Blog
May, 2024
I am, again, showing some work this May 17-19 at Art-A-Whirl 2024 in Minneapolis. My work will be in a new gallery this year in the Northrup King Building, Follow the Muse Gallery #166.
March, 2024
For my whole life, this one of two original Sister Corita Kent prints, has been in our kitchen at my parents house. Eating a bowl of Cheerios, year after year, how many times did I read the quote by Camus: "Great ideas, it is said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope...."
December, 2023
It was only a few years ago that my father bothered to mention that I met David Hockney. I was in the same room with him? No, you met him. Apparently, not a big deal to my father. I mean, in grad school, my best friends were the English students – it would have been nice to drop that in conversation with them. Oh yeah, I met Hockney. They're going on about Anthony Caro, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth...I met Hockney! The picture to the right is about the Hockney I would have met around 1970. I'm all of 7 or 8 years old, and have absolutely no recollection of the event. My dad got a call from his friend teaching over at UW-Madison, "hey bob, we've got David Hockney over here for an artist-in-residence, why don't you come by?" I guess we did. Anyway, as a longtime admirer of Hockney's work and intelligence, this was a most pleasant surprise.
May, 2023
I am showing some work this May 19-21 at Art-A-Whirl 2023 in Minneapolis. My work will be in the Northrup King Building, Studio 445.
June, 2022
I discovered Terry Winter's work on a trip to NY way back in 1992 at a show at the Whitney. I have followed and enjoyed his work ever since, and kind of celebrating recently acquiring one of his prints.
May, 2022
This is a recent drawing called, 'Picasso's Horse'. I'm so captivated by the image from Guernica, and find myself drawing it from time to time.
April, 2022
“Via humor, I am honing your eye, the Emperor told his art agent. Arcimboldo, you see, began with fishes, but out of fishes he made the most magnificent face, whereas Bronzino began with a face and ended up with nothing. You cannot aim right at the face! The goal of course is a human face, not fish, but one arrives at human faces only through the roundabout route of fishes. (The Emperor added: I am saying something fundamentally philosophical when I say: The Bronzino is boring.) The true artist walks straight toward the insignificant, while slyly keeping an eye on the significant, and moving at all times away from the gorgeous. The Emperor had a lot more to say on the subject of significance and insignificance, but he noticed … that the art agent had urinated down one of his pant legs, so he thanked him graciously for both paintings.”
from The Organs of Sense, by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
The above passage is but a sippet of a much longer segment between the Emperor and his much too learned art agent, who has seemingly been blinded by book learning. Prior to the bit quoted above, the Emperor had threatened to gouge out the eyes of the art agent because he can't see with them anyway, a nasty joke. The timeframe and place is post-Mannerism in Vienna. The book is often pitch perfect in its satire of...well...intellectual, know-it-alls. I really found Mannerism refreshing in its way after coming out of a study of the High Renaissance, like a break from rationality. A stop making sense kind of thing, and a really important development in human thought at the time, that we now live with everyday. Anyway, this little vignette between the art agent and the Emperor ends with a blind Astronomer, saying, "One wants above all to understand the Sun, but one cannot aim one's telescope right at the Sun!" The essence of metaphor. Oh, and Bronzino boring! That'll ruffle a few feathers.
December, 2021
September, 2021
Kind of an irresistible quote, with an out-of-date word like masses, almost feels fresh again. Harkening people like Hegel and Marx, and other out-of-date words like alienation, both words no doubt replaced with fancier nuevo words that are less incriminating. But oh! what a poem can do, or a string quartet, a painting, dance.
Juneteenth, 2021
Sittin' here, on this beautiful summer's morning, listening to this awesome record. Just picked it up at a small antique shop in Wausau, Wisconsin. I went into this room full of amazing records, a ton of good stuff, but only came out with this one record (some of that is more disipline on my part). When I handed it to the guy when buying it, he said that I had good taste. And because it's my nature to run from anything even remotely close to a compliment, I deflected and said something to the effect that the record is worth the price just for the photo of the cool cat Basie. I have a pretty sizable collection of Jazz records, but I hadn't run across this one, and knew just the photo of Basie would be enough for me. The music is super though, so a good buy all around. But that photo of Basie is really something! His expression, his attire, everything just warms me, and maybe gives me hope in this very challenging time.
