ingratiated; their laughter and applause entertain him; he becomes bored without it. His boredom excites his drive to upset those who've long had disdain for him. It is easy to get the political class yammering and even easier to attract the cameras. Trump thrives with this attention, more so than most when it's negative. Now, on the stage that political norms ushered him to, he uses it to destroy the vehicle on which he arrived. There may be no way back.<br /></p><p>Is Trump irresponsible? His support doesn't think so, not as long as he is satisfying their belief systems. Yet, beliefs do little to solve the problems our nation or species have before us. Under threat of calamity and fear, beliefs have a history of promulgating persecution, mayhem, imprisonment and murder. First, identities are grouped into others, then they are targeted. The ravings of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon" target="_blank">Q Anon</a> have grouped Democrats, for instance, as pedophilic satan worshipers stealing children from pizza joints. The "China plague," it has been suggested, is a communist plot to destroy the United States with a manufactured virus. In China, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/chinas-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/609772/" target="_blank">conspiracies promoted on the web</a> suggest Covid-19 is a U.S. plot to destroy China. Undoubtedly, we will see countless conspiracies around manipulation of our election, many not resolving for years -if ever.<br /></p><p>Conspiracies are born out of a union of fear, ignorance, and an invisibility of mechanisms. Conspiracy-thinking is a form of political superstition -a mental salve and impetus for action. Can any good come from overwhelming ignorance (of which we are all capable), fear, or acting on that which is indemonstrable? We should all say not, were we to fully believe that we act from a place of unknowing. </p><p><i>Superstare</i> [<span class="IPA">suˈper.</span><span class="IPA">starə]</span>, the Latin root of the word superstition, means 'to stand over,' sometimes implies 'to survive.' To stand over, of course, is to overcome, even to conquer. The Latin root indicates, to me, standing over <i>reason</i>, standing over what is knowable -the material earth, from which facts and reason can begin to be derived. Facts, reason, rational argument -these are underfoot, stood over, and <i>overcome</i> under the spell of superstition. This is the characterization I would apply to the base support of Donald Trump. Even if I were to stretch superstare to the meaning <i>survive</i>, it could be easily shaped to describe an identity politics of survival based in personal belief. This is the politics of superstition.<br /></p><p>Where do we go from here? Some scholars believe the recurring European plagues of the 14th through 16th centuries led Western civilizations to the period known as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment" target="_blank">Enlightenment</a>, from which many of our social and political ideals were founded. But, I understand if you think three centuries of change doesn't offer much hope today. If you have the time this winter, watch <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Black-Death-Worlds-Devastating-Plague/dp/B01M27CU26" target="_blank">The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague</a>. And, if not so much for its contemporary analogue, the historical description of a small pox outbreak in Montreal, documented in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Outbreak-Anatomy-Plague-Marc-Beique/dp/B07JNVQZKF" target="_blank">Outbreak: Anatomy of a Plague,</a> assures us that the psychological and political responses to wide spread infectious disease are entirely unchanged. See -order can be provided by knowledge.<br /></p><p>As for Donald Trump and his rhetoric of disinformation, racial othering, blame, conspiracy, hubris and guile? I'd rather ignore him, because it deflates him, and consider this election, more than anything, a referendum on our nation's citizenry. </p><p style="text-align: center;">Vote, stay safe, reason, touch the earth.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-57181000735411920342020-10-24T05:00:00.002-05:002020-10-24T05:00:02.944-05:00Forced March<div class="separator"><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"> <br /></p></div><p></p><p></p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYkAP0sqETcr9sBh_26L0qeRHzxxcQv2wyRNW4bpnWEuZCRf3HnTh9fzn9vxeTUAlDJGa4C2d9V5x56GqO3yWgdqA0FP2ZUVOByD28SH-nT-yi0kVkEA3JOuHf0JmftKnVwdf9WfTf7DkV/s640/verbenafarm.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYkAP0sqETcr9sBh_26L0qeRHzxxcQv2wyRNW4bpnWEuZCRf3HnTh9fzn9vxeTUAlDJGa4C2d9V5x56GqO3yWgdqA0FP2ZUVOByD28SH-nT-yi0kVkEA3JOuHf0JmftKnVwdf9WfTf7DkV/s16000/verbenafarm.JPG" /></a> <span class="">The day was not ideal -but was it ever going to be? I
mean, at least the wind was a breeze and the temperature above 30°. As
far as I could tell it was the best day out of the following ten or the previous three. Sleet and graupel, thunder and lightning, snow, wind and temps dropping to ten degrees forced me to plant in the snow on a day more like March than October.</span></p><p><span class=""> </span></p><p><span class=""> </span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD90WZtnCN-GBYlJOsLF5ugpps70U_yRgJIHZLauptGMWHXaSYPyLVJdBRCCcnHe_4EqTa5UehJbYL_unJKpZk6O2S-M497mEf3Q4HaDa03kkMBErTdVvXzt1VhMzUXZ_vjaggkUxPw372/s640/snow-covered.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD90WZtnCN-GBYlJOsLF5ugpps70U_yRgJIHZLauptGMWHXaSYPyLVJdBRCCcnHe_4EqTa5UehJbYL_unJKpZk6O2S-M497mEf3Q4HaDa03kkMBErTdVvXzt1VhMzUXZ_vjaggkUxPw372/s16000/snow-covered.JPG" /></a><span class="">I tilled last Sunday before I knew for sure what was coming and
that tilling modestly displaced the snow so that I could mostly make out my
rows. The little hump in the top center is a few kale I left in place should things change and another few leaves can be eaten.</span></p><p><span class=""><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixQcNuIE8w9YZMuMjnnlIremJLY7qaiV47GAvoCq8bXqzvrJ8Bt29WnyG6kVrsdYZ1Uefl5l3fUHAbQX_f75XfXGpJBSM2zpBdCZhcpQ6TRhV6lZZuwfiC1WFxPz7LN4a_sNIwJtw82E-q/s640/porcelain.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixQcNuIE8w9YZMuMjnnlIremJLY7qaiV47GAvoCq8bXqzvrJ8Bt29WnyG6kVrsdYZ1Uefl5l3fUHAbQX_f75XfXGpJBSM2zpBdCZhcpQ6TRhV6lZZuwfiC1WFxPz7LN4a_sNIwJtw82E-q/s16000/porcelain.JPG" /></a>Despite the drought this year, several heads of garlic sized up well and even when they didn't, there were plenty of large cloves. Above, Porcelain variety named "Music," a well known large garlic. My other Porcelain is the strain known as "Armenian."<br /></div></div><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_UPuQhNZN_6VXDDjATOwr9AtNKjPKEOj0Z9t_T1-QVT1c-BUN_Hr-elgciooRo0khUwe_m0HuvFtuQUSD5mKJVSOJmhQzHqYibVNQ65kUuzjLKB2eHY02SAARrO9VitaNZPAJyJUidjcl/s640/thickasgoo.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="wheel dib" border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_UPuQhNZN_6VXDDjATOwr9AtNKjPKEOj0Z9t_T1-QVT1c-BUN_Hr-elgciooRo0khUwe_m0HuvFtuQUSD5mKJVSOJmhQzHqYibVNQ65kUuzjLKB2eHY02SAARrO9VitaNZPAJyJUidjcl/w640-h640/thickasgoo.JPG" title="wheel dib" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="">The real trouble was the snow drenched soil which, as the image of
my wheel dib should tell, clung hardily to my gloves and glued the
cloves large and small to it! The weight of the accumulating goo slowly
pulled my glove away from my fingers, disabling dexterity and my attempts
to push the glove back with the slick left handed glove were fruitless. The soil, wet and cold, clung to soaked gloves made for cold hands, but that was the worst of it. I completed the project in a scant three hours if I cut the clove popping done in the morning from the calculation.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /><span class=""></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /><span class=""></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class=""><img alt="Garlic patch" border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG7wvT2QCYmFRjkwcTntif9Rw9I08pfKo9T3rweTWe2pGpHNvApJ74Q_81yu8v8PYfXl8O2h2v0vMU8eSQWCt3nH56iWmYcSltCoRPn9knWI7v5Id1NsiyWKP2FLBeVTRAjnhjnvJBRHdz/s16000/garlic+planted.JPG" title="garlic patch in the snow" /></span><span class=""> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="">I’ve reduced my
garlic count this year to about 500 -my lowest count since my first year growing garlic. At
the end of the day, the patch looked like I had a fight with a tub of Oreos
cookies and cream, but was glad to be done and not out there today or
any of the days to come. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class="">I still have, ahem, a few projects sitting unfinished under snow. I'm holding out for a brief warm up that I tend to think will come whenever the temperature drops so incongruous with the season. So, some porch work this November, or if I am lucky, just before Halloween? Scary thought is how many things sit under the snow that were near completion or that I thought I could get to, but simply couldn't, by dint of weather and age.<br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span class=""><br /></span></div><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-86569799767976053192020-10-14T05:00:00.002-05:002020-10-14T05:00:06.497-05:00Where Have I Been<p>It's been awhile, and maybe it shouldn't have been. As you can see by the square-formatted images below, I have been spending too much time <a href="https://www.instagram.com/artist_and_builder/" target="_blank">working for Instagram</a>. Much more of my warm weather time is spent repairing our house in the woods (prior post). Yet much of that work should be ending soon as we approach freezing.</p><p>I took a break -really forced myself to cease working on siding and house painting to make a visit to our neighbors, adjacent to our woods, on the southern edge along the powerline. Luck has given us great neighbors, a couple -half from Minnesota and the other half from eastern Pennsylvania. Their property was formerly part of a farm, as was ours, but ours was the woodlot and the wetland waste where old car parts, appliances, and other mysteries were dumped (ravines were farmers' dumping grounds).</p><p> </p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhueRMXQp0uiuCEWIfblL5G62xmelZTpULopble_YxV-sm3967GP0VuY7hZV2uHpMIG1HWj5ZalJC-12AzNPknPx1BVlZBFgoAC85V8bnj92kBGcD7MPNF8_F-TLVBbW2_QPFxk4rhlPhWr/s640/E2255810-0261-4775-9615-87818117FFB6.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhueRMXQp0uiuCEWIfblL5G62xmelZTpULopble_YxV-sm3967GP0VuY7hZV2uHpMIG1HWj5ZalJC-12AzNPknPx1BVlZBFgoAC85V8bnj92kBGcD7MPNF8_F-TLVBbW2_QPFxk4rhlPhWr/w640-h640/E2255810-0261-4775-9615-87818117FFB6.JPG" width="640" /></a> We grow what vegetables we can in one hundred and forty square feet of
raised beds in the sunniest portion of our front yard. The remainder of
what we grow, including my garlic, happens at the neighbors' garden
patch. </p><p> </p><p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJmBoAdxgoJgUSxnAt5lWwToxc1FJO1JgSqQH1-gkinjny3lIs97_EOcpMgsg5CrS_uoxUzd_WCWPZ3XMN7f9yuPgSJoYKP1Y4DmHNAn6XfjLENHi5mwPpeliW70tWMTrcTtZbu5rlQaLj/s640/40C0599F-A4C5-41E7-994E-F03DB792D870.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJmBoAdxgoJgUSxnAt5lWwToxc1FJO1JgSqQH1-gkinjny3lIs97_EOcpMgsg5CrS_uoxUzd_WCWPZ3XMN7f9yuPgSJoYKP1Y4DmHNAn6XfjLENHi5mwPpeliW70tWMTrcTtZbu5rlQaLj/w640-h640/40C0599F-A4C5-41E7-994E-F03DB792D870.JPG" width="640" /></a> You’ll see some of my native and non native
plants growing in rows here (for sale next spring!) and hard to
believe -my first successful carrot (just one -is that success?). </p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH4B0XClzQ88efjQM1tb7CM04N1Tedv0OTKWbpZhHyP3jcAw3_CdVJeQUq7CVlWwf_TIOoWTenswtueIXTu-xZyMo6qBaATWPLe0h3_MD4y1mZQq4FrY-VyfbieqZzcnbfTaYlzJnriLII/s640/7C1C1F8E-D769-4539-AFBE-C5F340D1B788.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH4B0XClzQ88efjQM1tb7CM04N1Tedv0OTKWbpZhHyP3jcAw3_CdVJeQUq7CVlWwf_TIOoWTenswtueIXTu-xZyMo6qBaATWPLe0h3_MD4y1mZQq4FrY-VyfbieqZzcnbfTaYlzJnriLII/w640-h640/7C1C1F8E-D769-4539-AFBE-C5F340D1B788.JPG" width="640" /></a></div> <p><br /></p><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkYHUN_bqKFZr2ojXoyFpwtIWL38rjjspvS50W4RKfh0ixO8hfh3iYyLcgx0PhyphenhyphennR0TF9wL9xlDRucUdZeBEAMKUgox1WwT5nscwgEZn_Bv0TAcEUolax6ii6yc1-qqSQqsRFnjU3NOTUd/s640/63643AF3-8264-4025-A480-07D951DD1975.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkYHUN_bqKFZr2ojXoyFpwtIWL38rjjspvS50W4RKfh0ixO8hfh3iYyLcgx0PhyphenhyphennR0TF9wL9xlDRucUdZeBEAMKUgox1WwT5nscwgEZn_Bv0TAcEUolax6ii6yc1-qqSQqsRFnjU3NOTUd/w640-h640/63643AF3-8264-4025-A480-07D951DD1975.JPG" width="640" /></a>And the greenhouses -where I now have the
pick of the last tomatoes which will be sauce as soon as I can get to
it.</div><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEzFbGtcktvUI5y3cTtkBIuNdGNg6__jRHwnZsvvsK2cT0_l5A5x1myOgg6lSwBShLBuaO7fmD_3FiSKfll3G0r_vRdOzthfFmbHEmltJWNJCJXwU9JJL-TyYZsQT93DYPfWuKP7VqgQSf/s640/37E745B9-4349-4AA4-8048-CDAC31BDBD73.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEzFbGtcktvUI5y3cTtkBIuNdGNg6__jRHwnZsvvsK2cT0_l5A5x1myOgg6lSwBShLBuaO7fmD_3FiSKfll3G0r_vRdOzthfFmbHEmltJWNJCJXwU9JJL-TyYZsQT93DYPfWuKP7VqgQSf/w640-h640/37E745B9-4349-4AA4-8048-CDAC31BDBD73.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-_nyWc2coG1qFTdfBKvBCZZDwRw8Qur3QU8RIsCZJwbrTV4r9YYmuqw75smysYhRfpHivn-16HqvubUJRFhyphenhyphenjZI7FKl_wa4g2PTTzk5agFlTvejxkEtT55GRMA93Y_3ti7wURU6k9S2Ks/s640/B3BA294A-A1D0-44E4-BB86-1936D431435B.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-_nyWc2coG1qFTdfBKvBCZZDwRw8Qur3QU8RIsCZJwbrTV4r9YYmuqw75smysYhRfpHivn-16HqvubUJRFhyphenhyphenjZI7FKl_wa4g2PTTzk5agFlTvejxkEtT55GRMA93Y_3ti7wURU6k9S2Ks/w400-h400/B3BA294A-A1D0-44E4-BB86-1936D431435B.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>The balance created by visiting open space while spending much of my time within the woods is restorative. I grew up not far from the sea -I would go there whenever I needed that open space. The desert I lived in, now over twenty years ago, also provided it. Now, the neighbor’s cleared ten acres and garden patch does the same.<br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIwn6KKYfszb4HeMp9sqvioSAEKc_5qBY1uBWDtmjTQYLrLEv6lsx3lo4CPS66nVTE8JFkTnyhhynjCrJI4rVZubiaAk4T8Kl5SZu5NFWFby4qB8esGiaKRQjqHJM48N1rxVZ3CZvKhOyj/s640/C4D3D333-817C-4474-A951-294475679F6C.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIwn6KKYfszb4HeMp9sqvioSAEKc_5qBY1uBWDtmjTQYLrLEv6lsx3lo4CPS66nVTE8JFkTnyhhynjCrJI4rVZubiaAk4T8Kl5SZu5NFWFby4qB8esGiaKRQjqHJM48N1rxVZ3CZvKhOyj/w640-h640/C4D3D333-817C-4474-A951-294475679F6C.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-77464721781556170422020-10-01T11:20:00.002-05:002020-10-13T11:22:38.321-05:00An Interview With Artist Jim Hittenger<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-c5ead83f-7fff-8faa-7711-d45dc9dc1c4c" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rosalux artist Frank Meuschke talks with fellow Rosalux artist Jim Hittinger about studying art, working in Minneapolis, and takes a deep dive into his recent work.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 785px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="785" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/lWYWUBsCg8oG6CC-UJNcxLLc-YOenugZRtWvUl8I2Ijke0BPGN222WvCa7MCT4HoypfJGQQMV0MLqS-P_LJTmGns-4_YlOUKZE03PZVcua0_lY88F2hqxDdKyY2Ra-4rV6iV8gZG" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You grew up in Michigan, was it suburban, city, or rural?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was the suburbs of Detroit, not far from the city. Metro Detroit is massive, ridiculous sprawl. If you were to drive from downtown Minneapolis to the forest, if you drove that same distance in Detroit, it would still be six lane highways, strip mall hell for a while longer. So, yeah, I grew up in the Metro Detroit maze.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And that created who you are today?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Laughs) I guess so, yeah.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did you have a sense when you were younger that you wanted to study art?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I always wanted to be an artist. Honestly, earlier than I can remember, I was always drawing. It was always my thing when I was a little kid that I was good at drawing -that was my thing. You know some people’s parents are like “We’re not wasting money getting you an art degree!” But my parents were always like “Yeah, you should go to art school. You should be an artist.” So, yeah, I was always gonna do this.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That seems to me to be a less common story. Why do you think they were so supportive?