Instagram – Page 2 – Sidewalk Face

I wrote this blog post last October. Why haven’t I published it? I too would like to know! Call the Art Police Procrastination Division and get someone on the case.

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On October 8th, 2015 Terry Gross interviewed Andrew Goldsworthy on NPR’s fresh air. I’ve been a fan of Goldsworthy since the early 1990s, saw the documentary about him called Rivers and Tides. He is an inspirational character. He goes into nature and uses what he finds there to make ephemeral sculptures. If you don’t know his work, here are a few examples:

andy-goldsworthy-1

I was listening to the interview while dog walking, my main interaction with nature such as it is in my hollywood neighborhood and pondering how Goldsworthy’s pursuits are highly unusual. Most people can not hang about in nature all day crafting whatever comes into their heads. How many people are doing that on planet earth right now? It’s got to be a pretty small number right? Just economically he is the only person I know of to get paid for this kind of labor. So I was thinking about his activities and how pleasant it would be to do that for a bit. I don’t mean to make light of his effort or imply his experience is not strenuous and painstaking. I wasn’t imagining fully being him, just that I would enjoy a small taste of his process. In my current station in life it is rare that I am fully connected to space and time, reacting only to what is around me. Mostly I am interacting with the virtual world and juggling twenty things at once and suddenly it’s 2 months later. Very different. Anyway, dog walk over, didn’t hear the whole podcast, back to the grind.

The next day I was dog walking and saw this:

And for some reason that I think had to do with Andrew Goldsworthy, I thought I should try and turn it into a face.

Before I got home I had made four of them. I made another one on the 11th. I made eight on the 12th. Knowing I could and would put them on Instagram sealed the deal. Boom! It exploded into a full blown obsession. I’ve made forty in 2 weeks.

So the process is this: I see something that I can use or seems like part of a face and then I start assembling. I look for needed material in the immediate vicinity. I have found and collected a few bottle caps that I stash in my purse and have used more than once but outside of that, all the objects are found on location, mostly within one to four feet of the face.

As an artist I have always liked reacting to something. I think that is why I am an editor. Editors react to footage. When I make art, I don’t visualize something first and then try to make it. I’ve tried but I don’t like the results and I don’t like the process. That’s a lose lose so why bother? I have to quickly make something I can react to. As soon as there is something, a line, a shape, a color, I can start to do more. The impulse just clicks in like a wheel on a rail. All art making is a reaction to something at some point in the process. This essay is a reaction to thinking about what I have been doing lately. When I film something, it’s a reaction to light, or composition or something interesting happening. For some people I imagine the reaction is in their imagination, an image comes to mind. The moment of reaction is the muse.

Making these ephemeral faces is so pleasurable just as I imagined when listening to the Goldsworthy interview. Being super focused and having the whole process constrained to that single drawn out moment is a relief, an escape from multitasking and endless computer interaction. I like having some of my creativity happen in the outside world. The only problem is obsession. Can’t seem to stop.

Here are a few of my favorites:

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As you may know if you follow me on Instagram I have not stopped and just posted Sidewalk Face 159, today April 10th, 2016. Glad I wrote this when I did as so much has happened in the meantime. Perhaps I will write about what is happening now and post it next August!

You can see more by following me on Instagram at:

https://instagram.com/eaglecrowowl/

I love Instagram. Love it! It’s the most productive of all the iPhone time wasters. I made it to level 74 of Candy Crush about 6 months ago before becoming afflicted with sudden onset virtual diabetes. Games are mesmerizing and nominally relaxing but all the benefit ends the second I stop. Instagram gives back. I enjoy it even when I am not doing it. In fact, now I am never not doing it because I think about what I am going to post next all the time and what I am going to post next is art.

In the last year or so I’ve returned to making more two dimensional art on paper and sharing it on Instagram. It’s great because the little grid of posts is like a mini art studio where I can contemplate my themes, interests and techniques. This is a familiar place but one I haven’t been in for nearly a decade. I gave up painting somewhere in my daughter’s preschool years as the intersection of parenting and documentary video editing ate all my time. I never completely stopped, I kept drawing in little blank books, but I ceased actively reviewing my work in this arena. I lost consciousness of my body of work and it ceased to flourish.

Thanks in part to Instagram and in part to my recent overwhelming need to make abstract art, the creative beast is out of hibernation. Drawing woke it up and Instagram offered it art salmon. Or drawing gave me a lot of stuff to post and Instagram rewarded me with ego biscuits. Getting likes is motivational. I love seeing my posts add up. The more I post, the more inspired I became. Since my main art goal in life is to make as much as I can before I die this is a really helpful tool. By keeping me conscious of what I have been doing, the Instagram grid of posts puts me in a never ending dialogue with my work.

I follow a lot of artists on Instagram. I pick them because I think they make interesting work. If I see a picture I like, I click the person’s homepage and look at their grid. I am attracted to attractive grids (how’s that for a sentence that couldn’t have been written in any other era). If I like that, I switch to the linear mode and look at each post separately. Beside the art itself, I am attracted to posts that make sense in relationship to each other. Does the artist bring the same eye to their dog photos that they do to their paintings? It’s not that I need or want every post to be brilliant, whatever that might mean, but I want it to be curated. Is that fair? There is nothing inherently “fair” in optional actions, right? It does make me ponder how others judge my grid of art. That’s an issue with Instagram. There is the individual post and the totality as seen in the grid. To me, I want them both to be satisfying. It’s challenging. I’ve wondered if my grid is it too eclectic? I make several different kinds of art.

If I only posted my abstract work, my grid would look like this.

But I also like to post my old surrealist paintings, banana faces, pencil drawings, shadow photographs and other things. So my grid looks like this.

You just don’t know what kind of art you are going to produce before you produce it. You may think you know but it’s only in reviewing it after the fact that you can say, oh, so that’s what I make, that’s my style, those are my concerns. To me it’s the most interesting thing to do and gives life great joy and meaning. It’s the opposite of consumerism, an antidote I need to stay sane.

Currently my Instagram account is occupying a lot of mental resources. I can spend more time considering whether two of my Instagram images look good next to each other than I can considering where are we going to live when we retire. That’s probably not good but it’s keeping the artwork flowing.

You can check it out for yourself at:

https://instagram.com/eaglecrowowl/

Tag: Instagram

Andrew Goldsworthy, Instagram and Me