Explanations are the traitor of art according to Jonathan Jones of the Guardian’s art&architecture blog. Jones actually has one or two good things to say in this post, but you wouldn’t know it by the first two sentences. “Serious art defies easy interpretation, and artists should resist the call to explain themselves,” he starts with. “It is a vice of second-rate art to come with its own eloquent explanation attached.”

The term “serious art” always throws up red flags for me. I know there are hobbyists who dabble in painting, retirees who pick up a brush and paint from their back porch because they don’t know what to do with themselves after retiring. Bella Vista, Arkansas — a retirement village in my own county — seems to have plenty of these.

Yes, I know that was a bit of a harsh example, but the point is that there’s a difference between people who paint for relaxation and people who paint because they have to. It’s in the latter’s blood to be visually creative. They are restless and incomplete if they don’t have the time or opportunity to regularly be in their studio. However, Jonathan Jones doesn’t seem to be segregating hobbyists from those born with artistic passion. From what I can tell he’s referring specifically to the passionate types.

Further, he implies in no subtle terms that serious art is a certain kind of art by using Jackson Pollock as an example. Pollock is largely representative of 20th century art — however myopic this point of view may be — which is a very small slice of the millennial pie. I happen to like Pollock’s drip series, but using him and other expressionists as an example leads one to believe that the only kind of serious art is cutting edge (to a fault, in my opinion), always looking for the newest thing. Also implied is that serious art is only non-representational art. This is bogus as well.

Being modern, cutting edge or novel does not necessarily make for serious art. That said, it is good and important for artists to eagerly explore new ideas, new media, but they need to constantly remember that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Is art second-rate just because it comes with an eloquent explanation? Of course not. Judge the work on its own merits, please. If the artist wants to attach a few paragraphs of his or her inspiration and intent, let them. This has no bearing on the formal qualifications of the canvas, even if it might give viewers a different way to look at a painting.

So what does Jones get right in his post? Particularly this: “As soon as you start saying what people want to hear, adapting your art to the common sense political and moral platitudes of ordinary speech, you betray subtlety and poetry.” I’m not exactly certain what he means by “common sense political” speech, but I wholeheartedly affirm the importance of subtlety and poetry in art.

I am very happy to begin to post on this blog. This is the first time I have been given the opportunity to share some of my views regarding planning and urban design in this format.

A little about my background, I am originally from Lexington, Kentucky, where I lived for 16 years. I think it’s fair to say that many of my impressions regarding planning, in both the ills and successes, are formed from my time there. I went on to study in Colorado, where I received my Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Colorado at Denver. I presently work as the City Planner for the City of Siloam Springs, Arkansas.

I know that there is much to discuss and explain relating to my field of study and how it applies to aesthetics. I hope to address these soon in future blogs. I am excited to be on board with the blogger team and look forward to many future discussions, rants and dissertations!

I’m quite pleased with these two pieces, particularly the green one on the walnut “prairie.” They are a mid-fire buff clay that was given to me by a friend, and the terra sig and smoke took to it beautifully. The idea to put a cloud form made of clay over a laminated piece of wood as the horizon is something I first worked on back in 2001. I still have some of the abstract forms, but only one ever made it onto a prairie, and none of them were as refined as these.

The texture on the sides of the wood was an exploration of ways to approach the material other than the traditional sanding to a smooth surface. This was inspired in part, to be honest, by my occasional impatience and by observing the handmade details on our 100 year old upright piano. I made the texture using a brace (hand drill), hammer and nutpick or nail set, chisels and a strange shoemaker’s tool I salvaged from the Creekview Flats. The texturing turned out better over the walnut. The soft maple feathered more than I wanted, and the color just doesn’t show the marks off as well as the darker wood (though you can’t tell this from the photographs). The prairies are finished with beeswax.

Both of the clay forms reference pileus clouds. I like these works, along with another very similar form not pictured here, well enough to hold them back from the Etsy store at this point in hopes of getting them into a gallery show in the near future.

Now I just need to find said gallery show to submit them too!

From an NPR story earlier this week, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has used rhetoric which encouraged squatters to move onto the properties of wealthy land owners. Dozens of squatters squatted on the Hacienda Santa Teresa back in the year 2000. Instead of becoming angry, however, owner Alberto Vollmer welcomed the landless poor. Santa Teresa, a sugar cane farm known for producing some of South America’s best rum, has been in Vollmer’s family since 1885. He offered land and “home building expertise” to these homeless, working alongside Chavez’s government which is usually hostile towards the rich.

Instead of the squatters just throwing up shacks of found objects, Vollmer talks in the NPR spot about designing how this community would look. The neighborhood now contains 100 houses. In exchange, the homeowners pay state sponsored mortgages and see that their children go to school. From Santa Teresa’s website:

What began as an invasion of private property in February 2000, was transformed into a low-income residential development project. With the cooperation of the organized community, the Aragua state government and the leadership of Ron Santa Teresa, an agreement was reached to offer their own dignified homes to 100 families from Revenga County.