The other thing about my brief interaction with this very "knowledgeable, and refined" store clerk that has got me thinking is, "you have good taste." Always a highly subjective thing to say, but it got me thinking about what a low priority it is with most people — the art and things they choose to surround themselves. It's everything and everywhere, the books, music, chairs, clothes, you name it. People sitting around reading some of these serial authors with the appalling bookcover designs, like we live forever. Their action tacitly saying, I'll get to the good stuff once I slog though all of the banal titles? Notsomuch. And, of course, "good taste" doesn't mean expensive and rare items that only the rich can have. To me, it's about surrounding yourself with meaningful things, beyond the superficial, and deeply personal.
June, 2021
Yes, the second music! That less noticable undertow, hidden under the melody. Layers of sound, the same as with painting.
April, 2021
The aforementioned T. L. Solien print has made it into our family collection. One from the original edition came up at auction, so I was able to acquire it for my father. I think I've reached that time in life when you want to buy things for your mother and father as a small way to say thank you for everything they've done for you, and always being there with love and support. In my father's case, a super high level of intelligence, humility, sensitivity and kindness.
October, 2020
Well, now I've gotten into a pile of ancient history, old slides of work. This is part of a group of pictures I was doing with appartitions in them, circa 1992. Mummified pods, mysterious, a metamorphosis, me. I think the idea was the living spirit vs. things like rocks. Always set in nature, some sort of natural environment. T.S. Elliot's the Waste Land, probably electrified my brain with its evocative imagery, and served as a backdrop for my art and thinking about the world for a number of years.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Boiling things down to their essences. I still think like that, but differently. Maybe less catastrophic?
September, 2020
The painting above is by T.L. Solien, a marvelous artist that came by Moorhead State when I was in the midst of my art schooling/training. Our painting class trekked down to the Plains Art Museum, where he was showing. The class got a tour of the show, and had a Q & A with the artist. Nobody every talked in that group, and the silences were downright painful. We may have been in front of this painting, and because nobody would ask anything!, I asked him if his paintings told a literal story. Somebody had to say something!, and I didn't really know the answer, but it was clearly not a question he was anything but annoyed to get from the group of young minds. You're hungry, if not starving, for concrete answers to bewildering phenomena in the world, as a student. I was attracted to Solien's work, but baffled by it at the time. Plus, we all want solid answers, we're literal minded, in a world where they may not even exist. In the end, Solien's annoyance was perfect, it's like, kid, you don't get straight-forward answers in this world, figure that out.
For the most part, I don’t care much about what artists have to say about their work. Except maybe, the artists that weave (sometimes cryptic) insights into their process, along with a more philosophical overview. The work is laid out in plain view for everyone to see, so what’s your question? As a student, this used to drive me nuts, but now I appreciate it so much. When artists get specific about what a picture is about, more often than not, it takes away from my own absorption/intake of the work. Occasionally, I’ll want to know more, but not usually. It’s one place where facts kill the work. Poetry lives and breathes without everyday facts, but you sure know it when it’s false.
September, 2020
I made an oil painting in the late '80s, still a student, called 'Description of a Struggle'. It was a halfway successful painting. My Kafka period, title totally ripped off an obscure Kafka story I was confident nobody would catch me on, no one did, but that's mostly because I'm obscure. And if someone did catch me on it, I'd rejoice that someone else read that impossible story. Anyway, the painting is long gone, I have absolutely no idea where that painting lives, I don't even have a photo image of it. But it's one of the first paintings that helped me understand the eternal struggle it would be to find or make a picture of something I haven't seen before. I'm looking for the image of this painting...
OK, I found it. Not a great image, but it's pretty much as I remember it. I painted with oil a lot more than I thought and remembered. The Kafka story is really pretty suffocating, and this work tries to render that. Words you read make this picture in your head, and this is the odd picture this story made in my head.
August, 2020
Well, the State Fair Fine Art show went on this year, despite being in the midst of a pandemic. Art is all about life, death, existence in one way or another, so it went forward – that's cool. Once again, I somehow made it into the show. This year our Daddy and Norah photo couldn't take place at the opening as usual, so we made a little montage this year. The judge this year was the awesome Chris Monroe, who's 'Monkey with a Tool Belt' children's book series has me loving the books as much or more than Norah at bedtime.
