Asheville

Living in Asheville, breathing in the delicious fall mountain air, walking down Broadway into downtown. The city is alive and thriving. It almost seems every one is an artist of some kind. Either visual artist or musicians the city is crawling with creativity, or at the very least attempts at creativity. I need to get painting again, I've been painting a little here and there but I have yet to throw myself into it like I have in the past. It may be because my studio (aka garage) is falling apart and is currently being fixed. It could be the I don't have any room in there because my housemates stuff is taking up most of the space. However excuses are just that, there is also room to work and create to thrive and express. I think apathy is the real reason. To paint without feedback is difficult, I need to find my niche, a group of people who I can meet with and talk about art and expression and push my ideas further as they come into contact with others ideas. To make contact, to conflict, to blend and to grow, a natural growth of ideas based out of community.
Anyways I don't know why I even write on this thing. It's not like anyone every fucking reads it.
~till next time
Noah

Fluidity of the Moment Photos

Fluidity of the moment


We are fluid creatures. Constantly changing. Constantly shifting.
All that really exists is the moment, which is a fluid changing structure. Beginning as a photographer I was fascinated by the ability of a camera to invent a fixed moment. Simply by setting the shutter speed I could compress anywhere between 1/500oth of a second to three hours into a single moment. However the single moment isn’t real it’s simply a recording of light. Painting is no different it takes gestures over time and presents them as one concise image.

The abstract expressionist attempted to express emotion rather than showing it pictorially. Each gesture, each stroke has a great release of emotion. It is released and expressed in the moment, but this does not mean it is recorded. We are fluid. Our emotions are always changing. Any painting created in this manner must express this fluidity.

Painting is a meditation that expels emotion and allows the mind to rest. This series does not attempt to express any emotion but rather celebrate life and being. Because these paintings take place over time they are a layering of many emotions as they are expressed and freed. Each painting represents a compression of time ranging from three months to one week. They are composed of multiple layers representing the process through which my mind settled from an emotional state to a meditative one.

Jackson Pollock says “ a method of painting is a natural growth out of a need.” My process has grown out of a need for meditation and expression. These paintings are reductive. They are limited around the horizontal and vertical axis. This has allowed for an intuitive composition process where one gesture or mark demands the next. Each gesture is a result of its predecessor creating a rhythmic flow during production; ultimately resulting in an atmospheric expression of the creation of a moment.


Noah Kalos

Tracks

I spent this summer up in Vermont working as a camp counselor. Kind of the usual for these last few years. I've always been interested in wilderness survival and this summer I took it to a new level. I worked to expand my awareness of nature and my awareness of myself and my limits. Ok so maybe I was reading a bit too much Tom Brown, but I gained a lot of new insight into myself and nature. I had a sort of life changing experience where I spent a night sleeping under a tree and in a pile of leaves through a severe thunderstorm. After that I thought I was gonna hitch hike across the country because I wanted to spend more time in the woods. After some thinking I decided to just move to Asheville NC, while this isn't as intense as hitch hiking I think I may actually have more opportunities to play in the woods and definitely get to know one area better. With the increase in my awareness of nature I grew a fascination with tracks and signs. Finding pushed down grass where deer had beaded down and then some scat became a thrill. seeing sticks displaced or leaves pushed where something had been evoke a sense of awe at the mystery of nature. I began to be fascinated by the things left behind and that which left them.
I see my paintings as tracks of my presence, as traces of what I've left behind. They show the tracks of my brushes pallet knives and razors. But what have others left behind, what mysteries can I find of animals and people and they're interaction in an urban environment. I hope that once I move to Asheville I can begin to incorporate traces and tracks of people and animals into my art to show the intersection between myself and the environment I find myself in. How can a found object move me to create, how can one trace move me to create new traces new images new work. I hope to allow my art to intersect with all that is around me and allow all that is around me to intersect with my art to produce a unified expression of self and place.

these ones are a bit better

Senior Show

fluidity of the moment

quick shots of work from the show

big show last night. I took some quick shots with the lighting that was in there. I'm having john come through to document also and I think I have him use even lighting rather than the spots. anyways here is the link. Noah's work from squaring off

it's my birthday!

