it is raining, and all my time is spent in a windowless room with white walls

this is news, since I live in northern california where it never rains. Well today, like yesterday was spent working on the world in a jar installation, and what an installation. The legs for the table which is laid out above just arrived today, and this large snaking table is designed to hold 850 plus photgraphs in a jar. pretty much this installation will take up most of my time over the next week until the show opens on tuesday March 6th. I have been thinking about the donald judd prints I saw at the Phoenix museum the week before last. I have been thinking about these prints for two reasons; 1) I have never really seen these prints installed in person and seeing them arranged on the wall in linear stacks made me realize how sweet they were to use the print paper as an object and then to display them as such rather than as simple print images. 2) I was really pumped about going to new york and seeing some art so I have had to put that new york enthusiasm into the little bit of art i saw in phoenix.

so busy, but yet nothing seems to be getting done

yet another deeply introspective artist portrait

i've been playing around with different progressions for the lead cornI continue to clean up and refine this piece pretty soon i will either throw it away or have it powder coated


60"x60", I think this is the first square format I have made since 2001, I kind of like the square maybe I will make more

I have been spinning my wheels with alot of my work, but I did manage to get the coffee cups into the kiln, and hope to have them in metal by next week. I continue to miss opportunities to proof my print, but I did manage to get this piece cleaned up a little bit, and made another rust print. This time I am mixing it up a bit by trying a square format piece, this one is 60"x60",a very satisfying scale. Today at work we close the faculty show and begin getting ready for the world in a jar show, 850 pictures in a jar on a table, yay, I can't wait. I hope when I get some free time I can get into san francisco to see the brice marden retrospective at sfmoma. Marden is still one of my favorite painters and if you have an hour to waste, take the time to watch the charlie rose interview with him, in fact I will save you the trouble and embed the video here


I admit that brice is a bit of a blowhard but I really like his overly romantic views. The interview is a bit tedious, and I had to watch it in two seperate sittings but it was well worth it. Brice is part of the original yale mafia which includes, eva hesse, chuck close, richard serra, and various other notable artists of the 60's who got their mfa at yale, back when art was a little dumber than it is today.

I went around my Az to get back to my elbow

well I would have been blogging the caa conference right now but mother nature had other plans. I left tuesday night with a scheduled layover in Phoenix, but when I got off the plane in phoenix I was greeted with the news that all flights into new york had been canceled, so the airlines arranged for me to get a "distressed passenger rate" in a phoenix hotel. I was all scheduled to fly out the next afternoon at 4, when I went to sleep tuesday. I thought in the spirit of the conference on wednesday i would kill my time by going to the museum in phoenix. The phoenix museum of art was amazing, a very solid collection, they even had some purchases, like a tom firedman piece from the show he just had at gagosian in LA.
here are some images from the phoenix museum of art


yet another josiah macelheney, man these things just pop up everywhere


this one is still life with preparators tools


this is an anish kapoor piece titled "please do not touch, or take pictures"


a bronze bob in the sculpture garden
and as a bonus they were doing all kinds of crazy road and sidewalk work in phoenix which created some of the most amazing accidental sculpture i have seen in a long while






in phoenix the clouds just sort of stay put, like this one resting on top of the light pole


this building was beautiful and so was the next one



I was really pumped to continue my art experience with more new york viewing, and then i got the call that all flights had been canceled into new york and i should come to the airport immediately. When I got back to the airport, after much debate and discussion, the airline counter agaent declared it "a futile trip",which is the airline industry term for when they send you back home. So 23 hours later and one time zone later I touched back down in san jose. To comfort myself I have been working on my job applications, and putting together a proposal for next years conference in dallas. also some comfort is to be gotten from the caa conference blog, which provides spotty coverage at best, oh well today I will just be going to work and preparing the display table for the world in a jar show which is coming up next in the gallery. And in case you were wondering, after being on hold with travelocity's office in india, I was given a full refund for my airfare and hotel, and my friend james of ars virtua was able to use my conference packet, so I at least didn't lose my money but I still would have rather been in new york.

remembering michael tyzack 1933-2007

Michael Tyzack was quite a character. He was a British abstract painter, and one time chair of the art department at the college of charleston in south carolina. I was fortunate enough to have worked with Tyzack, and to even have had the chance to feel a certain closeness to him. I will never forget how he seemed to have a perfectly clean linen suit for every occasion, and although he was a painter there never seemed to be a speck of paint anywhere on his outfit. He was very supportive of me and my friends when we were students of his in college. I have to imagine he had seen hundreds of artists before us, but I always felt like we had his undivided attention, and he seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing. I remember one of the first group shows I was involved in off campus, Tyzack stepped in at the last minute with a generous sum of money to pay for the opening his words went something like
"you should celebrate boys!"
Those who knew Tyzack, knew he was nothing if not generous. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Tyzack was the strict discplined way in which he dressed, painted and conducted class being diametrically opposed to his other passion in life, Jazz. Tyzack was an acomplished jazz trumpeter, but above all he encouraged all his students to push ahead with their work and to make something of themselves.
I have Lost, given away, destroyed or sold all of the work I made in college, save for one painting. The painting is a small 10x 14 inch simple abstract cityscape, nothing too spectacular, and it now resides on my bookshelf. After the news of Tyzack's death reached me yesterday the painting took on a new meaning. In my second year of painting at the college of charleston I took an independent study with Tyzack, and for our final critique he had me line up all the paintings I made that semester. It was december 2001, a particularly frenzied semester of painting, I think I hung no less than 30 paintings for him to look at. Tyzack sat down stroked his beard and said in his very dry british accent
" well Jonathan I don't know whether to tell you to slow down or speed up"
and then he chuckled his signature laugh and continued
"which one do you think is the best?"
I shrugged my shoulders and told him I really didn't like any of them, but I vaguely gestured to the small one in the middle,
he said "yes I rather like that one too."
The truth is I never thought much of this painting, until yesterday when I looked at it and all these memories came back to me. I will always owe Tyzack a debt of gratitude, the simple prodding and support he gave me has sustained me to this day. When I saw Tyzack this past summer I expressed to him my disappointment with Graduate school and how different it had been than the experiences I had before, In true Dr. Tyzack fashion he said "you thought it would be nirvana, but it was bananas". Again he always knew just the right thing to say, and I count myself among the fortunate who had the chance to work with this generous man.

been awhile/start spreading the news

I have been taking these source images...I don't know what they are the source for , but source image sounds cooler than snapshot of stuff that looked interesting to me.




I realized it has been a week or so since I wrote, which is weird i have been busy and feel very worn out. I booked my tickets for the caa conference in new york next week so that will be very exciting, new york i mean. I will get to see some art and some old friends i haven't seen in over a year. I will be doing a lot of gallery hopping and that will be nice to see some fresh art spaces, i feel like i know the sf moma and sj museum too well, you know not all white cubes are created equal. brooke and i rented this movie idiocracy by mike judge the guy who created beavis and butthead and king of the hill, it was very funny and disturbing like borat, because it was so true. I have also begun collecting what I consider new source imagery, don't ask me what they are the source for I don't know I am just collecting them maybe just for a body of photography, but I have been focusing on what catches my eye. I started making a little more headway on the portable consumer fetish box, which should be finished some time in march or april, I am not really worried about it I will finish it when I finish it. In the back of my mind is the vermont studio center residency, and I have a vague notion of how to use that time, but november is a long way away. brooke and I have decided to make our wedding brunch themed, which has us really excited and we think the date will be more like october .