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah. Well my parents are academics. My dad is a philosophy professor and my mom has been an administrator at various schools and non-profits. So my parents are into the liberal arts I guess. They were always cool with it.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s great that you had that support.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My parents are interested in art. My family would go to museums; we’d go to the Detroit Institute of Arts and look at the collection on a Saturday.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where did you go to undergraduate school?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wayne State University. It’s a state school in inner city Detroit. It’s a bit like the U of M Twin Cities, where there’s a little nugget just inside the city that’s the campus -so that’s where I went to school.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is it a school that is known for art study?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes, there is actually a really strong art program there. I don’t know that there was anyone who went there that is super famous, but Arthur Danto went to school there in, like, the late forties. The printmaking area had some of his old woodblocks and editioned some of them in my senior year. </span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I had no idea he was an artist.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He is better known for his theory and philosophy stuff, but he was also a printmaker.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s an intellectual pursuit, printmaking…</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, I guess so. That’s why I don’t have the patience for it, not smart enough I guess. (Laughs)</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I did not have the patience for it myself. Did you have to read his writings while you were a student?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, honestly, I think I had to read his stuff more in grad school at the University of Minnesota than I did in undergrad.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Was there a particular professor that stood out for you as a resource or mentor?</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jim Nawara. His work was very different from mine. He makes very traditional, hyper-realistic landscape oil paintings. He paints meadows and streams, very traditional. I think that was great for me to have because even though I do not make paintings like that, I learned a lot about paint. He was obsessed with paint! He was the type of guy you would ask, “should I use this color or this color?” He’d then talk to you for like an hour about the differences between the pigments and oils used in this one versus that one. There were a lot of formal things that I just didn’t know about paint; which I know talking shop about painting bores the hell out of people who aren’t painters (laughs). So there is a lot about that that I learned from him that has been invaluable to me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 489px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="489" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/D-veXV6xuSw8yOeZRMrI9c0oBLJNE5sYHaNYzTuCtHw38arAmFeniVxbRYPE3408kFcjAzA1nOMt-b4slX-vSL0mJ3YdqtcKWLzuYhLw_Kl0HYPGGAWQZEAjoxuzZfthL9hMUwDs" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> James Nawara, Blue Fence, oil on linen, 1999</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It sounds like you were not going to resist going to college or say, “Screw this, I’m going to LA to be an artist.”</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, the thought crossed my mind. I think I may have been more likely to do that if I didn’t have the support that I had. But you can go to college for art and I was like, okay, why not? I’ll have to take other classes, but I’ll get a cheap, shitty apartment in Detroit and go to art classes and hang out for four years. Sure, I entertained the idea of not doing that, but it wasn’t a hard decision. In school you get to learn your studio practice, you just kind of learn how it all works with some training wheels on. Going to exhibitions, talking to your professors about how you make money! Do you sell your work? Where do you show your work? Who do I have to talk with to show </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">my</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> work? It’s important to learn that stuff while you have this community safety net and I think that’s a really invaluable thing.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did your teachers have an answer for you when you asked these kinds of questions, like, how do you make a living?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, I would talk to my professors a lot about that. And they were always encouraging me to try to show work outside of school. It’s like the best thing you can do to get the ball rolling is to show some work that’s not just the end of the year BFA exhibition. There are open calls at this gallery and this gallery, so I think that was a really helpful thing to learn. If I had decided when I was 18 to move to LA and figure that out for myself, I probably would have eventually figured it out, but I am glad I had that help to figure it out.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So you were actively showing while you were in undergraduate school?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah. I think that was a benefit of being at a school that was in a city. Just being in a city that had a whole art community and art scene happening completely outside of school was really helpful.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what brought you to Minneapolis?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grad school.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How much time between undergrad and grad school was there?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I came right away. I wasn’t even expecting to get into grad school right away. I was looking for state schools that had teaching assistant opportunities, funding, but I wanted to be in a city. I didn’t want to be in some off the beaten path college town. There are some really good MFA programs you can go to, but you’re in kind of the…</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cornfields?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah. Exactly. So the University of Minnesota checked all the boxes for me. So I applied and got in and came. That was in 2012. I finished in 2015 and I’m still here ‘cause I like it here.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sounds like staying here was a pretty easy decision.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, I was planning on staying for at least a little bit. But I’ve been here long enough now that I feel at home here. Not necessarily certain that I will live here forever, but I like being here right now.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the U has been a kind of anchor for you after graduation?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, a lot of my best friends in town I know are from there and are doing lots of different things. If you are just going to uproot and move somewhere, it’s definitely good to have a built-in community.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What was your biggest struggle as a painter? What do you worry about, artistically?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My painting sucking! (Laughs)</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So you weren’t worrying that painting was dead or where will I go with painting?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think that is always there. There’s always going to be people who think painting is for idiots who just want to make pictures.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But not painters. It’s hard to be a painter who thinks that.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, that would be interesting, actually, if you were. I never had much of a concern about that. There were enough other painters on the faculty and in the program that there was always a good conversation around painting and about what painting can be, where it can go, and what possibilities there are with it.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How broad is your definition of painting?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t think I really even have one. It can be so many different things. If you are applying paint to a surface to make an image of a thing, you can separate these two things. Applying paint to a surface goes one way and making an image of a thing goes in the other direction. You could be working just with the idea of imagery, with making a representation; that doesn’t have to involve paint or traditional painting or drawing tools at all. There are also artists who are using painting materials to do something that doesn’t really look like painting at all. So I think there is a pretty wide and deep definition of painting now.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I imagine painting as being on of the broadest disciplines. For example, I like to think of photography as a kind of drawing. As a painter I sometimes made photographs as preparatory work, and I thought of that work as a kind of drawing. So now primarily working with photography, I see that as a kind of drawing too.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, I think more and more the idea of having a medium and sticking to it is not super important. Going back to art academia, there is an interest in blurring the lines between your study areas. I think this is a good thing, probably.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What brought you to Rosalux? You must’ve known about it while you were at the U.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I applied for the Open Door show in 2015 or 16 and had one or two paintings accepted to that. Maybe six months after that show there was an opening in the roster, and I got an email from, maybe it was Terry, saying this is what the gallery is and we are looking for a new member. It wasn’t an invitation to join, but it said I should think about applying for the open spot. So I did.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How’d that make you feel?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was pretty cool, yeah.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have a short list of exhibits that really impacted me as a young artist. Do you have any that had that effect on you?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is one show, about ten years ago. I saw an exhibition of </span><a href="https://www.menil.org/exhibitions/13-vija-celmins-television-and-disaster-1964-1966" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vija Celmins work at the Menil Collection</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in Houston. That’s one of the best things about my parents living in Houston now. Every time I am down there for Christmas or whatever, we go to the Menil Collection because it’s such a great museum. There was this huge show. It was called Television And Disaster. I bought the catalog for it, and I don’t usually do that, because who has the money for exhibition catalogs, but I had to get this one. It was great because I was already a fan of her work, pouring over images online and in books. It was great to get to see a lot of that work in person. She has done a lot of different types of work over decades, but it was specifically a lot of paintings of these hyper-realistic TV news stills…</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like a ship blowing up</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, yeah, a lot of stuff like that. She has this amazing way of painting those things where it isn’t just a painting of the event seen on the news. It really feels like a painting of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">television screen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of the event happening. She has this really fucking brilliant way of capturing that filtered experience with paint, which is something that I am really interested in doing. She has always been an important artist for me and I got to see a bunch of her most iconic work in one place and it was amazing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 468px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="468" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/pvQPeKxd5xJpjgKEuGb9XmavFw5mZLwxgO_MAbp_eIO02Qdwv6clK_uQ-mXrr5ro0WLHF8Ye7qEJLuKKBWc3a28mU4Jv71j3hfwOvKUdu6WKRMI2c6V1gypsuf9rcEKo3pK4DZN8" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Vija Celmins, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Explosion at Sea</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, 1966, Oil on canvas</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Celmins seems to exist on this plane of Agnes Martin. I have no idea what her life is like, but I imagine it as an ascetic kind of life. Maybe it has something to do with all that detailed rendering, the pencil work. It’s like, if Agnes Martin had watched TV all the time, you’d get Vija Celmins. (Laughs)</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I always show my intro to drawing students some of Vija Celmins' drawings, some of those insane drawings she did of aerial water views. I tell them, "This is a pencil drawing by one of my favorite artists, just so you know here is a possibility for graphite drawings."</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Does that blow them away?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, usually it’s “whoa!” It’s part of the first day lecture showing them a bunch of photo-realistic renderings in graphite; now here is a bunch of stuff that is not that, but</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: red; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are still very good drawings. It’s to show intro students that you do not have to be able to do a Vija Celmins water drawing to make a good pencil drawing. It’s a way to get over the fear of “does it look realistic?” I show Vija Celmins to say, “Here’s what you’re not likely to be able to do and that’s okay.” (Laughs)</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Who’s work are you connecting with right now?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/aleksandrawaliszewska/?hl=en" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Aleksandra Waliszewska</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a painter from Warsaw, Poland. Her work looks very different from my own and deals with different themes and ideas, but I think there is still a lot of overlap. I'm interested in how she presents these bizarre, fantastical images with a decidedly un-fantastical aesthetic. Her paintings show these surreal, nightmare scenarios, painted in this very matter-of-fact way in drab color schemes, mixing fantasy imagery with mundane scenes from contemporary life.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 392px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="392" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/NFmr5a7fwLv53FBxY_uguEQEHISRW7rl8t8pDrK3ytVn83hzJgWt76woLXI9E0sx_Zx0kVEk6r_b_aCMsuIHHfa6HQ9gjPIeAON27uaxUB_rRs0D5dTfzPaGUJgjJdWCEcpObxKY" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Aleksandra Waliszewska, Untitled, Gouache, 2012-2013</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did you have a moment that defined your point of view as an artist or has it been a steady evolution?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t think that there is really a specific moment where that happened; I think it’s been a constantly evolving process, but I’ve had a lot of similar interests and aesthetic preferences for a long time. If I look at work that I made ten years ago, I’m like “what the hell? This looks so different and I would never make this now.” </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But work I am making now doesn't seem any different from the work I was making six months ago. There was never one moment where there was a hard left turn. Little, incremental things change.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So if you put that work that you made when you were 20 side by side with the work you are now making at 30, an observant person might recognize a connection or do you think not really?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, yeah. I think that there has been a kernel of what I am doing now in what I have been doing for a long time.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What would you say about your work is unique to you, what is the Jim Hittinger genius, and when did you become aware of it?