Vollmer’s actions are a breath of fresh air. Sure, a lot of wealthy people are philanthropically involved, but a project like this on his own property seems to be born of personal conviction more than social obligation. I may be stretching a bit, based on the few details the story actually conveyed, to make this statement, but for what it’s worth that’s my two pesos.

What if something similar were to happen in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), where a completely new city — Navi Mumbai — is being built next to the poorer old city. Navi Mumbai was planned back in 1972, and is a picture of wealth by any country’s standards. Real estate prices rival those of New York City and London. The new city took off during the recent economic boom in India. People are flocking to the city and making good money according to NPR’s Morning Edition. “Where will they spend that [money]?” asks the news editor at Navi Mumbai’s daily newspaper. “They need the malls. They need the food courts. They need the multiplexes. They need the theaters.”

Right.

Much of the city’s recent success can be attributed to Reliance Industries, which is investing “vast sums” of money in the metropolis. While I very much appreciate the attempt to create one of the largest planned cities in the world, I have to ask, “What is Reliance and its leader, Mukesh Ambani, doing to help the thousands of landless poor in old Mumbai? According to the NPR story, squatters’ shacks line the railway through the city — the most efficient way to navigate the Mumbai, if you can keep from falling out of the overcrowded trains. The new city destroyed the livelihood of poor fisherman by building, at sea level, on top of swamps they used to fish. Pollution in the nearby waters from the burgeoning area doesn’t help either.

I don’t know if Reliance and Ambani are or are not helping out the poor in their native India. They may already be. Regardless, they should look to Venezuela’s Vollmer as a good example.

The banner needs some work, but The Aesthetic Elevator Etsy store has reopened, again. Visit it via this link, or click on the screenshot below.

Pricing, as Tim Jones pointed out a week ago, isn’t much fun. I noted in the comments of that post my ceramics professor’s own philosophy. He said he’d rather price one of his platters at $10,000 and have nine to give away as opposed to selling all ten for $1,000. I like that philosophy, but it might not flush itself out in every circumstance. I haven’t used it in my Etsy shop at this point in time, to be sure. However, marking things too low shows a lack of confidence and personal valuation. Pricing too high comes across as pretentious. All things considered, the small sculptures I listed today are probably a good deal, in my opinion anyway, for starting out in earnest.

Tell your friends, or purchase a piece or to as a small meditative addition to your desk or bookshelf. You can find a few different works of mine at MissionaryArts as well, via this link.

Here’s a piece I started this afternoon from the sketch in the background. The banding wheel is new, a very nice tool.

This approach is something I’ve been wanting to attempt for a while now, larger in scale and with more realism than a lot of my recent works. I’m eager to see where it goes. I recently came across a glaze I’d like to try out for this work, after a cloud formation I observed and photographed a month or so ago.

I learned yesterday that I need a new evaporator coil for the air conditioner. This will cost roughly a third of an entirely new furnace/AC unit to purchase and have installed. Professionals seem inclined to replace the entire unit, which is a little more than half-way through it’s expected life-span at 11 years old. Their reasoning is mainly tied to the much greater efficiency offered by new models.

Of course, the decision for my wife and I boils down to a financial one. Herein lies a certain tension between paying more for a more efficient or more durable object when the bottom line says “no.”

I’m all about, in philosophy, a more durable and sustainable built environment, but it costs more, in money and time. It costs more to build a house that’s going to last for centuries than it does to throw up spec homes. It takes more time to involve an architect and wait for details that most mass developers forgo, such as a wonderful, authentic, masonry wood burning fireplace.

I would love to put in a newer more efficient air conditioner, but my savings account says that’s simply not gonna happen. Sadly, it’s easier to justify spending more for a new unit with a significantly higher SEER if you plan to be living in the house for a longer period of time. We don’t have the foggiest idea how much longer we’ll be in this little bungalow — it might be one year and it might be five — but the point is that I don’t like being cheap just because I might not receive the benefit of a certain purchase.

I imagine a lot of people are in a similar situation. We’d like to build sound and articulate homes. We’d like to save on utilities and live more sustainably by using higher efficiency appliances, solar panels and longer lasting, recyclable or less toxic roofing such as metal or tile. But our bottom line reiterates that’s simply not gonna happen.

To a degree, my wife and I have put ourselves in this position. We’ve chosen — very purposefully — at this point in life to work for a non-profit, and have therefore chosen a lower-class lifestyle than if I were to pursue graphic design or she were to pursue newspaper management in the “secular” world. Further, we’re not willing to go into debt as readily as most Americans seem to.

The tension, therefore, persists. I will, because I don’t feel like I have any other choice, pay for the repair instead of the improvement. The savings account wins.

