A Slide Show

Viewing some of my art work

I have a hard time shooting pictures of some of my art work. The pictures never quite show what I see. I suppose that’s a common complaint among amature photographers. Just the other day I discovered a way to shoot some of my work in a way that I really like.

I realized that I don’t interact with my work from a distance and see the work in a static view. No, I walk around or past each piece. Sometimes my eye catches one or two elements. Sometimes I get drawn into fragments. So I started shooting details of some of my pieces, isolating parts from the whole. For some pieces it works nicely.

Detail from painted table base by Todd Fillingham.

Detail from paper table by Todd Fillingham

This last image is a little off-putting I think. It is really not out of focus, this is how the print looks on the table base.

Another way that seems to work for me to shoot some of my work is to include some of the context or enviroment that the piece is in. Sometimes I like the environment to be a little undefined. Here’s a sketch for a carving.

Drawing by Todd Fillingham for a carving done in mahogany.

Resin nude on Paper Base Table, both by Todd Fililngham

And sometimes just shooting the piece in room it is shown in when the light is just right is OK.

Boy With Kite by Todd Fillingham

And this last piece I had to “photoshop” the background.

Resin, wire and cloth figure by Todd Fillingham

I’ll get back to that post about the next table I’m working on soon.

Oops, I wanted to add this painting as well.

Milwaukee Art Museum, art and wilderness

I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in an online chat today with the new, incoming director of the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), Daniel Keegan. The format was casual and the event was obviously meant to introduce Mr. Keegan to the Milwaukee community.

Here’s my 2 cents.

Q: Todd Fillingham of Milwaukee – The MAM has a unique relationship to Lake Michigan. Beyond Calatrava’s kinetic, architectural expression of this how do you envision the influence of MAM’s wonderful location in the shaping of future shows and programming?

A: Daniel T. Keegan - Thanks Todd. No question that the total environment of MAM includes its beautiful surroundings, parks and the lake. The Board and staff of the Museum have begun exploration of how the outdoor environment can be further developed as part of the Museum experience. I will pick this up as one of the opportunities ahead.

I thought Mr. Keegan, gave a good answer, especially since he was responding quickly and had many topics to respond to. My question however sought to go deeper than simply expanding the museum experience into the outdoors. I was thinking particularly about how this extraordinary work of architecture is sited within this city.

The significance of this location cannot be overlooked. Prior to the Calatrava addition the building designed by Eero Saarinen was and still is momentous not only because of it’s design but also because of it’s site. I do not want to discuss the relationship between architecture and site here, what I do want bring up though is the relationship between a building that houses and displays art, a great building that houses and displays art and this particular location.

The MAM is situated right at the water’s edge. At the edge of a great lake, one of the Great Lakes, Lake Michigan. This juxtaposes an institution dedicated to one of the civilized world’s highest accomplishments with the wild. For Lake Michigan is a wilderness. And yet this is not completely disharmonious, in fact it reflects a relationship between civilization and wilderness that art mediates. Cryptozoic impulses infuse art. Feral energy animates art. “Fear no art” the bumper sticker says, but who among us faces art unprotected, unshielded, undressed?

Art museums also govern much of the relationship society has with art, they create the means by which most people evaluate art, they offer access to art, they influence the creation of new art, they are gate keepers. MAM is at the gateway to the city of Milwaukee. Traveling from the wilderness into the heart of the city travelers must cross this threshold.

Carving/ Sculpture

Two views of another type of carving I do. This is a figure I carved as a gift for a very dear friend. My previous post got me thinking about my wood carvings. Now I really need to get back to work in the shop.

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I highly recommend…

I opened my latest issue of The Surfer’s Journal last night. I always have to wait until I can sit down for at least an hour to open that magazine, because it takes me at least that long before I can tear myself away from it, at least. Even if you are not a surfer I highly recommend opening at least one issue sometime. I love the paper they print on, the images are magnificent and the writing stands head and shoulders above most “surf writing”.

This December- January 2007-2008 issue has a story about Tom Killion’s woodblock prints. He uses what he refers to as a “faux ukiyo-ë” method of printing. The Surfer’s Journal prints full page images of his work. Really, go find this.

Although I don’t really have the time I went on a web search for more information on Japanese style woodblock printing as it rekindled my interest in it. I use to do some woodblock printing, even printed our wedding invitations on a press I made from a wringer washer roller-wringer. Here’s a good website on Japanese woodblock printing how-to.

Another highly recommended item is again Bob Reitman’s radio show- see my links.

I’ve got to run now, I need to buy some wine before Holly and I go for our run.

Why Art?

This mornings New York Times’ Science section has great article : “The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start” by Natalie Angier. She takes up Ellen Dissanayake’s thesis that art “did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many”. Dissanayake goes on to say: “Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls ‘artifying,’ people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin.”

