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Making Pictures

Freedman

Jeremy Freedman, an artist whose works are exhibited in the Eckleburg Gallery, discusses his artistry with Eckleburg and why he prefers making pictures to painting. Click here to view his art.

 

I am not interested in making photographs as much as I am in making pictures. Sometimes photographs have too much “reality” for my taste. And of course, it’s not really reality, but only a kind of photographic reality, one that may constrict experience and not open the eye or the mind. I’m interested in a different kind of focus, one that lets the mind wander inward a little bit, in pursuit of the ambiguity of life and the slipperiness of truth. My various techniques are ways to isolate and concentrate on the experience of seeing. And for me, my pictures are as abstract as words, a chance meeting of my memories and the present moment.

Eckleburg: What is “The Illusion of Validity?” Why an illusion? Are we not valid?

JF: We’re valid but our thoughts and perceptions may not be. The title of this body of work, “The Illusion of Validity,” comes from the book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In that extraordinary work, which explains a lot about how our minds work and why we may often make wrong choices, Kahneman says, “Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.” I would go farther than most psychologists and question whether there is ever any basis for the belief that we can understand the world objectively. We’re all prisoners of our subjectivity. Anyway, it’s useful to challenge ourselves.

Eckleburg: Why are you interested in different kinds of focus? Is truth really slippery? Is truth or reality too starkly bright? Or, what is it about reality that makes you want to make it go out of focus?

JF: What we perceive as truth changes according to the differing circumstances of a particular moment. We are always learning and unlearning. My use of focus is a way of reminding me that the surface “reality” of many photographs is an illusion too.

Eckleburg: Are your works always in presented in black and white? Is this part of what you’re trying to convey with the “Illusion of Validity?”

JF:Black and white is a useful distancing mechanism, but I also often photograph in color. See my website, jfreenyc.com, for more pictures.

Eckleburg: Among the pieces exhibited in The Eckleburg Gallery, which one is your favorite?

JF:It is not possible to choose a favorite, but “Pessoa in New York” is important to me because, even though I admire his writing highly, the life story of Fernando Pessoa has assumed metaphorical significance for me. Pessoa’s ability to create and fully inhabit dozens of different heteronyms illustrates, to me, fundamental mysteries of our consciousness. The photograph comes from a short film I made some years ago about an imaginary trip by Pessoa to New York City. You can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou-2gKetRgg

Eckleburg: Why do you choose the medium of photography to express your artistic creation?

JF: It’s faster than painting!

 

Jeremy Freedman is an artist and writer in New York City. His photographs have been exhibited in Europe and the United States and were recently featured in the Monarch Review and Urbanautica. His work is on the web at jfreenyc.com. 

 

 

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Art in the Information Age

Chinese-Red

MB Jones, an artist whose works appear in the Eckleburg Gallery, discusses his art, in the context of history and modernity. Click here to see his paintings.

 

A painting is a form of communication. It is the best form of communication because the audience simply can’t resist looking and reading into the image placed before them. It takes only a glance to be engulfed by a painting, before the image is burned into consciousness for a lifetime.

Sure, there is an academic tradition and dogma when it comes to reading a painting. University libraries are full with volumes of scholars battling over their reign as supreme arbiters for defining what is or isn’t art. Although all this may be necessary for the documentation of art history, the traditional academic fascism of how to interpret art is no longer relevant, having gone extinct sometime in the second millennium AD. Scholars are awakening to the fact that what has been termed art or art history is a semantic mistake that defines art by the narrow tradition of ‘classical’ Greco-Roman sculpture and European painting. With the advent of the Internet, modern travel, and general globalization, the public has emerged from the dark ages of information. The audience can experience art created by people of every cultural and socio-economic background. In short, exclusive rules on how to interpret art are superfluous. An adult can act as though a child by unknowingly looking at the color painted onto a large canvas and be moved to emotion, or just a smile. 

