Some Great Things about 2007

1. Wolgang Tillmans at The Hirshhorn Museum (pictured above)

- adventurous installation for a "white cube" town.

2. El Greco to Picasso at The Guggenheim NYC

-It is always a treat for me to see Zurberan and Cotan, oh right and Velasquez, Juan Gris, Picasso, blah, blah, blah...

3. Susan Walp at Tibor de Nagy - http://tibordenagy.com/#/artists/

-I challenge you to find more arresting little paintings.

4. Still-Life Invitational and Fresh Nine at Gross McCleaf Gallery Philadelphia, PA
-I exhibited in both. Pretzles and Lord Chesterfield Ale for all!!!

5. James Kalm "Man on the Bike" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsdot7YjGM

6. Books on Disc in the Studio- This year has included Plot Against America, Spoken Arts Treasury, and Teacher Man. 2008 is going to bring some good and pulpy detective novels. It's all the rage this season!

7. Jay Reatard/Blood Visions on the In the Red imprint

8. Derek Walcott's poem The Prodigal

9. Seeing Simon Schama's Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art.

10. Dr. Vino - http://drvino.com/

11. Ted Kooser - The Poetry Home Repair Manual

-Good insights into aspects of creativity, audience, intelligibility and I learned how to be a better reader of poems.

Winter Solice

This winter for me, as are most winters, very introspective. I am constantly trying to further develop an approach to painting in consideration of what, outside of subject-matter, my paintings communicate. That is, how the paintings are composed is a subject in itself (probably the main subject.) , but there is also this other dimension of 'representation' that always needs to be addressed, whether it be depicting something concrete like a cup, or something abstract like space.

I recently came across a really good article about fiction, dislocation, and the creative input of the audience in an interview with Brazilian writer Bernardo Carvalho. http://bombsite.com/issues/102/articles/3038

Fiction and dislocation I think about a lot in terms of perception and painting, but I haven't ever considered how a viewer will have to cobble together all of this visual stuff in quite this way. I always thought paintings either impressed themselves on a viewer or slapped them around. Viewing has always seemed to be a more passive act, at the mercy of the subject being viewed. But to think of viewing as an assertive act of creativity - to which the subject is subjected - is new for me.

Is it that the viewer has to rebuild perceptually all of the relationships that the artist has created in their work? So, no matter how clearly I think I have laid something out it is still up to the viewer to organize what the work projects back to it's original intent. (If that is exactly possible is another matter entirely. see Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos) Or, is it all a positive accumulation in which the work begins a life in the studio, projecting outward, and is then subjected to innumerable readings? I'll work on that.

This receivership notion expands the artist/viewer relationship for me. At the same time as it offers a little direction it also enlarges the discourse beyond any one single frame of vision.

By way of introduction here are some places to find images of my work.

Bio information, location, cv, etc are all there too.

1. http://mtthwmnn.com/home.html - out of date but relevant. Kind of like a retrospective.

2. http://artdc.org/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=1057 - newer images.

3. http://www.benschwab.com/freshnine2007.pdf - press release from a show I participated in during the summer at Gross McCleaf in Philadelphia. If you want a catalog just ask. Audiences agree that I managed to put a well stated little blurb about my work in it. This was the second show with Gross McCleaf in '07.