About

Matt Niebuhr is an artist living and working in West Branch, Iowa.

.../miscellaneous - is a personal journal, self educational in nature, containing notes and images that inspire me, or that I wish to learn more about - as such, it includes works by other people as noted with full acknowledgment and credit to authors and sources where possible.

I also share content of my own making that I think is worth sharing with a larger audience. If there is any work by others who object to having their work posted here, I will remove the content if so requested.

Visit Matt Niebuhr - Works a site featuring my work exclusively. I established my studio practice in the summer of 2012 named "West Branch Studio".

Matt Niebuhr - Drawings a visual journal of my work.

If you are interested in work(s) for purchase please see this or simply email me: niebuhr.matt [at] gmail.com.

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Darkness Tangible (Sol LeWitt - Scribble drawings)

Part of my appreciation of Sol LeWitt’s work is summed up quite nicely in an introduction essay about Sol Lewitt’s “Scribble wall drawings” in the catalogue for the show at PaceWildenstein Gallery, 2007 -  by Robert Stor as he writes with the question of metaphoric intent in LeWitt’s Scribble wall drawings:

… “the idea that he [LeWitt] had given a work an a priori expressive purpose would contradict the basic rationale of all that he had done hitherto by over-determining a visual outcome, assigning it a specific, hence restrictive meaning, and thus making preordained content master of procedurally arrived at form.” - from Darkness Tangible by Robert Stor (p. 9)

I want to believe that something is discovered in the act of making a drawing - that drawing is not merely recording something that has already passed, an event, an emotion, an object, a picture of a thing… etc. If this is the case - then art of this kind is the evidence of an idea expressed in a form influenced deeply by the context and situation of its existence in a physical form - something that can be transmitted in some way in order to be perceived…  Something always changes in the process - the act of making something concrete- that is the exciting part - the discovery.  What will it look like?

"The Bigger the Searchlight the Larger the Circumference of the Unknown - Harland Miller"

~

nice.

HARLAND MILLER
Waiting for Nothing to End - My Story, 2003
Oil on canvas. 213 x 155 cm. (83 7/8 x 61 in)

listen… (via NPR)
Stichometry -  a term applied to the measurement of ancient texts ”rows” or verses of a fixed standard length.  In poetical works the number of metrical verses was computed; in prose works a standard line had to be taken, for no two scribes would naturally write lines of the same length.The object of such stichometrical calculations was a commercial one, viz. to assess the pay of the scribe and the market value of the manuscript.sourcealso… Jay Kennedy, University of Manchester

listen… (via NPR)

Stichometry -  a term applied to the measurement of ancient texts ”rows” or verses of a fixed standard length.  In poetical works the number of metrical verses was computed; in prose works a standard line had to be taken, for no two scribes would naturally write lines of the same length.

The object of such stichometrical calculations was a commercial one, viz. to assess the pay of the scribe and the market value of the manuscript.

source

also… 

Jay Kennedy, University of Manchester