Trenton ReynoldsIt is Saturday, February 23rd, 2019. This is Room in the Trees.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonA podcast about tension and color and choreography and pork tenderloin follow-up. Room in the Trees is brought to you by Trent Reynolds and me, Sabrina Ward-Harrison. Show notes and links can be found at roominthetrees.com.
Trenton ReynoldsYou can support us by joining us on Patreon. You can go to patreon.com backslash room to subscribe and help us bring you this podcast. Okay.
But still I cannot see if the savage one is me.
Trenton ReynoldsCan there be so much that you don't know? You don't know.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonWe need a play-by-play of some life with daughters. I think we need to get a visual storyline of a day into Trent's world.
Trenton ReynoldsLet me work on that. I'm not sure if I'm prepared at the moment. We've got a sick one right now and a... one that's not in school and then a baby. So three girls home today. A little too close range for the moment.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonI've eaten so many pork tenderloins since I talked to you. I've got like two left.
Trenton ReynoldsAre you burnt out on pork tenderloins?
Sabrina Ward HarrisonYeah, I've had them every day since last Thursday. Every day.
Trenton ReynoldsThat is so much pork tenderloin.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonPork tenderloins and protein shakes.
So... That's serious. So rough.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonI got to shake it up today.
Trenton ReynoldsA little bit of a follow-up on the pork loin situation. You got a fairly extensive email, right? Yep. Yep. From Stephanie. And I thought it might be worth revisiting a couple of those pork loin facts.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonLet's see if we can play it. Let's play it.
Trenton ReynoldsDid she leave you a message?
Sabrina Ward HarrisonYeah, she left me an Instagram message.
Trenton ReynoldsOh, you didn't tell. I thought it was an email. I love that somebody sent you a... Was it video and audio or just audio?
Sabrina Ward HarrisonNo, just audio.
Trenton ReynoldsI didn't know you could just do audio messages on Instagram. Here we go.
Hello. Hello. So I'm listening to your podcast. Can you hear that? Episode 52. And already I love it, but I just have to tell you, each pig yields one tenderloin. Just one. It's the muscle right underneath the backbone, and it's the most tender because that's the muscle that's used for posture. Right. You know, I totally know that you want this science lesson in pig muscles. And how long it is is mostly determined by the age of the pig. So that doesn't actually really mean anything in the market today because most pork that you buy at the store is raised for a certain amount of time. So they're all going to be kind of the same. but it is a very good cut. And I'm not a pork fan. Like, I like bacon, and I like pork tenderloin cooked just right. Ham on occasion, you know. But other than that, I'm kind of with you. Like, pork, meh, you know. But, man, with, like, a really good Carolina Gold barbecue sauce, pork tenderloin is so good. And incidentally, it's a very, very different cut of meat than pork loin, which can be cut like a steak because it's much bigger and much less tender and holds up to long, slow cooking times. And why do I know all of this about pork? I don't know hardly anything except what I've told you. And it's because my daughters both raised pigs for the last eight years. This year is our first year without pigs on our land. So I learned a lot about pigs. Yeah. There you go.
Trenton ReynoldsThere's only one, and it's responsible for posture. How do we know that? How does one figure out that the tenderloin is where... you know, is responsible for good posture or posture. Like, do you do some kind of like MRI and like functional MRI or whatever and see that it's tense during standing, standing still? That just opened up more questions for me about pork tendon line.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonAnd I didn't think about pigs having posture. Did porks have good posture? Of course. Some of them had better posture.
Trenton ReynoldsOh, did I text you last week that that totally got in my mind, like the whole alliteration of Peter Piper pet a pig with perfect posture? Peter Piper pet a pig with perfect posture.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonPeter Piper pet a pig with perfect posture. Yeah.
Trenton ReynoldsYeah. Oh, God. A pig with perfect posture, Peter Piper Pet.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonPig with perfect posture, Peter Piper Pet. But I just thought a loin, like, didn't eat. Or maybe it's a groin is what I got confused with.
Trenton ReynoldsYeah, you don't want to get your loins and groins.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonThat's what I got confused.
Yeah.
Trenton ReynoldsThere's no tender groin. That is something entirely different altogether.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonThat's why I was getting confused with groin and like last week thinking about where it was in the body.
Trenton ReynoldsAnd do humans also have a posture muscle that would... be the human tenderloin? Do I have a tenderloin? I guess it's kind of a weird direction to go.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonI'm going to look it up right now just for a second really quick.
