rockin’ kids songs

via jef

Filed under: entertainment., family, life, music, personal., random, youtube , humor, kids, life, parenting, random, youtube

wrong side of the bed

It’s odd. Karen and I never really had sides of the bed early in our relationship. At some point it just sort of evolved that I slept on the left and Karen on the right. In our new house that means that Karen is always next to our door. The problem is that we leave the door open so we can hear Teagan. On top of that Teagan listens to music all night which can easily be heard with our bedroom door open. But wait there’s more— outside of the window that faces Karen’s side of the bed is a rather large, bright orange street light (that was burned out until recently).  All of this has, in Karen’s eyes, resulted in her getting significantly less good sleep than me. So last night we spun our bed around (which we had to do because our mattress has a different firmness on each half) and I slept on Karen’s side of the bed. Needless to say I slept horribly and woke up feeling less rested, slightly grumpy and reluctant to get out of bed. Maybe Karen was right.

I wonder how I’m going to convince her to switch back?

Filed under: family, life, personal., random, thoughts

our new pup prancing in the snow

It’s a good thing that our new pup took to the snow because we’ve gotten a ton of it this winter. Here’s a pic of her prancing in the snow— I was hoping to get a shot of her running through the yard with her nose plowing piles of snow to eat, but she is just too damned fast— so this will have to do.

Filed under: family, life, maine, personal., pics, portland. , dog, pics, puppy

more progress on the house

Despite the rough beginning to our week, when we woke to a house with no heat as a result of our aging boiler igniter and motor,progress on the house is marching on and its beginning to look like a whole new house. The siding on the front of our house is done, replacement windows are in and despite the 4” of new snow last night and the on and off snow/rain all day I came home this afternoon and was greeted with a view of our new metal roof on the addition (2nd pic).Now work is beginning on the inside— tomorrow the studio gets a skylight and the lower roof gets finished. We have just about a month and a half before its all done and I can’t wait!

Filed under: family, kevin + karen townsend, life, maine, personal., pics, portland., thoughts , home, home improvement, life, personal.

before and after

here is our house as it looked in Jan 2006

and here is how it looks now in February 2008

The updates and the addition are still going on despite the 4-5 foot piles of snow and the 12 degree weather. We are loving all the changes so far and just can’t wait for the rest of the work to be done.

Filed under: family, kevin + karen townsend, life, maine, personal., portland., random , home, home improvement, life, personal.

is education killing creativity?

Filed under: art+photography, artsy., life, youtube , art, creativity, education, life

a selection of new work

Here is what I’ve been up lately——well, at least what I’ve been up to in the studio. I am in the process of applying to MFA programs and have been developing a new series of works, completing applications and writing program proposals and artist statements.

a bit about this new work (and what I propose to do in an MFA program)

