Can I afford to Love

Love And Life

I believe the New Yorker Magazine is very good, I simply can’t afford to subscribe at this time.  I can afford all kinds of love, and falling in and out with or without the flowers, stars, dogs, people, actions, activities, materials, students, mentors, books even knowing ….makes life fun!!!  I love one person so much I can’t say it to her enough…it’s pathetic!

Crying over characters in books, or movies…I can’t afford that, it’s exhausting but I do it anyway….I am pathetic for being too empathetic….what’s life about?  I’ll never be able to define it but gosh it’s so fun not to have to define it so I don’t do so!  Each art work….just a moment? A trace of being in love with the feeling of such a moment?

Roy Mills

In Terms of Words:

Paddy Lamb,

The things I can say in words do not rise much above average use of words and so personally I fear the mediocrity of my words limit the perception of my work ; tied to that anchor like a weight keeping a ship from sailing freely beyond . I think fine art saves lives when it is released to sail beyond.

There are rare souls who build words AND visual art that sail with the wind of potent connotations. I am not sure any of my work sails but that is certainly what I wish of it.

You words are strong and I don’t criticize them, Roy

https://www.kentridge.studio/in-defence-of-optimism-slade-lecture-no-6/

A Song for Now

my song inspired by”translucent babies” by Ben Sures

I pour my whiskey with dilutent maybe to

Avoiding making a translucent baby

Red heads who drink ought take care

Not to mate making more red hair

Be bop a lula baby I’d take you always maybe

Past due too few, who knew you’d be

The absence and death of me

But what if the albatross is just a bear to cross

In between here and all that sauce.

Song From a former red head

David is Goliath

Entanglement theory:
Higgs Bosson : God particle is basically the same. Where an old fashioned slide projection where light travelling through a film would naturally have the light on the screen show only what the slide held on it for the lower left corner and the upper right zone only projected information from the upper right area of the slide. Higgs Bosson can be thought of as a holographic projection where every pixel of the projection carries all of the information for the entire image if viewed from that height and angle. A holographic way of looking at the universe is built off of the truth that says any electron that has ever been in any other molecule prior spins synchronized perfectly with every other electron in that molecule across unlimited space and …get this…across all time.

So, when you stand on the banks of the river looking down thinking how molecules of moisture you are watching flowing past must contain moisture that was in Jesus or Hitler or your grandmother or all of your ancestors mingling with moisture from you last week. You should also try to feel electrons in your body spinning still synchronized to those that are in that river or are drifting out of your mouth to join a cloud at this moment. And the scene becomes one built like a Giacometti drawing of interwoven energy paths but also with inexplicable shared orientation holding all the information for everything in each single particle….we are holding everything within us and everything holds us and so we are one of everything. No separation!! One big entangled thing. Hating your neighbour is hating yourself…

tied and sharing far more destiny that one might ever have considered before..

Kids find glasses left behind as Art

Hello Carey, the history of art and the history of contemporary art both are very interesting to study because artists have often tried to make art that they felt would challenge the people of their era. So the list of local people I gave you all are doing their part to broaden perception and the ability to perceive in our era. I’d like to propose that time being the test of art is still a pretty good one and the only one that I personally care about. However, one of the worst things and absolutely useless art works that I ever saw in person is also one that served only its moment in time exceptionally well.

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain;

Better known as the urinal by the general population. It is useless to me now because I trust my judgement on art but in its day it was a nuclear bomb of influence waking up the general public to being critical and to NOT just accept art as art just because it has somehow been but in a gallery. That was its purpose and intention and it sent shock waves around the world. It is exactly what those kids taking a photo of forgotten glasses that you sent ought to be alert to.

On the other hand my favourite quote by an artist to all other artists ever and one that I teach my students is by the terrific painter of many time tested outstanding paintings , Eugene Delacroix who put the challenge to artists like this:

“You who know there is always something new, reveal that to others in that which they may have overlooked.”

He is liberating and challenging artists of all time to serve their world and their community by causing the people to look at the world with openness at hope of seeing more than they first expected in everything. So while Duchamp was being incredibly cynical about artists Delacroix assumes that artists will always try to describe things valuable about being alive. And those lovely children in the photo you sent me taking photos of glasses left behind are demonstrating willingness to look at anything as revealing something about being alive that they too may be overlooking.

So while most would say that this image points out what is wrong with the contemporary art world it IS pointing out why children are beautiful in how they openly look at the world and tend to see in anything at least potential and I will send you now two photos of my glasses in slightly different light that reveals what is great about looking more carefully at glasses that most don’t even take time to see in there own everyday lives. And if I did a painting of if, people might say my how poorly this man paints the lenses of glasses.

Thanks for reminding me that I saw my glasses one day out of the corner of my eye and noticed the polarizing lenses being very interesting…so I took these two pictures. I’m not saying those kids saw this, but unlike most adults , maybe their parents or teachers encouraged them to give everything in a museum a chance? Of course I hope that after going to a gallery of a museum, everyone is provoked into looking for visual miracles wherever they travel in life.

respectfully, Roy Mills

Vulnerable to Musk and health and…

To Rianne Edwards-Switzer : searching beyond what one knows is not comfortable , certainty left far behind /and so many many unpaid or poorly paid hours are these things simply a part of any professional life ,/ and is the desire to get lost and to risk being denied life in familiar comfortable territory … does this mean teaching one’s self without a text book or personal guide book to follow; or any guarantee that the truths discovered have any truth beyond proving that one should keep trying ? Trying even most in the face of inevitable moments of self doubt. ?