Trenton Reynoldswould you even like a scientist wouldn't call a human part uh tender right because the reason they call it a tenderloin i have to believe is because it's appealing as a food product right you wouldn't call it a tenderloin like that's as a scientific term
Sabrina Ward HarrisonDo humans have a tenderloin like pigs and deer?
Trenton ReynoldsAnd is it more developed if you have good posture?
Sabrina Ward HarrisonOkay, here's something. I know they're so grossed out. The tenderloin muscle in animals raised for human conception is the posseus muscle, the four-legged animal. This muscle, which is an underlining one, is rarely used and therefore tender and nice to eat because it's just not holding the body up.
Trenton ReynoldsThere we go. There's the posture. There we go. Wait, ah, so there it is. There's a question. On a human, it would not be tender because it's got to hold us up.
Yep.
Trenton ReynoldsBut if we were four-legged or crawled always, then maybe we too would have a tender Pisaeus.
Oh, God.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonOh, yeah. So this is the last set. In humans, the posea muscle connects the lumbar spine with the hip joint. It is used in straightening the hip and also flexion of the hip. It's also stretched when the spine is rotated. Tightness of the posea's muscles frequently indicated as a cause of lower back pain and compresses the lumbar discs, thereby placing pressure on nerves as they leave the spine. And believe me, it's not a tender loin in humans.
Trenton Reynoldsoh goodness well there you have it
yep
Trenton Reynoldsalright well I wanted to share something that we've been refining over the course of my time teaching art and trying to understand art and trying to verbalize creative processes and I don't think it's anything new. I'm sure there are other people that have said nearly the same thing, but I wanted to say it and get your response. But when I get to a point or when a student gets to a point in a painting or any kind of work of art, where they know that the artwork isn't working, right? Just something isn't right. They're having a hard time really pinning down exactly what it is, though. Uh-huh. It's like, what do you do in that moment? How do you... get to the bottom of that problem. Like what is wrong? How do you assess what, what it is that needs to change and how to change it? One of the ways that I've come up with thinking about that and, and overcoming that, that situation is to think in terms of the balance of unity and variety and comprehend what we're looking at. That sameness is comprehensible. It gives us a way to enter in the artwork to figure out what it is that we're supposed to be looking at. If there's too much sameness, if it's the big white blank canvas, it's very comprehensible. We understand what it is very easily and can connect with it on that level, but it's boring. It's not giving us enough to engage and and appreciate, right?
Yeah, you're right.
Trenton ReynoldsAnd then on the opposite end is variety, and variety is difference, right? Contrast. Too much variety, too much difference and contrast and dissimilarity, creates chaos. And with chaos, you run into a similar problem where there's just not enough for a viewer to engage with, right? It becomes overwhelming and there's no way to kind of connect with it and it turns you off, right? The viewer doesn't want to stick around. It's easy to kind of lose attention and not really want to spend time engaging with the artwork, right? So an example of this might be you're looking at an image. Man, I wish we had a visual way to... to show this. But it's important to me to distinguish, to say unity is sameness because sometimes you'll be looking at a painting that has a lot going on, right? That's really gestural, lots of really goopy paint. but everything is treated exactly the same, right? So it's a pattern of the same thickness of brush stroke. It's the same size of shapes that are being created. It's the same direction of line. It's the same, right? So it's that sameness that might be what is turning you off or making it feel like it's not resolved. Yeah. And it needs to then you need to go in and make some of the lines thicker and some thinner and make some of the shapes bigger and some smaller. So it doesn't necessarily unity, I think, or sameness. It doesn't mean that everything is simple, like refined. I don't know. I guess the problem I see a lot of students and myself to running into is the look at something and it'll feel boring. So they'll want to add more exciting stuff. Yeah. And it's not that it's boring, meaning it needs more stuff. It's boring in that it's all the same stuff. And the solution is not to add more exciting stuff. The challenge is or the necessity is to create more variety. Do you understand like why I'm making a distinction between those two?
Sabrina Ward HarrisonYes, yes, yes, yes.
Trenton ReynoldsSo you come by a student, this is especially important, I think, or relevant when you're working in with abstraction, right? Because there's not a direct metric of success where you can say this looks like that, therefore, it is complete or not complete. And you know, there's not that literal comparison to be made. So you have to think in terms of design principles and I don't know the simplicity of that relationship of unity and variety I think is has helped me kind of get through the complexity of being there present in the work and having a hard time distancing myself enough to really see what's.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonSo what do you encourage students to do in those moments where, so say there's just a bunch of, you know, like maybe someone's collaged or painted and there's just too much going on. And the tendency for someone, and I've done this before, where I just paint over all of it or I just start peeling everything off or it just, there's just too much that's the same kind of materials, tones, colors. stuff like that.