I mentioned a couple months ago the struggle I have with posting my personal studio fare on a blog I hope to be a place for some discussion beyond technical issues related to my craft. Like I said, I’m comfortable at this point with mingling the deeper thoughts and my personal work. This may change in the future, however, especially depending on what The Aesthetic Elevator looks like with it’s additional contributors.

Then again, I hope this will be a place for future contributors to share their own work as well. So we may just roll with it.

The following images are from a smoke firing in my electric kiln.

I’m still perfecting this technique, but it’s coming along. Some of the time I don’t use enough newsprint to get enough color and variation. I’ve begun using other organic matter as well for the smoke, including sawdust, leaves and last night a large dead beetle that seemed to give a nice sheen to one of the funnels.

Adding: Julie asked for more about the technique in the comments below, and I thought I’d elaborate on what I know here in the post instead of in the comments.

I usually only fill the bottom of my old electric kiln with pots or sculptures for smoke firings. I run the bottom element on high for 45 minutes to an hour (an hour is probably longer than necessary), let it cool and remove the works. Some of the smoke will discolor the bottom of the kiln, but this goes away during the next higher temperature firing.

This is very similar to a post from last week, but I was struck again with a sense of time-related frustration which led to this post.

I spent a significant amount of time this weekend glazing and firing. I mixed up the glaze from my line blends that looked most promising, but it didn’t come out like the test at all. This is a bit frustrating in my present situation, mainly because I don’t feel like I have time to experiment at length — much as I might like to.

And I still haven’t begun to market my works, the finished ones that I like. The Local Flair gallery won’t be opening until this Fall (she had hoped to open this past Spring), I haven’t begun to look into local shows and still don’t like any options I’ve found for an online venue. I’d like to have my own website — I know what I want it to look like — but I don’t have the time to learn how to do it myself and don’t have the money to pay someone else. Thus, I’ll probably land on Etsy for the time being. It’s aesthetics and price are good, even if the management isn’t.

In May I interviewed friends who are on a 12 year journey preparing to work in missions aviation. They said some good things about being flexible in times of discouragement, keeping your goals while altering your course. I will keep plugging away. But let it be known that this aspiring, day-job artist is not of the most patient kind.

Here are my first attempts at getting back into creating my own glazes since getting back into ceramics in the last 18 months. They are a series of cone 04 line blends based on two very simple glazes I had written down in my notes from college, one gloss and one matte.

I like some of the things happening on either end of the spectrums represented here. 2% iron and 2% rutile worked quite beautifully in the matte glaze. For the gloss, the manganese and the combination of cobalt and rutile in higher percentages are quite nice. The photographs don’t convey the subtleties very well. I want to keep pushing these glazes with some different combinations, but probably need to acquire a few more colorants before going at it again.

My electric kiln supposedly has the ability to fire to cone 10, although I haven’t fired it this high yet and probably won’t until I buy new elements. High fire glazes generally have more depth, more complicated surfaces, desired by many ceramic artists. For the time being, I’m looking forward to the challenge of creating subtle and beautiful glazes in a simple electric kiln.

I hope to be able to, some day, do some soda firing again. Design-Realized did an ‘expose’ of sorts on her blog of the inside of a soda kiln in a post called Up Close and Personal: Soda kiln. It’s worth looking at her pictures. A friend who is building a house just outside of town is also interested in building a wood kiln on his property. Apparently a new technology, something called Kaowool, can be used in place of bricks. It’s a lot less expensive than spending $3-4 on single firebricks to piece together a kiln according to my local ceramic supplier.

From the International Herald Tribune, an article titled Dwindling art supplies generate blindness - and erratic prices. This interesting, if unfathomable, piece ends with this paragraph:

Art lovers with millions to spare, do not despair in these lean times. Even when there is not much left to sift through, great works of art can still be found, if only because so few buyers have the eye needed to recognize them.

The article basically laments how wealthy collectors bid up mediocre works by popular artists while overlooking better paintings by lesser known craftsmen. Regardless, the numbers being thrown around are the kinds of money I think of retiring on — after giving most of it away.

But I’m not writing this post in response to the numbers or to desperate connoisseurs shelling out boatloads of clams just so they can say they own a Monet. I’m writing this to ask whether or not we can we create more of a sense of balance in the art world, with more reasonable prices and local markets. This was where my mind went after reading the title of the aforementioned article.

It’s OK that galleries, museums and individuals express such desire, via their wallets, for certain works of art by categorically revered artists. But, and this is really just brainstorming here, isn’t there a better way for all of this money to be spent? Why can’t these cash laden art lovers do a little more research and help out the quality up-and-coming local artist by purchasing his or her canvases. Not just paintings by the dead ones. What if they spent a little less on antiques and a little more on new works?

Just a thought. A rant. An aspiring artist’s ramble. Sure I have a vested interest in how collector’s spend their money on the work of living painters and sculptors. But, seriously, aren’t the prices being paid for these masterworks more than just a little bit out of hand?