Self doubt is a real thing for many people , humility, fear, and vulnerability … this state of being doesn’t seem like something that deserves to have monuments made about it but… I seem always to arrive at that kind of outcome. I feel tenuous, I feel life is very fragile , that consciousness is ethereal and that fortitude and all of my physical energy serves people maybe…?/and a god/truth/nature that is incomprehensible? Well thankfully the truth of that incomprehensibility is encouraging and beautiful in a way? I’m glad that no amount of science and no individual can ever know it all …any sense that any single person owns the entire comprehensive truth is wrong , no? …so while most people seek certainty in their investments and work in life, I guess I hope that on behalf of people who may feel vulnerable often…I am burning my flame, my body and spirit not as if I offer an example but because I don’t know what else to do. Nothing else makes more sense? Is that a set of worthy words? Are any of the sculptures worthy documents testifying to the effort to make sense of my being here?

You know some academics with full tenure and pensions and benefits and parking and prestige from a life of exemplary work agree that Michelangelo’s Rondinini Pieta is the best work of his entire life. Not the David, not the pieta in St. Peter’s but the one work he made when his health was failing and he was no longer certain he was immortal and a kind of god. I learned that in first year art school while hoping that my hardworking family from Homesteader roots might believe in an art career that delivers art that is in service to a community. I was confused by the paradox that heroic public art that lets a community believe they could vanquish their foes in a heroic way like the sculpture of David offers would ever be less value than a quiet somber expression of sorrow and even doubt…as the Rondinini Pieta does….it took me most of my life to see uncertainty as one of the greatest of human states of being.

Fear is honest, frailty is definite and humility is far more useful to those who are not arrogant and are not the vanquishers of anyone, no? If one wants to serve heroic vanquishing types then of course they should follow their hearts. But to me, my experiences lead me to accept my tenuous existence, health, job, circumstances…family…everything leads me to think I am always going to end up making work about fear, vulnerability and Sculpture is what I chose to keep doing in the face of those inevitable feelings? Does that make any sense?

I’m laying in bed bathed in the light of a full moon. What soft gentle light? What world council allows Putin to attack others and threaten nuclear war ? What society gives Elon Musk or China or Jeff Bezos the authority to fill that sky or that moon or that Mars with their money making schemes? What innovative brilliant person would ever give their lives to serving as a politician who must answer more to truck drivers and lobbyists from prevailing industries more than university students or healthcare experts? Even well meaning good minds can’t read enough to comprehend how to communicate to the masses of people who fear they will never have a home, let alone a mortgage on a average priced 850k home?

Vulnerable? Fear of US style healthcare insurance? Fear of an emerging class system? Fear that one is running out of time…what do any of us do in the light of the moon and god to honestly keep the people we hope to serve company?

I surely fear that I am not worthy of doing much…but circumstances have given me yet another day and because I can, I must ! I must try to serve. I must try, but , in truth…fear I am far from able.

maybe I am like everyone or at least someone else…

Carry on Critical Assessment:

Well There is truth in human perception and I teach that. For example the average human can only see well enough to read 3mm tall text at 1M distance or 30 mm at 10 meters…similarly we know that sound as a wave generates harmonics that amplify waves in predictable ways, well , colour harmonics do as well and proportions in physical compositions create interest and predicable agreement on beauty. And then after the laws of visual fundamentals are studied over a year. You have to spend time studying why consider art at all. What role documenting observed reality played until photography became prevalent for example. Because once we had painters as the only means of recording the appearances of people places and things, but after one has achieved skills at observing and seeing the world as it is better than most will ever bother to see and describe it through drawing, painting and sculpting the human mind needs more and here is the truth for each and every single soul alive. Answer this question for yourself after you read the question, and before you read what I believe is a set of English words arranged to describe a decent language. ( I put it like this because I believe great visual art is deeply needed to describe things that words cannot. )

What is common about all of the best experiences in life?

Is it not true that regardless of choosing sports or building, food, sex, chess, etc…. Best experiences in life are always when we arrive at doing or feeling something that we previously didn’t know we were capable of prior?

If you run, you somehow run faster, if you read, you comprehend something you never considered so well etc?

The most satisfying experiences in life are when we gain awareness of more potential and more personal liberty, no?

So if that is true of an individual then perhaps individuals who bought that to an entire era of other humans are to be celebrated for their achievements? Their greatest works may have changed the course of history by opening up avenues of potential for every human afterwards? So, those works may have absolute observable quality but like people who want a signed Gretzky jersey or stick the market begins to be willing to pay large sums for even that great artist’s less than great art. Sotheby’s has some value, but like the stock market, you need to be aware that corporations daily buy or sell their own stocks creating measurable wealth even though not a single extra thing of value has been created for the world. One thing is for sure, the more we listen to great music the more we are not easily satisfied with anything less and visual art, food, athletics, building, driving, dancing everything is compared to the best work we have ever seen in that realm.

I trust talk that simply and humbly asks three questions

1.) what is it?

2.) what is it essentially about?

3.) how could it be about that in any better way?

Those three questions empower any human to critically assess any thing or any experience in its own terms and not on term that they think they want of experiences, but in terms that the experience is actually doing in to their perceptions.

Maybe that releases all of us from accepting that the DJ is playing good music? Or that the curator chooses great art over famous artist’s lesser works?

Scale and Transcendence

M x T x V x C1 x C2 x A \ F = Q

M= Material Essence Transcended

T= Time Duration of attention

V = Venue or even size of frame

C1= Commitment Demonstrated

C2= Concept or Feeling

A = Aesthetics (unity,variation,contrast)

All dissipated by F= Fear to invest beyond common levels.

