Mandala 1401D by Bill Armstrong

Mandala 1402D by Bill Armstrong

I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness, and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful.

I spotted this quote on Tumblr late last night, and it made me think of today's editions. I've actually been thinking about the editions a lot lately, excited that they've finally come to fruition after a long and fascinating process with photographer Bill Armstrong. It's certainly no surprise that Mandala 1401D and Mandala 1402D are beautiful. I mean, look at them! They're gorgeous. What's extra wonderful about them though, is that they're also very good and very successful. Achieving such feats of artistic daredevilry is nothing new for Bill—he's been making and exhibiting critically-acclaimed work for years and some of the world's finest museums have his prints in their collections.

So yeah, you could say that Bill's a Famous Artist, but the time that Sara and I spent with him was a window into the mundane ways in which Artists Are Just Like Us. It was in the familiar surroundings of a filled-to-the-brim NY apartment of busy people living busy lives—the clutter and chaos that comes with sharing that home with a small child, and that child's drawings and extra-curricular schedule stuck on the fridge—that we had the novel opportunity to work with Bill for an afternoon, assembling pieces to be photographed to make the editions for today, which kind of made us feel like kids. We stacked shapes and combined colors with abandon, arrayed them across backgrounds of varying hues, and then gingerly carried our compositions across a clackety parquet floor to Bill's deceptively simple studio set-up. As he rather matter-of-factly went about his business of photographing, it was painfully obvious that there was nothing about what we were doing that could have been art unless it was looked at through Bill's eyes.*

That was reinforced again when we received the first round of proofs from Bill. His process and commentary was so alien to I'm-so-not-an-artist me, and also utterly delightful and sort of magical to boot. And yes, his was also the voice of experience—that's the mundane that makes the magic—the day in and day out of making work and refining a practice. And there's something magic in the mundane, too—that's the romance of the artist-in-his-garret meditating on a small and special thing and honing it into ART.

How lucky we are for the artists in this world, who create these amazing things, some of which we even get to live with. I'm certainly looking forward to living with Bill's photographs—the intense colors are surprisingly soothing to contemplate. High-strung as I am, the idea of meditating on anything usually makes me twitchy, but these energetic images hold my attention in a way that replenishes my capacity for joy.

* Which makes me think of another edition I'm particularly fond of, Craig Damrauer's Modern Art.