Posts Tagged ‘pop art’

In the studio January 17, 2010: Abstract pop art?

Sunday, January 17th, 2010
abstract pop art
Work in progress: A painting called Hypermodic Spastaculatron, as of 5pm on January 17, 2010. Lots of fluorescent paint going on. Is it abstract pop art, or something entirely different?

The latest news from my studio is this:

My Spring/Summer 2010 collection of paintings is officially “on.” Projected launch date is May 15, 2010.

This will be a decidedly “maximalist” series of paintings. (See more in this style in my maximal abstract art gallery.) This will be a departure from my Fall 2009 Collection, which was focused completely on minimal, geometric compositions.

I am not sure whether labels from the 20th century, such “abstract” and “pop art” really define what I’m painting. (”Abstract pop art” doesn’t quite work, either!) What I’m painting is something new, something that defies categorization, something that hasn’t been seen before. I’m gathering new shapes, patterns, and colors and throwing them into the future.

A New Year’s ambition of mine is to paint one painting per week. The Spring/Summer collection would therefore roll out with 16 pieces, if I’m lucky. Year to date, I have completed 0 paintings. Today, I am still working on version #3 of painting #1 in the collection, shown above. I shall persist.

abstract pop art
Choosing my colors: In the studio on Saturday, January 16

All of this considered, I want to show you progress on my work as best as I can. Yet, I also want to keep the collection under wraps until the launch date. Therefore, I shall offer you glimpses of paintings in progress, when available. Just like above.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by.

— Grant Wiggins

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Minimalism meets pop art

Monday, December 8th, 2008

Last week’s production included two paintings (10 x 16 inch, or 25.4 x 40.6 cm) studies inspired by the SEPTA logo.

pop art minimalism

I’ve posted both to flickr. Above is Spectral 2, which seems to me a bit packaging-inspired, even though that’s not the case. Midway into making it, I decided not to flood the perimeter of the canvas with red; instead, the red merely outlines the yellow and white stripes. So perhaps I will begin to pursue a middle-ground between minimal design and graphic design, voyaging back into packaging-inspired works. I feel as if I have been searching for a combination … and I know the floodgates will open when I discover it.

In other news:

• I think I’ve devised the perfect bright red, which has the most intense luminosity of bright red ink. It’s one part naphthol red light, one part fluorescent red. The result is excellent, although it requires six coats. This color lacks the overt fluorescence of fluorescent red, and is more opaque. Completely eye-popping!

• I enjoyed reading this article about Sol LeWitt at Mass MoCA, in yesterday’s New York Times

• I found the Julian Schnabel interview on 60 Minutes compelling last night. Schnabel utterly lost it when Morley Safer breathed mention of critic Robert Hughes. His reaction was visceral. See for yourself here. My take-away was this: If you care that much about what others write and say about your art, you’re probably making art for the wrong reasons. It’s hard to see someone get wound up by a critic. Focus on making the art instead. Make art for yourself. That should be reward in itself. To hell with the rest.

Wishing you happiness and the causes of happiness,
Grant

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Another painting just finished!

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

I’m happy to say that I just finished An Error Occurred While Processing This Directive yesterday, a photo of which is shown below. I’m not sure where the idea came from or what it all means, but I’m stoked that I got it done and I’m ready to move on to the next idea rolling around in my brain!
another painting just finished
On that note, a couple of weeks back I came across a fantastic article in New York Magazine titled “Has Money Ruined Art?” Author Jerry Saltz raises some important questions about what’s going on in the “art world” (a term I have never been comfortable with) today: students charge $25,000 for paintings, art collectors view pieces as currency, “third-rate product” by “second-rate artists” is going for half a million dollars U.S.

Reading this article, I wondered to myself what I’ve been missing out on, if anything, considering how that kind of talk is completely foreign to me. I deliberately chose to live in Phoenix, rather than move to New York, because 1.) I don’t care what’s going on in the “art world” and 2.) the quality of sunlight in Phoenix is phenomenal. There’s nothing like the Arizona sun striking fluorescent paint.

Ultimately, I have chosen a life that is not affected by market pressures. I can paint whatever I want. And I think it’s totally appropriate for so much boring, insipid art to command high values. That’s typical. The “art market” (another term I dislike) has never made sense to me. The quality of a work of art and its value rarely match up. What’s more, wealth does not guarantee taste. Lots of mansions are filled with utterly hard-to-look-at works of art.

Mr. Saltz’s article also quoted art critic Peter Schjeldahl as saying that the excess of money flowing around has “allowed many artists to lose what should be the No. 1 lifelong fear of all artists: making a bad piece of art.” I’ve reflected considerably on this quote, and I respectfully take issue with it.