The Venue in a drawing or relatively flat art work that is 20cm x 20cm is far different than one that is 90 x 130 or even larger. And this has everything to do with scale.  Scale is not size although size is a factor of scale.  The relative size of your marks relative to the size of the venue / frame or frame of reference always will always have much to do with whether we will attend longer than we thought we would and whether we will step towards and discover more and even sometimes whether we will feel commitment on the part of the maker.  I say maker with every connotation that word might imply.  Artist, Nature, God, science…etc.

However we got made and for whatever reason you have faith that today should be at least as good as yesterday made us with eyes that work in definable ways. The distance that we can read 3mm tall typeface is approximately 1 meter.  Any further and identifying a smudge mark from a mark done with symbolic intention are largely the same.

We might even say that the material substance of the work changes such that we experience transcendence when we experience a shift in awareness as we drive, walk and lean closer to something of great interest.

We might think something we see from a quarter mile away is human made but on driving or cycling up we find it is doubtful that it’s human made and then when we get three meters away feel certain that it is nature made and then on stepping one meter away we finally believe or pause uncertain whether god or human, science, luck or all of the above are implicated.

An example of that is this simple pencil drawing by U of A Alumni Chantel Schultz.

https://pin.it/1KXkAka

It presents at an intimate distance relative to human scale…and it equivocates from being something nature-god-science made ( like frost on a window ) and human made right up and until you are millimeters from it…and then only when she tells me that it is hand done by pencil do I believe that reading I was equivocating on was true.

So, as you work between larger scale venue pieces of paper or plaza scale billboards or sculptures or design or draw for 20 x 20 cm or 20 x 20 mile venues, transcending the perception of not only the material but transcending the perception of the commitment and in this case even the concept changes because of scale.

Lastly, use this formula at a tool to focus your mind on certain aspects over others.

Choose on variable and try to emphasize that aspect, then try the other and don’t forget that human scale and perception due to our scale is a great asset that you can use.

Have a great studio day!! With great respect, Roy 

50 Elemental Words Describing things you value about being alive:

Hi A:

I’m glad to have you in this group! In terms of elemental we could think of gasoline as being important to our lives. I suppose a hydro carbon like gas I made of components that we call elements, Hydrogen , carbon and in certain proportions that make one hydro carbon ethanol and another methane and each is quite different. So while the word hydrocarbon is quite a broad word like the word family, carbon is elemental. I have slowly been trying provoke thought about the irreducible in life to make the defining of life’s complex things tied first to the simplest words we can think of.

All complex words are hugely valuable but I think they are to easy to say.

While you all can make individually important metaphors and symbols referring to things that may be idiosyncratic, unique and personal but I wonder if it is valuable to try to express in words aspects of the complex in simplest words?

For example: I may value family in life more than anything, but rather than launch a poetic string of words from there getting more complex and each getting more open to interpretation, I am trying to encourage people to back up one level of difficulty first to mentally try for more irreducible words.

I recall you being exceptionally strong as a student and even in this mini assignment, but many students we send on can’t describe using words what they are looking at , nor can they easily break a complex visual experience into simple words for their friends and family.

In trying to reduce the word family down to it elemental building blocks some would wildly jump to the associated word love. But, love is even more complex than family meaning so very many things to many different people. So, I might say that on a spectrum where one is most elemental and ten is most complex; family is a four and love is an eight.

To try to identify English words that are elemental building blocks I have to focus and think about words. Arguably English is not the best language at all! Maybe a person who knows more languages could describe elemental human existence in other better ways using Japanese or French.

Ultimately, I hope that this exercise does two things: one, I hope it sharpens how agile people are in describing significant complex and valuable things in life., and two, I hope it leads them to feeling that many of life’s most valuable experiences are possibly better described by other arts than just literature.

Being better with English is great! Being better with another literary language like Japanese is even better but These are both variations in abstraction . Words don’t describe many of the best things in life as well as other art forms do. Colour for example!

To describe the red that I want your mind to imagine using words is basically impossible. A more accurate way would be to paint the colour in a room lit in a certain temperature and show you that red exactly! No language can beat that. No? What can music describe that words can’t? And for that matter what can a violin describe about life that a drum can’t? Sculpture?

I need artists in my world who are masters in defending art and using words is only part of it. I can help get them better with words but words don’t replace experience. They just don’t!! I love sculpture! I love physicality. I love texture, I have read that smell is even more important to memory than visuals but few languages have any words to describe smells. Inuit people have many words for variations in snow!! But to communicate that even more precisely…we could be better served by showing each other, no?

So back to the question of elemental:

Family: a four in elementality, I can’t just use trust because while it is maybe a “two” it is still pretty abstract….what about “hug”? What about “touch” what about instead of “mum” I say “hands”, still a two…and then” caress”?

What if it is hard to define the elemental in life but in that we open up a treasure chest of power to draw, paint, sculpt, dance, sing and yes….even write poetry that is accessible to others using?

I can recall a wonderful student getting at something she valued about being alive by using a series of sculptures of crows. We’re crows the elemental things that she valued?

Maybe, but maybe it was “resourceful”, steady, prevalent, fearless,“survivor”, “resourceful”, “adaptable”, smart, creative…. honourable ….and in this list of words I have used here to describe a crow only one or two are elementally irreducible!

Most are complex .

This student I admired started making crows out of different material substances and she began to invest more or less commitment to each one.

What does commitment express in art anyway.

