dayton is not in ohio

It seems that everyone I know has made some sort of resolution to blog more regularly this year. I’m not making any promises, but I do want to focus this thing a bit.

I’ve decided that the blog needs to be about art. If I want to blog about sports and stuff like that I’ll start another blog, but my thinking is shifting a bit and I want to redirect my focus here. The blog will be about art in Chicago, friends’ art, and what’s happening in my own work. Feel free to call about my thoughts on the Phillies or what-not.

This leads up to an important confession that I need to make before I proceed, and which will require a little explaining: I’m starting to like art. I know that may sound odd to some readers, but I suspect that some others know exactly what I’m talking about. And I’m not talking about art objects. I know a thing that I like when I see it. I’m talking about the culture, the people, the conversation. Let me explain…

As a junior in high school I took an art class, picked up a National Geographic, and did a shaded pencil drawing of a black and white photograph of a soldier. It looked really “real” to me, and so I proceeded to spend the next year-and-a-half drawing Michael Jordan and every other basketball player I liked at the time. 6B pencil and a paper stump. I had discovered that I could “draw,” which, more accurately, was a knack for picking up art media quickly and making images that appeared a bit like the real thing. This, to me, was art - I was good at it, and I had discovered what my college major would be. It was the only subject that I liked, and it was easy, so why not.

In college, a couple of good professors tried to chip away at my isolated enjoyment of life-like images. It wasn’t that they were opposed to representing the world as it appeared, but they recognized that my enjoyment was disconnected from the much larger conversation about images and ideas that had been happening for a long, long time. They failed to fully penetrate my stubbornness, but they succeeded in planting a few seeds that began to germinate, so that upon moving to Philadelphia I had begun to ask myself why I was doing art.

In Philly, working as an art handler, I was exposed, for the first time really, to the subculture that is contemporary art. This was important in that it set the work I was doing in contrast to a very different way of thinking about, and working at, art. My work shifted from painting to sculpture, and I embarked with a slightly shifted mindset as I continued to work.

I also now had a group of friends that kept me vicariously connected to the art world, but I still often felt like the odd man out when the conversation turned to contemporary art. Whose work did I like? Don’t really know. Have you read such-and-such? Probably not. It was friendship, a common faith and my skills as an organizer that kept me connected to these folks, but not really a common interest in the art world. I liked to make stuff, and I liked to talk about theology-and-art, but I rarely went out of my way to investigate the work of those also making art in Philadelphia. Any of those folks who know me would probably agree.

I don’t actually think this was a bad thing, just the way it really was. I was very interested in the things I made an effort to know something about, namely theology and making stuff, but I was less interested in the thing I was surrounded by and gave little attention to. I was making art primarily for the “atta boys” from folks who knew just as little as I did about the art world. Still, I was good with images and ideas and making things, and this resulted in two opportunities to make some fairly conspicuous site-specific works, and score a little attention from the world I was hovering outside of. I immediately cashed these projects in for a ticket to grad school.

School has been fantastic. It has done what it’s supposed to do: learn me some stuff. It’s taken a while, even in this environment, but as I’m immersed in the art world that is Chicago, I’ve discovered my curiosity about what’s going on has gained some traction. The more I’m getting to know artists and their work, galleries, museums and all, the more I’m discovering that I’m actually interested in this stuff. I’m reading art theory just out of curiosity (of course when I admit that this is my first time reading some of the more foundational writings some folks are a little shocked). This feels like an embarrassing confession for a person that is about to finish his MFA from a recognized institution, but the truth is the truth. I’ve always been a late bloomer - I process stuff like a crock pot cooks. So after fifteen years of education, I think I’m finally starting to like art.