"Ordinarily we do not make full use of our faculty for seeing...So much escapes our perception, either due to indolence, or because of our preoccupied thoughts, or simply because our visual sense has not been disciplined to more active and substantial use. Drawing is a discipline of vision. It heightens perception. Drawing = seeing, as we have already said, but the nature of the equation is complex and elusive; the complexity is compounded by misconceptions and the elusiveness increased by the ambiguity of words."                

- Edward Hill, The Language of Drawing

 Yes, words are tricky. They entice me to think that I can pin something down with them. They claim to stay put, but then they don't.

 The line that forms a letter and a string of letters represents a sound. The sounds talk to me. They buzz.

 The line that makes a form is just that; a form. It is absolutely silent. This drives some people crazy. Even me. I like to be reassured by sounds, by words. I even assign words to my forms - but they don't stick. I mean, they do for a few weeks sometimes or even months. Then they begin to slip. Just a little at first, and as soon as I notice I quickly pin them up again. But then when my back is turned they slip even more. They slink down the wall and wind up in piles on the floor underneath my drawings. Sometimes I pick them up and sometimes I just leave them there. I can always sort through them later. That's my excuse. And its a fair one. Nothing worse than an artist who talks about their work and never works.

 But the piles of words are getting bigger and bigger now. I can see that. They're getting noisy. I have to step over them to get to work. What can I do with them?

Its embarrassing to post my thoughts up here alongside my artwork. Its hard to know if this is because the nature of the internet publishing – ‘blogging’ ‘posting’ and such – makes it difficult to edit ones thoughts carefully. I know someone who assures his readers right in the title of his blog that his thoughts are likely to be stupid at times. This is one of the perils of the internet age: instantaneous publication. Little or no editing. No peer review. No time to rethink one’s speech or even to choose silence.

But there’s something even more disconcerting about doing this as an artist - about posting right here on my art website. Why is that? Is its because there is something about the artists who talks that defies our image of the modern artist as necessarily enigmatic, elusive and detached, like one of the many mute objects on display? Is communication un-artistic? Is allowing oneself to be reached, to be understood by anyone, anywhere, at anytime, not properly elite? Why is it so risky for an artist to be transparent? To be accessible in the same way that a writer is accessible?

Is it worth the risk?

I am deeply honored to be included in this exhibition. Curators Robert Cozzolino and Julien Robson have touched upon a most salient concept and context in which to present this work and I am frankly thrilled to be counted among some of my heroes in modern and contemporary figurative art.

Pictures of the Body

Location: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Dates:
February 5 - April 10, 2011
Curators:
Robert Cozzolino, Curator of Modern Art
Julien Robson, Curator of Contemporary Art

Description:
While artists in the past explored and recorded the body as a means of understanding its structure and operation, in recent decades contemporary artists have increasingly employed representations of the body as a means to address issues about the nature of the self and subjective identity. This installation drawn primarily from PAFA’s permanent collection brings together over 30 works that reveal the innumerable ways that artists have focused on the human body since the 1950s. In contrast to the earlier academic concern with anatomy as a source of verifiable visual knowledge, this renewed interest in the body employs anatomical and medical imagery for differing philosophical ends. Understanding that the body is not a singular anatomical entity but is layered into a complex socio-political, scientific, and cultural network, contemporary artists now employ the human form in their work as a way of engaging questions about unity, fragmentation, and the mediation of the body in contemporary society.

Artists featured in this installation include: Sue Coe, Rafael Ferrer, Gregory Gillespie, Sidney Goodman, Jenny Kanzler, Jules Kirschenbaum, Paul Lamantia, Philip Pearlstein, Paul Pletka, Honoré Sharrer, TODT, John Wilde, Richard Wilt and others.

Image: 'Gastromancy II," Michael Shelby Edwards, charcoal and graphite on rag paper, 2008.

Hello my friends,

I'm happy to announce a showing of my work at Artists' House Gallery in Philadelphia once again. These nine miniature paintings were all created in my new studio in Seattle and shipped back to Philadelphia to be included in a large exhibition of small works from various artists connected to the gallery. To give you a sense of the Artists' House history and mission, here is a statement recently released by the gallery:

Artists’ House was founded in 1991 with the mission of creating a gallery that could help emerging artists get a start in the art world. The secondary, but equally important role, was to bring excellent art to Philadelphia art lovers at prices that were affordable.

Twenty years later, our mission remains unchanged,  except that many of our emerging artists have now become established artists.  Some have established reputations and connections far beyond Philadelphia, but continue to exhibit at Artists’ House.

This is great venue that has been supportive of my work ever since I emerged from the Pennsylvania Academy in 2008.