I say- Yes! And I say that this idea goes a long way to explain the friction and dissonance between art’s core and the exclusivity that many have and are trying to extract from art. It is such a shame that artists are forced to hang on to the hierarchical stratifications imposed on them by galleries and dealers just to be able to survive when art is so conducive to healing so much of the social fragmentation resulting from late 20th century materialism. Art grows from the roots of the mother-infant bond according to Dissanayake and others. Traditional and early cultures benefited from nurturing this primal power. Should we not as well?

My mother painting

Me

As I lay in her womb.

Intrepid

My Microtek 4850 scanner has an attachment for scanning slides. It does a pretty good job on slides that are not very dark, but on dark slides it adds a lot of noise that is hard to edit out. In working on my new web site I’ve been going through a lot of old slides and a lot of old digital images. I found a few slides of a piece I did some time ago as a commission for a fund raiser. It was auctioned off and I’ve lost track of it now so these slides are all I have of it.

I think you can get idea of the piece even with all the image noise.

Here’s a scan of slide I did in the same session. It’s of one of my 3 legged stools. This was sold through a gallery.

You can see the difference in image quality between the two scans. It must be that the stool slide had a lot of light.

Over the years I’ve done quite of few of these three legged stools all based on the stools of Wharton Esherick. As a matter of fact here’s a set of 3 I recently made on a commission basis.

OK, why am I posting stools and mobiles? Maybe it’s because I think of the stools as sculpture. I really like the carved seats, each one is unique and they are a sculptural element that you interact with. Also, I like the contrast between the sensuous carved stool seats and the flat, metal elements in primary colors of the the mobile.

Sitter2, Fall

Sometimes, especially as winter approaches, it seems like you get very tired.

This is the same model as in Sitter. My drawing instructor at the time said that a lot of figurative artists will try hard to avoid drawing or painting the hands and feet of their model. They’re not easy, this was as good as I could ever get, at least back when I was taking class.

Fall leaves and a cast concrete piece I have yet to name.

Here’s a little Miles Davis to go with this post.

sitter

I’ve brought a drawing I did some time ago in from home to repair the frame and thought I’d take a picture of it and post it today. There’s a little key stoning as I didn’t quite get the optimal set up for shooting it but I’ve cropped it so you won’t really notice it.

 

I drew this back in 1983 while taking a course in figure drawing at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. This model was great for what I was trying to express in my figures. I have another drawing I did of him that I actually like better than this one and I hope to shoot it soon.

 

 

 

There is something about figure drawing that changes the way my brain works, the way it looks at things and the way I draw. I need to do more of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Master in the art of living…

The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does. leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.

-Zen Buddhist Text

-page 41, volume sixteen, number four of “The Surfer’s Journal” , a magazine worth every penny, surfer or not.

Other’s have said this or have quoted this (google) but this magazine has such a nice way of presenting it.

update:

I flinched a little at the epigrammatic-ness of the above post, I’m not usually prone to passing epigrams. However, after writing about entropy below I felt a need to try for a little balance.

Making things for other people requires a viewpoint that considers the end, the final product and a completion date. Much of how I like to live my life is with a viewpoint of the path, the moment, the dance as it unfolds. Somewhere in between is where I fall.

Whether the above was originally said by James A. Michener, a Zen master or the guy next door (well, in my case I can hardly believe he’d say this) it works for me in my balancing act of business, life, art, fun, work.

Reclining figure 1

Orca got hauled and I have a little time to post something. Here’s a drawing I did, then scanned and manipulated, then printed out and put up on my wall for awhile, scanned again and have posted here. It’s part of a series.

Todd

P.S. Here’s a link to a figurative carving I have up on my current web site.

The wall.

I’ve just started this blog by uploading a header image taken from my studio wall.

Weber’s airline chair, Giacometti’s “le Nez”, a glass head by Vallien and a post card of Narendra Patel’s work along with a navigational chart of the entire Lake Michigan have somehow managed to stay up on that wall for many years. Many other things have come and gone.

I design and make custom furniture. I also make sculpture and do some painting. Weber, Giacometti, Vallien and Patel are just a few of the people I look to when I’m searching for inspiration.

Today I am in the midst of creating a new web site. My current site, Fillingham Art Furniture Design is the third iteration but has been unchanged for far too long. I created this last version in Dreamweaver and dread re-learning all of that again. I thought I might step away from the site for a while. Something of another wall seems to be blocking me.

For a while I’ll be writing about getting the new site up, my plans for it, some design ideas for furniture I will show on it and some ideas about how I’ll sell the furniture through the site. Soon I’ll write about furniture design, construction, working with clients as well as fresh water surfing, and sailing. I’d also like to write about making mobiles, resin sculptures, carved wood,  and figure drawing.  That’s just for beginnings.

Todd Fillingham