What is art good for?

Wednesday 27 Jan 2010 by Peter Miller | No Comments
Filed under: Vision Tags:

The Big Picture. A tsunami of data washes over us every day. Is it any wonder that public leaders fail to ‘connect the dots’? These intelligence failures are really failures of pattern recognition — an inability to see the ‘big picture’. Imagination is not some peripheral feelgood activity, it is actually essential for survival.

Perspective.   Sometimes the ‘big picture’ can only be seen with multiple perspectives, another artistic skill of value to everyone. Not only do various groups have radically different perspectives, they live in different worlds. In art, these mutually invisible points of view are incorporated into a coherent vision. Such artwork is often a necessary prelude to their integration in reality.

The Craft Instinct.   Art is about making things. Like any manufactured object, a picture should have conviction, coherence, and a quality of design and execution that makes it worthy of use. Art-making builds an appreciation of craft, and a kind of hands-on understanding that is otherwise unobtainable.

Innovation.  It’s axiomatic that art is creative, but much of what passes for art is imitative, derivative, mannered, contrived, and boring. Artists when they are truly creative add to the stock of available reality, expanding the universe of possibilities we have to work with.

Mistakes.  This may seem an odd answer to ‘What is art good for?’, but mistakes properly understood are the best teachers. If the etching or the printing fails, the problem is always traceable to something I did or failed to do. I can’t blame anyone else. This realization enables me to find a solution, and is a template for similar efforts outside the workshop.

Enjoyment.   Beauty has been exiled to the remotest corners of the contemporary art world. Disparaged by the cognoscenti, mocked by the heavily advertised trend-setters, ignored by the paragons of State Art,  nevertheless undying love of beauty is one of the best-kept secrets of the art world. While the super-rich punish themselves with the ‘transgressive’ toxic-waste dump of contemporary art, the rest of us still enjoy a well-crafted composition evoking pleasant memories or prospects. Folks, there’s no need to apologize for that preference.

http://kamprint.com/xpress/

Saturday 28 Nov 2009 by Peter Miller | No Comments
Filed under: Design, Videos and slideshows, Vision Tags: ,

As promised, viewers now have a way to search prints by mood, at xpress. Below the opening slideshow, you can click to view each Series, as before. Below the Series links are the Mood Tags — Dynamic, Expansive, Intimate, Reflective, and others. This enables searching by emotional content, the mood of each piece. Works with multiple moods are hard to categorize, so I’ve tried to sort them by overall impression. If a print tagged as Mysterious strikes you as Luminous instead, please let me know! Viewers also respond to texture subjectively. Rough or soft, flowing or granular, linear, rhythmic are some of the qualities of touch that photogravure etchings embody. Texture emerges from the mix of ink, paper, and composition, a blend of imagination and form. You can also search by ink, paper, image size, place, and price. The name xpress links speed of search and personal expression with the etching press in my workshop. This new way of searching is designed for viewers to reach a short list of potential selections quickly, and is also fun to use — give it a spin and let me know how it works. Your comments will guide the future evolution of this site.

Seascapes in Saint Petersburg

Thursday 8 Oct 2009 by Peter Miller | No Comments
Filed under: Exhibitions Tags: ,

Saint Petersburg, Russia, is the site of the next exhibit of Seascapes in photogravure, October 22 through November 6 (2009) at:

Blue Lagoon

Blue Lagoon

MArt Gallery
Director: Olga Lyalyakina
Saint-Petersburg 191002
Marata Str., 35
tel: +7(812)710-8835

A city whose design and grand style rival those of the greatest capitals of Europe, Saint Petersburg is a center of art,

English Embankment

culture, and intrigue.  St Petersburg was the birthplace of the Russian Revolution, and the locus of unimaginable wartime suffering. Rebuilt along the lines of its former Imperial splendor, St Petersburg today, known as the Venice of the North, has truly turned its maritime setting to great advantage.

Since opening in 2006, Gallery MArt has brought together artists distinguished by a high level of professional skill and aesthetic merit, working in both modern and traditional styles. The gallery is also engaged in a series of exhibits on ‘Painters of the Far East’, curated by Olga Lyalyakina.

Located in the center of Saint-Petersburg, Marata st. 35, near the Nevsky Prospekt, Gallery MArt is open Tuesday-Friday 12-19 and Saturday 12-18. The exhibit includes new Seascapes created since the September 2008 exhibit at Artetage Museum in Vladivostok.

Sub Rosa

Thursday 8 Oct 2009 by Peter Miller | No Comments
Filed under: Appreciations Tags: , , , ,
Secrets of the Deep

Secrets of the Deep

Comment by Alex Gorodny, Director, Artetage Museum of Contemporary Art, Vladivostok, Russia:

Sub-Rosa is Vladivostok!