I hope this helps to cause the assignment of coming up with 50 elemental words listing what you personally value about being alive a pleasure.

Viscosity? Friction? To glide, to hold? Squeeze? Warmth? A slight breeze? Corduroy? Skin? Wrap? Uncover? Ridged? Flexible? to stretch to unite?….

I don’t know….these are just English words other languages have even better words but what words do…why has my life lead me to being a sculptor?

On Sat, Jan 8, 2022 at 9:29 PM Alyssa Lao-An <alaoan@ualberta.ca> wrote:

Hi Roy, I remember creating a list of 50 elemental things I value about being alive in fundamentals, but maybe I didn't understand it correctly. Can you please explain to me what it means for the words to be elemental?
Thank you, A

Merry Christmas Eve Steve

Merry Christmas Eve Steve:

You speak very well. I wish we could talk more.

Thanks for the encouragement and the feeling that you afford that says I may be of use to the world as you value it.

I argue that artists serve others who are too busy serving the world in other ways. I have limited authority to speak for people. But we share certain things : gender, cultural heritage, family, love of nature, respect for duration and maybe the physical presence of stone to name a few. So I’m interested in hearing from key representative of the constituency that I have even any amount of authority to speak on behalf of.

I have no authority to speak for the things First Nations artists value or women or scientists or red necks or….? But in terms of beauty and in terms of power or in terms of presence and physical…I’ve experimented now for quite a few years. And in some ways maybe those thing transcend politics, heritage, history and time.

In short great and beautiful things have the power to fight for their existence even over conquering civilizations. I’m not sure anything I’ve made is worthy of that status but I aspire to that challenge! I’m not going to be satisfied easily. I study beauty but I certainly don’t think that The truism “ beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is true. Sure kids love jello and for a while sugary treats are the “best foods” but after a while of becoming an expert in what makes one bowl of Jello better than another we finally recognize that there are more nutritious foods and each of them can be compared, the first steak against the second against the third and so on until we are all experts in our own way . Sure some like salty more than sweet or rare more than well done but more or less the range of human taste is definable.

I argue that music with no lyrics is the most abstract in all the arts. It goes right to our hearts. A piano played in a certain way can sound like a gentle breeze or a soft rain or a hurricane of dire consequence….yet the piano sounds like nothing in nature at all. Because of its power, humans have studied music. We know that a harmonic chord is one where each wave from each note in a harmonic amplifies the other and that a harmonic chord is uplifting and balanced. But move one finger one note off and we get a dissonance that feels melancholic or wistful.

So , why in the world would colour not be studied in the same way? Harmonic colours are not any easier to arrive at than tuning a guitar or a piano. It takes concentration and tools and both. Tuning colours in a painting are as hard as tuning a piano in my opinion. One needs to know the wave frequency and know how to “listen” and check.

So, why in the world would proportion not be the same? One rectangular block is elegant, the next more stocky , the next scrawny but the next Lithe ….and a sculpture with a series of masses and volumes, surface passages and visual vectors all affecting each other is a symphony of relationships using major chords and minor chords etc.

This supports the idea that those who study cooking or study music or study painting are experts to be differed to. But, I argue that when it comes to excellent art, we all know what excellence is. Training or no training, we all know when a choir member is out of tune, or the piano is out of tune. And we all reach for our camera over certain sunsets but not all sunsets!

So I always aim to empower my fellow Albertans, my fellow humans, to feel invited and with all the skill needed to decide if something is beautiful compared to all other like experiences.

Life is about comparing. It’s one way to savour!

I show one painting of a horse by excellent artist Norman Rockwell to every first year group and they like and admire it; then, I show them a painting of a horse by Rembrandt and they all know it is better. They may never have studied art before but they all know it.

If I ask a kid to sign their name on the black board 30 times and then they and every student in the group pick the same five as being the best of the set. Before during and after they study, humans know what beauty is.

Sometimes I think we expand techniques, expand ability to articulate what is or isn’t being seen and felt in words but in terms of assessing quality, only eating all the various mixes of jello makes one an expert in Jello, only studying the greatest paintings gains us the power to compare wisely .

I respect your opinion on life and look forward to exchanging more as life goes on. I only ever aim to promote others in their way, so if I ever seem snooty or arrogant , please take me down . Anything that compares to the best experiences in life are art!

Merry Christmas Eve Steve, no need to be coy Roy.

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 7:48 PM Steven Schroeder <ss wrote:

Hey man, I think I might (barely) be able to understand what you are saying. What you do, and teach to others is something that is difficult to convey. I find it unfortunate that our society rewards vulgarity and boisterous imbeciles who portend grandiose promises and claim to speak for the masses. Love of guns, a lack of respect for the sciences and the worship of graven idols. Where is the appreciation for beauty and the admiration of creating pleasing forms, voice, taste or sound?

I learned something from a phycologist at the French immersion school Katie went to for junior high. We as parents, only raise our children, and install our values, until about grade 8, then society raises our children. Facebook, Tick Tok, Snap Chat et al have taken over. I may have spelled those programs wrongly as I am not a user of such drivel. My brain is turning to oatmeal quick enough on it's own that I don't need some influencer helping things along. However, we continually try to change our surroundings and make things better for those in our sphere. And, society, and the ills of society are continually trying to change us. Buy this! Do that! Eat these! It's a struggle.

People are more interested in displaying the spoils of their own wars of sorts, and don't seem to take time to admire what the natural world supplies for us, or that the gifted can offer to our senses. The Arts. If I were to offer any simple observation, it's that what you provide will be around for generations to admire, and the beauty will endure. Tick Tok....will be gone tomorrow and replaced by the next whiz bang idiotic fad.

