David Warner: Illuminated

A tribute to David Warner. Professor of History at RISD, who passed away in May 2013.

David's friends have assembled a collection of reminiscences and touching words about his indelible character, powerful sense of goodwill and his highly respected work as a medieval historian. 

Achilles.

How I imagine it might have been.

House of Cards.

One of the best ways to get the wheels turning is to revisit old stuff that I'd left unresolved. It's still unresolved but I'm done for the day.

Lost and Found.

Who can explain why it's sometimes so difficult to get started, and at other times we can't stop ourselves from creating things? This is such a mystery to me. I'm sure someone has an answer.

In between illustration jobs I try to paint. It keeps me fresh and a bit more daring, allowing me to practice freely and follow intuition with no obligation. I get so sick of painting unbridled joy.

I found a stack of paintings I started several years ago. They were a little damaged from being laid on top of one another, and they weren't resolved at all. Most were pretty bad, even though they started good. This excited me. 

I have put them in a pile on my table. I woke at 4:00am today, Paavo between my knees. I allowed him to sleep with me last night, a reward for us both. I didn't bother getting dressed, other than pulling on a sweatshirt and knit cap, and I walked in the dark to my studio, the snow lighting my way. 

Another Stonington Island.

Another iteration.

It's slightly out of focus—just didn't have what I needed to shoot it well—but you get the idea.

Stonington Islander.

This isn't translating well in the photo, unfortunately, and I can't get a good shot with the camera and lighting I have here. 

The islands off of Stonington, Maine have these abundant bouquets of trees. I wanted to make something for Lorraine, who loaned me the place for the week. 

The Woman Who Needed a Zipper.

"Over and over, Lauren would swallow potentially dangerous objects in the context of stress. She swallowed the screwdriver, the knife blade, and the ninja knife when she learned that her uncle was terminally ill. The two knife blades and four fork handles were a response to learning that her sister had hepatitis. The box of nails was after a fight with a neighbor. Each time she said she felt better after she had swallowed something and then brought herself to the emergency room for treatment."

—from Falling Into the Fire, by Christine Montross, previewed in Brown Medical Magazine

Just what I needed.

This project has been so fulfilling. It came to me from a wonderful art director, who sensed that our needs were well matched. Not finished yet, but getting there.

Sketchbook: One Day University.

We spent the day listening to some really stimulating lectures by Professors from Columbia, Yale, Brown and Rutgers University. I'm so glad I went. 

I've said before that sketching while listening to discussion intensifies my focus on what's being said, and helps me make sense of information. Below are spreads from each of the talks.

Louis Masur from Rutgers talked about Lincoln as "evolutionary" rather than "revolutionary," and chronicled the transformation of his thinking about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment.

My favorite talk of the day was delivered by the brilliant Tamar Szabó Gendler from Yale. She offered a cogent yet brief discussion entitled "How to Think Like a Philosopher." Excellent and very helpful to me as I continue to frame my thinking on Truth Beauty and Goodness in studio discourse.

In the middle of all of it, I took a break to reflect on some thoughts about the role of philosophy in critical discourse, the subject of my talk at the ATINER conference in Greece the first week of June.

Tina Rivers from Columbia discussed four paintings which exemplify particular roles of the art. Good talk about some great contributions to painting.

Finally, John Stein from Brown discussed learning, memory and the brain—a fascinating explanation of various times of memory, the physiological processes which trigger them and ways to keep neurogenesis active.

Three Great Ideas: Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

Truth.

Beauty.

Goodness.

This timeless and formidable constellation of philosophical ideas is essential to our navigation of life. In fact, we cannot get through a day without these fundamental measurements of virtue. As I form the thoughts you're reading by putting pen to paper, I'm seeking common recognition of some simple truths. I'm trying to accomplish this with aesthetic appeal through the art of writing. And in the end I'm hoping for an enhanced awareness—a good outcome, some degree of betterment as a result of my efforts.  Judgments of what is true (or not true), beautiful (or not beautiful), and good (or not good) pervade our critical thinking, both consciously and unconsciously.

