Category: Visual Art

This summer I have traveled from Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia) to Michigan. I am teaching in the summer program at Interlochen Center for the arts. Interlochen is in Northwest Michigan, near Traverse City. On the way there, I stopped in Williamsport, Pennsylvania to visit the artist Chad Andrews. Chad has been an early tenant in the Pajama Factory. The Pajama Factory is a building that holds artist studios and performance space. It is owned by Mark Winkelman who is an architect from New York City.

This floor of the Pajama Factory has yet to be developed.

I have seen other cities convert old factory buildings into studios (e.g., the Crane Building in Philadelphia or the Goggle Works in Reading, PA) but I have never seen a building this large with so much potential. This makes me wonder if projects like the Pajama Factory will have a greater impact on the art we see in the future? As the internet has made images of artists’ work more accessible and art fairs have made it easier for galleries to make sales in multiple markets, will artists seek out these new centers where the rent is relatively inexpensive compared to big cities? One of the smart choices that the Pajama factory has made was to start an artist residency program. This allows young artists to consider being an artist in a less than obvious place.

A renovated floor with new studios.

After touring the building with Chad Andrews, I began to feel that another advantage to a facility of this kind is that resources can be consolidated. For example, Andrews has refurbished several printing presses and just opened a printmaking workshop akin to Second State Press (located in the Crane Building, Phila. PA). So far Andrews has signed up several talented local artists (e.g., Jeremiah Johnson and Lori Crossley) for membership and access to his print shop. Only time will tell how large projects like the Pajama Factory will work. However, I feel a wider range of studio options will only benefit to the artists of the the future.

Chad Andrews’s new printmaking studio.

Two years ago I started a painting (acrylic on canvas) that was to be dominated by the chroma white. Initially, I was inspired by the abstract paintings of Robert Ryman. Ryman is known to use an abundance of white. Rather than making an abstract painting, I wanted to paint a boat I called the “Arkadelphia” making its way to Anchorage, Alaska. My painting was to depicted extreme cold through extreme white.

As I started to paint, I quickly realized that what appeared to be white on the palette no longer looked white on the canvas. Any little bit of color mixed with white had a profoundly colorful effect when placed on my canvas and compared with other more pure whites. I found that my image began to suffer from two flaws: either I made it too white and the imagery became difficult to see or I added too much color and then it was no longer dominated by white paint.

Not knowing how to proceed, I left the painting alone for two years and this June, after what I consider a long detour, I began to work on it again. Forgetting about my original objective, I began painting portraits inside the boat. Later, as I worked I tried to make these portraits whiter and concentrate on cool colors (blues and greens).

After working on the painting for a couple of days, I arrived at a point of decision again. Rather than continue and obliterate the image with more white, instead I stopped. This is the point at which I dropped anchor and the painting remained still. This metaphor of “dropping anchor” became an apt description and I wondered if the city of Anchorage was founded in a similarly specific and arbitrary way. After finishing this not so white painting (see the image below), I wondered if I would ever successfully make a painting truly dominated by the color white. Perhaps this future painting will have to depict a scene in route to Antarctica.

Anchorage, by Kip Deeds, 25″ x 26 1/2″, Acrylic on Canvas, 2010

The cracks in my previous post (as seen in the photographs) are located on State Route 3003 near Laceyville PA.

For the last two weeks I have been spending time in upstate Pennsylvania (about a 45 minute drive northwest of Scranton). Driving around this part of the state I have noticed and often tried to avoid patches of broken asphalt in the road. It seems dirt roads are less worrisome than these dreaded jagged piles of broken asphalt. Although I felt that the pictures of the ravaged roads were impressive just as images, I thought posting a few pictures might also highlight the need for road repair. I can’t imagine what these roads would be like with a lower tax revenue. The following image was made while I was going for a walk.

The image below is a little further down the road.