Responding to the call for small works, I used the opportunity to make some rather frank little oil sketches in preparation for upcoming larger paintings. The images may reveal my increased interest in mythological and religious themes from the Western tradition, weaving these ideas in a very personal way with my autobiography. The show opens Friday, January 7th, and I will be present at the reception from 6-8pm. Work remains on veiw through the month of January.

Thanks to all who participated in the first Intensive Drawing for Beginners class. Everyone made wondeful progress and I was frankly overwhelmed by the positive feedback I received from students emailing me between classes. Here's one such message that I received from a student just aftert the first lesson:

"Michael, your Thursday class was fabulous. Your teaching is excellent and the group is wondeful. I learned so much from just this last class I was up until midnight drawing afterward!"

-Lon Marie Walton

Thanks so much Lon Marie. I absolutely love sharing what I've learned in my own practice with others. I hope to continue to bring you the best possible instructuion and support through future fine art classes and lessons.

I would encourage anyone to contact me with questions or comments about these classes, and remember, the next Intensive Drawing for Beginners class starts Thursday, October 14th, and Classical Figure Drawing starts Friday, October 15th at Artist and Craftsman in Seattle. Please give me a call (206) 383-9655 or contact me through the website to get more information or to register. Looking forward to another great cycle of classes!

Cheers,

Michael

As some of you may know, I've had great success working and teaching private art lessons from my studio in Philadelphia, and am now continuing my practice here in Seattle. In addition to giving private lessons, I'm happy to be able to offer group classes as well, thanks to the cooperation of Artist & Craftsman's newly remodeled classroom facility. While private lessons are still the best way to improve rapidly and dramatically, the benefit of a group class is that it reduces cost for the student.

This class is called Intensive Drawing for Beginners, its open to adults as well as mature teens, and is especially suited to anyone interested in seriously improving their basic drawing skills.

The registration deadline is August 23^rd, so if you’re interested, contact me right away to reserve your place.

Just completed a small intimate painting called, “The Prince Who Emerged from a Basin of Milk”.  Its an image I’ve had in my mind for the past year. Actually that’s not quite true. I think it’s a core image for me. To be honest, the image first became manifest as far back as 2005, where this face emerged in a portrait I made from my memory of a young man that I new once in Seattle. He modeled for me many times that year ( I was in college at the University of Washington at the time) and was the basis of a whole series of drawings that I exhibited there. But the real result of all those studies of him was that I started to realize how I could reveal a remembered image with a certain quality of accuracy and attention to truthfulness by a combination process of observing my memories as if they were objects in my field of vision, observing the changes in the materials as I worked them, and remembering the topography of the subject with my hands. From that process, I later developed the process that resulted in what I think of as the ‘Navel Drawings’ – all those works on paper which sustained my attention through graduate school.

By the time I picked up the paint brushes again in 2008, learning to observe remembered visual percepts had given way to learning to observe envisioned or invented percepts. That’s why today my paintings are developed largely by invention, but enriched with intercession of models, mirrors and other visual guides.

But some pieces are just envisioned from beginning to end, like this one. My model is a combination of mythic and actual figures and personas that I have known and observed well. The content is personal – signaled by a bodily attitude that I respond to psychologically, emotionally, and physically, with a yearning for something to come. That attention to ‘emergence’ is a core theme in all of my adult work. I first saw discussed in literature when I given to read a little Heidegger in graduate school – his “Question Concerning Technology”, and always feel the pulse of it when I think of the Shroud of Turin, or catch a glimpse of the soapy limbs of a crucified-Christ.

As I was reading through a wonderful collection of Italian Folktales this year, I came across one called “The Foppish King” in which a young, handsome king becomes so vain about his looks that his bragging causes his wife, the queen, to grumble one day that there just might be some man more beautiful than him. He hears her comment and becomes enraged, challenging his wife to find a more beautiful man than he or her head will be cut off.

So she seeks help in this and eventually finds out that there is a prince, who is so beautiful that he must be looked upon through seven veils to shield people from his radiance. So the king and his wife go to see the prince, and beg his father to let them look in on him as he sleeps. As the veils are removed, his radiant beauty becomes so overwhelming that the king faints and eventually dies from shame.

The queen, having returned home, is so haunted by the vision of the sleeping prince that she is cannot rest until she sees him again. So a wise woman gives her three golden balls and instructions to place the golden balls into a basin of clean, pure milk. She asks the chambermaid to bring the basin of milk, and when she places the balls into it, the prince emerges out from the milk and is fully revealed to her gaze. Every night, she summons the prince to her chamber in this manner.