As you stated, sushi is not steak, and tofu is not steak, but sushi is not supposed to be steak, and tofu, well it's trying to be something that its not. The great pretender. Tofu takes up a significant spot in my wheel house now, not because I admire it, but because I've been dealt a hand that well, makes it an option. Sushi, on the other hand, does not want to be steak. It takes it's rightful place in our plethora of culinary options. My limited intellectual capacity sees sushi as the arts. As I read this, I realize it sounds fuckin' corny as hell.

At his stage, and my advanced age, I am only capable of limited synaptic coherence. I no longer understand where the line is between right and wrong, up or down, real or imposed reality. Geez, not to get political but I heard that Jesse Waters, some talking douce bag at Fox News said somebody should ambush Dr. Fauci and send a kill shot to him. Astounding. No repercussions for such untoward behaviour. Nope, just the norm in our dumbass society. We need more of what you and your industry provides. Keep it up.

Hope to see you guys soon. Have a great Christmas. Steve

From: "roydenmills" <roydenmills@gmail.com>
To: "sschroeder" <sschroed
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2021 6:43:22 AM
Subject: Writing

Hey Steve:
I wanted to follow up on my reply to your eloquent and excellent email encouraging me around the marble sculptures. I replied with concern about a trend in the art world that favours academically advantaged verbally gifted artists who have taught art for years and who have connections in the academic circuit . So, people like me. I fear that we write too much or use our positions to feel pretty great about ourselves. But actions in this vein are based merely on words. It occurred to me that maybe when I replied to you that I was seeming to be implying that your great reply to me was in some way less than outstanding.
I am grateful to you for your words, your encouragement and your time.
I am suspicious of my industry but feel that great work in any industry should speak for itself. Anything at its highest level is an art form. Math, medicine, business, farming, plumbing, hockey…but art, stuff called art sometimes gets in its own way by not volunteering to be scrutinized on how strongly it carries meaning-feeling or beauty.
We all know when one sunset is remarkable and worth taking a photo and others not so much.
I propose to empower average people to ask three simple questions:What is it? What is it essentially doing?And how could it be about that in any better way?
Don’t shy away fearing you don’t have the words, don’t look merely for what you think you already like ( don’t criticize sushi for not being steak).
But most of all, to my colleagues, don’t build a set of words that basically seek to exclude people who don’t practice those words because that is simply like when I was nine and I moved to the big city of Red Deer from Camrose and I walked up to a bunch of kids in the playground and they were talking about movies and shopping malls and wearing clothes that I hadn’t seen or heard of. They wielded words and fashion as a way to temporarily keep me as an outsider but eventually …words are cheap.
So , that was all I was saying.
I’m still grading portfolios in three teaching slots for seven levels of undergraduate students. I believe that if the work is good any conqueroring civilization would not throw the work out. Good moves people. I’m glad you like the new work.
Thanks again for taking the time, Roy

--
Royden Mills : Sculptor

What is in a word?

Interesting how words beget words isn’t it Kerri ? I came to a point where I began to wonder if verbal language and visual language and auditory language and the language of taste all just need a break from each other...? Music about Architecture is about as useful and interesting as architecture about sculpture. Or dance about painting...it is!!! It is interesting, but words are the sibling of the modes of communication that seem to be the favoured child, and that is fine and even possibly understandable since we have come to build our whole world around words but what if...? What if we hadn’t thought to make any mode primary or first? What, if any of the other modes of communication had become more primary? It’s just a fun thing to ponder , no? Ideas and structures within eras become words and these words block us from seeing things outside of the realm of our constructed structures. Deconstructavists have written at very long length about this fact for example....

...but it is worth a playful thought to consider how orthodoxy is constructed and how polarities bind us? Until only recently gender was only one of two things, politics in the USA is still one of two things...thankfully the arts are many of many things and defining those many things comes with exactly as you say...many words and some become exclusive or elitist. Elitism isn’t even wrong in some ways? Perhaps? Olympic sports? Or Math and science and maybe usefulness could be measured?

But is it lovely and true that the single art work or the single word or single sentence...original and true may never gain its author a friendly smile or a meal of worthy warmth, even if the world finally sees a beautiful idea from it? or is it enough even that one other single equally lost soul recognizes a kindred spirit in the utterance, painting or sound?

I feel good comes to us daily from all over....being alive is a painful, messy, horrifying but also stunning , miraculously unpredictable challenge of incomprehensible scope and thankfully no human will ever comprehend it all in 100 life times!

Some art reveals to some and others to others and talking is one way of sharing how we feel...but let us remain always vigilant that we try to see others?...other arts in between? People trying in between? Maybe beyond the consensus there lays an opportunity to enjoy potential that none have yet seen? Let’s hope, for the sake of our world that this always is taught in school and that so is humility as a virtue? I feel about as vulnerable and uncertain as ever but I engage with life and with others not to win or to be best...rather to openly ask is there is better? What ever we love about our community or love about our Province, our street, or Country...should we not openly discuss the least aggressive way to enjoy the nature of what only it has to offer?

Too much will human power, to many human developments and wilderness is lost for ever? If it is the will of many then it comes to be but...in that invention from the many in agreement...sometimes a lost point of view is overlooked and what if that held the key to sustaining exactly what everyone was actually living for? Maybe the word we chose was too coarse and forced overlooking upon the many? ...and maybe that single soul just didn’t bother to make their argument grander using the communication style of the era? Or maybe they should have been born with greater more forceful convictions? Or maybe they simply didn’t choose the write art form? (write intended).