August, 2020
Ran across this long lost and forgotten piece from youth. My childhood friend Tim Spurgin and I used to spend our time together drawing our sports heros. The starting lineup of the 1971-72 LA Lakers, my team, fully ingrained: Gail Goodrich (G), Jerry West #44 (G), Wilt Chamberlain #13 (C), Happy Harrison (F), and Jimmy McMillian (F). It's so interesting to me now that the keystone activity with many of my friends in age 8-12 range was drawing. With another friend, Carl Bock, I remember drawing moths at his house after school, and another friend, Patrick Clark, we were into various alien world monstrosities. We'd sit drawing at his kitchen table, spinning yarns about this or that outer space creature we'd conjured in our artwork.
May, 2020
Long before I knew it, I was in love with String Quartets. Of course, it happens in pieces. For years, I listened to a Felix Mendelssohn string quartet, randomly purchased, a ratty old record, but it took you straight into the edgier (I suspect), drawing rooms of the 19th century. Gradually, the string quartets started to stand out not just amid the realm of classical music, but of everything else out there – I thought, these string quartets are so fine. There is an edge to them, and they can often be melancholic. Then, the Kronos Quartet and Emerson String Quartet came along for me – remember evenings at the Walker in Minneapolis and Ordway in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Recently, I've found a couple of wonderful vinyl records by the Julliard String Quartet featuring Elliot Carter, Mozart, and Schumann. These records are 50 years old, and rarely played, but they are magnificent! I feel like I can see the entrances and exits of the sounds, like colors transparently playing across a mind. The layers of sound build upon each other, and end up a story. They weave a tale that seems utterly lost on today's world.
April, 2020
Another of the spontaneous variety pieces. Ran across a poem I wrote last year, read it again recently like I'd never seen it before. Things take time, so much time to ferment. It meant absolutely nothing to me until I read it again recently, and it clicked. So, why not add a drawing of the internal workings of a bee?
April, 2020
I find little spontaneous drawings like this so nourishing. No, I haven't come down with Covid-19 just yet. It started out around the nose, grew and grew some more, pretty soon it was Emily Dickinson (not what Emily Dickinson actually looks like, more of a mind's eye kind of thing). Then it was the poem of hers I can never get out of my mind. It probably doesn't look like much to anybody else, but I guess I'm just sort of captivated by the way it grew into something I never knew was coming.
November, 2019
And then you think, "This drawing needs more contrast, everything is blending together". Then you say, "Okay, how? Where?" It's not so easy to just add it.
August, 2019
HAIRCUTS!!!! After our back-to-school haircuts, opening night of the 2019 Minnesota State Fair Fine Art Show. The drawing, titled, Sonoran Rhapsody, made it into the show this year. Our traditional daughter Norah, and I standing next to my drawing. Juror Daniel Volenec made some very heartening comments about the works he judged into the show, saying, "each piece had to display superb mastery of the artistic elements...the best of these works held my attention, set themselves apart from the crowded field and made it into this year's display."
June, 2019
"I pulled Swann’s Way off the shelf, read the first paragraph, and was astonished. Its obsessive attention to memory, time, and the minutiae of experience as it occurs through thinking—it was not just good. It was, as they say, extremely my shit. Everyone says you should read Proust, but no one had ever told me that I, specifically, should read Proust."
from Proust and the Joy of Suffering, Elisa Gabbert
Like many of the truly special books I've read over the years – the ones that pull you up by the knickers, that slap your face a few times – I'm still struck by how off my first impression of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), was. I may have vaguely heard or known of Marcel Proust at the time, perhaps only through a 'Fawlty Towers' joke, or some such thing, but I remember the where and when of discovering it like yesterday. In the summers, as a student, I spent a lot of time at the Moorhead State University library, often looking for something in particular, but also just meandering through the stacks. One day I came across a group of very thick books, each about the size of 'The Brothers Karamazov', so I opened Volume One. I sat in the aisle and started reading...first thought, is this abstract literature? It doesn't seem old and stuffy, boring – it was modern, fresh, but what the hell is it? The first few pages made no sense at all to me, impressions with no basis in the real world. Surrealism? dreamlike was what I thought, so I checked it out, and took it home. What a thing of pure wonderment that exploded in my brain for the rest of the summer that year (and for about 10 years thereafter). It wasn't abstract at all, but just microscopic in its descriptions of the world – no detail left unsaid, inside a mind, and how a mind really works. Affected by the smells around you, the air, the colors, the light, the pains, both physical and emotional. This book seemed to capture being alive perfectly.