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well first of all, I definitely would NOT call myself a genius! (laughs) But probably when I was in grad school. That was a big part of what that experience was; having discussions with faculty and peers about those kinds of things and trying to unpack what it is that you are doing and why. How could you be doing this differently or more effectively? That was really helpful.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did you have a moment of crisis?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I had some moments of trying to completely blow up what I was doing and try to do something completely different. Every time I would do that I would find myself, before I knew what was happening, making work that looked just like the stuff I was trying to get away from. Sometimes that was frustrating. But there is something there. There is some reason why I keep making this decision, this decision and this decision even if I try to completely stop and do something else. So, that was a good way to identify what those things were so that I could start thinking about why I make those decisions. What is the significance of these decisions, look at each decision independent of the others, and identify what is important and what is not.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I look at your work, one thing that strikes me right away is your color choices. There isn’t a lot of color, but the color that there is, is very strong and you are fairly consistent with that across your work, at least over the last five years or so. Your color feels like it is loaded with something.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 465px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="465" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fWkfweQVqD8IKPRZarBLGVDh4umGlULj3i7grEBIQ6s2NrUnW7NOsk_FQTER4eGsDD41XXDEo4Dj3lGejrCnayhbwHfSySaHEMKkUUQfkjn-M9Mf15jzjG8NVJkmcET4hucYDfjk" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Search Party</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Oil on Paper, 2015</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Color is really important and that is a relatively new thing. The work before grad school and some during grad school had no color at all. I was making gray, brown, muddy, murky paintings. That’s not to say I wasn’t thinking about color. I was actively thinking about making different kinds of muddy, earth tones and grays, and how I could make different non-colors interact with each other in an interesting way.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The super bright colors, that was something I would never do in a painting that I thought I should try and see what happens. Maybe I should use some neon orange and see what happens. I started thinking about how those types of colors are usually reserved for a kind of code that everyone understands to mean caution or danger. These colors appear on traffic barrels, the lane is ending, the “X” they paint on diseased trees and it has to go, or construction safety vests. These super bright colors were perfect as a formal foil to the gray murkiness but also made sense conceptually.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is a visual, formal thing but it is not extraneous because it speaks to the content of the work. If I do a series of paintings where this orange shows up in one image on a traffic cone and another image it's on a guy with a safety vest and then another image there is an inflatable pool that is the same color, then the inflatable pool becomes part of the code where there is something dangerous. Now this banal object, this dumb object, gets put in the same category as the “oh, shit, this is dangerous stuff.”</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So these colors came out of a formal rut but there are a lot of colors out there and you chose very specific industrial colors that elicit an emotional reaction. Danger or warning aren’t emotions, but maybe these colors elevate the cortisol a little bit -there is a danger here.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The orange and the green, but particularly the orange, suggest the fluorescent crayons I had as a kid. I didn’t use these colors for most of the year, but in September and October I used them to make my Halloween pictures and this association is indelible.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, yeah, yeah.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are some Halloween characters in your paintings, but I don’t think your paintings are about Halloween. Would you talk about that?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 445px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="445" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/lVzIpH4RBtv7BCHX4z75OQLWTOeUYh4DnbNpjW3zrdHMYZVRjXPgeHqrzq8GF0aVFqHYqMS_nag7u5JGRgiKH9gE16sYLOALpxv2SkeMkZh4N1Hgfvs7kCe96zmBNXkPZGdmGNiF" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Devil's Night</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Oil on Canvas, 2015</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the biggest things I am interested in exploring through my work is the idea of the uncanny, stand-ins, and substitutes for things. There are these symbolisms for grander ideas like mortality, spirituality and death. These huge ideas that people always grapple with get turned into a visual shorthand, in a similar way to how the colors mean “pay attention here, there is something dangerous here.” The way this holiday has evolved, Halloween and even Christmas, other rituals and festivals have these lofty ideas, but to symbolize the idea of the afterlife we are going to put some plastic ghost on our lawn. They become this fake, dumb plastic effigy to something that is actually an existential dread. Those colors tie into that, too, where anything that is that color isn’t real; this isn’t found in nature, it is something that is put here.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the colors operate in a similar way, as a kind of stand-in. The orange is dumb, in the sense of not containing a lot of information and that, on the face of it, may conceal the extent of the danger. It says beware, but there is quite a lot of breadth between the sign and the actual danger. This makes me think about how painting itself operates in the same way, as a kind of stand-in where there is a lot of distance between the face of it and its impact.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In your painting Behind the House, 2019, a bright green, inflatable kiddie pool suggests to me the innocence of childhood. It’s as if the kiddie pool establishes the footing I need to view the work. There is an adult, face blackened, standing in the kiddie pool. Drooping shoulders present a kind of disappointment, as if the kiddie pool could have returned that adult to childhood innocence. Instead the water is black; its clarity appears sullied by the figure itself. Why did you title this work “Behind the House?”</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sure, the pool is a thing I’ve used a lot and also the white plastic lawn chairs. Because those are, and this is going to maybe answer the question you were asking about painting being that exact thing, those are things that are so recognizable if you grew up in the American Midwest. I use these dumb, mundane, objects like the pool, chairs, and chain-link fence as a comfortable, domestic thing so they can be like</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> an</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> inflatable Frankenstein. These can be painted in such a stupid way, but it will still be very clear what it is.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 480px; overflow: hidden; width: 566px;"><img height="480" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/GPXENaP1QrnotoGSwhN56FyTePXQqarbnfwh6ojE9oFE4EUzn-rl3n_Oj_5XfKcP3fsfV4buGG1C3nX6zZUebyDOtaQysgTDsZG9USHlU0I8wDvGVc20Bq0MkG1femdebOn_hYdM" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="566" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Detail, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Parking Lot</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Oil on Paper, 2015</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The white plastic chair is a good example. Even if I do the crudest, laziest job of painting that shape, I think that it will still resonate for a lot of people -you know what those chairs feel like, you’ve stacked them before. So these become like a symbol of that domestic setting that you’ve experienced. That’s the purpose of all that stuff, to establish that you’ve seen this before; you’ve been here before. But now something is wrong back here and I juxtapose those types of things to show an underlying anxiety and dread that is going on even when we are in these comfortable surroundings.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As for the Behind the House title, I really like giving titles that are just “this is what it is;” not getting super poetic with titles. What is the difference between saying “In my backyard” and “Behind the house?” There is something upsetting about how cold and mechanical it is to say “behind the house” instead of “in the backyard.”</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I read some poetry in that title. It isn’t in the specific words, but in the intent, so if I saw you on the street and you asked me, “Where’s the barbecue?” and I said, “It’s in the backyard,” that would be inviting. But when I say, “It’s behind the house,” there is a coldness to that; maybe its dangerous.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, this guy is going to kill me if I go back there.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What’s going on behind the house? It’s all those things that happen out of sight of the public. It’s all those aspects of living that you may want to hide. It operates maybe in the same way as a chain link fence. If I am going around a house, to the back, and there’s a chain link fence, there may as well be a barking German shepherd there too. Automatically I am on guard and maybe I shouldn’t go back there. The twist in the artwork is that I am imagining what may be happening behind the house when I read the title, what I cannot see, but you are showing us what’s back there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 768px; overflow: hidden; width: 571px;"><img height="780.6383344714166" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/HKiK9fvkfx-OLE8zZNHotbngRFtyUhmpju4d0Pvqw4qMtHrkNfu4xwn2SLTrrWKupmtSOqzc4Fz6VI6tm8Xp59lFJVK_IAfExx3WReZUmUiA9DfS5J8F8PtF2-gSKvILm0_R2GwV" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: -6.31917px;" width="571" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Behind the House</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Graphite and Gouache on Paper, 2019</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tell me about the blackened head and torso?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve been doing this for a long time. The treatment of human figures is to make them anonymous. People say, “it’s ghostly," and that makes sense, but I bring this on myself because I use horror movie imagery. I never think of them as literal ghosts.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t get that from them either.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am paying attention to anatomy enough that we can empathize with the form that it takes, but making them hazy, fuzzy, and not totally distinct, especially compared to the other stuff in the paintings, is a way of denoting that this thing is alive and sentient whereas everything else in the painting is really flat, or painted as a pattern. I am finding ways to paint these familiar things in a way that isn’t what the thing looks like in real life, but as some sort of stupid symbol of it. Then, by painting the figure that way, without making it a super realistic rendering of a person, it becomes a different formal way to show that this is a different type of entity than all the other objects. Maybe I shouldn’t resent the "ghostly" thing.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe it’s not so much a ghost, but more the spirit. The first thing that comes to mind when I see this figure is representations of the grim reaper. Not the scythe and all that, but it’s the black within the hood, it’s this void. That’s what we’re afraid of, that’s what the death represents -this void. You enter into it, but really it sucks you in. The blackened head and torso draws me in to some kind of internal space that I do not really want to find myself.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your painting Procession, of 2017, I see as your most Celmins-like painting, now that I know the influence her work had on you. It has the sense of being seen on TV. In fact, when I imagine a funeral procession of vehicles, I picture the way it looks on TV. I know Kennedy’s procession was with horse and carriages, yet somehow I imagine this procession of black cars as seen on TV!</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe you’re thinking that because you are getting the funeral procession crossed with the memory of Kennedy being assassinated in a car procession seen on TV.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Probably. There couldn’t be anything more dry and dull to watch on TV than a funeral procession of cars. Yet, there it is in your painting and to me it has this sense of abstraction, of distance, as if it was on a TV screen. Am I reading that right?</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wasn’t actively thinking about that layer of it when I was making it, but it makes sense, I can see that. Also, since we were talking earlier about the huge influence that Vija Celmins had on me, I think there may just be a subconscious thing where the way I like to paint things is so rooted in being into Celmins that I would do something like that without even thinking about it.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So there is always this death, mortality, and morbid fascination but a hearse is such an easily identifiable thing that that is one of those things [like objects in my other paintings]. Two other cars are part of the procession. One is my car that I had at the time and my wife’s car. The other one is the hearse; it has this ornamental landau bar on the back. We know what that is. We know </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is just a car and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a car to carry dead people to a ceremony. And it has the little orange flags on it. You get the magnetic flags to stick on your car and it is that same orange color [as in my other paintings]. I’ve been looking at a lot of 19th century Russian realist painters making these super bleak paintings of Russian peasant life,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: red; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Perov" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vasily Perov</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And there were a lot of funeral procession paintings. So I’ve been looking at all these paintings of Russian villagers doing funeral marches through tundra and I was like, I am going to do a 2017 version of this.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If it was only a hearse, I’m not sure I would have known what to make of that, so it needs the two “regular” cars. Feeling disconnected, maybe due to the sense of the TV screen, leads me to think about how I feel disconnected from my own death. This seems part and parcel to ideas you were talking about earlier about the color of warning, the orange. Feeling disconnected is part of being on this side of the symbolic. We are all living under the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 125,000 people are dead, yet still, those of us alive and well are somehow not affected by it and are disconnected from that possibility of death. So when I look at your painting I see death and yet somehow it’s not me.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet it is and still it isn’t. It’s haunting in that way.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 456px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="468.00000000000006" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/FVl93qFP0FZ2BGa2jYoK4WRhhTM7ddUd7gjp4mWtOJFH-UFjiCg2fgDuRyXsbggI9ahuFjg1mL4UsByAA74byOQn-nVSXWsYNRwbuHyGd1zC_K9-D9kcaPOGPvEB9A3NjnaOtpkd" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: -6px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Procession, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Oil on Canvas, 2017</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, that disconnect part of it was part of my motivation. There were all these opportunities in this image for formal experiments but then also being able to put the profound ceremonial thing and stick it in with some objects that are more comfortable and familiar. Like you said, if it was just the hearse, it would be a very different thing. It’s the hearse in relation to the other cars that was the thing; comparing a hearse with a 2010 Ford Escape was the thing I was interested in. The hearse might by like, oh that’s not me, that’s the disconnect, but the 2010 Ford Escape -that’s fuckin’ </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> dude!