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Art by Instinct

7:06 pm Thursday, March 15, 2012 by Jonah Ward

I’ve always had a high level of fascination with bees, wasps and hornets. The immediate danger juxtaposed with total calmness and structured productivity that they command is something to admire. Throughout my childhood I would come across many of these insects’ hives or nests of different sorts, but none more fascinatingly beautiful, yet inherently ominous looking than the nest of the Bald-Faced Hornet. In actuality, they are not really hornets, but from the same genus as the yellowjacket wasp, though black in color.

Their nests can be found hanging from knee height to 30 or 40 feet up in the air. They can be as large as 3 feet tall and house up to 700 wasps. During the summer the Bald-Faced Hornets will gather all types of weathered wood and even plastic tarps and other various forms of paper to fabricate the envelope that encases the combs inside. The nest essentially becomes a reflection and a true representation of its surrounding colors and textures.

In Fall, when the first rains descend, nests are abandoned and most will fall to the ground. I started collecting these nests in 2005 and found them many times in or around the same Madrone trees I collect bark from to make another series of work. Being that much of my work is made using wood and paper I felt a deep connection to the intriguing texture of these nests and they have inspired me to create new artwork.

By cutting up this once three dimensional structure into rectangular pieces and connecting the lines of color horizontally, they become like layers of the earth in the new form of a structured “painting”. Each layer embodies the essence of the natural construction materials these colonies of wasps gathered and created by instinct.

To come full circle I find my actions to be similar to the wasps; I collect materials from encompassing locations and use them to create something that symbolizes the DNA of those areas, which is what I am striving to accomplish in this series of work.

“seemingly chaotic content bound by structure”

12:26 am Wednesday, February 15, 2012 by Jonah Ward

I’ve always been completely infatuated with natural, textured, paper-like materials I find outside. One in particular comes from the Madrone tree, also known as Arbutus, with its beautiful, sleek, rich orange-red bark that at the end of each summer peels off to expose a new, silvery-chic layer underneath. It’s so smooth, it’s like skin — and when it gets saturated with rain the shiny surface of the tree looks like a tangle of naked arms and legs emerging from the forest floor.

As the bark peels off, it collects at the base of the tree like hundreds of tiny paper scrolls littered about. On the hottest days, when this is happening, you can actually hear the bark drying and peeling off of the trees, reminiscent of the sound of slow, crinkling paper. When I was younger, I used to help my mom collect bunches of these delicate pieces because when soaked in water, an ocher-colored dye is released that she would then use to stain her basket weaving material. After she was done soaking the bark, we’d pour it outside and I noticed how it transformed and became soft and pliable. I could then unravel the curled up “scrolls”, revealing some pieces almost as big as a sheet of paper.

Since then, I’ve been fascinated by Madrone bark and in the past few years have been thinking of ways to incorporate it into my artwork. I want it to be appreciated and highlighted as a piece of nature’s beauty. Something that just needs to be picked up off the ground, given a little time and energy to turn it into something that people have never seen before, or at least arranged and displayed in a new, unseen way. I have started to cut and apply them onto wood canvases, completely covering the surface. By cutting the bark into rectangular pieces they become almost like swatches of color from a paintbrush, creating a painting-like form, but with a richness and depth only matched by other naturally occurring colors and materials.

This idea of making a painting or drawing using processes and/or materials that normally wouldn’t fall into that category is very important to me; to reinterpret the idea of a painting or drawing through the lens of my own artistic perspective. The final work represents an organization of seemingly chaotic content and situations, yet bound by a sense of structure, a common thread that has become prevalent in all of my work.

“it’s about TIME”

4:12 am Thursday, July 14, 2011 by Jonah Ward

It’s hard to tell which day is which, anymore. It might as well be 3011. Time is kinda funny in that way– you can’t live with it, you can’t live without it. You need it to plan and organize your life, yet, as each day passes, you feel pressured to make the rest of the days better than the last. You feel more heavily the effects of time the more you look down and check your watch. It’s as though the more you think about it, the older you get. The world would stop without clocks, though. Maybe everyone’s clocks are making us age faster. Maybe with each clock made the earth spins faster and the days get shorter. Why is it that they call them “grandfather” clocks, anyways? Suspicious if you ask me.
How do you describe today? It seems like it was pretty much like yesterday, and the day before yesterday for that matter. I bet tomorrow is going to be about the same as well. How far back do you have to go to feel like it was different? You have to start blocking time in years to make something stick out–decades even. It’s a good thing sometimes to not remember everything; There is quite a bit of information out there, especially these days. And how many days is that you ask? I suppose as many as it seems necessary to make it stand out. A millennium maybe? In the meantime…I guess I should get back to work.

“emergence”

1:42 am Saturday, April 9, 2011 by Jonah Ward

I heard this really interesting Radiolab broadcast the other day on NPR. It was mostly about emergence, about how rhythms and patterns in nature can materialize from what seems to be nothing. They told this story about John Buck, who in the 1960′s was the the first westerner to witness a huge phenomenon that takes place in southeast Asia every year. Tens of thousands of fireflies congregate on the banks of a river, blinking randomly at first as they normally would. Then, with no particular reason, one by one all begin to flash on and off again in perfect unison. Just image total silence, except the occasional chirp from an exotic bird, and for miles the mangrove forests that line the banks of the river suddenly light up like Time Square, then complete darkness. On…..Off…..On…..Off. Then they all disperse and it’s as if nothing happened. Individually they go about their business as usual, but when they collect, they, for whatever reason, blink in total harmony.

This happens with all sorts of things on earth. Out of chaos a rhythm and pattern can form and create life. This is something that I am completely fascinated with. I love to let things happen on their own. There are so many simple things that when combined and allowed to emerge on their own can create something so fantastic it’s hard to believe there was no conductor facilitating its unimagined result.

“unexpected destinations”

2:08 pm Sunday, February 13, 2011 by Jonah Ward

I just left the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s refreshing to revisit some of the “masters” every once in a while.  Artwork becomes so much more accessible when you see it in person. There’s no detachment, no filter, you’re face to face with it and you just have to deal with it. You have to keep reminding yourself that you don’t have to like everything. Spend time with the ones that you can’t look away from and breeze by the ones that don’t speak to you.

I always find myself gravitating toward Dali. I could stare at his paintings for hours. There’s something that is very liberating about surrealism, even though you’re stuck in a fantastic dream from which there’s no escape. After Dali I find myself flirting somewhere between Mondrian and Pollock. A dizzying back and forth between absolute structure and organized chaos.

Perhaps this is where I always find myself. Too much of one or the other and nothing seems to make sense. Just when you think you’ve mastered one, the other takes control and drives you blindly to unexpected destinations.

“plug your ears and just open your eyes”

1:29 am Monday, February 7, 2011 by Jonah Ward

Laying on a beach in Half Moon Bay reading Steve Martin’s new book called An Object of Beauty. It’s funny how hard we try to put a price tag on beauty. The way in which you look at something defines how beautiful it really is and how much it means to you. It’s so easy to be influenced by others perception of beauty and it’s not until you yourself stand back, plug your ears and just open your eyes that you will know how beautiful something really is. Beauty is free and available to anyone. You just have to trust yourself. Sitting here on the beach in February with the sun shining and the waves chorus to a never ending search for somewhere to go, I feel like this is what beauty really is and no one can tell me otherwise.