The best reward of all was that I came upon the famous Madeleine description (check it out if you haven't already) organically – entirely by my own dumb luck. It's one of the great segments in literature, and I thought I was the one who found it! Such a broad smile upon my face, I felt like I'd just discovered something big, and needed to share it with anybody and everybody. I was photocopying the Madeleine description, among others, and snail mailing it to friends. Look at this!
August, 2018
Going back to Paul Brach's comment, “The most interesting thing about abstract painting is their subject matter, while the most interesting thing about representational painting is their form.” I want to attempt to illustrate subject matter of abstract art with a snippet from Sam Hunter, art critic (and one of the more interesting and readable, I might add...), regarding just one randomly chosen painting by James Brooks from 1962, called Burwak (pictured above).
The "looming mystery" he sought in Jondol acquires fresh meaning in the dark, closely-keyed colors and slowly descending forms of Burwak. This painting and Sull attain a stern, sullen grandeur. Their major shapes are large – nearly too large for the canvas rectangle – and have an unwieldy and untidy quality. Yet, their muted, somber harmonies of tone communicate a memorable sensuous beauty, too. Under pressure and the fragile, small-scale aberrations of edge and shape conformation. These paintings are "oceanic" in their impact, with strangely disturbing powers of ego-reduction. One is reminded of Pierre Reverdy's statement that the modern poet "no longer seeks to stir the reader by a more or less eloquent exposition of an event, but to move them as broadly, as purely as they would be by a sky all crackling with stars, by a calm, grandiose, tragic sea or a great, silent drama played by clouds under the sun."
July, 2018
What a great time we had throughout the whole process of planning and setting up our show at the Carnegie in Mankato. Hope Cook did an amazing job hanging the show, and is so supportive and wonderful to work with.
June, 2018
Coming up this summer is a show with my father, Robert Finkler, at the Carnegie Art Center in Mankato, MN. It's been a lot of years since we've shown together, Northfield Arts Guild back in the 90's was the last time.
April, 2018
Paul Brach, American abstract painter, famously said, “The most interesting thing about abstract painting is their subject matter, while the most interesting thing about representational painting is their form.”
At first, this seemed counterintuitive to me. What do you mean, representational art is all subject? That is a still-life, a landscape, a portrait, etc. While abstract painting is all form. What subject amid all that form?
But, I see it now, and the key word is interesting. We know the most obvious thing about representational art is its subject – still-life, landscape, portrait. What’s interesting is the form. The form is the key to the meaning of the work. Think of all the still-life paintings you’ve known, Picasso, Braque, Morandi, Cezanne, the subject is a table of contents – boring. Their form – interesting. Form implies texture, color, shape, etc. How are the forms rendered? What’s communicated through that sort of rendering? It’s really all that matters.
For abstract art, sure, there’s the immediacy about the form (most obvious), but then what? Are the forms communicating happy, sad, calm, energy, a feeling? That’s the interesting part. Very complicated thoughts and feelings can be manifested through this pictorial language, not unlike the other most abstract form of the arts, music (at least, classical, jazz, and Sigur Ros).
March, 2018
I framed up Holocene, a work that has been hanging around my studio for a couple of years. That's not to say that it wasn't "finished" at least once. At some point, it hit me that it wasn't finished, and I had to go back in there and work it out. It looked incomplete, and it took a year to figure that out. It now feels layered, aged, authentic, and provocative to me, as though it is now finished.
August, 2017
A scene from opening night of the Minnesota State Fair Fine Art Show. Daughter Norah refusing to smile for the camera, me trying in vain to get her to do so. My drawing, titled, Attar, made it into the show. Just getting into the show is a medium-sized victory these days with the enormous number of entries. This year was my 8th trip to the show, out of about 12 attempts. The drawing sold this year to a collector in Wayzata, MN.