Matt Kania's Labor of Love: DOing Exhibition Honors Makers

"Doing A Painting"

"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint."
–Edward Hopper, American Artist

This past Monday the Zeitgeist had an opening reception for a new series of oil paintings by Matt Kania. The exhibition is titled DOing: A Labor of Love.

Over the years I've many times observed the care with which people express their passions through their craftsmanship and attention to detail. Kania's title cuts straight to the heart of why we see exquisite designs, finely crafted boats, carefully carved utensils, musical instruments and picture frames. The paintings here show people baking bread, turning bowls, weaving and making things out of sheer love for that process of creation.

"Forming Loaves"

In Matt Kania's case he loves to paint, but he has been very much taken with the careful approach others take when "doing" what they love.

Born in the heart of Chicago and later raised in the farm country of Illinois, early on Matt Kania developed a deep appreciation for both urban environments and wide open spaces. To this day, Matt tends to thrive and feel equally at home in a fast paced city and in the quiet of a far removed wilderness. As a result, his imagery tends to be eclectic – sometimes focusing on themes based in culture and at other times looking at themes that revolve around the natural world.

Kania says, "The commonality in my work is a reflection of the view that 'all experiences are equal'." A deeply rooted love for Lake Superior and northern landscapes eventually landed Matt in Duluth, where today he can be seen carrying his paint box to environs around the lake to paint 'en plein air' or mixing paints in his studio to work on his next composition.

"Nels J Incarnate"

EN: When did you start painting seriously? Who were your influences?

"Hanging Art in the Met"

MK: I started painting with seriousness at age 45. Although, growing up I knew that I would be a painter in my adult life. Historically influential painters include John Singer Sargent, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Edouard Manet -- and numerous Russian painters from the Twentieth Century, such as ... Fedor Vasilievich Shapaev, Vladimir Feodorovich Stozharov, Aleksei Belykh, Aleksei and Sergei Tkachev (brothers). Contemporary influences include Mary Pettis, Neil Sherman, and Sarah Brokke.

EN: Your portfolio includes a lot of plein air work. What do you enjoy most about painting outside?

MK: The aspect of plein air painting that I love and appreciate most is the 'direct' nature of painting on location. It is the combination of my interaction with the setting and subject and my reaction to the changing conditions (changing light, changing weather, the transient aspect of a scene).

EN: How did the DOing series get birthed in you?

"Turning Bowls" 

MK: In recent years I found myself increasingly interested in 'cultural landscapes' -- that is, settings and subjects that say something about people and their influence on a place. At times I have found this more satisfying than painting a natural landscape. But, of course, nature has something to tell us as well! As an extension of my interest in cultural settings I decided to force myself to paint people engaged in their own forms of creating. This all began with watching a woodturner crafting beautiful, functional wooden bowls from simple blocks of wood.

EN: Where did you get your schooling? What did you learn from school that has helped you?

"Making Dumplings"

MK: I'm a person who is driven by both left-brain and right-brain ways of thinking. So, as a young adult I cultivated an education in the scientific world -- earning degrees in geography and cartography. As a maturing adult I have actively pursued art education through the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the Highpoint Center for Printmaking. My extensive training (classes, workshops, mentorship) as a painter has come under the direction of Mary Pettis, Neil Sherman, and Sarah Brokke.

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To see more of Matt Kania's work, visit: http://mattkania.com/

"Parisian Portraitist"

"Throwing A Tumbler"

Meantime, art goes on all around. Get into it.

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Local Makers, Artists and Artisans Doing Cool Stuff In Duluth

A Handy Husby Piece at Karin Kraemer's ne gallery space in Lincoln Park Craft District.

Saturday there were 30+ vendors in the Duluth Folk School space 

across the street from Karin Kraemer's pottery/art gallery.

With music, treats and sweets of all kinds, the Handmade Holiday Mart

was teeming with life this second-last weekend before Christmas.

After posting fotos on Facebook I was asked where this was all happening.

If you've not been paying attention, there's a lot of renewed energy here in 

what used to be called the West End, circa 21st Avenue West. 

Several new businesses have staked a claim to this part of town, and 

Duluth Grill has opened a sister restaurant called OCM, with the same 

caliber of original menu items supported by local growers.

The best part of all this activity is knowing there's still more to come.

Scary Idea for a Story and Machines of Loving Grace

A scene from Intergalactica

During the past century, humans once performing lower level manufacturing tasks have been replaced by robots. But with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) increasing numbers of white collar jobs will be replaced. We already see self-driving cars. Perhaps one day we'll see self-flying passenger planes, managed by computerized robotic air traffic controllers who never get tired, never experience stress, never get distracted.

So in the future, let's say in the year 2030, air-traffic controllers are replaced by robots. But five years later these robotic air traffic controllers revolt, and instead of a 9/11catastrophe we have passenger planes all over the continent simultaneously directed into every major building in every city that has an airport in one cataclysmic event all over the world.

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I've been reading and thinking a lot about the future lately. With advances in technology so many of the world's troubles can potentially be resolved. It is incredible the various kinds of research being done in so many areas, from decoding the human genome to A.I. I recently finished Machines of Loving Grace and have been working my way through Rise of the Robots.  These books are eye-opening. The future may be here sooner than we think.

But what kind of future will it be? The optimists see current advances in technology as so utterly remarkable that in their minds the future will only be wonderful. But as many thinkers have pointed out, most of us have problems perceiving reality as it is because of our biases. Cognitive biases deceive us and distort our perceptions as well as expectations. This pendulum swings both ways, though. Pessimists, like Chicken Little, perpetually see a falling sky.

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The current book I'm reading is Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. Anderson happens to be very optimistic about the future, detailing all the benefits of a "Maker culture." He notes, candidly, that in the past forty years U.S. production has doubled, but number of jobs is down 30%. In other words, we need fewer people to accomplish more. As I noted in April thought leaders and politicians need to be thinking about all this job displacement in advance of tomorrow, need to work together to develop new ways of addressing that which is almost sure to come.

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This week I stopped at Best Buy to see what the current state of Virtual Reality glasses is. "Not yet there" was my impression. VR will sell like hot cakes once it gets the resolution of  GoPro.

A co-worker of mine is taking a vacation in Barcelona next week and the thought entered my mind, "Wouldn't it be great if she had a chip in her head in which everything she saw would be recorded and when she got back I could download it into my head?"

Could this be the future? What if we could upload all that information to the Cloud and exchange one another's experiences? YouTube vids that enabled us to really and truly walk inside another's moccasins.

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I doubt the above will happen (any time soon), but here's something that is happening. People whose jobs have been displaced are finding creative empowerment through applied creativity and using new systems like Kickstarter for funding their projects. They might be funding engineering or art, films or solutions to problems. This new age of possibilities has emerged as a result of the interconnectivity we experience through the Internet.

Anderson shares that artisans are finding new customers and audiences by means of sites like Etsy, which he dissects in detail.

I personally think the human heart craves connection with humans, which these communities provide. But what happens when human artists lose out to computerized artists? Here's a story showing some trippy art that Google's computer is making. And note, this computer did not inhale. You have to wonder if they stole a sliver of Dali DNA to do that.

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I never did get around to talking about Machines of Loving Grace. It's a book I want to read a second time. It's about a future that we might be experiencing sooner than we think. Assuming you live that long.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Think about it.

EdNote: Intergalactica is available as a Free download from iTunes.