I have these memories, horrible memories from my past— I’m huddled in a phone booth with my biological father, a hard cold receiver pressed against one ear, the scruff of his face grating against my cheek and his hot whisper in my other ear. His words described the atrocities he would commit if my mother wouldn’t come back to him. He wanted to hear his words come out of my mouth; he needed my mother to hear these horrible things in the small, trembling voice of a four-year-old boy. Even now as I type these words, my hands shake. I have relived, this memory and others like it in sweat-soaked slumber for most of my life.Each of these memories represents a separate existence, a self-portrait, encapsulating my thoughts, sensations and emotions from a moment in my life. They are the architecture of my identity. If time can be understood as the space that our consciousness travels along then these memories also occupy a specific location in space-time. And while our experience of times passage may be universal our perceptions of those moments are highly personal.As we move through our lives the external world provides each of us with an incessant stream of stimulus and sensations that are processed by our minds and encoded as memories. These processes of memory formation, their subsequent degradation over time and the impact of memory on ones perception of self, fuel my current work. Informed by Hume’s Bundle Theory of Identity and Kant’s concept of Transcendental Idealism, my work seeks to give form to the substances of memory and their corresponding internal locus, representing memory as a substance that occupies a space in time, encapsulating the sensations and cognitions of a moment and forming our self-concept.Through my work I explore metaphors for the internal sites of memory capture, containment and collection from my personal history as a means of connecting with the universal experience of memory formation. The act of drawing is at the center of my process and is a way for me to examine, understand and articulate the vessels that hold the substance of these recollections and access their content. In the drawings, text and image often work together as a means of depicting the markings in ones mind from the processes of cognition. Hand-written text functions as a representation of speech itself, a kind of narrative simultaneously documenting the past and attempting to record perceptions as they happen in the present. In this way the drawings themselves become vessels—filled with idea and image and encapsulating the moments spent embedding them on their surfaces.The vessel as locus for memory imparts associations with containment, circulation, distribution, and transportation on the work and offers an opportunity to play with binary oppositions. Concepts of strength and fragility, fullness and emptiness or presence and absence, create hierarchies in our minds implying that the second term is inferior, almost parasitic, to the first, and are employed in my work as a means of giving voice to the impact of time on anamnesis and the duplicitous nature of memory.Presently, I find myself in new territory, delving deeper into this vein of content, influenced by artists like Wolfgang Laib, Ann Hamilton, Gary Hill, Louise Bourgeois, Nedko Solakov, Doris Salcedo, Ernesto Neto, Anselm Kiefer and Marina Abramovic, I see my role as an artist shifting from the making of images to the fabrication of experience. In my most recent works I have begun to utilize the drawings as plans for the construction of 3-dimensional objects and small installations. If accepted as a participant in an MFA program, it is from this point that I propose to move forward and further pursue the exploration of installation-based work as a means of giving form to my content.Hume describes man as a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and that are in perpetual flux and movement. In our current culture many of these perceptions happen in front the flat screens of televisions, cell phones or computers, where our personal sense of perspective is lost, where we communicate through the push of cold buttons and where we publish our most intimate moments for public consumption and commercial gain. It is for these reasons that I seek a more intimate means of engaging the viewer and propose to produce works that allow the viewer to physically move through a space and encounter objects, in much the same way that our consciousness travels through time. By engaging them in an experience that is simultaneously physical and temporal, communal and individual, it is my aim to cause the formation of a new memory within them.

 

Filed under: art+photography, artsy., kevin townsend, life, personal., pics , art, drawings, images, new work

fun with poo

Lately Teagan has been having some “potty issues” and our life has been way too focused on poo so this is my way of venting.

Filed under: family, life, personal., random, thoughts , family, fun, personal., poo, toys

greener graffiti

I love the idea that graffiti artists are thinking greener and as a result raising new questions about the line between vandalism and artistic expression. By using a glorified version of the “wash me” graffiti usually found on the back of dirt and dust covered 18 wheelers, artists like Alexandre Orion (see a video of him in action here) or Moose, of Symbollix, make their art by cleaning surfaces covered in dirt, dust, grime and soot or power-washing dirty side walks. This kind of graffiti raises questions in the minds of the anti-graffiti activists. Questions like: Is the selective cleaning of a dirty surface vandalism? or Is it possible to fine or otherwise penalize someone who has done no damage to public property?

The practice of reverse graffiti is not new, just think of all of the times you drew on a dust covered surface with your finger. But these guys are stepping the concept up a bit and using it to produce work that is evocative on both the aesthetic and social level.

Then there is Edina Tokodi, who I learned about on Inhabitiat and whose work is pictured above. Edina employs a different method of green graffiti that is literally green in both form and content. Her method seems less like graffiti and more like site specific installation art that relies on the contrast between her medium, her imagery and the setting in which they are displayed to draw attention to the insufficient relationship between its city dwelling audience and nature.

This is the kind of thing I used to love to talk to my Humanities classes about when asking them: What is the role of the artist in contemporary society?

Filed under: art+photography, artsy., pics, random, thoughts , art, graffiti, green

indigenous nudity

I am sitting on the couch, unwinding after class, watching a new show on Discovery called Last one standing. The show is focused on 6 guys who are immersing themselves in tribal cultures from around the world, from South America to Africa, in order to learn how to fight or compete in each tribes traditional style. Before the actual show begins a warning crosses the screen “WARNING:Viewer discretion advised This show contains scenes depicting indigenous nudity and and graphic content.”

Really?
Indigenous nudity.
Interesting— I regularly experience indigenous nudity in my shower as well and my bedroom.

Filed under: random, thoughts