</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a sense, it’s that aspect [the Ford Escape] that makes it real, the particularity of the vehicle. Which is funny because I tell people cars are the hardest things to draw because we all know exactly what they look like.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They are hard to draw! If you are off a little bit, it’s fucked up!</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You could draw a human body off and it would be fine, but when you get a car wrong, it’s way off. We know them so well they are like stand-ins for ourselves. It’s a way of putting yourself back into the painting.</span></span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In your painting, Burial At Sea, 2019, you have a lone figure attempting to push a beached whale back into the sea. There is something absurdist and surreal about it. Even if a lone person could push a whale into the sea, there is the sea pushing it back onto land -a terribly Sisyphean prospect. What had you thinking, from Minnesota, that you should make a painting of a dead whale on the shore?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, as we have been talking, it often comes back to thinking about mortality. I think it’s something that everybody is thinking about all of the time, but maybe don’t make artwork about it (laughs). I look at this painting and say, “what the hell?” This one is very different than other stuff that I’ve made. I guess that was the best way I could think of to use an image to talk about futility, to wrap your head around the idea. This thing is obviously dead and it’s also fucking enormous and not from your realm. Whales are scary, they are fucking huge, they live under water, and they are not part of our world. Just to see a whale on the land…</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fish out of water, man.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I know that these things exist, but it doesn’t belong here and I don’t know what the hell this thing is. The thing I wanted to get the most right in this painting, a key thing, is to have the illusion that the figure was pushing, and bracing itself on the land, and pushing as hard as it could.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 488px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="488" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/cS5fc1c02zpHoh_syLsKMegGC7Its9t1PBUpbZ19tfm7LkLaGNEA6U19g_-j2hcWbe8Yz0Sg-O-vWXsO048vbcGPySaOS2ZBjBoB5zrX1e6xoWvfM4R2tVIg6tqZpYjtdzMuuDS5" style="margin-left: -0.48666px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624.9733191035218" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Burial at Sea</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Oil on Paper, 2019</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For me, it’s like pushing away the idea of death. Maybe I can put it back where it belongs -the dark, incomprehensible depths of the sea. Having grown up near the ocean, I innately understand how the waves push everything right back; so you can try to push it out, but even if you could, there is something bigger than you pushing it back. So you have to confront this death, as big as a whale. It’s a really good painting as it really captures a lot of this idea, but with this sense of activity, of pushing it, of trying to push it away. You’re not trying to save the whale; you are trying to get rid of it.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could run off with ideas about climate change because whales have become a symbol of ecological calamity, that is hard to ignore, but I don’t think that is what this painting is about. It’s about an awareness of our struggle with our own death and that this death is a lot bigger than us.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, you know it does read as something absurdist and surreal, but compared to every other painting I’ve made, this is the most realistic. Whales do wash up on the shore, this happens in the real world, but it is such an insane thing that seeing a painting of it is totally absurd, but it happens!</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And when you see it, there is a sense of the world being out of order. </span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I find myself in a confrontation with the deep sense of my own aloneness in your work. Is that intentional?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes, the sense of loneliness and isolation is definitely intentional. I want the images to feel like they exist in a vacuum to a certain extent. They are representative of things from the "real" world, but I want them to feel sort of anonymous or like they are happening internally, like a memory of an event rather than the event itself captured in real time.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I like your new animations. Tthey are both humorous and sad, and contain many of the themes found in your paintings. Why animation? Tell us about your graphical choices -particularly the use of 8-bit graphics?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Animations are a way for me to incorporate an element of time and movement into the work. The time and movement is pretty minimal, but I think it makes a huge difference. If I do a painting of a plastic bag stuck in a tree versus an animation of it, where it is almost entirely static except for the bag getting blown by the wind very slightly, that opens a lot of possibilities for what the work can do.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The vintage video game style is for a few reasons - one being that I am by no means an expert in animation or digital drawing, and working with low-res, pixelated images makes things easier to animate. It's just a matter of moving a few pixels over between animation frames. I'm also an avid video game-player, and there are a few games that actually strongly influence my painting work, particularly open world fantasy role playing games. Animation is a way to for me to more directly interact with those influences.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: medium none; display: inline-block; height: 288px; overflow: hidden; width: 288px;"><img height="288" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/V5nPWYeL3CLZfcC-_rMmoXouSmWLG8Mx8mDzl7mllWgs84RaSLcXpV07gPGh5iH2g-hnk8q8C_2tMQRsuSRurmtmFrFgwqrlE5KgIv6hojYqHjHNbVa6arH2xhMUkRGkxHlHXTMN" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="288" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Untitled, Digital Animation, 2019</span></div>
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<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The long-term plan is to actually make a video game, which I have started on! I've actually been working on it for a few years now, but it's slow going since I have no idea what I'm doing. The only "training" I have in this is looking up tutorials and reading Reddit threads about pixel art and game design. I do have a super crude version of it working, which is basically an overhead view of a neighborhood that looks like the settings from my paintings. It’s done in a Super Nintendo RPG style where you can control a little figure to walk around, but that's about it so far.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jim Hittinger is an artist based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He works in several media including oil, gouache and watercolor painting, graphite and charcoal drawing, and digital animation. Duplicates, the uncanny, mortality, and unseen forces lurking just out of sight are recurring themes in his work.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-8e4d3fa2-7fff-3f6d-f8b3-3a7eb352af83" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jim received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2015. He’s a member of</span><a href="https://www.rosaluxgallery.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rosalux Gallery</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, an artist collective in Minneapolis. You can learn more about Jim and his work at:</span><a href="https://www.jimhittinger.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://www.jimhittinger.com</span></a></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-8e4d3fa2-7fff-3f6d-f8b3-3a7eb352af83" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Frank Meuschke received his MFA from the New Mexico State University in 2000. He’s also a member of Rosalux Gallery. You can learn more about him and his work at <a href="http://www.frankmeuschke.com/">www.frankmeuschke.com</a></span></span></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-68176281216576054492020-07-22T05:00:00.000-05:002020-07-22T05:00:08.481-05:00The Five Year Porch<br />
No social life and little to no work during a time of pandemic may mean time for completing home projects, or at least the contemplation of completion. I have been fixing our front porch for the last five years; longer, really, as the posts and front staircase were tackled years before we moved in. A porch seems like such a simple object -a roof and a floor, yet there is always more to the structure than meets the eye.<br />
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The siding has been replaced on the roof sides, the entire porch jacked up and seated on new, treated posts now anchored to the concrete piers below. New joists added where needed, new joist hangers added where needed, new decking where needed, new staircases where needed (one done, one in process, one more to go), replacing or restoring, then repainting, porch railings and posts, repair, replace, and paint framed latticework underneath the porch, restore drainage at the perimeter of the porch, siding at the corners where it met the porch floor -and still there is more to do!<br />
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Consider all the new houses that have gone up since the Clinton decade, that accelerated during the Bush decade, and continued even through to the current period. Now in our second economic collapse in a dozen years, I think about the construction materials and methods that will not stand the test of time and will not at all stand the test of shrinking incomes. As with subsistence farming, our economy and culture have moved us away from understanding our material world and the skills to required repair it. <br />
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A new home creates an illusion of the perfect object. Our structure, 1995 vintage, was one of those not too long ago. The original owner's dream home decisions and the cost-cutting needed to make them a reality, as well as cost-saving new materials and some sloppy craftsmanship have led to problems that started to show around the twelfth year. Since we began visiting during the warm months, in 2007, we also began the dealing with exterior problems that shouldn't beset a dozen year old house.<br />
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Replacing doors after fifteen years is absurd, that is, unless these items are now considered disposable. And if they are considered disposable, it is an economy and culture which demands it. If the door begins to fail after a decade and shows obvious signs of needing replacement in year fifteen, that means there have been five years of water damage to the structure the door is placed into. <a href="https://nycgarden.blogspot.com/2015/09/job-one.html" target="_blank">These repairs</a> become ever more costly given the construction materials used around doors which are not rated to stand up to the leaks inherent to a failing door.<br />
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Pulling back from this digression, I want cover a simple repair technique that allows
water to drain from the bottom of a porch railing. In part two, I cover epoxy
coatings, reassembly, paint, and some additional notes. The link to <a href="https://www.artistandbuilder.com/2018/03/how-to-repair-porch-railings-and.html" target="_blank">Part II</a> is also at the bottom of this post.<span style="color: #990000;"> </span>These methods and materials can be used on any non-structural wood repair, but are never a replacement for an understanding of what conditions lead to wood rot and the assembly required to avoid it over a longer period of time. The most important concept is that water should not stand on wood, painted or otherwise. All water must drain, and if it doesn't, wood will wick moisture, the microbiology of the earth will begin to consume the wood, and paint will soften and peel. <br />
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Older porch components are often, although not always, made out of
western red cedar -a naturally warp and rot resistant (never rot proof)
wood grown in western, coastal North America. This is a good choice of material, yet most
porch railings are constructed by quick moving builders who will not take
the extra time to make little adjustments that will allow rain,
snow melt, and dew to drain properly.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHZ-ti1rg-DWLyrHrYrdxjIenbMd__hYo8_VDjRt6kOTtflHb3H8pjmiuiU-skKjKiWrsMlGMltXL1CBe3MfiVX0ej7KrOJrCHloLqyT74srP3wnnG6yoC2rJpss6y42feclfZd04Sofgf/s1600/house.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="house porch railing repair rot fix" border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHZ-ti1rg-DWLyrHrYrdxjIenbMd__hYo8_VDjRt6kOTtflHb3H8pjmiuiU-skKjKiWrsMlGMltXL1CBe3MfiVX0ej7KrOJrCHloLqyT74srP3wnnG6yoC2rJpss6y42feclfZd04Sofgf/s640/house.jpg" title="house porch railing repair rot fix" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The porch being repaired</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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The railing components, below, are about twenty years old, just about the amount of time I would expect
above ground, western red cedar to last when not draining properly, particularly in the harsh environment of Minnesota. We see more extremes here than in most parts of the country, in terms of temperature and moisture. Wood shrinks a lot at twenty percent humidity and -30 degrees, and conversely, swells quite a bit at 90 degrees and 95% humidity. We can have years of 26 inches of rainfall, but also years with forty. This takes a toll on all outdoor woodwork.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1OKKiBgEOagfDNxw3vpfy5Hud_r5Vq-9nMhUtEBqM00XwKFoiNVMGAIaQlLMq9ggzRKZZH-BeUxlo73O1ah0A90-u-13eknryDSPFncOSYPUdDB2n6H99gpPAU1CwPKilRzmAwL3W4SOU/s1600/Rotspindle2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1OKKiBgEOagfDNxw3vpfy5Hud_r5Vq-9nMhUtEBqM00XwKFoiNVMGAIaQlLMq9ggzRKZZH-BeUxlo73O1ah0A90-u-13eknryDSPFncOSYPUdDB2n6H99gpPAU1CwPKilRzmAwL3W4SOU/s640/Rotspindle2.jpg" title="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The lower portion of a porch railing is where much of the decay can be found.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
Wood placed against wood will hold moisture and
eventually decay, even when painted. As I mentioned earlier, the rotting wood will
undermine the surface coating leading you to notice the rot. Rotted wood
is soft, sometimes crumbling, sometimes green with algae, and can
even release moisture when pressed. This is likely to happen
where spindles (the vertical pieces) meet the bottom rail, and more so at porch corners
where they receive rain from two sides. The spindle's end grain wicks
moisture up into the wood, creating a hospitable environment for fungal growth, which in turn rots the wood as it is consumed.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZt4hnHWxtIiThMNIvaxsPoWZCMaxF65IpEdTpdKdzRLaa2w_sHMFKjoWXGoLc82d88bK6jCV73pffI6BVmgCsD036AxpT3A0g5fvG30RxTLxEnxH219i9Ev1fw6ibH0tz_jvb33KRG_Cp/s1600/RotSpindle.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZt4hnHWxtIiThMNIvaxsPoWZCMaxF65IpEdTpdKdzRLaa2w_sHMFKjoWXGoLc82d88bK6jCV73pffI6BVmgCsD036AxpT3A0g5fvG30RxTLxEnxH219i9Ev1fw6ibH0tz_jvb33KRG_Cp/s640/RotSpindle.jpg" title="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">End of the porch bottom rail</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
Another
prime spot for decay is the bottom rail, again, particularly at the porch
corners. Rain easily gets into the corners since there is no overhang at the sides. Water running down the porch corner posts and spindles attached
to it collects at the bottom rail. The bottom rail's end grain wicks moisture
laterally and the spindle having also wicked moisture up into itself,