Peter Miller has been here three times and now can’t help but truly feel, in his heart, what our city is about.   However, one could find such a landscape anywhere in the world.  But this is a chronicle – a historic record:  you can see the graveyard of sunken ships right alongside seaworthy ships — ready for new adventures — at the mouth of the Golden Horn, a bay in meditative sadness.  The stillness of the bygone greatness pulls in the bystander, makes him stop, not just to witness the past… but, I believe, yearn to witness the future… because this city — the whole of this place is magnetic… Such landscapes as these give food for thought; they make you stop and ponder…

Here Peter Miller’s tender lyrics — tinged with anxiety and consequence — are filled with formidable primordial fantasy that is possibly not within everyone’s grasp.  This landscape becomes surreal.  All of the author’s compassion, the openness of his artistic soul, is represented in this beautiful example of photogravure art.

I have acquired Sub-Rosa for the Artetage Museum for two reasons.  One is that this piece of art is really close to me.  When I was young I used to work as a sailor in the Vladivostok port fleet for several years.  Second, this is a great artistic work!

A. Gorodniy,

03.10.09

English translation by American astronaut Alvin Drew, Gagarin Space Center. Original Russian text here

Mood Tags

Saturday 12 Sep 2009 by Peter Miller | No Comments
Filed under: Design

Text-based searches for documents display thousands of results, most of them irrelevant unless you know exactly what you’re searching for. When searching for images, text-based searches are even less likely to hit the target. The problem is, the sort of remembered association that is best at recalling them works in fundamentally different ways for images and for words.

Naming the pictures lets computers search for them, but usually for objective data,  such as title, subject matter, place, medium, and so forth. This kind of search is helpful for finding illustrations to supplement verbal information. But pictures are far more than information. They evoke responses of excitement, reassurance, joy, dread, involvement, mystery — the whole panoply of human emotion. What if we could search by such responses?

I am currently engaged in setting up a system to do just that. But what about the beauty-in-the-eye-of- the-beholder problem, different people responding to the same picture in different ways? This is where you, the viewer, come in, if you like. The mood tags below link to graphic examples. What search terms would you use? Which mood tags would make sense to you in searching for images? What’s missing — what would you add?

Dynamic
Reflective
Mysterious
Sensual
Spontaneous
Expansive
Elegiac
Intimate
Luminous

Are these tags really right for the examples? There won’t be total agreement. But if certain tags consistently cluster around the same prints, then those tags will be useful in a search. What about prints with two or more moods, like a clearing sky after a storm? Such complexities make prints interesting and true-to-life. Let’s save multiple moods for later, assuming for the moment that one mood each is enough. Then we might look at textures (rough, soft, rhythmic, and so forth). The idea is to build viewers’ experiences into the design of the system used for searching images. Your responses are invited!

Furiously Yours

Monday 7 Sep 2009 by Peter Miller | No Comments
Filed under: New publication Tags: ,

In May 2002 I held an exhibit in Kamakura where visitors were asked to write haikus. They could be about the show, the season, their momentary feeling — often all three. Amazing that so much can go into 17 syllables! One of these is:

波音を

抱き寄せて知る

春の夢

nami oto wo / dakiyoseteshiru / haru no yume

In rough translation: the sound of the surf / reminds me of its embrace / and a dream of spring.

The author of this haiku, Shinpei Ishii, who died recently, will be remembered as a writer of great style and sensitivity.

In 2003, Charnwood Arts in England arranged for a world-wide group to write haikus in English on the Seascape Furiously Yoursphotogravures. One of these, by Hazel Witherspoon, goes: ‘Your love / in all its fury / storming my senses’. Both of these haikus stayed with me, contributing to the titles of my most recent Seascapes, Wave-Embraced and Furiously Yours. The violence of the ocean’s embrace is akin to that of love, and something of that spirit inhabits both prints. As a tag line, Furiously Yours may be more in synch with the perilous intensity of human relations than the standard ‘Sincerely yours’ or ‘Very truly yours’. These prints recall the intimate association of beauty and danger long considered to be the essence of the sublime.

Music websites

Tuesday 1 Sep 2009 by Peter Miller | No Comments
Filed under: Appreciations

Music to listen to while printing editions has never been easier to find. Here are some sites I’ve found worthwhile:

ArchivMusic –  Archiv enables searches by composer, performer, period, label, you-name-it. Their customer service is fast and responsive. CDs usually arrive within a week to 10 days, and they have a growing list of MP3 downloads, which arrive immediately.

Pristine Classical — This site features re-mastered recordings from the era when individual style was more highly valued than technical perfection. The founder of this site, an audio engineer with a musical background, uncovered a hoax involving well-known performers’ recordings copied and passed off as those of an unknown pianist. Actual, original recordings of the Pro Arte Quartet, the Budapest String Quartet,  and many others are generously presented here as these recordings were rarely heard — without the scratches and crackles that oddly seem, in memory, to be part of the music. Can there be too much of a good thing? When the glissando, rubato, and vibrato begin to sound like background music in a Hungarian restaurant, it’ s time to move on to…

HD Tracks –  Crisp, edgy contemporary performances are available at this site, mostly in downloadable formats ranging from standard MP3 to lossless multi-channel studio-quality originals. They have adopted the popular-music practice of selling individual tracks, each one individually downloadable. An interesting approach: the architecture, such as it as, may be assembled in various configurations by the listener. Large selection of contemporary music, all of it with an open-source commitment that once you buy a piece, you’re free to listen to it on any device you own (CD, MP3 players, I-pod, etc.) — no proprietary formats.

