I'm happy to announce that a selection of the flat art I've been producing (drawings on paper with ink, pen, pencil, and/or watercolor) is now for sale in the Zero Point Mechanic section of the Luna Lola website. I've put a few small sculptures there also.

I've been producing many more drawings than sculptures this year. I had a mild case of sculpture burnout after the push to finish the Dirt Dance Floor show last fall, and drawing was something I could do sitting around in the house in the morning or evening or whenever I had some spare time. It's a good activity to fill in the cracks, especially at the moment when escapism is all the more precious.

I rarely find myself short of ideas. When I do I just start dragging the pencil across the paper and inevitably something begins to emerge. Is it always something I end up liking? No. But the time and energy investment is so minimal that it's easier to be comfortable experimenting. 

The pictures above are images of some of work with India ink. I tend to draw stuff I like, which includes bizarre houses, animals, strange mechanical contraptions, people, and combinations of all of the above. If you're into this stuff, please check out my work on the website. There will be more added as I finish new things and keep going through my stacks of stuff from this winter and fall.

As my show at Tapp's winds down, I'm working on my next move. Most of the pieces in the show didn't sell (here is a page showing all of them), so they'll be coming home with me at least temporarily.  The show technically ends on the 29th but Tapp's in in full bug-out mode now as they prepare to shift to their new location. So I'll start moving my pieces out in the coming week.

I think my next move is to find a gallery somewhere in the region through which I can sell. I've sold pieces in Columbia and feel very supported here, but my guess is that I will do better over the long term with exposure in another area with a more developed art market (Charleston? Asheville?). I have zero experience in approaching galleries, so if anyone out there has any leads or advice I'm listening. Inventory is no problem, as I have many pieces of varying size and price point ready to go. If you a know a gallery owner that you think might be interested, please send them the link to the Dirt Dance Floor page or just my gallery. 

Because I still work in my garage, I have low overhead. The profit from the pieces I sell generally goes into my daughter's college fund. Given recent events, I may start diverting some funds into the legal war chest that I'm building to defend myself and my blog.

Anyway, if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them! I'm going to keep on creating no matter what, but I need to get better at getting my work in front of the right people. I'm not a professional artist, but I'm still better at that than I am at being a salesman.

I'm currently in Jackson, Mississippi, for the annual Southeastern Archaeological Conference meeting. Between the time change last week and then the shift from the Eastern to Central time zones, my body has lost track of what time it's supposed to be. I guess that's what clocks are for.

Anyway, I'll post more about SEAC later. I've been having a good time chatting with colleagues. I give my presentation on the size of Paleoindian social groupings later today. 

The downside of being here is that I missed the second First Thursday of "Dirt Dance Floor" at Tapp's. Tapp's announced yesterday that they will be moving their operation to Five Points after they vacate their current Main Street location at the end of the month. It looks like there was a good crowd there for the last hurrah.

I took some time last week to go through my show before the pieces get scattered. Believe it or not, I did have a fairly coherent vision of what I wanted the show to be. I still can't fully articulate that -- if I could put it into a few simple sentences I wouldn't need to have an art show -- but I can say a few things about the individual pieces that I'll likely not remember a few years from now. So that's the point of this video:

It's nothing fancy, but I think it gets the job done.

I've created a page on my art website that shows all the pieces in the show, and I've gone through the whole lot (one per day) on my Instagram account.

Reading the Tapp's story let me to this story by Tom Mack in the Free Times. It's a really nice write-up and I appreciate the author's thoughtfulness and keen eye. Enjoy!

It has been a busy fall. It seems like our family has been going going going since before the final push in late September to get my solo show set up at Tapp's. The kids had entries in the State Fair, we've had family in town, my wife and I attended the Gervais Street Bridge Dinner (they used some of my art, which was great), and there has been the usual run of birthday parties, school events, etc. My introvert side is operating in deficit territory.

I'm really proud of my show. It's not everything I imagined it could be, but it's more than I ever thought I'd get to do. Given that art is still a weekend/evening enterprise for me, I feel very fortunate to have the flexibility in my life and the family and friend support necessary to have dreamed it up and pulled it off.  My wife deserves a lot of credit for backing me up, especially during the last couple of weeks before the opening. I owe Chris Gillam for helping me move the big stuff (again). And I really appreciate the support of Caitlin Bright and the others at Tapp's: they gave me rope and let me do what I wanted to do.

I'll post a few pictures I took before and on opening night. I thought the turnout was good, and I had a great time talking to those who wanted to talk. It's a really nice feeling to have others come out, look at, and appreciate what you have done.