holds it against the bottom rail. This double whammy will
rot the bottom rail from the side and the top.</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX-L3-KeJPEM4hjSN25qUGKAFci4gBIzFqAtjBWoGOigrbdUIKLpLi6ww8Bi3VuZ0UAao8e6K2ADhtqjZ5JIidffzhxBB5TpTUHzhLOtp9sEW46zQNoAH2jE-IGpI5JocVjocHR3RHK9lu/s1600/Accent.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="557" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX-L3-KeJPEM4hjSN25qUGKAFci4gBIzFqAtjBWoGOigrbdUIKLpLi6ww8Bi3VuZ0UAao8e6K2ADhtqjZ5JIidffzhxBB5TpTUHzhLOtp9sEW46zQNoAH2jE-IGpI5JocVjocHR3RHK9lu/s400/Accent.jpg" title=" how to fix the porch railing using the accent pieces " width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Accent rails and spindles at the top, south side of the porch</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Top accents at the front of a porch do not rot as easily -they don't see as much rain,
but <i>side</i> railings and accents get a lot more weather. On the south side of a porch these components see sun and rain while on the north
side, these may never dry out for <i>lack</i> of sun. These two sets of conditions
lead to rot! Although most are familiar with shady, damp conditions of the north side of a
house leading to wood rot, people are often surprised to hear that a full day of sun can
lead to decay as well. Sun degrades all materials in part due to the UV rays. There is a lot of interesting science around paint and pigments and how UV changes the paint over time. This is also true of wood. UV exhausted wood will often have raised ridges, certainly be gray, and will rot more easily in this condition in a wet environment.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXMUAeTscKyUkMB3KfBL2gvog1ynT_JXkjOiNF8nSIZy_k_u5OWw4luuLjz82DAuZAKuujsTUPau5tbjczWQAFbwf8_twlni1yJd027OUWuX8V5JIn5Yiv9PopXlrNjv2tzjiC0P_TQeHn/s1600/Priming.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting fixing the porch" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXMUAeTscKyUkMB3KfBL2gvog1ynT_JXkjOiNF8nSIZy_k_u5OWw4luuLjz82DAuZAKuujsTUPau5tbjczWQAFbwf8_twlni1yJd027OUWuX8V5JIn5Yiv9PopXlrNjv2tzjiC0P_TQeHn/s640/Priming.jpg" title="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting fixing the porch" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Accent rails that have been repaired, primed, and are awaiting their new spindles</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
So, how to fix a porch railing components using the
accent rails as an example? Read on. Note that the process for fixing the porch handrail is
exactly the same, only with longer spindles, and the more expensive handrail component if it also needs replacement.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The first step, of course, is to take your accent rails down. They are typically installed with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Phillips" target="_blank">phillips head</a>
screws above and possibly finish nails or phillips screws into the
porch posts. These should be fairly easy to remove, but sometimes the phillips head strips while attempting removal. If nails are used,
or screw heads are stripped, or spin, but do not come out, you can use a pry bar -but this may
do some damage. Its better to use a reciprocating saw with a metal blade or an oscillating tool like the one shown below. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWM26o0hQfk03DtLT1UmqHX_xGe3-fgd7Zq7SyD31r9eTtlUU0CM4LXwNPnShMxwYDbV-9ygY2Xbz96EtWJUoTykUx7WtIIIJSdF_gJY5rDf64QtzYxZ-5s8_pcffG4E9nv_qvzHDwcb46/s1600/Feintool.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="porch railing repair rot fix fein tool" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWM26o0hQfk03DtLT1UmqHX_xGe3-fgd7Zq7SyD31r9eTtlUU0CM4LXwNPnShMxwYDbV-9ygY2Xbz96EtWJUoTykUx7WtIIIJSdF_gJY5rDf64QtzYxZ-5s8_pcffG4E9nv_qvzHDwcb46/s640/Feintool.jpg" title="porch railing repair rot fix fein tool" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Feintool Multimaster</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The <a href="https://fein.com/en_us/multi-tools/tools/fein-multimaster/fein-multimaster-top-0342759/" target="_blank">Feintool Multimaster</a>
is my home repair go to powertool. If you do any home repair, this tool
is a must have. There are lower cost brands, of course, but the
Feintool has been good despite my abuse of it. You can use the metal-cutting blade shown below to slice
through soft nails and even hard screws. Be aware that the hard screws
will wear your blades much faster than nails, often blowing through a blade with three or four screws cut. Note: avoid using phillips head screws, or square head drives -use star, or six-lobe, screws only for easier extraction in the future.</div>
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBWv4300po_p7krC0RxRRFFuoXgME0d2fnHyQAPu7kXG6YT6lCZ7QE3tAhrAyz7mfMjdCnr6zs8LtKH_YajhLiqk26NWgicFMa-kp3u8A22jPxpFjo_RtWUo9ccuicaejSkCY7Ov5Rqy8d/s1600/BiMetal.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="porch railing repair rot fix fein tool bimetal blade" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBWv4300po_p7krC0RxRRFFuoXgME0d2fnHyQAPu7kXG6YT6lCZ7QE3tAhrAyz7mfMjdCnr6zs8LtKH_YajhLiqk26NWgicFMa-kp3u8A22jPxpFjo_RtWUo9ccuicaejSkCY7Ov5Rqy8d/s400/BiMetal.jpg" title="porch railing repair rot fix fein tool bimetal blade" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">BiMetal Blade. You can use it on wood, but it is designed for soft metal cutting.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The
only drawback to a Feintool Multimaster, or any oscillating tool, is
the cost of blades. Buy them in bulk to save a few dollars, protect them
in your kit, and use them wisely to save on wear and tear.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1OKKiBgEOagfDNxw3vpfy5Hud_r5Vq-9nMhUtEBqM00XwKFoiNVMGAIaQlLMq9ggzRKZZH-BeUxlo73O1ah0A90-u-13eknryDSPFncOSYPUdDB2n6H99gpPAU1CwPKilRzmAwL3W4SOU/s1600/Rotspindle2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1OKKiBgEOagfDNxw3vpfy5Hud_r5Vq-9nMhUtEBqM00XwKFoiNVMGAIaQlLMq9ggzRKZZH-BeUxlo73O1ah0A90-u-13eknryDSPFncOSYPUdDB2n6H99gpPAU1CwPKilRzmAwL3W4SOU/s640/Rotspindle2.jpg" title="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The lower portion of a porch railing is where much of the decay can be found.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Once
you have the railings down you can take them apart. If they are really
rotten, it will be easy to separate the spindles from the bottom rail
-typically attached with 16-18 gauge brad nails applied with a pneumatic
nail gun. Brad nails are soft and flexible and easily cut with the oscillating cutter if needed. Note: the handrail bottom component will typically have screws driven from the underside which should extract fairly easily, but if not they will need cutting.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The
top component of the upper accent rail is typically a 2x4 and is usually connected to the spindles with
phillips head screws. These should be easily removed with a cordless
drill and phillips bit. I do not expect the top board to need replacement as it sees the least rain. The bottom rail, a more expensive milled piece of cedar should
be saved if it is not too far gone. I'll show you how to fix it, if shows rot, below.</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2zpcYKE2HQ1ZyxG9VRvZ1tFwP7moVQP0Worf1EteP1n2FlkwJSMoF25Hu-IVe0mu3kSwi1rdCUNcJD0pHiKfqPI94QcKhnxeRhIcUBS23t6KzZy0CDQS2W4NVg26QYA4XcSyPhA4rlLkg/s1600/SandingPad.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Feintool Sanding Pad Porch Railing repair rot fix" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2zpcYKE2HQ1ZyxG9VRvZ1tFwP7moVQP0Worf1EteP1n2FlkwJSMoF25Hu-IVe0mu3kSwi1rdCUNcJD0pHiKfqPI94QcKhnxeRhIcUBS23t6KzZy0CDQS2W4NVg26QYA4XcSyPhA4rlLkg/s640/SandingPad.jpg" title="Feintool Sanding Pad Porch Railing repair rot fix" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Feintool Multimaster oscillating tool with sanding pad attachment. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
I
go to my Feintool Multimaster and sanding pad attachment to quickly
remove loose paint on any railing pieces I plan to re-use. The sanding
pads come in boxes of 50 in all grits. I use 60, 80, or 120 grit to
remove paint on these pieces. These Velcro attached pads are relatively
long lived, but their most valuable feature is the ability to rotate the
pad to help with difficult corners. Avoid pressing too hard while sanding. It creates a lot of heat that will melt the plastic Velcro pad at the pressure point.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUE5nhE0Y6azUwu6ST7Ya3JyepyOfz7eVzHbYNQjZGNiZgMJhXU1musFVFkLxilssETXfmbw632j_ann1fy9gxuP0MkPlMC2FYa1xDY6l_Vj2e-dhxuQfxrZ0PCqRs81mWJjRvSYZo8hoO/s1600/spindles.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="spindles Menards western red cedar precut wood" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUE5nhE0Y6azUwu6ST7Ya3JyepyOfz7eVzHbYNQjZGNiZgMJhXU1musFVFkLxilssETXfmbw632j_ann1fy9gxuP0MkPlMC2FYa1xDY6l_Vj2e-dhxuQfxrZ0PCqRs81mWJjRvSYZo8hoO/s640/spindles.jpg" title="spindles Menards western red cedar precut wood" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Basic spindles are cut lengths of 2x2 cedar. Typically these are surfaced, meaning smooth, and are actually 1.5x1.5 inches </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
I
aim to replace all of the spindles, rotten or not. Why? Because the
spindle is the lowest cost piece of the railing and, at only 6.5 inches
or so, they allow me to get several spindles out of one piece of 2x2
western red cedar. You can buy 8 foot lengths of 2x2 cedar at your local
box store or lumber yard, but it may be even easier to find cut
western red cedar spindles of 36-42 inches in length. Lastly, the part
of the repair that ensures a longer life railing requires another 1/4 of
an inch in length. So, if your spindles are in good shape, and you do
not mind shortening them, you can re-use as needed. Otherwise, I
recommend purchasing a few new lengths of 2x2 western red cedar.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b>A word about choice of wood</b>: you may be tempted to buy <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_preservation#Chemical_preservatives" target="_blank">treated lumber</a>
for any or all aspects of your repair project. I firmly reject treated
wood, typically pine, for porch railings. Why? It simply is not stable
enough. Where I was asked to use it, it has twisted, pulled screws or
nails, split and checked, and has molded on the surface where unpainted. Painting
it is also a problem, often requiring an adequate drying time before a
coating can be applied. In that time, the drying process has twisted or
warped the wood. It's simply not good for this forward facing part of
your home! </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8HAN9xBoA5DOdaSxQ0gvJLfrYgSllWKA8vy4_ZzQkr8ZCCl_nx6eVs5FVhjRd0z81-i8aEBgNLxA-jgl0EnABXQSl-e0pzWBTYO3B5vkgt__Stul3VfIx_golEnyF4UpJwWBSgcJHf474/s1600/Chopsaw.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Dewalt Miter Single Bevel Chop Saw rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8HAN9xBoA5DOdaSxQ0gvJLfrYgSllWKA8vy4_ZzQkr8ZCCl_nx6eVs5FVhjRd0z81-i8aEBgNLxA-jgl0EnABXQSl-e0pzWBTYO3B5vkgt__Stul3VfIx_golEnyF4UpJwWBSgcJHf474/s640/Chopsaw.jpg" title="Dewalt Miter Single Bevel Chop Saw rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A simple, useful tool -the miter saw. You will not need a fancy one for this job.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
You will need a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miter_saw" target="_blank">miter saw</a> for this repair, although it can be a non-electric miter box and saw for these small-sized, soft cedar cuts. What I am using here is a <a href="https://www.dewalt.com/products/power-tools/saws/miter-saws/10-254mm-compound-miter-saw/dw713" target="_blank">10" Dewalt compound miter saw</a>,
generally a solid cutting tool. Your blade should be sharp and, if you cut slowly, a 40
tooth blade will work just fine.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
The
first task is to cut your spindles a wee bit longer than needed. If 6.5
inches is required, then cut each to 6.75 inches. This leaves room for
your miter cut. This is important because it is this miter cut that will
spare you the rot returning as quickly as it had the first time!</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJgvHfSBVihAdogZxkGmXDOyRScVkrNC3fIH6thZ1R2yEKGJa0jLJI6mjQTiOcy6m6YD66YyNUs3AXbWclIbYv7VlfCpWftyT2o5HjBSgHR7PIxU94qF3rm31HAO6fJNkxRdrsWOTpaAAT/s1600/Fencestop.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJgvHfSBVihAdogZxkGmXDOyRScVkrNC3fIH6thZ1R2yEKGJa0jLJI6mjQTiOcy6m6YD66YyNUs3AXbWclIbYv7VlfCpWftyT2o5HjBSgHR7PIxU94qF3rm31HAO6fJNkxRdrsWOTpaAAT/s640/Fencestop.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Make sure that your stop, a device that allows all cuts to be the same length, is square!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Now
that you cut all your needed spindles to 6.75 inches it is time to make
your final cuts. To ensure that all cuts are exactly the same length,
we clamp what is called a stop to the back fence of the miter saw. This
can be done on any type of power or hand miter saw. I've used a piece of
3/4 inch thick plywood that I checked for square (see picture above)
and ensured that it is clamped flat to the miter saw fence and table. </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXu07DpWpsRl02V1OOPzCK-32Ko_GmgieVLaLs5cSxyPUqLVbUc7k0o46Ci3NkSCI5svwK7gr8cxxBwjrBa7vYpIVmRIeEtpS8b_eJ8U47UTqfEoV7fxsdU-PBmNv241l1SB26aD92y2Zr/s1600/measure.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXu07DpWpsRl02V1OOPzCK-32Ko_GmgieVLaLs5cSxyPUqLVbUc7k0o46Ci3NkSCI5svwK7gr8cxxBwjrBa7vYpIVmRIeEtpS8b_eJ8U47UTqfEoV7fxsdU-PBmNv241l1SB26aD92y2Zr/s640/measure.jpg" title="chop saw miter saw measure dewalt rot railing fix" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Measuring accurately is important. -the blade tooth lands squarely on the 6.5 inch line.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Measure
to ensure 6.5 inches from the stop to the right of the saw blade (or
left, if you are working from the other side). After measuring, affix
the stop with a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-clamp" target="_blank">C-clamp</a> to hold the stop firmly in place -then measure again to make sure it didn't move. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFkQStlkvXDZJsz9wFhE4DpgkuXvq7vYZuRSctNPQNnBfm9zyzL70YtKLL4E0MoHwBmqHjYEGsFdzA_O_HcrgHUMvIGxBZ30g4AgKADZI5UhajWME6XxfUPWz1ZhPmTPTTNJHKzrKg9M90/s1600/Mask.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFkQStlkvXDZJsz9wFhE4DpgkuXvq7vYZuRSctNPQNnBfm9zyzL70YtKLL4E0MoHwBmqHjYEGsFdzA_O_HcrgHUMvIGxBZ30g4AgKADZI5UhajWME6XxfUPWz1ZhPmTPTTNJHKzrKg9M90/s400/Mask.jpg" title="3M safety dust mask face shield rotted spindle, rotted porch railing, rot fix porch painting" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A combination dust mask and face shield.</td></tr>
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Before
making your cut, be safe. Wear safety glasses and a dust mask, or what I
prefer -a full face shield with lung protection. It offers better dust
protection and full face projectile protection. The above is a <a href="https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/3M-Full-Facepiece-Reusable-Respirator-6800-Medium-4-EA-Case/?N=5002385+8709322+8711405+8720539+3294780256&preselect=8720550+8720784+8726633&rt=rud" target="_blank">3M model with exchangeable filters</a> for a variety of pollutants and a silicone seal that is remarkably
comfortable given its level of protection. Honestly, I wish I bought one
of these 20 years ago. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBqrlVa4CDHTcSMaXG7DT5zXRpFy1tP5c9lNqTLobc4QNpUwoEPjZcfXARkGYi6rhT18GPyBh0nN5MF4y3eHsig2jkWWUgzhrV5JEa5m0LL8Tq6zrmp9qhpa-RgPzuTaE0PgMCNVRu306-/s1600/AngleMiter.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="chopsaw porch railing repair miter cut" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBqrlVa4CDHTcSMaXG7DT5zXRpFy1tP5c9lNqTLobc4QNpUwoEPjZcfXARkGYi6rhT18GPyBh0nN5MF4y3eHsig2jkWWUgzhrV5JEa5m0LL8Tq6zrmp9qhpa-RgPzuTaE0PgMCNVRu306-/s640/AngleMiter.jpg" title="chopsaw porch railing repair miter cut rotfix" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Note the subtle angle, about 4 degrees from square (square added to show angle -please remove!). </td></tr>
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Now you are ready to move the miter position about <b>4</b> degrees <b>away</b>
from the spindle (to the left in this example) and lock it in place
(usually by turning the knob). Place the 6.75 inch spindle between
the stop and the blade, holding it firmly with hand closer to the stop
than the blade. Get the blade up to speed and pass it slowly through the
cedar spindle. Hold the saw down while it slows to a stop. This will
protect the wood from tear outs and splinters while protecting you. When
