<![CDATA[ - Blog]]>

<![CDATA[ - Blog]]>Sun, 20 May 2012 04:05:14 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[Spring 2012]]>Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:15:55 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2012/03/spring-2012.htmlSpring got a good start while it was still winter, this year. The weather has been quite a bit warmer in March than usual - for the whole Eastern half of the US and Canada (east of the Rockies - that is). Some places - especially Minnesota - had temps that were 40 degrees above average. Many places were breaking records - many for the warmest it had been that early in the year.

Here is has only been Spring a 2 days - but the daffodils have mostly bloomed and dried up. I took a hike at McCormick's Creek State Park yesterday - and the Spring ephemerals were all blooming at once. Normally, some early ones come out, then some others as the weather warms up a bit, then some more. May Apples were up all over in a way that resembled mid-to-late April. Bluebells are blooming.

Every year I take photos of the Spring flowers as if I had never done so before. I'll have to compare dates and see how far along the flowers were in previous years.

Painting-wise - I'm working on some images of snakes / cosmos / water / earth.

I plan on getting out and drawing some wildflowers before they are gone. ]]><![CDATA[Winter 2012]]>Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:01:53 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2012/01/winter-2012.htmlSo far - as of the 10th of January - we have had a warm winter with little snow. Today it was 55 degrees, though it is forecasted to be colder in the next few days. One problem with this is that there are still ticks around. Our dog, Zuma, picks them up. We have never had ticks last this long before. We have had them end in early December and show up again in FebruTwenty years ago, the ticks were mostly around in May and into June, sometimes July. Now the weather is milder due to global warming plus new varieties have shown up that live in the fall and into the cooler weather. The cooler weather, smaller ticks, are more likely to carry lyme disease. Thus - we'll need to use the anti-tick treatment on our dog.

I have been painting some - I'm finishing a large painting with 2 large, green snakes floating in the universe with part of the earth showing, along with a nebula, the moon, comets and galaxies. I was inspired by various groups (China, Mexico, Africa) which had snakes as part of their creation stories. Snakes have also been a central image seen in constellations - revolving around the pole star.

]]><![CDATA[Summer 2011]]>Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:52:38 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2011/07/summer-2011.htmlI have been doing a lot of painting. Not that I have created a lot of paintingS. One I recently finished is primarily of a mound of dirt (which suggests Mother Earth), with 2 green snakes, 2 green peahens in a tree, 2 young baboons, and a storm in the background. I'm nearly finished with a painting of a river, I'm halfway done with a field of wildflowers, and I just started a new painting which will be a movie/video.

It's been a hot July following a fairly cool, damp Spring. I'm looking forward to it cooling off. Feeling that global warming. ]]><![CDATA[Spring 2011]]>Tue, 17 May 2011 04:35:23 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2011/05/spring-2011.htmlJust as last fall was dry - this Spring has been unusually rainy and cool. The good thing about it is seeing the trees and plants emerge slowly instead of all at once. (The bad thing has been flooding from here to Louisiana). Right now at 11 am the temperature is 47 degrees. The normal high is 74 for this time of year. I enjoy watching the weather - I enjoy the various information available at wunderground.com/ (Weather Underground). I enjoy noticing how plants react relative to the temperatures, wind, rain, etc.
I graduated a week ago - with my MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in painting and drawing. The video I created was part of that experience. I plan to make more. I have gotten shelves and I am in the process of organizing what is worth keeping and getting rid of what is not. I have a large painting in the works and I want to get started on several smaller ones as well.
I haven't seen anything of the snake. It may have decided to go outside the day I saw it, never to return. I have wondered - what with moving and rearranging things if I may see it again - since that is what precipitated it's appearance before. But not so far.]]><![CDATA[NYC-CAA]]>Wed, 23 Feb 2011 10:31:26 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2011/02/nyc-caa.html

I spent a few days in NYC a couple of weeks ago - at the CAA conference. One of the great things was seeing some of the authors I have been reading. Mira Schor was on a panel with artist art critics, and Griselda Pollock was on a different panel with Norma Broude about Feminism. Pollock also attended the Feminist Art Project seminars on Saturday. All of those events were standing room only and I was happy to have found a chair. The organizers seem to underestimate the popularity of these events.