Trenton ReynoldsI think that that's it is like, um, the difficulty in, in knowing what to do next is because often it's just like, I don't know what it is, but I know it's too much, too much of what, like, is it overwhelming? Is it an emotional too much, a psychological too much? Or is it like, I don't know what to do too much. Like there is that feeling, but there's no real, uh, a way to kind of walk yourself through how to deal with it. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Um,
Trenton ReynoldsSo I would say, like, if it was somebody doing a collage, I would say, spend some time looking at it and think about what, where you see sameness. Do you see sameness in the size of the collage elements, in the color of collage elements, in the way they're spaced from each other, the way they're spaced from the edge of the composition? Right. Where do you see sameness? Yeah. And can you introduce variety where there is sameness, right? So can you pull off one of the pieces of collage element that are evenly spaced and overlap it with another collage element instead of having it evenly spaced out? Can you tear one in half so they're not all the same size? Can you paint a different color or different variation on one of the colors so they're not all the same thing, right? Yeah. Or like you're saying is like if there's too much chaos, but I see that's the thing is is sometimes I don't think it's like people see a lot of stuff going on so they think it's a problem with With chaos or variety when oftentimes it's a problem with sameness, right? It's that there's too much of the same thing happening over and over and over again what we need is to to create more variety. I don't know if I'm explaining that very well. So, when it feels like there's too much variety, there's too much going on, or it's hard to enter in, and it's too, just doesn't feel like there's any focal point for you to grab onto, or a way to enter in the work, and no visual pathway to kind of walk through the work on, then I would say where can you take some of that variety and create sameness? So some of that might be take a big area and just scrub it until it all mushes together and becomes a single shape. And that will help to solidify the composition in that area and help us make sense of what's going on in that area so we have something that we can hold on to and comprehend and engage with while we figure out what all this other mess is. Yeah, I like that a lot. And so sometimes I think it's a good practice to just scrub the whole thing. And that helps unify all this chaos into a big mess, a big mush. It helps unify color. It helps unify texture and shape and all these other things. It helps unify contrast. Um, but I don't think that necessarily, what I'm trying to get at is like, what is the principle that makes that a successful tactic?
Does that make sense?
Trenton ReynoldsLike it's, and I think it comes, it comes to this idea of, or this tension between unity and variety, too much unity, boring, too much variety, chaos. And thinking in those terms gives you a way to kind of a practical way to, to approach that problem of sorting out. how to fix it.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonAnd it's so sad. It's like that, like it hurts so good kind of thing. It's so frustrating, but yet you're like, it's so the journey of the making a piece, like that you're like the abstract, especially with abstract work, You're just thinking where is, you know, finding that balance, finding that sweet spot.
Definitely.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonYou know, it's like the mystery of the alchemy of what happens when you're, like, where do you have to pull back? I love that it's not, there's no rule book to follow. There's no step of this is exactly what you need to do.
Trenton ReynoldsRight. Yeah.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonI found that a lot in our painting process process, when you were talking about kind of like looking at something like it was a house and bringing in the elements of like, these are visitors and they're kind of, I love that analogy of like, and these are kind of the visitors and they're sort of shy over here. And it's really cool.
Trenton ReynoldsThat's a metaphor that is, that's helpful to me to think about it in terms of building a house.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonCan you talk a little bit about that a bit more?
Trenton ReynoldsSure. This, the house metaphor came up in, in our collaboration with, here in Santa Monica. And we were talking just about, uh, well, I don't even remember what we, maybe you better say what the house metaphor is. Well, we were, we were looking at,
Sabrina Ward Harrisonwe were looking at two paintings, two paintings side by side and saying, and yours had to, two or three pretty significant larger marks. And you said this is kind of looking like a shape of a house. I mean, in the sense of it's this big square. And then I was stepping back and I was looking at... And what I had been doing on the other piece was a lot of smaller... kind of similar in shape uh so there's a sameness issue kind of happening there um a lot of color variation but when you step back but it kind of took on the same square square shape and you brought in that metaphor of a house and and you're you were sort of pointing to certain colors that were off to the side. I can't remember exactly how it went, but it was a beautiful, I got it. I really worked well with those visual metaphor lessons like that. I love that.