you raise the saw blade you will see a slight angle on your spindle. </div>
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This
angle gives the spindle a length of 6.5 inches on one side and about
6.625 inches on the other. This little bit changes everything. An eighth
of an inch over the spindles' 1.5 inch width is the same slope as a 1
inch drop over 12 inches of length also known as 1:12 pitch. It is the reason the bottom rail can now
drain water instead of hold on to it!</div>
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So is that it? It could be. Attach your spindles to the rail and replace the component. <i>Or</i> you can take rot resistance to the next level. Read on in <a href="https://www.artistandbuilder.com/2018/03/how-to-repair-porch-railings-and.html" target="_blank">Part II, Epoxy Repair...</a></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;">*Please
note that the tools and products used in this post are the one's I
use. I do not receive any paid or product support for the links
provided.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-25567596035898377032020-07-11T12:43:00.000-05:002020-07-11T12:43:58.827-05:00Hey NYC! A Chance to Get Your Soil Tested and Compost -Free!<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://mcusercontent.com/ae61667c9ae3e03e40b6fa9dc/images/99fc5a6c-a5d4-480e-848d-972a2757854a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="618" data-original-width="800" height="494" src="https://mcusercontent.com/ae61667c9ae3e03e40b6fa9dc/images/99fc5a6c-a5d4-480e-848d-972a2757854a.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Check it out. An <a href="https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?u=ae61667c9ae3e03e40b6fa9dc&id=dd02174ef5" target="_blank">unusual offering to get your soil tested for free</a> by the Urban Soils Lab at Brooklyn College. It also looks like DSNY will be handing out compost, 5 bags per household too. If you are growing vegetables, or just digging in your Brooklyn dirt, you should do this to discover the levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and other heavy metals you may be breathing in (as dust) or consuming via your leafy greens. See <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/garden/14lead.html" target="_blank">this article in the New York Times</a> to learn more. Yep, that's me when I was a youngin, gardening among the lead and the strays.<br />
<br />
From <a href="https://ucceny.org/community-gardens/" target="_blank">a co-sponsor </a>of the event: <br />
<span style="color: grey;">"UCC/ ENYF! understand the difficult times
our community growers are facing each day. We want to make sure that we
are supporting our gardeners as much as possible. <strong>On Tuesday, July 14th from 11am to 1pm</strong>, ENY will be hosting a clean soil distribution and free soil testing <strong>at our Wortman Community Garden</strong>. Due to state regulations, this is an <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSepRkYd6nILyAYMRR_qO340APkUGVYKeyYXzD67lXbIR4vuxA/viewform">RSVP</a> only event. Slots are limited! If you have questions or trouble registering, email Elise at edahan@ucceny.org
or call 718-649-7979 ext 18. You must wear a mask! Please come prepared
to bag your own soil. ENYF! will provide bags and shovels."</span> <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">July 14th, Tuesday, 11am-1pm, Wortman Community Garden </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">987 Lincoln Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11208 </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSepRkYd6nILyAYMRR_qO340APkUGVYKeyYXzD67lXbIR4vuxA/viewform" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">RSVP LINK</span></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-28367228572456415322020-07-05T16:00:00.000-05:002020-07-05T16:00:06.139-05:00An Interview with Artist Jim Hittinger<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-c5ead83f-7fff-8faa-7711-d45dc9dc1c4c" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rosalux artist Frank Meuschke talks with fellow Rosalux artist Jim Hittinger about studying art, working in Minneapolis, and takes a deep dive into his recent work.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 785px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="785" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/lWYWUBsCg8oG6CC-UJNcxLLc-YOenugZRtWvUl8I2Ijke0BPGN222WvCa7MCT4HoypfJGQQMV0MLqS-P_LJTmGns-4_YlOUKZE03PZVcua0_lY88F2hqxDdKyY2Ra-4rV6iV8gZG" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You grew up in Michigan, was it suburban, city, or rural?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was the suburbs of Detroit, not far from the city. Metro Detroit is massive, ridiculous sprawl. If you were to drive from downtown Minneapolis to the forest, if you drove that same distance in Detroit, it would still be six lane highways, strip mall hell for a while longer. So, yeah, I grew up in the Metro Detroit maze.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And that created who you are today?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Laughs) I guess so, yeah.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did you have a sense when you were younger that you wanted to study art?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I always wanted to be an artist. Honestly, earlier than I can remember, I was always drawing. It was always my thing when I was a little kid that I was good at drawing -that was my thing. You know some people’s parents are like “We’re not wasting money getting you an art degree!” But my parents were always like “Yeah, you should go to art school. You should be an artist.” So, yeah, I was always gonna do this.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That seems to me to be a less common story. Why do you think they were so supportive?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah. Well my parents are academics. My dad is a philosophy professor and my mom has been an administrator at various schools and non-profits. So my parents are into the liberal arts I guess. They were always cool with it.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s great that you had that support.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My parents are interested in art. My family would go to museums; we’d go to the Detroit Institute of Arts and look at the collection on a Saturday.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where did you go to undergraduate school?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wayne State University. It’s a state school in inner city Detroit. It’s a bit like the U of M Twin Cities, where there’s a little nugget just inside the city that’s the campus -so that’s where I went to school.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is it a school that is known for art study?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes, there is actually a really strong art program there. I don’t know that there was anyone who went there that is super famous, but Arthur Danto went to school there in, like, the late forties. The printmaking area had some of his old woodblocks and editioned some of them in my senior year. </span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I had no idea he was an artist.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He is better known for his theory and philosophy stuff, but he was also a printmaker.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s an intellectual pursuit, printmaking…</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, I guess so. That’s why I don’t have the patience for it, not smart enough I guess. (Laughs)</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I did not have the patience for it myself. Did you have to read his writings while you were a student?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, honestly, I think I had to read his stuff more in grad school at the University of Minnesota than I did in undergrad.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Was there a particular professor that stood out for you as a resource or mentor?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jim Nawara. His work was very different from mine. He makes very traditional, hyper-realistic landscape oil paintings. He paints meadows and streams, very traditional. I think that was great for me to have because even though I do not make paintings like that, I learned a lot about paint. He was obsessed with paint! He was the type of guy you would ask, “should I use this color or this color?” He’d then talk to you for like an hour about the differences between the pigments and oils used in this one versus that one. There were a lot of formal things that I just didn’t know about paint; which I know talking shop about painting bores the hell out of people who aren’t painters (laughs). So there is a lot about that that I learned from him that has been invaluable to me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 489px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="489" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/D-veXV6xuSw8yOeZRMrI9c0oBLJNE5sYHaNYzTuCtHw38arAmFeniVxbRYPE3408kFcjAzA1nOMt-b4slX-vSL0mJ3YdqtcKWLzuYhLw_Kl0HYPGGAWQZEAjoxuzZfthL9hMUwDs" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> James Nawara, Blue Fence, oil on linen, 1999</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It sounds like you were not going to resist going to college or say, “Screw this, I’m going to LA to be an artist.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, the thought crossed my mind. I think I may have been more likely to do that if I didn’t have the support that I had. But you can go to college for art and I was like, okay, why not? I’ll have to take other classes, but I’ll get a cheap, shitty apartment in Detroit and go to art classes and hang out for four years. Sure, I entertained the idea of not doing that, but it wasn’t a hard decision. In school you get to learn your studio practice, you just kind of learn how it all works with some training wheels on. Going to exhibitions, talking to your professors about how you make money! Do you sell your work? Where do you show your work? Who do I have to talk with to show </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">my</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> work? It’s important to learn that stuff while you have this community safety net and I think that’s a really invaluable thing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did your teachers have an answer for you when you asked these kinds of questions, like, how do you make a living?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, I would talk to my professors a lot about that. And they were always encouraging me to try to show work outside of school. It’s like the best thing you can do to get the ball rolling is to show some work that’s not just the end of the year BFA exhibition. There are open calls at this gallery and this gallery, so I think that was a really helpful thing to learn. If I had decided when I was 18 to move to LA and figure that out for myself, I probably would have eventually figured it out, but I am glad I had that help to figure it out.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So you were actively showing while you were in undergraduate school?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah. I think that was a benefit of being at a school that was in a city. Just being in a city that had a whole art community and art scene happening completely outside of school was really helpful.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what brought you to Minneapolis?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grad school.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How much time between undergrad and grad school was there?</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I came right away. I wasn’t even expecting to get into grad school right away. I was looking for state schools that had teaching assistant opportunities, funding, but I wanted to be in a city. I didn’t want to be in some off the beaten path college town. There are some really good MFA programs you can go to, but you’re in kind of the…</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cornfields?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah. Exactly. So the University of Minnesota checked all the boxes for me. So I applied and got in and came. That was in 2012. I finished in 2015 and I’m still here ‘cause I like it here.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sounds like staying here was a pretty easy decision.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, I was planning on staying for at least a little bit. But I’ve been here long enough now that I feel at home here. Not necessarily certain that I will live here forever, but I like being here right now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the U has been a kind of anchor for you after graduation?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, a lot of my best friends in town I know are from there and are doing lots of different things. If you are just going to uproot and move somewhere, it’s definitely good to have a built-in community.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What was your biggest struggle as a painter? What do you worry about, artistically?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My painting sucking! (Laughs)</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So you weren’t worrying that painting was dead or where will I go with painting?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think that is always there. There’s always going to be people who think painting is for idiots who just want to make pictures.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But not painters. It’s hard to be a painter who thinks that.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, that would be interesting, actually, if you were. I never had much of a concern about that. There were enough other painters on the faculty and in the program that there was always a good conversation around painting and about what painting can be, where it can go, and what possibilities there are with it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How broad is your definition of painting?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t think I really even have one. It can be so many different things. If you are applying paint to a surface to make an image of a thing, you can separate these two things. Applying paint to a surface goes one way and making an image of a thing goes in the other direction. You could be working just with the idea of imagery, with making a representation; that doesn’t have to involve paint or traditional painting or drawing tools at all. There are also artists who are using painting materials to do something that doesn’t really look like painting at all. So I think there is a pretty wide and deep definition of painting now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I imagine painting as being on of the broadest disciplines. For example, I like to think of photography as a kind of drawing. As a painter I sometimes made photographs as preparatory work, and I thought of that work as a kind of drawing. So now primarily working with photography, I see that as a kind of drawing too.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, I think more and more the idea of having a medium and sticking to it is not super important. Going back to art academia, there is an interest in blurring the lines between your study areas. I think this is a good thing, probably.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What brought you to Rosalux? You must’ve known about it while you were at the U.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I applied for the Open Door show in 2015 or 16 and had one or two paintings accepted to that. Maybe six months after that show there was an opening in the roster, and I got an email from, maybe it was Terry, saying this is what the gallery is and we are looking for a new member. It wasn’t an invitation to join, but it said I should think about applying for the open spot. So I did.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How’d that make you feel?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was pretty cool, yeah.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have a short list of exhibits that really impacted me as a young artist. Do you have any that had that effect on you?