But one night, the demons whisper to the chamber maid, causing her to suspect that these meetings are evil. So the chambermaid grinds up some glass into a fine powder and mixes it into the milk before she brings it to the queen. This time, when the prince emerges, he is covered with blood from head to toe; the invisible glass shards cutting his flesh as he emerges through the tainted milk. Betrayed, the prince sees the queen believes it was she who hurt him, and renouncing his love for her, he disappears back through the basin of milk. The prince arrives back at his father’s house fatally wounded, and the whole kingdom shrouds itself in black waiting for their radiant prince to die.

I wont tell you the rest of the story. Suffice it to say that the image of ‘The Prince Who Emerged from a Basin of Milk’ is an one that bothered me in such a way when I read this story that I have spent the last year pushing it out of my mind, and have only just recently begun to name it and deliberately make work about it. This small piece is by no means the pinnacle of my efforts in handling this theme. I suspect that what has been evoked in my imagination through the story, connecting me yet again to such a rich ‘complex’ of images and meanings that I have only just begun to scratch the surface of it. But I made a conscious start in this little painting. It will be on display at the Artist House Gallery for the month of December 2009.

I keep going back to my artist statement and making slight modifications. The really sticky area, the place that keeps changing, is the part that makes me bother to draw or paint the body in the first place. In my effort to understand what it is that I’m up to when I start a piece, I’ve been paying close attention to how I talk about it. Because if I say it a certain way, and it irritates me, then I know its probably not completely accurate.

Fortunately, I picked up a copy of Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception, which is shedding quite a bit of light on the subject of what the artist is ‘up to’ from a psychological and even a physiological standpoint. This re-discovery of Arnheim is home sweet home for my mind because I picked up on this sort of ‘gestalt’ spirit when I was a student at the University of Washington. I knew Arnheim’s voice through my teachers because they knew him through theirs in and around the 1970s. Now I’m being given back some of the language that I had once found so impressive and fascinating as an undergraduate. It couldn’t have come at a better time. It was and is still exceedingly practical.

However, I don’t want to jump to any windy conclusions until I have made a thorough study of the book for myself. Suffice it to say that I’m onto something.

Today I found this remark in another classic I’m going through called How to Read a Book. Its applies to my situation in art, both in describing my work process and in the process of working itself. The author says of the subject:

“If he [the reader, or in this case, the artist] is sensitive to the difference between passages he can readily understand and those he cannot, he will probably be able to locate the [parts] that carry the main burden of meaning.

If we understand 'passages' to mean those found not only in our reading of literature but also in our reading of nature and of our own work, this remark rings true. It offers us a sound guideline that can be applied both during our work in the studio and in our subsequent thinking about our work. The authors then makes this remark which really startled me and made me smile:

… be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.”

Columbo couldn’t have said it better! We are to be detectives when making art as well as in thinking about our work. And after all, isn’t the study of art, if not the practice of art itself, an investigation of nature? 

Its very cold in Philadelphia at this time – its especially cold on the boat. This is probably a good thing because my studio is heated during the day, which makes it particularly inviting and well worth the train-ride into the lower northeast. I’m currently preparing for a group show in march – “Back to Cézanne” and another one in April – open themed. After spending the last three quarters of a year working exclusively on miniature panel paintings, I feel its time to begin opening up my work to a larger scale. I recently prepared several moderately sized birch panels (no smaller than 10 x 10 and no bigger than 24 x 24) and have started work on a larger canvas painting.

It’s been over two years since I worked on a canvas, and finding the springiness of the stretched canvas to be an unsatisfactory ground for my work, I decided to pull the staples out one by one and mount the bare canvas directly onto the wall of my studio - a method which I have never before attempted. I find now after working this way, that the piece is naturally taking on many of the material qualities of my dry media works on paper (I often refer to these as the “navel drawings”). I find now that while the oil paint and medium is more difficult to move than say, charcoal or pastel, with time and plenty of elbow-grease, the steel wool and sandpaper seem to move the particles of dry or semi-dry oil paint in a manner similar to that of the “navel drawings” and as a result the content of the painting is beginning to take on a very direct connection to those drawings.

This is a good thing. I’m looking for unity between the contents and processes involved in the “navel” drawings and those of my oil paintings, and this way of making oil painting, on body-sized, loose canvas mounted on the wall provides a clear solution to this.

At the same time, my waxing interest in early renaissance painting is taking me deeper into a world of firm smooth surfaces and deep, placid dream-like spaces filled with languid alabaster figures. I have no desire to compromise this world by scratching into it will steel wool any more than I would like to put a ground plane into the navel drawings and or make them anything less than ensoul-ed sheets of paper. The marriage of these two disparate ways of working is yielding some very promising offspring, but nothing so comprehensive as to supersede or replace either parent. For now these alchemical components are strongest each in their own original state, but the experimentation continues nonetheless.