Visiting Artist Talks Art, History of Work
Linna Jones
Editor-in-Chief
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| Photo by Linna Jones |
| Multitalented- John Norris, assistant professor of Drawing at Arkansas State University, answers questions asked by students during his presentation March 10 in the Art Complex Lecture Room. Norris talked about the progression of his painting and his music. |
MONTICELLO- A visiting artist talked about his work, the history of his work and his music in the Art Complex Lecture Room March 10.
John Norris, assistant professor of Drawing at Arkansas State University, talked with students and faculty about his work and the history of his work. Norris attended Murray State University, where he earned his undergraduate degree and went to graduate school at Louisiana State University.
Norris started painting a little over 10 years ago. He walked students through the progress of painting for him as an undergraduate through graduate school to where he is now.
During the presentation, a few students asked questions about Norris’s artwork and techniques.
Senior Rusty Nail, Art major, asked if Norris’s project start with objects in mind, which can be found in a room?
Norris said the objects he paints have to be personally related to him and objects he sees everyday.
“My paintings aren’t as conceptual in the sense that I start out with a very specific concept or agenda that I want to get a cross,” he said. ”Whether, it be political or personal or whatever, I much more sort of respond to objects and respond to them to my sensibilities. Concepts emerge, but I do not build a body of work from those”
Norris showed several paintings from other artist during his slide show. He showed paintings from Howard Hodgkin titled “Fire in Venice,” Peter Doig titled “100 years ago,” Wayne Thiebaud titled “Cakes, "Two Candles" by Gerhard Richter from 1982” and other artists. "Two Candles" also graced the cover of a famous Sonic Youth Album called Daydream Nation.
Creating Art
Norris described his paintings as taking mundane, everyday objects from his daily surroundings or objects he encounters everyday in his routine to inspire his work. He tries to figure out how to stage the objects and creates a narrative for each piece. He tries to develop a kind of plot, but he does this with still images. He creates the images by placement relationships and makes them into a unified image.
“I think about these as sort of stand in for the figure often times. As we go about our daily lives, often time the images that we interact with they start to be attached to our identities,” Norris said. “Things we surround ourselves with, they almost serve as stand-ins for ourselves in many cases day to day.”
He said he was also interested in the interactions of patterns, natural and manmade. He looks at patterns found in nature and man-made patterns throughout manufacturing and design. He looks how the patterns interact in light in or in something else such as wood grain.
His work is also a response to painting; to him painting is a limitless medium. He said it was pretty amazing how painting has continued for thousands and thousands of years, but people still find new ways of engaging in it all the time.
Undergraduate Studies
He showed a painting when he was a freshman in college. When he went to college the art program he studied under was classical and academic and it was very much about learning the methods from the past.
Early on, he became interested in the self-portrait. He said it seemed like a strange physiological experiment and a real sort of genuine challenge. He showed a chalk pastel drawing of himself as a freshman in college, and throughout that time, he tried to approach it from several different points of view.
He pointed out how some of the things he liked to paint were creeping in, like a wood grain floor in a portrait of a man cut in half.
He tried a self-portrait in abstract expressionism after a trip to Germany.
“I think during (undergraduate studies) that is a good time to seek out things you are interested in and just sort of play with how you might approach them from your point of view,“ Norris said.
He became interested in the idea of just object found in his daily life being able to serve as sort of stand-ins or sort of referring to something else very early.
He showed a painting of a plant people in Kentucky call a "coffee bean" plant. He looked at the plants as representations of human limbs or language. He would hang them on the wall. I was interested in how I could observationally and faithfully just pin theses up on the wall and make drawings of them, but how they might to start suggesting soething other than what they are.
He went on a trip before his senior year, when he was an undergraduate student. He traveled to Europe and for the first time he saw many works in person that he never really encountered, not only European works, but also many American works. He saw Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenburg, in additional to modernist masters like Picasso, deCurico and surrealist metaphysical painters.
“What I realized at that point, even though I really valued the education I got and since it is very rooted in learning how to paint and draw from life, “ he said. “I feel like I got a very solid background in terms of craft.”
The art program at Murray State did not really emphasize much art from twentieth century. He realized much of the work in the twentieth century was to some degree about fragmentation from cubism and even pop.
He said in work from the twentieth century onward, there was always an element of fragmentation or collage happening. This came as a kind of revelation to him, because he did not really work in this mode up to that point.
When he returned to school to do his senior show, he wanted to do something with fragmentation. He wanted to use everything he learned technically from painting, but come at it from different points of view.
He started collected different manuals from around campus like an Army dress code manual, physical instruction handbook, a manual on how to make Valentine’s Day crafts and one on how to play chess. The books featured drawings for informational purposes.