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is one show, about ten years ago. I saw an exhibition of </span><a href="https://www.menil.org/exhibitions/13-vija-celmins-television-and-disaster-1964-1966" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vija Celmins work at the Menil Collection</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in Houston. That’s one of the best things about my parents living in Houston now. Every time I am down there for Christmas or whatever, we go to the Menil Collection because it’s such a great museum. There was this huge show. It was called Television And Disaster. I bought the catalog for it, and I don’t usually do that, because who has the money for exhibition catalogs, but I had to get this one. It was great because I was already a fan of her work, pouring over images online and in books. It was great to get to see a lot of that work in person. She has done a lot of different types of work over decades, but it was specifically a lot of paintings of these hyper-realistic TV news stills…</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like a ship blowing up</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, yeah, a lot of stuff like that. She has this amazing way of painting those things where it isn’t just a painting of the event seen on the news. It really feels like a painting of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">television screen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of the event happening. She has this really fucking brilliant way of capturing that filtered experience with paint, which is something that I am really interested in doing. She has always been an important artist for me and I got to see a bunch of her most iconic work in one place and it was amazing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 468px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="468" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/pvQPeKxd5xJpjgKEuGb9XmavFw5mZLwxgO_MAbp_eIO02Qdwv6clK_uQ-mXrr5ro0WLHF8Ye7qEJLuKKBWc3a28mU4Jv71j3hfwOvKUdu6WKRMI2c6V1gypsuf9rcEKo3pK4DZN8" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Vija Celmins, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Explosion at Sea</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, 1966, Oil on canvas</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Celmins seems to exist on this plane of Agnes Martin. I have no idea what her life is like, but I imagine it as an ascetic kind of life. Maybe it has something to do with all that detailed rendering, the pencil work. It’s like, if Agnes Martin had watched TV all the time, you’d get Vija Celmins. (Laughs)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I always show my intro to drawing students some of Vija Celmins' drawings, some of those insane drawings she did of aerial water views. I tell them, "This is a pencil drawing by one of my favorite artists, just so you know here is a possibility for graphite drawings."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Does that blow them away?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, usually it’s “whoa!” It’s part of the first day lecture showing them a bunch of photo-realistic renderings in graphite; now here is a bunch of stuff that is not that, but</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: red; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are still very good drawings. It’s to show intro students that you do not have to be able to do a Vija Celmins water drawing to make a good pencil drawing. It’s a way to get over the fear of “does it look realistic?” I show Vija Celmins to say, “Here’s what you’re not likely to be able to do and that’s okay.” (Laughs)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Who’s work are you connecting with right now?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/aleksandrawaliszewska/?hl=en" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Aleksandra Waliszewska</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a painter from Warsaw, Poland. Her work looks very different from my own and deals with different themes and ideas, but I think there is still a lot of overlap. I'm interested in how she presents these bizarre, fantastical images with a decidedly un-fantastical aesthetic. Her paintings show these surreal, nightmare scenarios, painted in this very matter-of-fact way in drab color schemes, mixing fantasy imagery with mundane scenes from contemporary life.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 392px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="392" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/NFmr5a7fwLv53FBxY_uguEQEHISRW7rl8t8pDrK3ytVn83hzJgWt76woLXI9E0sx_Zx0kVEk6r_b_aCMsuIHHfa6HQ9gjPIeAON27uaxUB_rRs0D5dTfzPaGUJgjJdWCEcpObxKY" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Aleksandra Waliszewska, Untitled, Gouache, 2012-2013</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did you have a moment that defined your point of view as an artist or has it been a steady evolution?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t think that there is really a specific moment where that happened; I think it’s been a constantly evolving process, but I’ve had a lot of similar interests and aesthetic preferences for a long time. If I look at work that I made ten years ago, I’m like “what the hell? This looks so different and I would never make this now.” </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But work I am making now doesn't seem any different from the work I was making six months ago. There was never one moment where there was a hard left turn. Little, incremental things change.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So if you put that work that you made when you were 20 side by side with the work you are now making at 30, an observant person might recognize a connection or do you think not really?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, yeah. I think that there has been a kernel of what I am doing now in what I have been doing for a long time.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What would you say about your work is unique to you, what is the Jim Hittinger genius, and when did you become aware of it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well first of all, I definitely would NOT call myself a genius! (laughs) But probably when I was in grad school. That was a big part of what that experience was; having discussions with faculty and peers about those kinds of things and trying to unpack what it is that you are doing and why. How could you be doing this differently or more effectively? That was really helpful.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Did you have a moment of crisis?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I had some moments of trying to completely blow up what I was doing and try to do something completely different. Every time I would do that I would find myself, before I knew what was happening, making work that looked just like the stuff I was trying to get away from. Sometimes that was frustrating. But there is something there. There is some reason why I keep making this decision, this decision and this decision even if I try to completely stop and do something else. So, that was a good way to identify what those things were so that I could start thinking about why I make those decisions. What is the significance of these decisions, look at each decision independent of the others, and identify what is important and what is not.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I look at your work, one thing that strikes me right away is your color choices. There isn’t a lot of color, but the color that there is, is very strong and you are fairly consistent with that across your work, at least over the last five years or so. Your color feels like it is loaded with something.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 465px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="465" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fWkfweQVqD8IKPRZarBLGVDh4umGlULj3i7grEBIQ6s2NrUnW7NOsk_FQTER4eGsDD41XXDEo4Dj3lGejrCnayhbwHfSySaHEMKkUUQfkjn-M9Mf15jzjG8NVJkmcET4hucYDfjk" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Search Party</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Oil on Paper, 2015</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Color is really important and that is a relatively new thing. The work before grad school and some during grad school had no color at all. I was making gray, brown, muddy, murky paintings. That’s not to say I wasn’t thinking about color. I was actively thinking about making different kinds of muddy, earth tones and grays, and how I could make different non-colors interact with each other in an interesting way.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The super bright colors, that was something I would never do in a painting that I thought I should try and see what happens. Maybe I should use some neon orange and see what happens. I started thinking about how those types of colors are usually reserved for a kind of code that everyone understands to mean caution or danger. These colors appear on traffic barrels, the lane is ending, the “X” they paint on diseased trees and it has to go, or construction safety vests. These super bright colors were perfect as a formal foil to the gray murkiness but also made sense conceptually.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is a visual, formal thing but it is not extraneous because it speaks to the content of the work. If I do a series of paintings where this orange shows up in one image on a traffic cone and another image it's on a guy with a safety vest and then another image there is an inflatable pool that is the same color, then the inflatable pool becomes part of the code where there is something dangerous. Now this banal object, this dumb object, gets put in the same category as the “oh, shit, this is dangerous stuff.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So these colors came out of a formal rut but there are a lot of colors out there and you chose very specific industrial colors that elicit an emotional reaction. Danger or warning aren’t emotions, but maybe these colors elevate the cortisol a little bit -there is a danger here.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The orange and the green, but particularly the orange, suggest the fluorescent crayons I had as a kid. I didn’t use these colors for most of the year, but in September and October I used them to make my Halloween pictures and this association is indelible.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, yeah, yeah.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are some Halloween characters in your paintings, but I don’t think your paintings are about Halloween. Would you talk about that?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 445px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="445" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/lVzIpH4RBtv7BCHX4z75OQLWTOeUYh4DnbNpjW3zrdHMYZVRjXPgeHqrzq8GF0aVFqHYqMS_nag7u5JGRgiKH9gE16sYLOALpxv2SkeMkZh4N1Hgfvs7kCe96zmBNXkPZGdmGNiF" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Devil's Night</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Oil on Canvas, 2015</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the biggest things I am interested in exploring through my work is the idea of the uncanny, stand-ins, and substitutes for things. There are these symbolisms for grander ideas like mortality, spirituality and death. These huge ideas that people always grapple with get turned into a visual shorthand, in a similar way to how the colors mean “pay attention here, there is something dangerous here.” The way this holiday has evolved, Halloween and even Christmas, other rituals and festivals have these lofty ideas, but to symbolize the idea of the afterlife we are going to put some plastic ghost on our lawn. They become this fake, dumb plastic effigy to something that is actually an existential dread. Those colors tie into that, too, where anything that is that color isn’t real; this isn’t found in nature, it is something that is put here.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So the colors operate in a similar way, as a kind of stand-in. The orange is dumb, in the sense of not containing a lot of information and that, on the face of it, may conceal the extent of the danger. It says beware, but there is quite a lot of breadth between the sign and the actual danger. This makes me think about how painting itself operates in the same way, as a kind of stand-in where there is a lot of distance between the face of it and its impact.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In your painting Behind the House, 2019, a bright green, inflatable kiddie pool suggests to me the innocence of childhood. It’s as if the kiddie pool establishes the footing I need to view the work. There is an adult, face blackened, standing in the kiddie pool. Drooping shoulders present a kind of disappointment, as if the kiddie pool could have returned that adult to childhood innocence. Instead the water is black; its clarity appears sullied by the figure itself. Why did you title this work “Behind the House?”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sure, the pool is a thing I’ve used a lot and also the white plastic lawn chairs. Because those are, and this is going to maybe answer the question you were asking about painting being that exact thing, those are things that are so recognizable if you grew up in the American Midwest. I use these dumb, mundane, objects like the pool, chairs, and chain-link fence as a comfortable, domestic thing so they can be like</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> an</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> inflatable Frankenstein. These can be painted in such a stupid way, but it will still be very clear what it is.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 480px; overflow: hidden; width: 566px;"><img height="480" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/GPXENaP1QrnotoGSwhN56FyTePXQqarbnfwh6ojE9oFE4EUzn-rl3n_Oj_5XfKcP3fsfV4buGG1C3nX6zZUebyDOtaQysgTDsZG9USHlU0I8wDvGVc20Bq0MkG1femdebOn_hYdM" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="566" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Detail, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Parking Lot</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Oil on Paper, 2015</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The white plastic chair is a good example. Even if I do the crudest, laziest job of painting that shape, I think that it will still resonate for a lot of people -you know what those chairs feel like, you’ve stacked them before. So these become like a symbol of that domestic setting that you’ve experienced. That’s the purpose of all that stuff, to establish that you’ve seen this before; you’ve been here before. But now something is wrong back here and I juxtapose those types of things to show an underlying anxiety and dread that is going on even when we are in these comfortable surroundings.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As for the Behind the House title, I really like giving titles that are just “this is what it is;” not getting super poetic with titles. What is the difference between saying “In my backyard” and “Behind the house?” There is something upsetting about how cold and mechanical it is to say “behind the house” instead of “in the backyard.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I read some poetry in that title. It isn’t in the specific words, but in the intent, so if I saw you on the street and you asked me, “Where’s the barbecue?” and I said, “It’s in the backyard,” that would be inviting. But when I say, “It’s behind the house,” there is a coldness to that; maybe its dangerous.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, this guy is going to kill me if I go back there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What’s going on behind the house? It’s all those things that happen out of sight of the public. It’s all those aspects of living that you may want to hide. It operates maybe in the same way as a chain link fence. If I am going around a house, to the back, and there’s a chain link fence, there may as well be a barking German shepherd there too. Automatically I am on guard and maybe I shouldn’t go back there. The twist in the artwork is that I am imagining what may be happening behind the house when I read the title, what I cannot see, but you are showing us what’s back there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 768px; overflow: hidden; width: 571px;"><img height="780.6383344714166" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/HKiK9fvkfx-OLE8zZNHotbngRFtyUhmpju4d0Pvqw4qMtHrkNfu4xwn2SLTrrWKupmtSOqzc4Fz6VI6tm8Xp59lFJVK_IAfExx3WReZUmUiA9DfS5J8F8PtF2-gSKvILm0_R2GwV" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: -6.319167235708306px;" width="571" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Behind the House</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Graphite and Gouache on Paper, 2019</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tell me about the blackened head and torso?