Color is everything: it is the line, the expression of form, the representation of light, it is space or the absence of space, and finally it combines to give the painting its identity that connects it to the physical world. In the case of my own work, my paintings are a place where colors are participating in a drama, interacting with one another, complementing and fighting. The articulation of the relationships between the colors stimulates the viewer’s eye by creating movement beyond the solid form of the painting. This velocity of color works to signify the subject, atmosphere, and identity of the painting. The history of painting is the history of color, the way it takes form to depict the subjects and emotions from the time period when it was created. 

From Descartes to the modern age, philosophers have recognized the advent of written language as the starting point of human civilization: it is what differentiates us from animals.[1] What is left then that connects the modern consciousness to our pre-history from before the birth of civilization? Before linguistic signs, our ancestors communicated with painting, as is exemplified by various prehistoric cave paintings. A recent study that juxtaposes the Neolithic Wadi Sora cave painting, “Cave of the Swimmer,” with early ‘Egyptian’ visual art depicts this transition. Both illustrations are composed of similar images and symbols; however, the only difference is that the Egyptian illustration included hieroglyphic text.[2]

Egyptian hieroglyphs are considered one of the earliest forms of writing in the world and in ancient Egypt,few major inscriptions lacked a referring image.[3] Art is the original form of visual communication passed down from our prehistoric ancestors, and perhaps this is the reason why it continues to have such a strong effect on modern consciousness. 

In the same way that art connects humans with their prehistoric ancestors, it also connects individuals with their childhood. As children, most people have had the experience of drawing or coloring unabashedly and creating art. Later, as they become socialized adults, most stop drawing and expressing themselves visually, for fear of creating ‘bad’ art. If they were lucky enough to keep the drawings of their childhood they would perhaps look on them and laugh, judging how they are aesthetically bad. In my case, my grandfather was a painter and encouraged my naive ‘scribblings’ as a child. Now as an adult artist, and an audience for other’s art, somehow the visual stimulation of painting connects me to this childhood experience and my grandfather. In the same sense, one of the most enjoyable aspects of being an artist is to watch this inner time-travel occur in others who look at my art. When I exhibit my work, I am able to experience how each individual appreciates a different aspect of my work, and how it connects with something deep inside their own emotions.

This new world is what separates the current artist from those of the past. Although painting is a tradition with origins from prehistory, we are now are working in the information age, where artists from everywhere can communicate with ease, exchange ideas, and travel the world casually, unlike any previous generation. In the past three years, I have worked in art studios in places such as South Korea, Laos, the Netherlands, and the United States. In each place, I absorbed the cultural and artistic traditions, which is reflected in my art. My painting is a product of the developments of the technological age and the environment of the global community in which I live.



[1] Chomsky, Noam. 2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge. p.3.
[2] Le Quellec, Jean-Loic. 2008. “Can One ‘Read’ Rock Art? An Egyptian Example.” Iconography Without Texts. p. 25-42. The Warburg Institute. p. 35.
[3] Baines, John. 2008. “On Functions of Writing in Ancient Egyptian Pictorial Representation.” Iconography Without Texts. p. 95-126. The Warburg Institute. p. 113. 

 

 

MB Jones (1981-) Is a visual artist originally from western Massachusetts. While the style of his art is rooted in the American folk art tradition, his work also reflects his travels and past experiences living and working in art studios in the Netherlands, S. Korea, and most recently Laos. His work has been exhibited in commercial galleries and art fairs, yet he also embodies the underground DIY (do it yourself) movement in that he creates shows in unique places all over the world, exposing his art to new and unsuspecting audiences.

 
 

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Nature Frightens

HaberIra Joel Haber, an artist whose works are published in the Eckleburg Gallery (click here to view his works), discusses his life as an artist and how he will never stop making art. 

 

Nature frightens. No slow early autumn walks in the country for me. Nature is a mother with a knife, ready to pounce on us without warning. Mountains collapse, rivers reclaim, skies open up and caves swallow. But there is also a beauty in this destruction. Keeping myself far away from all things that are natural is what I have a sweet tooth for. The landscapes of my mind reach out for other minds in beautiful acts of aggression. 