(Like all links at The Kamakura Print Collection, nothing of any sort is paid or exchanged for them, I simply recommend what I enjoy and find worthwhile.)

With all these musical choices, there will be plenty to listen to during printing sessions.

End of an Era of Industrial Carbon Tissue Production

Friday 14 Aug 2009 by Peter Miller | 8 Comments
Filed under: Printmaking Tags: , , ,

The last remaining manufacturer of carbon tissue, used in photogravure etching, announced it is stopping

Resist tissue

production after more than 100 years of manufacture. Carbon tissue is sensitized and exposed to ultraviolet light to form a resist. Adhered to the copperplate, it controls how deeply the plate is etched, and thus the light and dark of the impressed print, as explained here. According to the manufacturer’s announcement, ‘It is with sadness that after 100 years of supply, MacDermid Autotype is now forced to discontinue the manufacture of Gravure Pigment Papers.’ Hanfstaengl and McGraw had previously stopped making gravure products. The most likely cause of the demise of industrial carbon tissue manufacture is actually the decline of photo film. This has dissipated knowledge of industrial coatings and knowhow related to the operation and maintenance of production equipment.

Since gravure products represent five percent of Autotype’s business, very likely other companies will start manufacturing carbon tissue. Bostick & Sullivan, for example, already has expertise in this area, and with the support of many artisanal customers, is now considering the manufacture of carbon tissue (resist tissue). It’s also possible to make it oneself; I will experiment with this before my supplies are all used up.

It may be the beginning rather than the end of an era. Real photogravure etchings may become even more rare than they are now, but when all the dust has settled, new artistic possibilities may very well emerge.

Kamakura as a World Heritage Site

Wednesday 12 Aug 2009 by Peter Miller | No Comments
Filed under: Cultural commons Tags:

Already a well-known tourist destination and cultural/historical center. Kamakura’s claim to World Heritage status is based on its origins as the site of the first Shogunate, the ‘bakufu’ or ‘camp-village’ established by Minamoto Yoritomo in 1192. Its setting on hills facing the sea, originally for strategic purposes, gives the place an attractive environment, further enhanced by temples in nearly every valley. One of these, Zuisenji, has an exquisite garden designed by the Zen priest Muso Soseki. The founders of Kamakura crafted a new Japanese identity out of their rustic simplicity, in conscious contrast to the splendor of the Imperial Court at Kyoto. They adopted Zen to focus their minds on the task at hand, whether war or Tea, or ceramics, architecture, the visual arts, and daily life. Kamakura became and remains a place of rustic charm and rough simplicity, embodying a wabi-sabi sensibility that is at the heart of contemporary Japanese culture.

For this historic contribution as well as for its natural setting, temples and shrines, and gardens, Kamakura’s inscription as a World Heritage Site seems assured. The application has the backing of Japan’s Ministry of Culture and prominent advisors to UNESCO. Yet there are currently 890 Sites on the World Heritage List, including 14 in Japan. Kyoto, Nara, Shirakawa, Yakushima, Nikko, Itsukushima are already inscribed. Since these special places ‘belong’ in some sense to all humanity, on a busy day in August it may seem as if all humanity is swarming through them. This has prompted renewed emphasis on balancing tourism and commerce with the qualities that make a Site worthy of inscription in the first place.

The World Heritage Convention seeks to combine natural and cultural qualities, reflecting its origins in American-style National Parks and the British-style National Trust for Historic Preservation. It celebrates and protects chosen Sites from over-exploitation, competing land uses, natural and man-made disasters, and other threats. Human culture in all its variety thus joins sea turtles and Siberian tigers as endangered species. The newer thinking on environmental and cultural preservation doesn’t seek to banish commerce, but rather to make the qualities that are worth keeping part of people’s livelihoods. Business and trade are part of human culture too, essential elements of the World Heritage. My guess is that Kamakura’s laid-back wabi-sabi-ness will survive its World Heritage inscription.

Sounds of Japanese summer

Monday 10 Aug 2009 by Peter Miller | No Comments
Filed under: Seasons

cicada3 (Click the link at left to hear the cicada song.) These midsummer days are filled with the sounds of cicadas like the one seen and heard here. Any Japanese movie seeking instant recognition that it’s summertime has this in the background. Whether it’s a samurai

Semi

movie, a romance, a film by Yasujiro Ozu, or a beer commercial, the hot steamy atmosphere of Japanese summer is indelibly evoked by these sounds. The association of cicadas and heat is not accidental, since ‘Cicadas like heat and do their most spirited singing during the hotter hours of a summer day.’ Only the males sing, and they do so with surprising volume from such a small creature. Cool weather brings an eerie quiet, a sign that summer is over, to be followed by susuki grass and a harvest moon.

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