Sharpening the Edges - Fall '14, Premiers for GOST on Columbus Weekend

This show, 12 new pieces in all, is currently up at my studio/gallery in Gardiner, NY. It went up the night before the Gardiner Open Studio Tour because that's exactly when it arrived--just in the nick of time. It got a lot of positive feedback from our visitors during this past Columbus Weekend.

It is very exciting to have them all up right now in the gallery. I'm living with my work and really enjoying it. It will be hard to see it go when I have to move this show and hang it in Hudson, NY at the 510 Warren St. Gallery for my December solo show there. The entire show is 24 x 36 images printed by Black River Imaging using the ChromoLuxe Dye-Sublimation process onto aluminum, and block mounted so that the images can be hung directly on the wall. The images are vibrant and really pop off of the wall.

The GOST was three days of open studio time with at least 100 people coming through over the three days. When the Tour was finally over Andrea and I were just exhausted and we just couldn't get enough couch time. We love the Tour, but it's heavy lift.

When we finally came to our senses 24 hours later, I was back to work. I had been meaning to do a video about my art making process, and I had started working on it in the off moments during the tour. So two days after the tour I was able to do the sound track and finish my video.  "Journey to Abstraction" is a video based on the construction process of images I had already made. These recordings are a byproduct of using ProCreate for iPad as a compositional tool.  I'm no wizard at Apple iMovie and I was just stumbling through trying to get things to work. Happily I discovered how I could slow down the transformational recordings of my work to 10% of their recording speed and I was thrilled. It still makes them look a bit blinky, but they are quite interesting and watchable in the video. For anyone who's interested they were recorded in ProCreate as I was creating the images on the iPad. It would be great if PhotoShop could do something similar, but I haven't found a way thus far.

A misleading thing about the video is that even at 10% of the recording speed, it still looks like I can do an image in 4 minutes or something. The recordings only show things I do to the image, they don't show what I don't decide to do. With the way I work, deciding what to do and how to do it are the main part of the creative process and that is not on display in the video. In fact deciding what to do and not do is the part of it that takes all the time. Selecting the menu items and pushing the buttons takes no time at all, it's choosing what buttons to push and deciding if pushing them was a good idea. In the end, even if it's not in the video, I have to say that figuring out what you've got and if it's good or bad is what eats up the night.

JP
Gardiner, NY