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve been doing this for a long time. The treatment of human figures is to make them anonymous. People say, “it’s ghostly," and that makes sense, but I bring this on myself because I use horror movie imagery. I never think of them as literal ghosts.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t get that from them either.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am paying attention to anatomy enough that we can empathize with the form that it takes, but making them hazy, fuzzy, and not totally distinct, especially compared to the other stuff in the paintings, is a way of denoting that this thing is alive and sentient whereas everything else in the painting is really flat, or painted as a pattern. I am finding ways to paint these familiar things in a way that isn’t what the thing looks like in real life, but as some sort of stupid symbol of it. Then, by painting the figure that way, without making it a super realistic rendering of a person, it becomes a different formal way to show that this is a different type of entity than all the other objects. Maybe I shouldn’t resent the "ghostly" thing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe it’s not so much a ghost, but more the spirit. The first thing that comes to mind when I see this figure is representations of the grim reaper. Not the scythe and all that, but it’s the black within the hood, it’s this void. That’s what we’re afraid of, that’s what the death represents -this void. You enter into it, but really it sucks you in. The blackened head and torso draws me in to some kind of internal space that I do not really want to find myself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your painting Procession, of 2017, I see as your most Celmins-like painting, now that I know the influence her work had on you. It has the sense of being seen on TV. In fact, when I imagine a funeral procession of vehicles, I picture the way it looks on TV. I know Kennedy’s procession was with horse and carriages, yet somehow I imagine this procession of black cars as seen on TV!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe you’re thinking that because you are getting the funeral procession crossed with the memory of Kennedy being assassinated in a car procession seen on TV.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Probably. There couldn’t be anything more dry and dull to watch on TV than a funeral procession of cars. Yet, there it is in your painting and to me it has this sense of abstraction, of distance, as if it was on a TV screen. Am I reading that right?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wasn’t actively thinking about that layer of it when I was making it, but it makes sense, I can see that. Also, since we were talking earlier about the huge influence that Vija Celmins had on me, I think there may just be a subconscious thing where the way I like to paint things is so rooted in being into Celmins that I would do something like that without even thinking about it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So there is always this death, mortality, and morbid fascination but a hearse is such an easily identifiable thing that that is one of those things [like objects in my other paintings]. Two other cars are part of the procession. One is my car that I had at the time and my wife’s car. The other one is the hearse; it has this ornamental landau bar on the back. We know what that is. We know </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is just a car and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a car to carry dead people to a ceremony. And it has the little orange flags on it. You get the magnetic flags to stick on your car and it is that same orange color [as in my other paintings]. I’ve been looking at a lot of 19th century Russian realist painters making these super bleak paintings of Russian peasant life,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: red; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Perov" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vasily Perov</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And there were a lot of funeral procession paintings. So I’ve been looking at all these paintings of Russian villagers doing funeral marches through tundra and I was like, I am going to do a 2017 version of this.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If it was only a hearse, I’m not sure I would have known what to make of that, so it needs the two “regular” cars. Feeling disconnected, maybe due to the sense of the TV screen, leads me to think about how I feel disconnected from my own death. This seems part and parcel to ideas you were talking about earlier about the color of warning, the orange. Feeling disconnected is part of being on this side of the symbolic. We are all living under the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 125,000 people are dead, yet still, those of us alive and well are somehow not affected by it and are disconnected from that possibility of death. So when I look at your painting I see death and yet somehow it’s not me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet it is and still it isn’t. It’s haunting in that way.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 456px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="468.00000000000006" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/FVl93qFP0FZ2BGa2jYoK4WRhhTM7ddUd7gjp4mWtOJFH-UFjiCg2fgDuRyXsbggI9ahuFjg1mL4UsByAA74byOQn-nVSXWsYNRwbuHyGd1zC_K9-D9kcaPOGPvEB9A3NjnaOtpkd" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: -6.000000000000019px;" width="624" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Procession, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Oil on Canvas, 2017</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, that disconnect part of it was part of my motivation. There were all these opportunities in this image for formal experiments but then also being able to put the profound ceremonial thing and stick it in with some objects that are more comfortable and familiar. Like you said, if it was just the hearse, it would be a very different thing. It’s the hearse in relation to the other cars that was the thing; comparing a hearse with a 2010 Ford Escape was the thing I was interested in. The hearse might by like, oh that’s not me, that’s the disconnect, but the 2010 Ford Escape -that’s fuckin’ </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> dude!</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a sense, it’s that aspect [the Ford Escape] that makes it real, the particularity of the vehicle. Which is funny because I tell people cars are the hardest things to draw because we all know exactly what they look like.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They are hard to draw! If you are off a little bit, it’s fucked up!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You could draw a human body off and it would be fine, but when you get a car wrong, it’s way off. We know them so well they are like stand-ins for ourselves. It’s a way of putting yourself back into the painting.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In your painting, Burial At Sea, 2019, you have a lone figure attempting to push a beached whale back into the sea. There is something absurdist and surreal about it. Even if a lone person could push a whale into the sea, there is the sea pushing it back onto land -a terribly Sisyphean prospect. What had you thinking, from Minnesota, that you should make a painting of a dead whale on the shore?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, as we have been talking, it often comes back to thinking about mortality. I think it’s something that everybody is thinking about all of the time, but maybe don’t make artwork about it (laughs). I look at this painting and say, “what the hell?” This one is very different than other stuff that I’ve made. I guess that was the best way I could think of to use an image to talk about futility, to wrap your head around the idea. This thing is obviously dead and it’s also fucking enormous and not from your realm. Whales are scary, they are fucking huge, they live under water, and they are not part of our world. Just to see a whale on the land…</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fish out of water, man.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I know that these things exist, but it doesn’t belong here and I don’t know what the hell this thing is. The thing I wanted to get the most right in this painting, a key thing, is to have the illusion that the figure was pushing, and bracing itself on the land, and pushing as hard as it could.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 488px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="488" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/cS5fc1c02zpHoh_syLsKMegGC7Its9t1PBUpbZ19tfm7LkLaGNEA6U19g_-j2hcWbe8Yz0Sg-O-vWXsO048vbcGPySaOS2ZBjBoB5zrX1e6xoWvfM4R2tVIg6tqZpYjtdzMuuDS5" style="margin-left: -0.48665955176089426px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624.9733191035218" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Burial at Sea</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, Oil on Paper, 2019</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For me, it’s like pushing away the idea of death. Maybe I can put it back where it belongs -the dark, incomprehensible depths of the sea. Having grown up near the ocean, I innately understand how the waves push everything right back; so you can try to push it out, but even if you could, there is something bigger than you pushing it back. So you have to confront this death, as big as a whale. It’s a really good painting as it really captures a lot of this idea, but with this sense of activity, of pushing it, of trying to push it away. You’re not trying to save the whale; you are trying to get rid of it.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could run off with ideas about climate change because whales have become a symbol of ecological calamity, that is hard to ignore, but I don’t think that is what this painting is about. It’s about an awareness of our struggle with our own death and that this death is a lot bigger than us.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yeah, you know it does read as something absurdist and surreal, but compared to every other painting I’ve made, this is the most realistic. Whales do wash up on the shore, this happens in the real world, but it is such an insane thing that seeing a painting of it is totally absurd, but it happens!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And when you see it, there is a sense of the world being out of order. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I find myself in a confrontation with the deep sense of my own aloneness in your work. Is that intentional?</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes, the sense of loneliness and isolation is definitely intentional. I want the images to feel like they exist in a vacuum to a certain extent. They are representative of things from the "real" world, but I want them to feel sort of anonymous or like they are happening internally, like a memory of an event rather than the event itself captured in real time.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I like your new animations. Tthey are both humorous and sad, and contain many of the themes found in your paintings. Why animation? Tell us about your graphical choices -particularly the use of 8-bit graphics?</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Animations are a way for me to incorporate an element of time and movement into the work. The time and movement is pretty minimal, but I think it makes a huge difference. If I do a painting of a plastic bag stuck in a tree versus an animation of it, where it is almost entirely static except for the bag getting blown by the wind very slightly, that opens a lot of possibilities for what the work can do.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The vintage video game style is for a few reasons - one being that I am by no means an expert in animation or digital drawing, and working with low-res, pixelated images makes things easier to animate. It's just a matter of moving a few pixels over between animation frames. I'm also an avid video game-player, and there are a few games that actually strongly influence my painting work, particularly open world fantasy role playing games. Animation is a way to for me to more directly interact with those influences.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 288px; overflow: hidden; width: 288px;"><img height="288" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/V5nPWYeL3CLZfcC-_rMmoXouSmWLG8Mx8mDzl7mllWgs84RaSLcXpV07gPGh5iH2g-hnk8q8C_2tMQRsuSRurmtmFrFgwqrlE5KgIv6hojYqHjHNbVa6arH2xhMUkRGkxHlHXTMN" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="288" /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Untitled, Digital Animation, 2019</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The long-term plan is to actually make a video game, which I have started on! I've actually been working on it for a few years now, but it's slow going since I have no idea what I'm doing. The only "training" I have in this is looking up tutorials and reading Reddit threads about pixel art and game design. I do have a super crude version of it working, which is basically an overhead view of a neighborhood that looks like the settings from my paintings. It’s done in a Super Nintendo RPG style where you can control a little figure to walk around, but that's about it so far.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jim Hittinger is an artist based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He works in several media including oil, gouache and watercolor painting, graphite and charcoal drawing, and digital animation. Duplicates, the uncanny, mortality, and unseen forces lurking just out of sight are recurring themes in his work.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-8e4d3fa2-7fff-3f6d-f8b3-3a7eb352af83" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jim received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2015. He’s a member of</span><a href="https://www.rosaluxgallery.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rosalux Gallery</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, an artist collective in Minneapolis. You can learn more about Jim and his work at:</span><a href="https://www.jimhittinger.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://www.jimhittinger.com</span></a></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-8e4d3fa2-7fff-3f6d-f8b3-3a7eb352af83" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Frank Meuschke received his MFA from the New Mexico State University in 2000. He’s also a member of Rosalux Gallery. You can learn more about him and his work at <a href="http://www.frankmeuschke.com/">www.frankmeuschke.com</a></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8296442124707185645.post-75737211471337358422020-07-05T11:59:00.002-05:002020-07-05T13:02:54.369-05:00Hmmm...Instagram...Zuckerborg...<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/p/CCQ1Yo8A_Ee/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="12" style="background: #fff; border-radius: 3px; border: 0; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.5) , 0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 540px; min-width: 326px; padding: 0; width: 99.375%;">
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<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CCQ1Yo8A_Ee/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style="color: black; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">Bombyliidae fly or Bee Fly. A fly, a pollinator, a parasite. Excellent fliers with a long proboscis (like a butterfly, but not as long), they hover, hardly ever landing, to sip nectar and eat pollen from a large variety of flowers. Bee flies do not land, unlike bees, yet they still do a job of transferring pollen among the flowers. In spring they flick their eggs near the ground nests of solitary bees and wasps so that their young can enter and eat the pollen store and then the larvae. It’s gruesome out there but beautiful too. #beefly #insects #insectsofinstagram #summer #pollinators #pollinatorplants #prairie #prairieplants #prairieclover #nativeplants #nativefly #fly #nectar #pollen #parasite #stopmotion #shutterspeed #burstmode #focus #infocus #sharp #mygarden #mygardentoday #patience #holdstill #shotoniphone #shotoniphonese @apple</a></div>
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A post shared by @<a href="https://www.instagram.com/artist_and_builder/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px;" target="_blank"> artist_and_builder</a> on <time datetime="2020-07-05T14:02:35+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">Jul 5, 2020 at 7:02am PDT</time></div>
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