The earliest piece of existing sculpture that I did was in 1958. I was very young. The piece is made of white interlocking plastic building blocks that I always played with. For me it was more than just play. The piece has some similarities to my present concerns. It looks like a building or a structure or a ruin. I glued the individual blocks together. Even at this early stage, I was concerned with making a permanent work of art. I found this lost and forgotten piece in 1971 at the home of my parents in a box of old things of mine that my mother had kept for all those years. The piece was broken into four sections, but it was not difficult to repair, because the parts fitted together like a puzzle.

In 1968, I started to fill small black sketchbooks with collages. I thought of them as intimate objects to be looked at by one person at a time. I never ripped out pages. I did these books for about a year when I decided I had accomplished at that time what I wanted to do with collage. In early 1969, I wanted to expand my ideas of collage, to break through the paper and get to the other side. It was at this point that I started small-scale sculpture, miniature environments and landscapes.

My training had been in commercial art. I began working in the advertising field in 1966, upon completing a 2-year course at New York City Community College, as it was then known. I had little trouble in finding jobs. However, these jobs depended on skills that I really didn’t have, and my heart was not really in the ad game. I wanted to be an artist. At night, I took drawing and illustration classes at The School Of Visual Arts, which made me want to be an artist more than ever. Finally, in 1967, I stopped working in advertising and from that time on I have devoted my life to being an artist.

Growing up in New York gave me easy access to all the museums and at an early age. I started to go to The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum Of Natural History, The MOMA, and The Whitney. The one work that stands out as having an impact on me as a child was Ernst’s “Two Children Are Threatened By A Nightingale,” because of Ernst’s use of strange perspective, bright almost acidy coloration, and the three-dimensional miniaturization of a gate and house. Some other influences were amusement parks – notably Steeplechase Park – movies, Times Square, and the artists Joseph Cornell and Louise Nevelson. Knowing their work from an early age was an education. Seeing what they (and others) had done with assemblage was inspiring and made me realize that although their accomplishments were magnificent, there was room still for an original new voice to be heard.

The first box I did was in 1969 and was made of cardboard, which was completely covered with a photographic reproduction of a landscape. Inside the box, I placed a cardboard backed cutout photograph of the artist Toulouse-Lautrec as a child, surrounded by his family. Unfortunately, part of this box was destroyed.

The first landscape boxes I did were also done in 1969 and were a series of “New York boxes.” They were small with diorama backgrounds of the city skyline in the 1900s along with loose material usually gravel or sawdust dyed to represent earth. It was also during this period that I actually burned many of the miniature buildings I was using. I was altering, changing, and manipulating my found materials as modern artists have done since Cubism. The action was just as important to me as the outcome of the work and the reactions the work would invoke. I think nature has a tendency to reproduce itself in miniature. A twig, a small stone or a puddle of water when separated from its natural environment and isolated can resemble a tree, a boulder or a lake.

I want my art to go through slow constant changes, but at the same time I want vast abrupt changes. Nature does the same. Since 1969 I have been making small scale sculptures and miniature environments that have been boxed, floored and walled. Within these small spaces, a wide range of images has been constant & consistent: houses, mountains, trees, bodies of water, and landmasses. My work over the years has changed, as I’m always experimenting with my language.

In 2001, after living in my loft for 31 years, I was forced to move because my landlord, out of pure and simple greed, wanted to get more rent than I was paying. I had to move 31 years of my art into storage and leave Manhattan and move to Brooklyn where I now have a 2-bedroom apartment. This is a small apartment, and I am using one of the bedrooms as an office-studio space. It was hard at first, but I soon got back to my personal and creative life and slowly, I started to make art again. I began to make sculptures along with large collages. The shock of losing my studio was extreme, but I was pleased that I started to make art again, and I realized that no matter what, I will never stop making art.

 

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe. He has had 9 one man shows, including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum, and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings, photographs, and collages have been published in over 100 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. Currently, he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.