Anatomy and Art

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon the work of Michael Reedy.  He’s really doing some incredible work.  This is an example from his anatomy series here.

His other work shows off his mastery of the human form in all of it’s levels just as well or even more effectively though.

I’m just so impressed.  This guy has figured out light and shadow, anatomy, and how the human form moves and bends.  Plus his overall compositions are just plain interesting.  I’m really pleased to have found his work.

Hey, look what came in the mail today…

They even included a shiny red ribbon in the package too.

For all of my thought and study into likenesses and human form, this guy is doing it with Rubik’s cubes.  Seriously.  This is one piece of modern art, I will not mock.  I don’t have it in me to make something like that, and it’s crazy neat.

You can read more about the project here from the artist’s own site http://petefecteau.com/

I recently finished up one of my old little skulls.  I still haven’t started reproducing any of these little guys yet, but a buyer contacted me not long ago for the originals I have around so far, so that’s encouraging to get back into it.  I wound up baking this last one completely black, but that just makes it strong.  Hopefully I haven’t lost too much detail in the coloring.  I think that getting back to these is really good practice for me while I’m out of the clinic.  Working in polymer clay is very different than working in wax, but I think that any kind of working in shape and form like this is good practice for me.

Gonna polish this little guy up a touch with some denim or something and I’ve got a bundle of skulls to send off to someone 🙂

So, it’s no secret really that I’ve got some love for Vincent Van Gogh.  And even though he wasn’t an anatomical artist or medical artist, he did study to improve his grasp of the human figure at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussles for a little while.  As far as I know, this is the closest thing to an anatomical art piece that he ever painted.  So today I thought that I’d like to post that here.

It’s kind of fantastic in it’s balance between simplicity and complexity.  I wouldn’t study anatomy from it, but it’s clear that he was looking at bones to do this and not just making something up.  The cigarette is maybe a little silly, though a lot of years have passed between the time he did this and everything else that might make me feel that way about it.  And you really do get the sense of a burning ember at the tip of that thing.  It’s a neat painting.

So for the most part, I’ve been in a work haze lately.  Between the store where I’ve been working part time, and picking up almost every other hour I have on that 3D anatomy graphics gig lately, it’s been like one big cyclone of work work work.  But, in the midst of that haze, I was afforded one particular Tuesday afternoon to relax with a visit from The Delightfully Wicked Elmo Martin.  While he was in town, we took the opportunity to peruse the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.  Now, I hadn’t previously been there, and in part that’s because I tend to have less appreciation for modern art than I do a lot of it’s predecessors.  But I have to say that going with someone who does have a greater appreciation for more high concept art projects was indeed enlightening.  One of the expressions that kept coming up is that “It’s all about the frame.”

But no, the frame isn’t just a physical frame on something, but more the overall framework in which the work is presented.  For a lot of the pieces we saw there, the whole room and the conceptual explanation was the frame.  I can get into that to an extent, but there is still a part of me that wants an artistic piece to stand on it’s own merit.  When I create fine art, I want people to be taken by it on it’s own right, and not just because they know the backstory, or because they studied really hard to get it.  And in taking this idea of calling all of that the frame, I couldn’t help but be amused with the introspection that I have, for years, gone out of my way to paint the edges of my paintings so that they do not require a frame.  And yes, as my friend pointed out, no frame is a kind of frame.  Sure.  But it got me thinking about what my frame of no frame means. If the frame is the packaging, the story, really if you think about it, the sales pitch even, then what does it mean that I’m always choosing to frame my work framelessly?  Or maybe being frameless in it’s most literal sense is fine, but it does make me think about the other ways in which I frame my work.  Sometimes I show things on this very blog.  I also have the gallery pages of all of my paintings.  These aren’t especially fancy presentations.  So maybe that’s something I should be paying more attention to.  The lack of bells and whistles has always felt more honest to me, but is it really?  And maybe presentation in general is something that I could work on in other aspects of my art, and even my life as well. Whether it’s a proper setting to display my paintings, or a clean lab coat in the clinic, it probably wouldn’t hurt for me to work on presentation a little.  Or maybe I should just make my own gallery where the only frames are on the benches where the patrons can sit.  I mean, they’re a part of the art experience too.  And maybe if I ever have my own anaplastology clinic, I’ll have extra lab coats for the patients to wear, so that we might all collaborate as experts working toward a common goal.  Now that’s my kind of frame.