The process of making art, for me, is not a matter of good vs. bad. That kind of thinking is very Western, and needlessly reductive. I do not think of right versus wrong, or worry whether a painting will be good. At one point, I did, and it got me into considerable trouble. Rather, I see art-making as a process that starts with trusting oneself. You have an idea, you go with it. Don’t second-guess it. Just let the process be the guide. The self will shine through. Whether others will like what I make is another matter; I cannot control that. I simply try to enjoy the process of making. And if my work comes off as seeming like The Weirdest Art in the World, so be it.

To sum up, artists have to make art for themselves. Money, social prestige, critical praise, biennials — all of that just messes things up, in my opinion. And that’s why I live completely off the “art world” map.

And so I will leave things there. As always, I wish you happiness and the causes of happiness.

— Grant Wiggins

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Synthetic Landscape showing in Global Warming, starting Saturday

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
Synthetic Landscape by Grant Wiggins
Set for the trip: Synthetic Landscape in my studio on Sunday afternoon.

On Monday, Olivia and I drove to and from the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, delivering Synthetic Landscape for the upcoming Global Warming: Artists Speak show.

A 742-mile round trip. Left at 8am (was planning on borrowing my in-laws’ van, but the painting was three inches too long, so we had to hustle to Enterprise to rent a cargo van, which worked brilliantly, but we departed two hours later than planned) and returned to Tempe at 9pm. It was a haul.

(Yes, I am fully aware of the irony of driving a van — which gets 15 mpg on highways and consumed approximately 50 gallons of gas during the round trip — to a show about global warming. There and back, the van emitted about 1,000 lbs. of CO2 emissions. I hope it was worth it.)

But I must say that the people at OCCCA are supernice. Had a pleasant chat with Laura Hines-Jurgens, the curator of Global Warming, and Barbara Thompson, director of exhibitions. Very enthusiastic and cool people. I’m really glad to be a part of the show.

Things have been a bit overly hectic lately, with freelance writing work (a good thing) and fixing up Synthetic Landscape (not such a good thing). I devoted Saturday to repainting parts of Synthetic Landscape that I was never happy with. The uneven sheen in some of the paints I used (despite matte medium), especially in the “Chevron mountains” part, had been irritating me for about three years. So I repainted the dark blue stripe, the green grass, the orange in the Gulf logo, and the light blue sky. In all the colors are much more intense, and I’m really happy about that.

OCCCA is spacious and historic gallery (was once an auto showroom, going back to the 1930s). I found downtown Santa Ana quite charming, as well. I recommend the completely restorative peach and banana smoothie at The Gypsy Den.

You will find Synthetic Landscape featured on the homepage of both OCCCA and the Santa Ana Arts District’s site (santaanaartsdistrict.com).

Global Warming: Artists Speak will open at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art this Saturday (September 1) at 6:30pm. More details at occca.org. Sadly, though, I won’t be attending the opening. The show runs through Saturday, September 29.

Until next time, I wish you happiness and the causes of happiness,

— Grant Wiggins

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On minimalism and pop art: Two new small paintings

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

Here are a couple of paintings that I started over the weekend and just finished. They’re both 9 x 12 inches. I wish the fluorescent paint (the pink in the yet-to-be-named piece at left and the orange in the piece at right) showed up better, but I think you get the idea.

I love fluorescent paint! There’s nothing like how it glows at twilight or in a dimly lit room.

Minimalism and Pop Art

Minimalism and pop art

Meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about a rethinking of minimalism that I saw in Art in America a couple of years back. At the onset of his essay, Pepe Karmel writes, “Together with Pop art, Minimalism continues to provide the basic language of contemporary art. It has become the great patriarchal symbol against which artists and critics rebel, championing Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Realism or Neo-Mad Magazine, only to succumb to Minimalism’s repetitious, all-embracing spell. But what is this art that retains such a hold on us?”

It’s funny now, but for a long time — especially in 2003, when I was first getting into minimalist art — I saw minimalism and pop art as polar opposites. Minimalism somehow ascetically negated popular culture. I used to agonize — I thought I had to choose one approach over the other.

From my current point of view, however, minimalism and pop art are complementary. They overlap, even — and the paintings you see above are proof. Fluorescent paint is, in my opinion, a pop art medium. It’s a commercial material, used to grab attention on windows, signs, and stock cars. But one can easily apply fluorescent paint to a minimalist composition, like the painting you see on the right.

Further, with vector-based software programs like Illustrator, minimalist and pop art compositions can come from the same place: one’s screen. The end product is just a matter of adding or subtracting graphical elements.

Ultimately, however, I’m not entirely sure how useful it is to talking about minimalism and pop art, anyway. I’d rather be talking about genres of the future — what’s going to happen, not what happened in 1964. So everything I just wrote is kind of moot. But wait, that’s being postmodern!

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Wiggins

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