Creative Process – Page 3

Stains. What are they good for?

January 31, 2020by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl4 Comments

I can’t think of any positive connotation for stain, can you? The word implies degradation, even ruination. Yet I hunt for these spoilers of the pristine. What’s the attraction?

For starters, I can’t add to perfection. If everything was unmarred, unsullied, untainted, unworn it would be like finding myself in a giant art studio with a huge canvas and no paint. There would be nothing to do. Boring!

So as the lowly maggot is to processing waste, I am to soiled pavement, an agent of transformation. Okay, not quite. My contributions are ephemeral and symbolic rather than transformative and pragmatically useful. Nevertheless, as I pass by the same stains week after week, I find that having spent time turning them into little characters I look forward to seeing them again. The stains become like neighbors, friendly ones I wave at rather than blemishes upon some vast field of unbroken conformity. The familiarity makes me feel I’m really here. Their specificity means I could be no where else.

To deeply notice a thing is to change your perception of it. To interact with it is to become intimate. To collaborate with it is to create a bond. That is why art is so transformative. It is like friendship but with a process rather than a person.

I can’t make the world a less blemished place but I can make the stains more fun.

Art, Creative Process

Waiting For It

September 24, 2019by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

Any given artwork is made over a period of time. The gestation period is inherently uncertain, a series of conscious decisions by the artist and other contributing factors outside the artist’s intentions. A marker could be losing ink and create a more textured line than intended, the artist finds them self either annoyed and starting over or pleasantly surprised and continuing. At each moment, an outcome and a reaction, a constant stream of decisions. The more chaos in the process, the less certain the outcome. If you paint in oil, make lots of preliminary sketches and perfect a technique, you may get a painting pretty close to the one imagined before the process began. But even then happy and sad deviations will occur. We don’t have the power to make our thoughts material in an instant with no mechanical intervention.

As someone who has very few concrete ideas of what I want before I start, I don’t aim for an outcome. I am much more interested in the moment by moment reaction to each new iteration. A very fast series of yes(es) and no(s) to the most recent addition. My whole goal is to not know what I will get, to work so fast and with so much randomness that I can’t possibly guess what the result will be. It’s not magic but a very good approximation, I think, and feels exciting.

The process of making a sidewalk face ranges from 5 to 15 minutes, about the time it takes for Decaf’s whimper to start getting annoying. So the evolution of the face is fast. Occasionally, sensing I could do better or needing supplies not locatable in the immediate vicinity, I go back to a spot and do a second version, my way of sketching and perfecting.

Most faces dissipate before I encounter them again. Wind or feet knock all the elements out of alignment and the character devolves back to a gunky stain or evaporates or decomposes or whatever.

But! There is one type of Sidewalk Face that does take time to fully develop, the faces I make in living matter. Aliveness and growth are additional chaos elements. I start the ball rolling and then wait to see the result, natural biological forces take over the creative process. It’s a collab with mother nature. How can it get more fun that that?!

Want to see what happened to him after he fell off? Check it out!

Art, Creative Process

When Grossness Is Your Medium You Can Make Art Anywhere

August 28, 2019by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl2 Comments

Over the past 3 years that I’ve been making faces in my neighborhood, I’ve learned a lot of very specific stuff. I learn it the same way wild animals learn stuff, I just walk around a lot and notice everything. So here’s a thing I’ve learned, the grossest things are in the the alley. Furthermore, the alley just south of Melrose is considerably grosser than the one just north of Beverly. Aren’t you glad you know that?

Most likely if you were to utilize this piece of intel, you would use it avoid them. What are they good for anyway? For me, needing to find and harvest all my art supplies, they are treasure troves. So much crap deposited densely in all directions. They are also wide and not well traveled. It’s nice to have some space.

Somebody recently hauled their refrigerator here and left it. It can’t have been easy to move, was its former residence the room behind that barred up window?

It’s nasty for sure buy not spectacularly so. Both the dogs and I had to check it out.

There is a not inconsiderable amount of gunk at the bottom. What’s it from? We can speculate but luckily we can’t know. I know you were wondering, is it still sticky and pliable or calcified into a permanent crust. It’s sticky. Time to grab a makeshift drawing implement (rusted nail, paper clip, bobby pin, thin but dense stick). Let’s do this!

Looks like we also need some white stuff and some eyeball definers. No prob. Here are two thin seed pods and a funky leaf. Good to go captain.

As much as possible I like to work with what is already happening such as that adorable left cheek and inquisitive mouth. It’s easy to know where to start. There is always something more something than something else.

I have learned that I can make art anywhere and I don’t have to know a thing about it before I start. It’s always a surprise. In a world that often makes me worry and fret, I like a nice surprise. Especially ones that upend my preconceived notions. Gunk is not just the result of past mistakes, it also has a future.

See Mr. Gunk Face in motion below. The dogs really dig the alley.