It was fun to have openings to go to such as the show "Be Aware: Women Working at Flomenhaft" in Chelsea with art by Faith Ringgold and Jeane Quick-to-see-Smith (top image), and others; and with the nearby Ceres gallery also having a Guerrilla Girls juried show. There was a NYC area MFA opening the next night that was so packed it was difficult to see stuff.

At the Museum of Art and Design (where the Feminist Art Project Seminar was held), I saw a teapot on display by Randy Long (who my daughter knows). At the MOMA - there was an Abstract Expressionist show up. The second photo shows a couple of Barnett Newman pieces. As it turned out - the next chapter I read in Mira Schor's "Wet" discussed those as part of her essay. At the MET - I esp. enjoyed finding some ancient artifacts of women from various cultures, as well as snake imagery in all sorts of media. I ended up using up my camera battery.

]]><![CDATA[Books I'm Reading]]>Fri, 04 Feb 2011 07:51:47 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2011/02/books-im-reading.htmlI had been reading The Indian Mother Goddess, but now I am mostly focusing on 4 books, which relate to each other - Wet, by Mira Schor, The Conspiracy of Art by Jean Baudrillard, Differencing the Canon, and Vision & Difference by Griselda Pollock.

It is interesting to read a chapter from one, a chapter from the other, because they interrelate. Baudrillard is arguing that Art no longer exists, while to Pollock & Schor - it is not that Art does not exist - but that Art that seeks to prop up white, male, domination can not be taken seriously. Pollock writes:
"In ideology cultural practices are at once the means by which we make sense of the social process in which we are caught up indeed produced. ...First the practice must be located as part of the the social struggle between classes, races and genders... Second we must analyse what any specific practice is doing, what meaning is being produced, and how and for whom."

Pollock takes on art history in general while Shor defends painting (and critics who say that "painting is dead". Being a painter, I agree with Schor that there is no reason painting needs to end - or that the "art world" should not take it seriously. Just when (because?) women have better access to the medium and possibly to cultural influence. There will always be newer media, but the way I see it, the possibilities for painting have never been so open.

From Schor:
"That ground was rendered female was never in doubt. Painting in the high Italian Renaissance increasingly became a system for ordering and subduing nature, laying a grid on chaos (femininity), which in the twentieth century became of process of razing and ashalting. For if the ground began to move and "if the 'objejct'" started to speak? Which also means beginning to 'see,' etc. What disaggregation of the subject would that entail? It might entail the death of the end-of-painting scenario, which should have been played only once according to late modernist critics, and which is to be endlessly resimulated by postmodernists. The narrative of the death of painting is meant to jam the signal of other narratives, that is to say the narrative of the Other."

]]><![CDATA[Ephemera]]>Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:16:49 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2011/01/ephemera.htmlI found out I got into the National Juried Show, Ephemera. It will be at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, MO from February 21st until March 18th of 2011. The juror, Daniel Keegan, Milwaukee Art Museum Director, will give a presentation on Feb. 21st at 7p.m.

The piece of mine that got in is the video I created which in on my home page, Women are Like Flowers. The theme of the show is "the notion of time, impermanence, illusion, ruin, and/or the temporary as primary characteristics."]]><![CDATA[Magic Realism]]>Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:21:01 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2010/12/magic-realism.html
It's been an interesting week. Interviewing candidates for a curator position. One brought up the idea of Magic Realism - which I had to look up. I like the idea of being a part of a genre that I was not trying to be a part of. The original idea of Magic Realism by Franz Roh in 1925. He meant the term more as the idea that the world is magical - just as it is. Not supernatural.