Inspired by the wonderful Amanda Priebe:

Amanda M Priebe yes, that is how I feel. Practicing art is like practicing medicine or practicing farming or anything else where one is totally committed, and so much so that doing it very well has consequences for the person doing it and the community they serve.

To identify with stupid mere superficial terms of verbal language like the term “creatives”is a way to let go of the more honourable and long standing word Artist. Paradoxically it isn’t the honour of the word “artist” that I seek exactly, it is the truth that in any given day a soul might find all forces in their lives might come together and for a blessed moment or day of being, they might make something that inspires others to feel their liberty and feel inspired to do something with as much excellence as anyone has ever done it. And in being so dedicated to giving to their cause they leave a trace of themselves that could inspire somebody else in a useful way!!

When ever a human does that, it is not merely making decorations nor merely making pretty things, it is not merely being creative; it is striking a chord of resonant truth!

I walked beside a then 93 year old master farmer named Rollie Hennig on his farm in Stony Plain for a few hours one day. When he talked he breathed and the words seemed almost a song, as if his being and the wind were one thing. Humility is too shallow of a word but there was nothing about aspiring nor “getting ‘er done” nor “trying” to do things. He was doing things at all moments of our walk. He walked and talked easily in step with the changing light; and the wind seemed to be registering on his cheek an ever important indicator of what to be doing next.

Willpower seemed less a part of it because it seemed more like a collaboration with what the elements of life in that moment would offer him the chance to do. He was revealed to me that day as a master artist.

It was me who was humbled. I met a living master! I think I know a couple of living masters of the practice of visual art. None are any more artists than Rollie and Beatrice Hennig. The two and their son Perry worked that day as a team with ease and rhythms that looked as practiced and effortless as a bird flying across the farm yard . Nature had taught them not to fight nor fear but to listen and adapt and to be at it all day, and not to be “done”, but to be “doing “ what nature asked of them. Sure it was long days, sure things broke down, and sure they face the pains of life but the need of the farm and the need of the art they practiced was the only important issue they seemed to serve, and they were in complete harmony with that.

This was many years ago now so I fear they may not be with us any more but on that day I took away a farm family lesson about art that changed my life and changed my way of making art and making my way in life. We all mingle with the breeze and it is a lovely lively dance. We need focus and an eye on what is called for. It’s an art....not a decoration.

Interesting how words beget words isn’t it Kerri ? I came to a point where I began to wonder if verbal language and visual language and auditory language and the language of taste all just need a break from each other...? Music about Architecture is about as useful and interesting as architecture about sculpture. Or dance about painting...it is!!! It is interesting, but words are the sibling of the modes of communication that seem to be the favoured child, and that is fine and even possibly understandable since we have come to build our whole world around words but what if...? What if we hadn’t thought to make any mode primary or first? What, if any of the other modes of communication had become more primary? It’s just a fun thing to ponder , no? Ideas and structures within eras become words and these words block us from seeing things outside of the realm of our constructed structures. Deconstructavists have written at very long length about this fact for example....

...but it is worth a playful thought to consider how orthodoxy is constructed and how polarities bind us? Until only recently gender was only one of two things, politics in the USA is still one of two things...thankfully the arts are many of many things and defining those many things comes with exactly as you say...many words and some become exclusive or elitist. Elitism isn’t even wrong in some ways? Perhaps? Olympic sports? Or Math and science and maybe usefulness could be measured?

But is it lovely and true that the single art work or the single word or single sentence...original and true may never gain its author a friendly smile or a meal of worthy warmth, even if the world finally sees a beautiful idea from it? or is it enough even that one other single equally lost soul recognizes a kindred spirit in the utterance, painting or sound?

I feel good comes to us daily from all over....being alive is a painful, messy, horrifying but also stunning , miraculously unpredictable challenge of incomprehensible miracles.

Some art reveals to some and others to others and talking is one way of sharing how we feel...but let us remain always vigilant that we try to see others?...other arts in between? People trying in between? Maybe beyond the consensus there lays an opportunity to enjoy potential that none have yet seen? Let’s hope, for the sake of our world that this always is taught in school and that so is humility is a virtue? I feel about as vulnerable and uncertain as ever but I engage with life and with others not to win or to be best...rather to openly ask is there is better? What ever we love about our community or love about our Province, our street, or Country...should we not openly discuss the least aggressive way to enjoy the nature of what only it has to offer?

Too much will power, to many developments and wilderness is lost for ever? If it is the will of many then it comes to be but...in that invention from many sometimes a lost point of view held the key to sustaining exactly what everyone was overlooking and maybe that single soul just didn’t bother to make their argument grander and more forcefully nor even in the write art form (write intended).

In reply for Red Deer Advocate

nd 

My name is Royden Mills, I played for the Red Deer Midget Chiefs and the Bantam Chiefs and the Ponderosa Pete’s PeeWee teams.

When I played PeeWee Hockey I worked at my dad’s family run carpet store not far from where the sculpture that Ray has decided to pass his judgement on in the newspaper.  I swept the sidewalks each morning not 100 feet from this sculpture before walking east each morning to go to Central Elementary School and Central Junior High.  I learned to respect cultural diversity on those streets because at first I didn’t know how to appreciate people of other cultures like the Mah family who have long run Wei’s Western Wear and the Yee’s who ran the Valley Hotel.  I came to see my narrow vision of Alberta as a problem and later came to be friends with Harold Yee and Chung and Allen Mah.  The things I learned about their Asian Culture mixed with dreams of being an NHL hockey player like Mike and Randy Moller and Brian Curran .  Red Deer was a great place to grow up.  Though I wasn’t as good as those NHL bound friends or Rob Hammil , or Sutters, I had the time of my life in Red Deer. 

