Category: Quotes

Creation or Construction

 

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists. 

G.K. Chesterton’s “Are You Creating or Constructing?”
Drawing on Paper
Tumult, Mixed Media, Hendricks ©2021

This article came to me through a friend on LinkedIn that I respect very much, Chris Zuege. The article is by Robert Rose. Chris posts on LinkedIn often, and I always find his posts enlightening.  This resonated with me because the work I do is very off the cuff.  I often wonder as I am working and when it is done. Am I the tool or the creator? For me, this quote and article gave me an answer. I am the tool, and what I create was loved before it existed. 

I know it has been quite a while since I posted to this blog. The truth is that I was off learning. I studied color… read philosophy… learned more about  3D digital art. I will be posting more regularly again.  

Today’s post was important to me. First, to wish everyone a great holiday and an even more fabulous new year and then share my last drawing of 2021.  Its title is Tumult. It fits for 2021. 

Art ReEducation

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.  ~ Pablo Picasso

Bill's working studio.
My Subterranean Studio

Bill Hendricks’s studio, upper-right-corner is the traveling studio

I earned my MFA (Master of Fine Arts) from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). It was a wonderful experience; I was lucky to have a teaching position at Minneapolis Community Technical College (MCTC). I taught Graphic Design and Web Design as a 3/4-time permanent faculty member and attended MCAD part-time as I earned my MFA. 

After graduation, I was ready to launch a career as a full-time artist. MCAD prepared me well by providing me with great instructors and an environment. 

Still, after graduation, I immersed myself in design, typography, the web, HTML, CSS, and associated software for the next 10-12 years for my students and job. I retired from teaching last year, and although the wonderful education MCAD provided. It was apparent; I needed to work where I left off after completing my MFA. So I am sharing and documenting my journey. Mainly for me.

Hey, did you hear the joke, “What do the acronyms BFA and MFA stand for?

Answer: BFA stands for big f—ing attitude and MFA for major f—ing attitude.”  I know it is an old joke.

Anyway, I added one new category in the sidebar titled, Inspirational and Technically Instructional–YouTube Channels. These sites, amongst others, re-educated and reminded me of some of the skills I lost.

The Painted Work—What’s mine?

 

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, “to lack, a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.” I read it again. It didn’t say “something helpful” or “enriching” or even “extremely valuable.” No, the word was “crucial.”

Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975
https://www.billemory.com/NOTES/wolfe.html
Drawing working with pen and ink
Experiment … Part of the Process, Mixed Media, Hendricks©2020

The quote above was written in response to an article in the New York Times, on Sunday, April 28, 1974, by art critic Hilton Kramer.

This blog is a journal of sorts, featuring my artwork and my ideas about art as I understand it. After 67 years of living, I now get to start practicing what I believe I am meant to do. That is to do art.

As I work, read, and reacquaint myself with myself through my art and studies, I seek a theory of me. It is becoming more and more apparent that I am emerging both intellectually and spiritually through my art.

I have never been keen on the significant art pubs or the art critics. Only because, through big words and lengthy explanation of what they see or how they interpret, the work often shuts out, divides, or disqualifies the everyday joe or mary from viewing, collecting, and enjoying art.

I guess part of objecting to the art authoritarians is that I never felt like I fit in being a blue-collar Catholic boy that is gay, not queer, dyslectic, alcoholic, and Quaker. So I often had to forge my own beliefs and codes of conduct.

That being said, I do believe there has to be some theory, some idea, path, or journey the casual viewer might need to understand my work or any artwork better.

Although, Wolfe is critical of Kramers’s reference to the “crucial” need for a perspective theory. Wolfe doesn’t say no knowledge is necessary. Thus every artist usually provides an artist statement for the viewer and gallery visitors.

I guess Artchangeslives(dot)com is where I work to find the theory of Bill.

Surrealism, Automatic drawing, and the Spirit

The old frontiers are disappearing and others opening up; we are witnessing the end of the idea of art as aesthetic contemplation and returning to something that the West has long forgotten: the rebirth of art as collective action and representation, and the rebirth of their complementary opposite, solitary meditation. If the word had not lost its strict meaning, I would call the new art a spiritual art. A mental art, then, which will demand of the reader and the listener the sensitivity and the imagination of a performer who, like the musicians of India, is also a creator. The works of the new time that is aborning will not be based on the idea of linear succession but on the idea of combination: the conjunction, the diffusion, the reunion of languages, spaces, and times. Fiesta and contemplation. An art of conjugation.

Octavio Paz,
Alternating Current
Ink drawing by Bill Hendricks
Going with the Flow

Going with the Flow, Hendricks ©2021

As I work with photography, digital, and tactile media, I am continuing to work to understand time, space, and matter and our perception of reality. Still harkening back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and my understanding of the brain acting as a receiver for our consciousness’s data can understand and act upon. It is only a small fraction of reality.


Thus, I blend  Realism, Surrealism, and Impressionism blended experience to understand better my relationship to what I may call reality. 
Please visit my most recent gallery of drawings before April 2021.

Documenting, Drawing, and a bit of Photographing

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

Mark Twain, Rescue Time
Sunny Morning in San Diego
Sunny Morning in San Diego, CA

Light through the Tree, Hendricks © 2021, Digital Work

Currently, I am updating my sites and documenting work I have completed over the years while teaching at Minneapolis Community Technical College. After earning my MFA, at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, students, technology, family, friends, and my Quaker community dominated my life. 

While those activities captured most of my attention, I was producing work. I didn’t have time to display or share my work as frequently as I would like. So now I am working to document it and display it. Apple Photo and other apps didn’t do me much favor. Many original finals are lost, but enough can be found that I am able to create digital galleries. 

Today I created a new page to share with all—

“http://artchangeslives.com/photo-impressionism-hendricks/”
“Seeing is Believing”, a series of photo impressionistic work I have produced.

Currently drawing more… mostly surrealistic work. That will be the next gallery I will work to create.