Hide the medium
Shannon and I spent the night in Baker City, Oregon the other night on our way home from tour. It’s an interesting place; very Eastern Oregon high desert frontier-y feeling, but with a clear and strong diy art presence. This is embodied prominently by the Churchill School — an old elementary school that’s been restored by artists into an artists’ collective. Among other repurposings, they’ve converted the lunchroom / gymnasium into a diy concert hall. SO inspiring.
They had an open sign out front when we drove by, so I wandered in, and was greeted by an artist — Richard Springer — who happened to be hanging out in a room near the door. He ended up giving us a comprehensive tour, including of his own studio, where he showed us some of his work. He works in several styles, but one style in particular caught my eye. The effect in it is dusty, sort of like one might achieve with charcoal, but markedly different.
I asked him what media he was using in this series, and he explained that it was acrylic and glitter — but that he applied a liberal coat of some type of fixative on top, to obscure the glitteriness of the glitter and make it not look like glitter. And he used a term for this that I hadn’t heard before:
Hide the medium.
And, wow, do I love this phrase! I love what it implies. I love the idea of intentionally obscuring the source of something as an artistic process.
This is something I do a fair amount with synthesizer textures and reverbs — roughing them up until you can’t quite tell what’s going on, you just get a sense of atmosphere.
My experience is that sometimes when things are too overt, I listen to them too literally, when what I want is not so much to hear something as to feel something. And in those situations, hiding the medium can be a super effective tool. And now I have a term for it!
Obfuscatorily — jamie