my internet is totally not working I don't know why. I'm at my friend's house at the moment. anyways I've been building a lot of frames. I'm working on staining them using oil paints. this way I can match the color to the paintings. most of my paintings feature a dialogue between prussian blue and light red. these two colors are compliments and neutralize to a dark black. the frames will range in color from the blue side to red side with some of the black in between. the first frame i made I forgot to account for the extra two inches due to the width of the wood. so I've been experimenting with stains on that piece. the first stain i made was to green because of the yellow color of the wood. I was aiming for a dark blue. so the next layer of the stain I will add more light red to neutralize the green. the addition of red will make the mixture more of a purple, purple being the opposite of yellow will bring the color back into the intended range. I may have to use a cadmium red or alizarin crimson because the light red is too orange to create the purple needed. another way to think of it is that i need to find the compliment of the green thats being created by the combination of blue and yellow. however i can not use the exact compliment because that would neutralize the color. Instead I need to find the compliment and add a touch of prussian blue to bring it back into a the blue range. for the neutralized light red frames I will have to just add little more light red to the compliment of the yellow color fo the wood.
I just started working on my largest painting for my show 5'x7'. I've gessoed it but i need to add one more layer. I will begin painting it tomorrow. I'm planning on getting some in progress shots soon. I want to try and document this large painting better. so hopefully more pictures to come.

Old videos

Here are two old videos of mine. The first is a project from spring of 2007 and traces the idea of memory and footprints left. The second was a collaborative project from the spring of 2005, although I wrote, directed, and edited it. Both pieces use vertical rather than horizontal time and take place in a somewhat surreal world.

Pollock Video

Chinese art factories

So I was reading this article talking about how cheap Chinese oil paintings are making it rough on the street painters of Paris. It was more of rant really. It said that any art lover should hang their head if the ever buy one of these paintings. so it got me thinking about reproduction and art.
first off I think that it is necessary to at least acknowledge that these painters have some skill. Its not that easy to copy a painting. thinking of one city exporting five million paintings a year is pretty incredible. Perhaps the painters even lack talent but they do have skill. "the fastest worker produces 30 paintings a day" as a painter the idea of a person who is able to paint 30 paintings a day, even if they are all of the same thing is amazing.
It is incredible to think of that many artist all in one place. however their living and working conditions are pretty terrible by our standards.
Is a reproduction of art actually a piece of art or not? Clearly a poster of a print is not an original piece of art. However if it was the actual print it would be considered original because it would have a unique series number and all that jazz. Even if the plates are scratched out after the series is printed it seems like the distinction is fetishizing the idea of uniqueness. While the poster may not be as good quality it is still the image created by the artist and representation of an original work. However this is all just talking about mechanical reproduction. When we start thinking about someone copying a painting all the sudden the hand of the artist is put back in play... just a different artist. While these paintings are no doudbt disrupting the painting market they still represent a huge force of painting skill.
I had some ideas about projects I would do if I had the funding and time:
1. go around the world and collect reproductions of a certain famous painting. I havn't decided which painting yet, but 1,000 copy's of __________ would be amazing. Ideally I would travel to many differenty countries and buy some of the paintings at tourist traps. I would conclude my trip with a visit to Dafen, China where a five million of these paintings are produced a year. I would ship the paintings back as I made my trip. I would also photodocument the trip and the people and places I bought the paintings from.
2. Have 1000 copy's made of one of my paintings roughly 4'x5' in size
3. have two gallery spaces adjacent to one another with the reproductions and the original of my work and the famous work sorounded by the reproductions. the original will be in the center of each gallery behind glass and roped off. the reproductions will fill the wall space all around, any extra reproductions will be left in crates and scattered on the floor of the gallery space.
4. Everyday the original paintings will be switched between the galleries. on odd days the paintings will be in the gallery with their own reproductions and on even they will be sorounded by the other reproduction. the changing of the paintings will be a ceromony with rediculous formality and the originals will be transfered with armed gaurds.


so thats what i would do if i had the time resources and money. well i can alway make the time, its the resources.

check out the this article about the chinese painting factories, this is not the guy ranting about chinese paintings killing the french street painting market.

article


so also thinking about reproduction, Shepard Fairey's Barack Obama campaign poster has stirred up some legal shananigans. He used an photo from the AP to design the poster and now the whole issue of who owns the image is in question. its seems almost redicoulous to argue over who owns a specific angle of Barack Obama's face. It doesn't even seem like it matters if it was created by scanning in the photo and outputting onto transparencies or if it was rendered by hand. Given that Barack Obama is a political figure all the photographer really can claim any right to is the specific angle of the shot and Obama's face. If Obama was willing to pose for me and I shot a picture from the same angle with a flag posistioned right in the back round who would own it, me or the AP? Well that would be another interesting project to do if I could get Obama to pose for me for a half hour or so.
article

These are from January some of them have changed a lot, some not so much

new blog new life

new blog new life? well not really. Anyways I'm a painter working on layered abstract paintings. I'm hoping to start taking more in progress photos of my work and posting them here. Unfortunately of the six pieces I'm working on five of them are developed enough to the point where they are drying waiting to be glazed. so those five won't really show too much change. the other one? who knows. My work is fairly process oriented. I roll paint on and scrape it off allowing for composition and color to become improvisations.