Later the idea got to including more dreamlike - but still presented more as reality than imaginary. There is a comparison from Oregon State University that suggests that Magic Reality (also referred to as New Objectivity) is more sober than Expressionism. That the paint surfaces are thin as opposed to thick. But other writers state that there are no set rules.

(http://www.phmoen.no/english/english_index.html?/english/magic_realism/what_is.html&main

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/ger341/exns.htm)

In my paintings, I have gotten to painting more soberly as I have gotten more representational. I have gotten more representational as I have wanted to present ideas through characters and situations. I do like to show close and far views, but I did that even when I was being somewhat expressionistic with my landscapes. I haven't painted in miniature, but I have been thinking about painting smaller - a result of working with details.

]]><![CDATA[Fall Colors - in a dry year]]>Mon, 25 Oct 2010 03:50:37 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2010/10/post-title-click-and-type-to-edit4.htmlI have been busy painting my women and nature series this fall. I had hoped to get out more to paint some plein air/ outside. I have been watching the colors, though. It's been an extremely dry late summer and fall - so many of the leaves just dried up on the trees and didn't change to their normally bright colors. Others changed, then promptly dropped their leaves.

I have a maple out front that I had painted in 2007 with bright red and red-orange leaves. That year was much more damp - and the leaves were holding on and bright all the way to Thanksgiving. This year - they are already mostly gone.

I am more aware of the colors of things that I have painted. I have painted the view from my driveway toward the South in summer and in fall. The colors in the fall seem to change daily and hourly.

This morning they were not the bright colors one might expect this time of year - but the browns and deep reds were interesting nonetheless. The ridges in the background were blending in with the sky - the result of some morning fog.]]><![CDATA[Snakes and Goddesses]]>Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:38:38 -0800http://mgohn.com/1/post/2010/09/post-title-click-and-type-to-edit.htmlI've reading books by Joseph Campbell, Marija Gimbutas and Merlin Stone (and others) about ancient religions. I'm curious about the concept of Mother Nature and how it was thought of several millennia ago. I'm also interested in what snakes and bulls and some other symbols meant.

According to Gimbutas, the idea of Mother Nature was one group and ideas about the Snake Goddess were another. But it seems to all overlap with Mother Nature worshippers having the snake as various symbols.

It is evident the the snake meant healing by it's use in present day medical symbols even though the snake is pretty much demonized in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I have read things in the past that suggest there may have been some use of venom that was used in ceremonies in ancient Greece (such that a little bit of venom may have helped induce visions in people who were versed in that).

One book said that there was an old idea from India that the earth is balanced on a giant snake. And that the snake accounted for earthquakes. (In China - snakes are currently used to predict earthquakes.)

Beyond those things, snakes have been associated with water and also with renewal and transformation - what with their skin shedding. Water, of course, being integral to life, was also integral to various Goddesses and was represented in different ways.

The concept of snakes being associated with the divine is common to so many religions around the world that it leads to the idea that the concept was commonly shared - probably when the world population was quite small and the idea was spread as people spread over the earth. There are snakes that adorn the roofs of old Stave Christian churches in Norway - and also snakes that adorn the roofs of religious buildings in Thailand. There are snakes and dragons on religious buildings in the Americas from before Columbus came.

Most ancient culture's religions have something about goddesses and snakes. In addition to water, healing and renewal, snakes were associated with the ancient concept of the Tree of Life. A snake rested at the bottom and an eagle was on top.

Gimbutas studied abstract snake imagery on Goddess figurines dating from 6000-2200 BCE. Some pregnant goddess/women figurines had a symbol of a snake coiled around the abdomen area. Campbell wrote that the Goddess figurines were created during the Aurignacian culture 35,000 - 26,000 BCE through the Old Europe time that Gimbutas wrote about and that there were still pockets of places in the mid-20th century where they were still being made. Often they were made in such a way that they could be stuck in the ground. Wishes for fertility, especially of crops, were often the purpose.
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