In particular these great ideas shepherd critical discourse with students of art and design. They are the foundation of our conversations about the aesthetic experiences our students are constructing. Where I teach, at Rhode Island School of Design, Illustration studio classes run five hours. That's 300 minutes of weekly debate about the merits and shortcomings of creative effort. I'm pretty sure that all studio faculty engage in this activity to some degree. We grapple with critical language to laud the beautiful or steer the ungainly into aesthetic balance. We weigh the value of one student's efforts against those of his peers, compare the success of formal decisions from one painting to the next, question the motives and intentions of the student in terms of the effect they wish to achieve. Most of us look for the true, the beautiful and the good as they are manifest in process, materiality and critical reflection. While a rubric for assessing these virtues would be mighty convenient, such simplistic, concrete measurement systems for art and design limit creative possibilities, and most of us steer clear of that. But while we may all be well served to identify truth, beauty and goodness as our shared foundation for critical discourse in studio education, the sort of exhaustive discussion necessary for thorough consideration and judgment against those ideas is rarely seen in the classroom. Why? Because it's difficult. Because it requires extremely nimble, patient, exceedingly curious minds and even the most gifted among us question the value of philosophy in our pragmatic, frenetic lives. To many, this level of philosophizing is akin to navel gazing, spinning wheels, an exercise in futility. To some extent, I agree, but only because I recognize the significant limits of time and temperament we face, with so much to accomplish every day. A thorough critical conversation, which even begins to scratch the surface of these ideas as they are manifest in the work of even a single student, could command an entire class period: five hours. Imagine the ensuing frustration if that were the case. Conversation about the nature of truth, beauty and goodness is necessarily circular and inconclusive. It can be unpleasant to dig in this way, of course, especially for an instructor, because doing so immediately opens the door to arguments of a professor's chief nemesis—subjectivity—the catch-all means of disqualification of critical judgment. And then there's time. With only 300 minutes and the hard-wrought work of 18 individuals to consider, there aren't enough hours in the day to completely, exhaustively discuss one piece, let alone the work of 17 more who are run ragged by working around the clock and who sometimes just want practical advice about form, color and composition. The last thing they want is more confusion. Unfortunately,  philosophy's first goal is to confuse. 

This summer, I plan to present some thoughts on this subject at a conference in Athens, the historical and geographic seat of western thought on these ideas, and I may try to hash out my musings here, in this blog. More than anything, I'd like to impart in my students a level of acceptance and recognition that these ideas are what drive our every opinion and decision in the construction of art, and even form a more effective form of discourse to consciously address these issues in the work of every student. Truth, Beauty and Goodness are at the core of all critical discourse. Let's begin with that daunting reality.

Finished Cover.

VUE36 Cover.  I still have a few days before it's finally due but I think I am finished.

Last Minute Panic.

I experienced a last minute panic on this one.  I'd uploaded the first version for the client but felt very shaky about it, so I decided to try something to reconcile my misgivings.

Believe it or not I absolutely slaved over the bottom image. Two days of painting and re-painting to no satisfaction. The idea worked OK in the sketch, and the client approved it, but when I brought color into the game everything fell apart. I was shooting for my usual neo-primitive treatment of the face, but the guy is just too damned good looking to deserve such injustice. Ultimately, I erased the goofy stuff, did a quick, minimal trace of his features and overlaid it on the painting, making adjustments to the skull  to accommodate. Surprisingly, while I thought I'd distorted his head significantly in my first attempt, it was almost dead-on in the contour. Weird.

Anyway, this one's done. My butt's killing me from sitting for three days straight. God bless the dogs for their patience—they've been amazingly calm and loyal.

One Down, One to Go.

Cunning Baffling Powerful.

Apothegm.

Santo Stefano.

Photos from my week at the dune shack.

Spring break.

No electricity, no running water. 
Just mute isolation in the dunes.

Finito.

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