sharonerlichman.com

Over the last few weeks I have been work­ing on what I call my “black & white panel series”  where I have taken the same size of paper and restricted my colour palette to only black and white acrylic paint.  I con­sis­tently did them every morn­ing and found that my incli­na­tion was to develop the ideas of one panel and respond to it in my next panel.  As I viewed the entire series of 20 pan­els that emerged out of this process,  I saw group­ings of pan­els that responded to each other –a dia­logue was created.

While these works began an exer­cise in set­ting lim­its (given my love of colour) I became involved in the rela­tion­ship between the the two colours and how they drove my sense of com­po­si­tion rather that decid­ing on the direc­tion of the com­po­si­tion first–the move­ment of the paint and the merg­ing of the tonal­i­ties dic­tated what direc­tion to go in. They have an “in the moment” feel and yet are detailed and nuanced at the same time.

View the com­plete Black & White Panel Series to see for your­self.

The mean­ing of a box

three hours on the mean­ing of a box

metaphor­i­cal

lit­eral

vir­tual

non­sense

present your mus­ings on video by Friday

Stretch your mind, stretch your bound­aries but not over the age of 30.…..too late.…need latte now.….

pay bills.….focus on boxes later.……

2012 has just arrived and with it came the usual arti­cles and media dis­cus­sions on the “best” of 2011 etc. One inter­est­ing radio piece (on CBC Radio Q) had an in depth dis­cus­sion of cul­ture in gen­eral and how noth­ing is new any­more. We are in a cul­tural rut, so to speak, where noth­ing orig­i­nal is being cre­ated anymore—just a rehash­ing of old ideas, fash­ions, music, art –you name it, it has already been thought of and/or done.

One of the most orig­i­nal, inven­tive eras that the human race has ever expe­ri­enced is right under our nose/staring us in the face and that is the tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion that we are caught up in and we are right in the thick of it. We don’t even yet know or can pre­dict what the full impli­ca­tions of these advances will mean but it has already changed the realms of the social, polit­i­cal and eco­nomic on a global scale. It has affected our per­sonal and pub­lic lives and changed the way we relate to each other and our­selves. If that is not orig­i­nal I don’t know what is…it is so seis­mic in scope and pre­dom­i­nates every­thing, that it is no sur­prise that other aspects of pop­u­lar cul­ture fade into the background.

Art has always reflected the social, polit­i­cal and eco­nomic times of its mak­ing and we are see­ing the inte­gra­tion and reflec­tion of this tech­nol­ogy rev­o­lu­tion in dig­i­tal media, tra­di­tional media, pho­tog­ra­phy etc. Just look at the course cal­en­dar from OCAD (Ontario Col­lege of Art & Design) to see the changes. Incre­men­tal shifts in style, cul­ture, music are sig­nif­i­cant and tell a story but one has to step back from it to rec­og­nize the seis­mic shifts under­ly­ing it. Ironi­cially, the very “rehash­ing” of old ideas is a nec­es­sary process and requires that very orig­i­nal­ity and inven­tive­ness that cre­ated it in the first place. Iden­ti­fy­ing that ker­nel of authen­tic­ity and view­ing it in a dif­fer­ent light that makes it rel­e­vant to a new audi­ence is vital.

Chal­leng­ing myself in my stu­dio prac­tice with new tech­niques, media and ideas is a pri­or­ity for myself this new year. Some­times being in a rut sim­ply means a fal­low period where sig­nif­i­cant changes need to be absorbed and con­sid­ered before the next new art move­ment, fash­ion icon appears—and it will cer­tainly appear. But first, get me that latte.…