It's still under construction, but here's a page on my art website that shows most of the pieces in the show.  I neglected to take pictures of several of the pieces (including all the big ones) before I moved them -- those will be added soon. I plan to do a video tour of the show at some point before I take it all down.

It has been a busy few weeks. As usual, I have more topics than time. At this point, I'm going to just accept that my blog sometimes functions as an open access journal. Here is the bullet point version of what I've been up to. We'll do art first, then archaeology.

The Jasper Artist of the Year Is . . . Not Me

As I wrote in December, I was one of three finalists nominated for Jasper Artist of the Year (in the visual arts category). The awards ceremony was last Friday. I did not win the award: that honor went to Trahern Cook. I met some new people, drank some wine, and had a good time (the picture above was taken there). Congratulations to all the winners!

New Pieces Over the Holidays

In addition to "Desire," I completed several other smallish pieces over the holiday break. 

I'm still working to finish up editing the student videos from my Forbidden Archaeology class last semester. I finished one on Atlantis last week and one on pyramids today. You can find them on my YouTube channel, along with videos about my archaeological fieldwork and my art.

New Grant For Collections Work

I'm happy to announce that I have received grant monies from the Archaeological Research Trust to continue inventorying and preliminary analysis of chipped stone projectile points from the Larry Strong Collection. You may remember me writing about working with the Early Archaic materials a while ago. I'm still working with those (more on that later), but now I'm going to move on in time and process the Middle and Late Archaic stuff. Part of the rationale is that I'll be dealing with those time periods in the materials we've been excavated at the field school.

South Carolina Archaeology Class: We're Making a Movie

I'm teaching South Carolina Archaeology (ANTH 321) this semester. The class is bigger than in years past. That's good from an enrollment standpoint, but a challenge from a teaching standpoint. In the spirit of experimentation, I decided to build in a class video project. We'll be making a video attempting to showcase the archaeology of this state. I've divided the students up into groups and given them topics (mostly organized chronologically) that they're responsible for. They're going to research their topics and develop proposals about what issues, artifacts, sites, and people should be included the video. Then we'll take it from there.

Go Deep!

Today I submitted  a grant proposal for systematic exploratory work on the deep deposits at 38FA608 (the field school site). We know now several things about the sediments below the Middle Archaic zones: (1) they're deep; (2) they're Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene in age; and (3) they contain artifacts. I don't believe I've mentioned it publicly, but I submitted a sample for OSL data from the deepest stratum we've documented so far (about 5m below the original surface) and it returned a result around the Last Glacial Maximum.  Also, we've found an Early Archaic Kirk point in a disturbed part of the site. What all that means is that the landform did indeed exist at the end of the last Ice Age and (minimally) Early Archaic peoples were using it. In other words, there's a really good potential for some very high integrity buried archaeology there. Fingers crossed. 

Other News

In other news . . . our 2003 4Runner finally suffered a terminal injury. And I'm tearing out our rotted deck. And I've started working a rabbit sculpture that's big enough to sit on. It will have a tractor seat. And a gear shift. And a dashboard.

And now you are up to date.

Flavia Lovatelli and I have several things in common: (1) we both live in Columbia; (2) we both do art using discarded junk; and (3) we're both finalists for the Jasper Artist of the Year award. We also both ran "summer selfie" contests last that were largely ignored by the public. The result is that we won each other's contests, which means we're making each other art.

We decided that we'd make each other the "same" thing. Flavia picked the subject: crows. I picked the title "Desire." I don't know when they'll be done, but I do know we've both started. I settled on an idea and started putting pieces together earlier in the week. I know that Flavia's got a least a couple of coats of paint down. That's about all I can say at this point. Maybe we can exchange the pieces at the awards ceremony.

In other news: the domestication of the dog continues unabated. Have a nice weekend!

One of the most gratifying personal aspects of moving to Columbia has been having the time, space, and resources to do art. I've got a notebook, some tools, a supportive family, a half of a garage, plenty of ideas, and a bunch of neighbors who give me their junk. In the last couple of years those ingredients have let me go places I never thought I'd be able to go. I've won things, sold things, met some great people, and had a lot of fun in the process. 

When I started messing around with sculpture about ten years ago (in the capacity that I could at the time), memory and sentimentality were core components of what I was interested in. Those remained central thoughts as I ramped up here in Columbia, and were the organizing theme of the "Afterburner" show I had at Tapp's in the spring of 2017.  Over the last couple of years I have continued chasing those feelings while trying to lean forward, pushing my vision, improving my technical skills, and expanding the range of materials I work with.

