I love this recent Facebook post by my dear colleague Yulia Hanansen: “ART in general, is about a DISCOVERY. It's about discovering something new: a balance in composition that works, new color combination, new materials, etc. Art is a FORMULA, an INVENTION. When you follow that formula to create something based on it - it's called CRAFT. It's a mastery that your creation is done with.”
Amen, sistah!
Discovering the new is what keeps me moving forward in my art practice. It’s why I go see old and new art, it’s why I read books, it’s why I try to pay closer attention to things that bore/frustrate/anger me to find what else there is to know about those things, it’s why I look and listen for visually-translatable patterns in feelings, politics, psychology, words, music, etc. And it’s also why I do some really practical exercises in the studio.
For example, the sample.
Samples are by definition exploratory; representative but not definitive. And they’re small, so if they’re successful then that gratification comes quickly, and if they’re only partially- or non-successful (rare that there’s absolutely no success!) then very little time and materials have been expended on that discovery! I think of samples as the mosaicist’s version of doodling: loose, spontaneous, destination-flexible ‘road trips’ during which ideas are born and unexpected discoveries are made.
Here’s my first sample of this new year, inspired by a lovely 4” ish diameter ceramic disc (@ambersartistry) with a matte white glaze poured unevenly over a daisy-like imprint that I unearthed when (finally!) sorting/filing years worth of random materials to make my home office rehabitable recently. The exposed claybody suggested the color palette of the Pennsylvania shale (@sagermosaics) background, and I just alternated and riffed with these two materials into mortar across a 6” square of 1/8” Wedi board until it was covered, throwing a few spikes of red smalti scrap in in a horizontal implied line to balance all that lanky verticality and because blood and snow are just, well, duh. Because this was a sample, not destined for anything in particular, I was free to tip the shale verticals at an angle occasionally, tuck in a wee stick of white or an iridized bugle bead wherever it seemed to make sense, and alternate between short and long at will.
And speaking of will, these small samples are great intuition-honers. I feel my way through the thing instinctively, letting what’s gonna happen happen, repeating things that seem to be working, placing things as they feel right, and then at the end I examine it critically to see what actually worked, and what specific takeaways there are for future artworks. My two favorite discoveries in this ‘doodle’, both of which you can expect to see in future artworks, are a) the narrow stacks of horizontal shale providing subtle relief from/counterpoint to the verticals (dang I love those little stacks!), and b) the border-breaching top and bottom add-ons to the white vertical, possible post-completion only because the border is epoxy putty and holds those afterthought bad boys in place like a mofo.
Hoping this is indeed just a sample of the myriad discoveries 2020 holds.
AFTER THE FACT
6” x 6”
Ceramic, shale, glass, epoxy