Trenton ReynoldsRight. Thinking in terms of like the structure of a house and building things, large shapes first, like pouring a foundation. And if you get to the small shapes, you're, too soon and you don't have a solid foundation to build into or build on, then it's not going to be as structurally sound visually.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonBut then the great, yeah, exactly. Then when you talked about these guests, I loved it. Didn't you bring up something like these guys over here seem like they're kind of like the guests that come and they feel a little uncomfortable.
Trenton ReynoldsWell, see, that's another thing that I do, and I'd be curious to hear what you're... I tend to create narratives. Yeah. Especially with abstract work where I don't feel like I really... I still have this need inside to... to understand what it is that I'm doing, right? To create some kind of sense for me to follow. Or it's just, it gets really like messy and I just don't understand what it is that I'm doing. So I tend to create narratives that I go by. So I think of marks as what their personality is and how they're interacting with other personalities on the page. or I think of it in terms of an event, like all these shapes and marks are kind of surrounding this area, and there ought to be some kind of main event happening here, which would be a focal point. So I tend to create these stories or these interactions, personifications that help me understand how to navigate the, yeah what is I'm doing do you have do you do stuff like that I don't think
Sabrina Ward HarrisonI've applied it in that in that put it in that way trying to think now I definitely think about things are talking to each other within a piece like how this is in the voice and how loud this voice is over that voice would
Trenton Reynoldsyou say that that I mean you're you're referring to sound but is it just sound or do you think are you envisioning actual like beings interacting? Or is it mostly an analogy? It's like a personality.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonYeah, it's not... Yeah, personality. Which leads me to an unbelievable... I had a conversation with a girl named Morgan yesterday who'd reached out to me. She lives here in Madison and she's studying early childhood education. And she told me about... She works at a school. She's a teacher, a student teacher at a school called Preschool of the Imagine... of the Arts or something? Preschool of the Arts? Like unbelievable... interesting. And she shared an I am saying unbelievable too many times here, but it blew my mind. She shared about how they were painting music. Like they had this large drum and different sounds were different colors. Like the depth of the it was like a bowl type drum that you circle bowl. And It's based from the, have you heard about Reggio Emilia? That concept, it's a place in Italy and it's a concept of, I have one of their books about children and it's for preschool education of exploration and they sort of learn their, I'm not able to articulate it very well, their but I'm pulling it up right now. It was so fascinating. Okay. Preschool, the arts, a community committed to exploration, creativity, and collaboration. What a cool thing. Composing with color over the course of their time at, preschool the arts the Red Room children have been deeply interested in music and sound in both the music and art studios the groups the group has been working to discover ways in which to explore music and sound through the visual arts a lot of discussion and research has gone into how this might happen during the research their music specialist discovered an article that connected the visible electromagnetic spectrum or color with its corresponding sound wavelength With a little bit of math, these wavelengths could then be easily translated into musical notes. Through this, the music and art specialists were able to color-code a tongue drum, present with the color-coded drum and some gems that children initially created compositions based on the colors that most appealed to them, So they made long stretches of color or ones of repeating patterns. They labeled them gem shapes as it goes on striped caterpillars, roads, and rivers. So it was like you would hit one color on the note, and then you'd paint the whole time that was playing. I'll send you the article. It just was mind-blowing.
No, that sounds really interesting.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonBut I think about like Rauschenberg's work and the conversation that would happen in an abstract painting of his. Or site Wombly's scribble scrabbles. There's voices in the pencil line. There's voice in the big sloshy huge You know house paint brush of red across it across a canvas You know, even the materials have a voice like you're working on a dirty splinter a piece of wood or you're working on silk
Trenton ReynoldsThat's that is a word that I hadn't considered but I think you're absolutely right that maybe I give and take is one of those things that like is so so arty give and take lost and found line the other another reason um i think i've i've personified uh art making like that is is i think it gave me when i was teaching um at santa monica college and doing uh you know, pretty much critiques every day, right? Yeah. Coming up with ways to understand other people's artwork and then have a meaningful, have something meaningful to say about it, right? And not just meaningful to me, but, you know, how to communicate that to somebody else. The language, using narrative and personification helps, you know, helps give it an analogy or a metaphor to be able to communicate that to students. So sometimes I would be up at the board with 20 paintings up on the wall, and I would see something and I wouldn't really know what to say about it, but there would be an overall mood. And I don't know, it was like... that gave me a way forward or words to, to start talking about, you know, I don't know. Does that make sense? Like, like I'd say this, this, this is kind of a sad painting or this is, you know, this is peppy assigning it. I think, I think assigning it an emotion or, or a feeling or, you know, this, a voice, I guess, you know, I think that word would be, belong here too, just gave me a way to start speaking about the word at work. And I think also just to understand what it was feeling, you know, to kind of reverse engineer my response to
Sabrina Ward Harrisonit. Yeah. It makes me think about, for me, book spreads that I would make when I'm trying to you know, trying to evoke the emotion in the language that I'm conveying and how you bring a sense of, I think, I don't think so much as one piece, but I'm always thinking sequentially. So I'm thinking how this flows into that, flows into that, flows into that page. And the relation between two pages, because it's always a book, obviously, it's two pages against each other. So what's the relationship between, what are they, each page saying to the other, you know, what are they in conversation about? together in harmony or in contrast. And then the flow, so you don't have harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony, spread by spread by spread, but you have this rhythm that has action and movement throughout from spread to spread.