The end of this semester was a busy one for our family, and I found myself working more in the evenings than on the weekends. After I finished "Passenger" in November I worked mostly on two pieces I had started earlier during the summer: "Painted Swan" and a dancing fox I'm calling "Kiss Goodbye." It was while working on the fox over the course of several rainy evenings listening to the radio that I realized that I'm at a pivot point in my art: the Afterburner series is over. Fifty is a nice round number.

I based the posture of the fox on a line drawing I found online. I wanted the animal to be light, dynamic, and playful. And I wanted the base to be the opposite. The fox is springing off a dead weight (an engine block), saying goodbye to a heavy, broken mass that won't ever move again.

As an archaeologist, I take it as axiomatic that you can't understand the present without knowing something about the past. The past provides context, texture, richness, and direction. Memories of the past are important. But they can also be toxic. They can be limiting when they become an obligation. Sometimes it's best to let them be what they are and move on -- take the power but leave behind the handcuffs.

Over the last few years I have developed my own style, created a cast of characters, and scratched out -- though both creation and discovery -- a vague grammar of symbols, shapes, and colors. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of energy, and I feel like I'll be able to both harness and unleash a lot more of both if I let myself out of the memory box. And so I'm out. The memories are there, but I'm going to attempt to defang them. Let's see what happens next.

Here is a video:

I'm happy to announce that "Passenger," my 10'-story-bear-with-butterfly-wings, has been accepted into the 2019 ArtFields competition. It's an honor to be included, and somewhat of a validation of the amount of time and energy I put into the piece. The idea percolated for months (years?) before I began bringing it into reality last May. I sweated over it all summer and we went through several love/hate cycles together. I'm glad it's in.

Since I finished the piece in November it has been gathering leaves in the driveway behind my house. I walk by it almost every day and barely notice it. It's a strange feeling to go from thinking about and struggling with something almost every day to forgetting it's there. Especially when it's a 10' bear with butterfly wings. 

If you like art and you live in the region, I hope you'll visit ArtFields in Lake City this spring -- it's a really cool event and you'll see a lot of fantastic artwork. I hope "Passenger" ends up somewhere in town where you couldn't miss it if you tried.

​A final plug: voting is still open for Jasper Project Artist of the Year. I've been nominated in the Visual Arts category. If you like my artwork, please take a moment and vote for me!

I'm happy to announce that I'm one of three nominees for the Jasper Project's 2018 Visual Artist of the Year. It's an honor to be nominated, and a thrill to be among such good company. If you like my art, I invite you to click on the link above and vote for me. If you don't like my art, please click on the link and vote for someone else! 

​And now here's a picture of me with one of my recent pieces, just so an image will show up with the link to this post:

If you'd like to see more of my work, visit the gallery page on my art website.

​I'll have more art news in the near future, including whether or not my piece "Passenger" got into ArtFields 2019, an announcement of a major sale (hopefully), and some reflections on what I've done over the last couple of years and what I hope to do in the future. Stay tuned, and thanks for voting!

It was busy spring for me and my family. Part of what made it busy was the convergence between the end of the academic year and art-related commitments I made to make things, ship things, and exhibit things. Although each of those obligations was worthwhile on its own, the cumulative effect was a feeling of being over-booked. It was a buzzkill. 

Art is a glorified hobby for me. Now that I've been successful selling some pieces, of course, there's also an economic utility. But I don't need to always have something for sale, always have a show on the horizon, always have a deadline looming. What I do need is get out in the garage and let my mind and body make what I want to make for a while. So that's what I'm going to do with the time I have this summer. I'm going to say "no thank you" to commitments through the fall. My gut tells me that what I make will be better as a result and it will make me happier to make it. And that would be the main point.

My wife and I went out to dinner last night before going to the EcoFAB show at Tapp's. We went to The Oak Table (for the first time) and learned that it was the last night the restaurant would be open. I had beef Wellington, which I have been wanting to try since I saw Gordon Ramsay getting pissy about it over and over again on Hell's Kitchen years ago. It was pricey, but it felt serendipitous that it was on the menu on what was the restaurant's last day and what felt like the first day of the real summer to me. Plus I just sold "Naked Flank," so it was a gift to myself to pull the trigger and order a $50 dish. And I didn't take a picture of it. Because that's dumb.

The show at Tapp's was a lot of fun, with some really interesting and creative work on display in both wearable and stationary form. A year out from my Afterburner show last May, Tapp's is one of the few places in town where I can go and feel like I know a few people who know who I am and like when I stop by. They don't know or care what I actually do for a living, I'm not defined by which kids are mine, and none of the interactions are torqued by the weird power hierarchies that permeate academic culture.

I'm happy to be involved in the art scene here in Columbia, and I'm determined to keep it that way. That means saying "no thank you" more often.