Category: Education

Design, Art, and the Common Good

I’m working on a project with some friends, redesigning the Minneapolis Friends Meeting website. As we work through fonts, colors, patterns, and all those design decisions, I find myself thinking about what’s underneath it all. What are we really doing?

I think we’re designing something for the common good.

And as I’ve been thinking about that, this wonderful Milton Glaser video by Hillman Curtis came to mind. It’s one I showed my students every semester. I haven’t watched it since I retired, but seeing it again, I felt I had to share it.

I think there’s an important message here for artists, designers, and anyone who communicates. We have access to the human mind. And with that access comes an enormous responsibility. To do no harm. To be honest about what we’re communicating and why.

I suppose that’s where my Quaker testimony of integrity comes in.

As I continue working on this website, other designs, and my own artwork, I want to keep that responsibility in mind.

And then there’s Glaser’s reflection on the third act. Hearing it again, I get a little bit of chills.

Maybe all these thoughts don’t fit together perfectly. But somehow, in my own brain, they do.

Bill

Milton Glaser, by Hillman Curtis

Art Re-Education Revisited

I’ve been thinking about that phrase.

A few years ago, while attending Friends General Conference, I took a Zentangle workshop. Part of my interest was practical. As a teacher, I was always looking for things I could bring back to my students. At the same time, I was doing some spiritual searching of my own.

When I retired, my intention was simple. I thought I would return to the work I had left behind years earlier when I completed my MFA. While teaching, my focus had been on technology, my students, and teaching itself. I assumed I would pick up where my thesis left off and continue from there.

I did return to my thesis and to its central ideas: how perception and physiology affect our vision of reality.

What I discovered, however, was that too much had changed. The media I was working with had changed. My interests had changed. Instead of continuing where I left off, I found myself asking some of the same questions I had wrestled with in graduate school.

What is my art about?

What am I trying to say?

And what medium is best suited to saying it?

At some point, I began to wonder if I was engaged in a kind of re-education.

Looking back at those early pieces now, I can see that many of them focused on value, texture, repetition, and mark-making. At the time, I didn’t really realize what I was exploring, but now they feel a bit like exercises in learning how to see and do again. To me, that’s my art re-education.

What I do know is that one thing kept leading to another.

A drawing would spark an idea for the next drawing, and little by little my curiosity carried me beyond the boundaries of Zentangle itself. Questions about line and pattern turned into questions about color, surface, and different ways to make marks.

Before I knew it, ink led to watercolor, watercolor led to gouache, gouache led to colored pencil, digital work, and eventually oil paint.

The recent exhibition at Collective Z feels like a milestone along that path. With the show entering its final week, I’ve found myself taking a breath and wondering what comes next.

And perhaps that’s the point: I’m still asking questions.

I’m not sure where the path leads from here, but I’m still eager to follow it.

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.”

— Paul Klee

What’s Bill Hendricks Been Doing?

My Sketchbooks, Hard Drives, and Blog are my Diaries.

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary”
~ Pablo Picasso

Six weeks is a long time away from my blog, and hope other artists will want to post on ArtChangeslives(Dot)Com to share their art and experiences of how art has changed their lives.

I put together a collage of images of my work. After working with Blender for a couple of years, uploading some of my Blender 3D objects into Second Life, and earning a couple of grants, I see a path of combining some of my tactile work with my 3D work to produce sort of a hybrid work works for the Metaverse and conventional viewing. Mainly, it involves the viewer,  akin to working in a more traditional gallery or exhibition hall. 

In grad school (MCAD), I produced several installations, and I was attracted to the participatory nature and how visitors could interact with them. Kara Walker and other artists engaged the visitor by incorporating the viewers’ shadow into the work, creating a relationship to the work that mere viewing does not necessarily achieve.

So, in the past few weeks, I have not created work that has been completed, which I normally post. I was also concerned about posting work that was not completed. I found that it kind of destroys the Ta-da moment. Hmm… I wonder how important that might be.

I am on my way to completing a project in Blender/Second Life. It is a simply built house that will be used in Second Life as a skybox. A skybox is a floating home on a parcel of digital space. The house is pictured in the image below, and you can see the documentation and the progression of the build here: Learning Blender Better. In short, I chose to produce a simple building to learn and become more proficient. 

I am finding that blogging is important to me ArtChangesLives(Dot)Com is over and is approaching its 20th year. I struggle with openly revealing myself here, but as I said earlier, my sketchbooks, hard drives, and blog are my diaries. It seems Picasso had his own diaries-one being his paintings. 

The image contains a smattering of artistic investigations. It shows a collection of recent work, including ink drawings and digital images created in Affinity Photo and Designer, watercolor, and Blender.
An Exploration of Artistic Techniques and Combinations of Media.

Creativity Explored—Celebrates 40 years

Creativity Explored

Starting from humble origins in a Mission District garage in 1983, Creativity Explored celebrates 40 years of supporting artists with developmental disabilities in San Francisco.

Link to Creativity Explored, supporting artists with developmental disabilities in San Francisco.
Creativity Explored celebrates 40 Years.

Creativity Explored was founded by Florence and Elias Katz, an artist and a psychologist duo who believed that art is essential to life. Throughout our history, we’ve facilitated the art careers of hundreds of disabled artists — and changed the art world along the way. Our artists have seen their work exhibited in museums, galleries, and art fairs in over 14 countries and have earned over $2.2 million from their art. Our San Francisco studios are the center of a thriving creative community where all are welcome.

Vanity Searching—Discovered Creativity Explored

Years ago, I bought the rights to ArtChangesLives.com for my blog. That was about 18 years ago; I was still in grad school. As I began to post my entries, I did some vanity searching and found that Creativity Explored holds the number one rank for Art Changes Lives, and they were located in San Francisco.

The next time I visited San Francisco, I made a point of visiting their studios. It was abuzz with activity and artists working in all sorts of media. I visited with a few of the artists, and they shared their work with me—genuinely excellent and original work. So, I want to recognize this organization for its work. 

You can explore Creativity Explored shop and see the artists’ work for sale. Visit their shop at creativityexplored.org/shop.

Looking at a blank canvas.

I’m starting a new drawing that seems to resemble currency.

A drawing begins
0718 – 2023-dollarbill, Hendricks©2023
Looking at a Blank Canvas

Lately, thank goodness, that is not a problem at the moment. I am working between two, probably multiple. This one promises to be fun. Trust me, I have had those moments. What to do?
Do something else if you are stuck. Yes, it distracts you and lets your brain refresh. The new else might help the old else find a solution.
One of our students at MCTC(Minneapolis College) was in a class my mentor and friend, Felix Ampah, taught. I was told the student sat in front of a canvas, and Felix went over and asked if something was wrong. The student blurted out, “I don’t want to ruin it.”
Felix Ahpah asked to have her brush. He took it and made a swash on the canvas, probably not big. Gave his wonderful smile that beamed and said, “Now it is ruined.” Then smiled, and they laughed, and he moved on.“