Trenton ReynoldsThat makes sense to me. You're talking about choreography. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, definitely. You're thinking about in terms of pacing and movement, those are all very physical-- Like a dance. --types of descriptors, yeah. Yeah. Which is something that you talk a lot about, the physicality of art making and how important that is to you.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonYou tend to work well with working on one size, like a size-- this is the size of the piece, and then the piece becomes that. Where I don't think I start with a size. So I start so much bigger and then find things that happen or are happening within it that I have a harder time working with something that's, say, 11 by 17. I think I'd make something pretty crappy. I think it's a different way of thinking. Yeah. Yeah. That's a designer in me can work with that. Like I like the sense of working with a frame to design something. But somehow the difference between designing and then creating, painting.
Trenton ReynoldsWell, I think there's something very restrictive about starting with a predetermined format, right? And that can be kind of daunting to some-- I'm sure to many people. It's like, I have to fill this exact shape with something that's successful or something that I like. And I have to use every square inch appropriately or in a way that is compelling somehow. Right. So it's like and I think that people get in this mindset like with a lot of beginning artists, there's this feeling like using an eraser is cheating or like a sign of failure, you know. Yeah. And it's not. It's just another way to make a mark. It's just another part of the process of putting on and taking off. And I think similarly, I think people don't really consider the option of working large worrying about the format after the fact, you know, having that be one of the malleable factors of the creative process rather than predetermining the format right from the start. And that's actually something that I've brought out. I've brought up you many times actually in classes. You know, I say I've got a friend that, you know, she works in this process where she doesn't lock herself into the format from the start. She allows herself plenty of room And then after the fact, you'll come back and you'll find the compositions within that or find the right way to frame each passage. I don't know. I think there's a power in that approach, actually. And I think we kind of just start taking things for granted that that art making has to be a certain way just by virtue of the products that are available to us at the store. Yeah. It's like, yeah, this is how the this is how a painting supposed to be because at the art store they sold me this canvas, you know.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonAnd yeah, this is like a normal size brush. And so I should probably use this and quote unquote average size brush. Or this is the color that came out of the tube, so I should use this. Yeah.
Trenton ReynoldsAnd that gets into the whole mentality of like, well, I'm painting somebody's face, so I should get flesh color.
Yeah, right?
Trenton ReynoldsThere's this kind of like assumption that there's a correct color or there's a correct thing for you to be making your art with. when really you should probably just be using a, you know, $1 brush from Home Depot and
Sabrina Ward Harrisonsplashing paint up on the canvas. I love how you can work with, you work with color, with skin, flesh. I was studying a lot about value with my dad when I was home with him in Portland and studied, we were working with pastels and I went nuts about it. I like, I am not studied any of this before and I just went nuts about it. Value is so
Trenton Reynoldsimportant. So important to understand.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonIt made me really excited to try to do pastel like really large. I like the idea of maybe we have like a, we do three part series on, you know.
You have three parts? Nope.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonJust thought of the idea. Just thought of the idea. Yeah.
Trenton ReynoldsOr just kind of, yeah, like having more kind of focused and intentional long-form conversations.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonThat was a great powwow. Be sure to join us next week for another episode of just randomness and art talk. We will see you then.
Trenton ReynoldsWe would love it if you left us a five-star review on iTunes. It helps us reach a larger audience.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonAnd we'll feature you.
Trenton ReynoldsOh, yeah. And if you want to shout out on the show, we would be happy to do that. Well, now go paint with the colors of the wind.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonYeah. Yeah, go paint with the colors of the wind. ♪ ♪