 I eventually attended the then world class Department of Art and Design at Red Deer College , and later got a Masters Degree in Visual Art and set up my first professional studio in Japan where I lived for two years.  I studied the aesthetics and the proportions, the writing and the philosophy of this ancient society.  When I came home to Alberta and set up my professional studio here on the prairies again I bought 3 acres of land using 1000 dollars that my Homesteading grandfather left me when I was eleven.

  The sculpture that Ray decides to pass his judgement on in this newspaper was made with obvious respect to Asian influences but also with respect to the vulnerability that my grandfather survived to build a shelter out of dirt in the face of the harsh landscape of our Canadian Prairies.  I was fairly young in my Art Career when I made “Onisama” that is pictured in the paper along side of the renown Ken Macklin’s sculpture in the Advocate.  I felt fearful that I could ever sustain an art career from Alberta.  

I felt vulnerable to an international Art World that seemed harsh and very exclusive and so this sculpture was a kind of fortress.  A safe place to shelter one person.  Don’t we all feel vulnerable sometimes?  I have gone on to have work purchased and located in very prominent public and private international collections.  Does Ray have any idea how hard it is to make the NHL?  To be a Red Deer kid and make it in the international art world is possibly as unlikely!  

But I made this and a beautiful soul in Red Deer bought this sculpture and donated to the city.  It was given to the people free of payment.  It stands humbly in a fairly modest street corner across from a burned out homeless shelter where people like the ones I used to say hello to each morning face the harsh reality of the streets.  It may not be glitzy or sparkly or merely pretty, I but I hope it respects a sense of poetic beauty that some kid of any age might take to heart.  Think of what can be done with a life my dear Red Deer friends!  Think about a Red Deer that used to have its own TV station and two very different Radio Stations and two or three newspapers.  Do we really want to criticize art we haven’t even bothered to research?  Do we want to limit the art we see to only pretty and glitzy, top 40 type tastes? 

 I hope some soul might come upon the art I make and feel less alone knowing that another human felt something beyond eye catching like an earring or pretty bobble.  I tried to make something that makes a person think about what might be inside sheltered there.  

How might we think of our Red Deer of environment and a degree of insecurity we might sometimes feel in it?   Do We need shelter from our brothers, who might criticize our life’s work in the community newspaper? Perhaps some folks will speak up for this point? 

  Lastly, thank you Ray and the Advocate newspaper for allowing me to answer so fully.

The Red Deer boy who swept those streets was discovered by a girl who’s family lived above the funeral home just north of Mills Carpets and we’ve been together 37 years now and her mum donated this work to Red Deer.  Isn’t it encouraging to know that any kid in Red Deer could choose a path and follow that beyond a narrow orthodoxy?  Shouldn’t a Red Deer kid be defended in his own home town?  Especially over a gift?

Royden Mills , RCA

Digital Stone Project 2020-2021 Dyscorpia 2.1

Digital Stone Project 2020 was cancelled but several artists from Edmonto forged ahead with the digital robotic milling with the commitment to go to Italy in 2021.

I refined a Digital model that I liked but then was forced to reconsider the proportions of what I had made. The result was a stretch in physical and metaphysical ways..

https://skfb.ly/6SSWo

Then, the vibrant Mariléne Oliver asked us to consider putting the DSP work in Dyscorpia 2.1 so I was able to take the file and give it to her in a way that brought up a lot of thinking about Democratic sculpture that anyone could enjoy and print from.

while much personal investment will go into milling and refining a monument in marble, anyone could download and print my work or even, I suppose alter it and mill or print and that is both interesting and intimidating too.

what need have we of monuments? What is a virtual sculpture? What does sculpture add if it becomes real rather than remain virtual?

somethings to think about in this era.

have a look and let me know what you think!!

1St International Public Art Symposium at Bhubaneshwar , Odisha, India

As a young Sculptor I came to learn about the great Anthony Caro at exactly the same time as I was studying the remarkable Hindu sculptures made in India. There was one master piece of Sculpture in the collection of the Edmonton Art Gallery ( Art Gallery of Alberta ) that my professor Peter Hide taught us to consider very carefully. 30 years later in November of 2018 I found myself being offered an opportunity to go to India to make sculpture. Kshitish Das contacted me and after much effort to arrange for people to cover my contract teaching at the University of Alberta, I was on the other side of the earth working flat out to make a sculpture along side 16 other international artists and some of the very most famous Indian Sculptors in that great country. I couldn’t know what tools or materials might be available, nor did I know the conditions, circumstances or people I was going to be sharing time with. I took a major leap of faith based on a feeling in my heart about Indian people based largely on the nature of the ancient stone sculptures that has stirred something in me those many years ago.