He started thinking how he could bring these ideas together of how he could alter them based on his experiences in seeing collage.
He showed one of his paintings, which incorporated the sleeve decoration of an officer’s uniform, chess piece, fragment of a human figure and half of a heart.
He said he missed drawing from life at that time. He started thinking about how he could physically collage things that are different together to make sculptural objects that will be something other than the objects themselves. Then he would make drawings of the objects to record the experiment.
He would build sculptures out of simple objects. He also did experiments where he would fragment paper and make little individual drawings out of simple everyday items. He wondered how he could take something simple, which he sees everyday, and change it into something strange and biomorphic where it took the form of something familiar and making it different. He did this with everyday items like camouflage and gloves.
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| Photo by Linna Jones |
| "Sonja"- Students and faculty look at a painting by Christian Schad called "Sonja." John Norris showed a paintings from other artists during his lecture. |
Extra Education
He moved to Brooklyn with friends and lived there for a year and a half after graduating.
He found out very quickly he did not have time, space or money to make very many paintings, because he had to work to pay rent.
He described the year as an extra year of education, because he was able to go to museums. When did have time to paint, he discovered he wanted to pull back and work on refining some of his ideas about painting. He started making simple painting where he wanted to refine his technique. He would also sneak away do one-session landscapes when he could get out of town.
After about a year and a half, he wanted to go to graduate school to make work and his work to progress. He knew it was not happening in New York, because he did not have a situation where he would have the time and space to paint.
After New York, he moved to his sister’s cabin in Eastern Kentucky to take care of the cabin and find time to paint.
Norris saw a lecture by David Hockney at the University of Louisville at Kentucky called “Secret Knowledge,” which led to new ideas for him. Hockney proposed the idea that the old masters used techniques with lenses to where they could project images and use them as part of their painting technique.
Hockney’s idea made him think about observation. He received a classical education where a person is taught to draw from life. It made him question working from life vs. working from photography vs. working from other forms of art.
He started thinking about a pure, kind of abstract surface and how that would work with an image.
“I was curious about how all these things coexist in a painting," he said. "What is really going on when you think about all the different influences occur when you think about sight? “
He started making what he described as bizarre, still-life paintings. He now describes them as “awkward, disjointed, confusing and confused. He said they were very important to him as a way for him to understand how one could think about texture on its own terms like mixing different sources like photography vs. working from life and how all of theses elements come together in a picture.
Graduate School
He attended graduate School at Louisiana State University. While there, he decided he wanted to make some very big paintings, where he tried to explore some of the ideas about diferent elements like photography, working from life and pure surface. He wanted all of those things coexisting in a more ambitious picture on a larger scale and something that would work more as a unified image.
He kept thinking of still life, of the objects that were important to him, and objects as stand-ins. He wanted to investigate those ideas on a larger scale. The large paintings he created would take months. In one work, he built up layers to see how an image could exist with all of the layers and textures. He thought much about what he could do with paint and how far he wanted to push it.
He started incorporating musical objects into his work like the neck of a ukulele, and microphone. He worked from life and taking pictures, but he did not try to stick to either medium too closely.
He made two large paintings his first year at LSU. He also made drawing of photographs. He changed his work from large painting to smaller ones. He started to use more musical images as times went by.
He enjoyed performing music since he was 12 –14 years old. He wanted to write his own songs and make his own recordings. He painted during the day and made recording when he went home after school. Music elements started appearing more in his painting like sculptures.
He showed his 2005 Graduate Show accompanied by music he composed and recorded. Norris took an independent study at LSU the summer before his thesis. He developed the idea for his these to record an album and make a body of paintings at the same time for his thesis. He did not set up a concept on how they should relate, but deeply immersed himself in both to see how they might relate.
“It was much more of an experiment than a conceptual project,” he said.
He made an album and a body of paintings throughout his last year at graduate school. As he composed and painted, the paintings became more “poppy,” and the narratives the figures suggested became more direct. He think by him recording on better equipment fed into him being more direct in his paintings. The lyrics, which he wrote, also started referring to the imagery in the paintings.
When Norris set up his show he had headphones attached to each painting, which played different samples from his album. A person could listen to the record and look at the painting at the same time.
After recording an album, some musicians encouraged Norris to play his music lives. He started to collaborate musically with others. The musicians he played with were also into art. He worked with designer, who created rock posters from his paintings.
Norris worked as an adjunct professor while playing his music and painting. He decided to focus on painting in new way and try to a job a professor. He said he was going to give himself a year to go out and try new things.
“The work I’ve made since then, that has been a year and a half,” he said. “I sort of thought of this as kind of a new beginning. I moved to a new place, it’s an opportunity to change my work.”
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