It was a very hard workload, heat and humidity and uncertainty over what materials.tools or resources made beginning anything a blind proposition, but again, take the leap of faith….measure the resources available and try to keep hydrated and maintain kidney function! There were younger artists assigned to work with the international artists, and many of them had sustainable studios of their own. I was very grateful to Rahul Bante and Akash Tirmal who were two of the great young artists who impressed be very much. Rahul and I collaborated and we made a large sprawling sculpture that featured human structure holding up Natural rocks that were specific from the actual site. There were seven stones, one representing each continent and the installation that we made was done in a specific site in the new Sculpture Park with the idea that the visual vectors of a near by canopy of trees would descend, flow through the energy of the sculpture and then rise up and out the other end into a large tree outside of the walls of the sculpture park.

http://anpic.org.in/

It was a life changing trip to spend time in India and I am forever grateful to these kind, and strong people

Americans For The Arts

https://www.americansforthearts.org/2018/08/14/reflections-on-a-quarter-mile-long-public-artwork-in-edmonton-canada

https://www.americansforthearts.org/users/15590

I was asked to write about the Terwillegar Park Sculpture Installation for the organization : Americans for The Arts.  Please go and read and let me know what you think.  It is the best thing that I have ever made and during the most challenging of life events and periods of heavy commitments;  Just like some of the best work by many other artists.

I have less and less faith in the power of words to describe important things these days.  There are just so many words coming at us all of the time and other languages have better words than we have. I am beginning to feel as if one might need to learn all of the languages that a human can communicate with in order to be able to most effectively transfer feelings and meaning using words.  But learn a colour pallet well, or a proportional sensitivity....learn to use weight or texture or strength of material, and sometimes humans can feel something that is really beyond the scope of words.  I think art can carry real connotations about events and issues, but I also think those things beyond the literal speak directly to our soul.  I would like to speak to people who have a great need for that.  I would like to speak to that without using words, ...and so I do.  Or at least I try in my own humble way.

The Digital Stone Project, Garfagnanna Innovazionne, Gramalazzo Italy

Thanks to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the University of Alberta Faculty of Arts, I received support and encouragement to go to Italy to visit the Digital Stone Project.  Many thanks to the great Jon Isherwood and a team of excellent technicians and amazing facilities, I was able to produce a marble sculpture that I think is really strong.  The 2018 version of the Digital Stone Project included 24 Artists from all over the world.

https://www.garfagnanainnovazione.it/en/digital-stone-project-2018

https://www.digitalstoneproject.com/workshops

You can go to this web site and look for yourself.  If you are a former student of mine, you already know about Jon Isherwood and about John Hock and you know that we are trying to make our own region of the world one that is active and inspiring for its art making energy.  Many of these students have met Jon and John and gone on to make exciting things happen for themselves and for others as well.  To my mind, this is how art becomes valuable.  When the challenges of existing seem overwhelming, art can sometimes remind us that we are not alone in our search for more than just existing.  Art and the labours of physical sculpture can save lives by pointing out something that the audience may have forgotten or been overlooking about being alive.  And, at the very least, we can sometimes feel that the art speaks to us in such a way that we don't feel so alone.  We may come to feel that there is at least one other person who noticed something about being alive that we too value and so we are not alone in thinking the way we do.

Tolstoy writes of a period of life where he has so despondent that the only real option seemed like suicide and he came to feel that the practical sciences only confirmed this, his search for options using the infinite and unprovable available in god presented its own problems but eventually it was exactly in the infinite and never quite comprehensible where he found the room for hope and optimism.  I can speak about this faith in the incomprehensible in more tangible ways too, but it is true that Art saves communities and it saves lives, if only one at a time...that is more than enough reason for them to be important parts of every community.

Dr. William Lakey is largely responsible for me having my life.  He removed congenital brith defects that were threatening to kill me in an emergency surgery when I was quite young.  He did this using ground breaking technology and procedures with an open text book and a phone line to Chicago from the University of Alberta Hospital in about 1965.  Years later one of his best friends told me of a lunch break the two renowned Doctors took together on a day when life in Academia seemed simply too frustrating.  They got in the car together and decided that they would go to the Edmonton Art Gallery, and as they drove they both were considering leaving Edmonton for opportunities that they had to take there skills back to the USA where they had gotten their training.  As the conversation progressed, they arrived at the front of the gallery to find a very challenging new sculpture that they had not yet seen, and they both remarked that if this city had a vision enough to bring something like that to the people rather than more straight forward orthodoxy in art, then maybe they should stick around and see if Edmonton really was THAT exciting.  They both stayed until they passed away a few years ago.  I can argue that countless lives in Edmonton, including my own were saved by them choosing not to leave Edmonton.  Obviously the art was not the only reason they stayed, however, I re-tell this story accurately and both Dr. Lakey and Dr. Von Borstiel served the University of Alberta and this region of the world for 50 years after that lunch trip where they we enthused by seeing challenging sophisticated art.

Eugene Delacroix said "  You who know there is always something new, reveal that to others in that which they may have been overlooking." .   I think that this is the challenge to all artists of all genre's and all eras, for all time.  Inspire others to see liberty in things around them, let them feel less alone and encouraged to consider their potential differently than they might have been doing.  Simple as that.

I hope some thing that I have put my heart into making might actually light a spark in some other human one day.  If this ever happens for you, and I am still alive to hear about it, please send me a note, I will feel that the sweat and blood and commitments have been validated, but until I hear of that, I will seek to make better work with the goal that I might achieve that.  

This is my first Post on My Website started October 2017

The premise that I subscribe to is that we all are most satisfied by one quality of experience. Regardless of what mode of life we choose to be experiencing, athletics, food, travel, etc:  We Find most satisfying that which causes us to arrive at doing something that we previously did not think we were capable of.  Basically this leans towards respecting that the audience of any art work thinks that they already know what they like but that they seek more than merely affirmation of things that they already know they like.  We want to be caused to stretch and grow, and feel more than we previously imagined of ourselves.

“Americans for the Arts” chose My recent sculptureResonant Progression an Exemplary Public Art work and here is what I said about that work.

https://www.americansforthearts.org/users/15590